World War II in Colour (2009–…): Season 1, Episode 8 - The Soviet Steamroller - full transcript
[theme music plays]
[background music over dialogue]
[bombs exploding]
[cannons firing]
[woman crying]
[tank engines]
[narrator] Summer 1943,
and on the eastern front
Hitler's armies were in retreat.
[cannons firing]
Huge Soviet artillery barrages
and tank assaults were
shredding the German lines.
[cannons firing]
[bombs exploding]
[guns firing]
Hitler, by now,
was fighting a war on two fronts.
In Western Europe and Anglo-American
force was moving up through Italy,
menacing his southern flank.
The Germans had been forced to pull
some of their elite troops back
from the eastern front to help.
[missiles firing]
It left their forces in the east
dangerously over-stretched.
[background music over dialogue]
The exhausted German soldiers were up
against the enormous reserves
of the huge Soviet military machine.
[guns firing]
The Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin,
now seized this opportunity
to wreak his revenge
and move onto the offensive.
[tank engines]
By early August 1943
the Red Army had driven the Germans
from the cities of Orel and Belgorod.
[people shouting]
[bombs exploding]
[cannons firing]
To celebrate the victory,
Stalin ordered 12,
124-gun salvoes and a barrage
of fireworks in Moscow's Red Square.
[fireworks booming]
[cannons firing]
He proclaimed,
"Eternal glory to the heroes
who fell in the struggle for freedom.
Death to the German invaders."
[fireworks booming]
[background music over dialogue]
In Germany, Hitler's response was
to take greater personal control
of all important military decisions.
[background music over dialogue]
[tank engines]
The effects were felt almost immediately
by Axis troops occupying the
strategically important city of Kharkov.
[machine guns firing]
The Soviet forces approached
the city from three sides.
[background music over dialogue]
The German commander,
Erich von Manstein,
ordered a tactical withdrawal.
[background music over dialogue]
Hitler immediately countermanded it.
[guns firing]
Kharkov should be held at all costs.
Hitler would not accept anything
that would reduce what he called,
Lebensraum, the land he believed
Germany needed to ensure its greatness.
Just as importantly, he also believed
Germany would win the war,
if not by numbers,
then by the sheer will to win.
[tank engine]
The Germans dug in.
[background music over dialogue]
[bombs exploding]
At first, it seemed to work.
[bombs exploding]
For several days,
repeated Soviet assaults were repulsed.
[bombs exploding]
More than 300 Russian T-34 tanks
were destroyed.
[indistinct chatter]
[cannons firing]
But by the end of August 1943,
the German positions had been overrun.
[guns firing]
[indistinct chatter]
Eventually,
Manstein went against his Fuhrer.
He ordered his men to get out.
[fire crackling]
The Red Army drove into
the ruins of Kharkov the next day.
It marked the beginning of a massive
Soviet offensive along a 1,500 mile front.
It stretched from Rostov in the south
to Smolensk in the north.
[tank engines roaring]
[distant voices of troops]
At the southern end of the front,
near Rostov,
the Russian breakthrough threatened
to trap pockets
of German soldiers in the Crimea.
[guns firing]
[background music over dialogue]
Once again, Manstein asked
permission to withdraw.
All he got was a message from Hitler,
"Don't do anything. I am coming myself."
[background music over dialogue]
But he never did.
The German military was forced into
another last-minute, chaotic retreat.
The withdrawal was made worse
by bands of battle-hardened partisans.
Many were former Red Army soldiers
who had been cut off behind enemy lines.
[background music over dialogue]
[train sound]
[explosion]
They now ambushed
the retreating Germans,
cutting their communication
and supply lines.
The Germans responded
with predictable ferocity.
There was savage reprisals
against the civilian population.
The Germans also launched
a scorched earth policy.
[fire crackling]
[explosions]
Factories, power plants, railways,
and bridges were all blown up.
[loud explosion]
A massive hydro-electric dam,
which provided electricity
for the whole of the Ukraine,
was wrecked.
[water rushing]
Meanwhile, in the centre of the front,
the Germans fell back
across the River Dnieper.
As they fled, they blew up yet more
bridges turning the river
into a formidable defensive line.
They then dug in along the west bank.
Stalin's response was to offer
the Soviet Union's highest award
to the first Red Army soldier
to cross the river.
By the early autumn 1943 a number
of small Soviet bridgeheads
had been established
on the German controlled west bank.
[cannons firing]
[machine guns firing]
[cannons firing]
But they met determined
German resistance.
Fighting raged along the Dnieper
throughout October 1943.
[loud explosion]
Finally, at the beginning of November,
Soviet troops captured Kiev.
[water splashing]
All along the river,
the Germans were pushed out
of their defensive positions
and forced to retreat still further west.
By the end of 1943,
the Red Army had virtually cleared the
Germans out of Russia's historic home.
[people shouting]
They were now moving
west across the Ukraine.
The countries of Europe
were in their sights.
[machine guns firing]
[tank engines roaring]
By Spring 1944,
Hitler's armies were in full retreat.
[tank engines roaring]
The Soviet leadership now poured in ever
greater quantities of men and equipment.
The Germans had two excellent tanks:
The Tiger 1
and the Panzer Mark V Panther.
Both were well-suited to the sort
of mobile defensive warfare,
which was the only remaining hope
for the German armies
on the eastern front.
But the Red Army had
at least twice as many tanks.
Mostly, the battle tried
T-34 and armament factories
in Siberia were turning out
more at a rate of 2,000 a month.
While Hitler was forced
to divide his forces
between a war on two fronts,
Stalin's war machine
was working flat out.
Six million Soviet troops faced less
than three million Germans.
[guns firing]
In early January 1944,
the forces of the first Ukrainian front
moved in from the north
on the German held town of Korsun.
It was the last German toehold
on what they'd hoped would be their
defensive line along the River Dnieper.
Twelve days later, the forces of the
second Ukrainian front drove forward
on the southern side.
The attack followed a, by now,
well-established Soviet pattern.
First, there was a build-up
of an overwhelming number of troops.
The Germans were never quite sure
where the first assault would come from.
[cannons firing]
Then there was a devastating
artillery bombardment.
[cannons firing]
Next, the mass tanks
of the Red Army would punch
a hole through the German defences.
Finally, the infantry poured in.
[machine guns firing]
In Korsun,
it quickly became obvious to the Germans
they were about to be overwhelmed.
[cannons firing]
[background music over dialogue]
The German commander,
Field Marshal Erich von Manstein,
flew to Hitler's headquarters
in East Prussia to beg,
yet again, for permission to pull out.
[speaks German]
But Hitler, once more, refused.
[guns firing]
[tank engines roaring]
After a week of fierce fighting,
about 60,000 men were trapped in what
became known as the Korsun pocket.
The Soviet's called it,
"Little Stalingrad."
The German forces now
attempted to break out.
[cannon firing]
But the Russians were ready for them.
T-34 tanks
and Cossack horsemen harried
the Germans as they tried to escape.
[horses neighing]
[machine guns firing]
The fighting lasted two days.
[loud explosions]
By the time Korsun fell,
the Germans had lost some 30,000 men.
The Red Army forces were
now moving forward at speed.
Their advance was made
possible by fleets of trucks,
mostly provided by the United States,
that kept their forces supplied.
It was a much faster process
than for the Germans,
who still relied heavily on horses.
[plane engines roaring]
The Russians were also
dominating the skies.
[plane engines roaring]
The Luftwaffe had always been a key part
of the German war machine.
But Hitler had been forced
to divert many of his aircraft
to defend the homeland from
a US and British bomber offensive.
As a result, Russian planes outnumbered
the Luftwaffe five to one.
The Red Air Force's Sturmovik
fighter-bombers took a heavy toll
on German armour and supply columns.
[background music over dialogue]
Yet, Hitler refused to contemplate defeat
and now announced a new version
of his "no retreat" policy.
[background music over dialogue]
He ordered the German troops
to create what he called
"fortified areas" or "local strongholds."
These were to be defended
to the bitter end.
Only with his personal approval,
could any of these fortresses
be abandoned.
It was a desperate ploy and would come
to cost the Germans dearly.
[wind howling]
One of the first tests of the new strategy
was near the Ukrainian town
of Kamenets-Podolsky.
Here 20 divisions of Panzers
were threatened with being cut off.
But Hitler declared it a fortified area
and refused to allow a retreat.
[loud explosion]
[cannons firing]
In the face of bitter fighting,
there was a vitriolic argument
between Hitler and Manstein,
who could see the writing on the wall.
[missiles firing]
Finally, Manstein got his way
and the Panzers were given
permission to break out.
Ten days later, some 200,000 men
of the 1st Panzer Army safely reached the
German lines over 100 miles to the west.
But they had lost most of their
heavy equipment and weapons.
By now, Manstein's requests to retreat
had become too much for Hitler.
The Field Marshal was sacked.
[machine guns firing]
[cannons firing]
Further south the Germans attempted
to hold back the Soviet torrent
on the Yuzhny Bug River.
[guns firing]
They failed and a large force of Germans
was caught behind Russian lines
in the Black Sea port of Odessa.
They, too, faced being cut off.
In early April 1944,
Hitler declared it a fortress.
But the German troops ignored him
and slipped out of the city.
Several days later on April the 10th,
Odessa was liberated.
[soldier's footsteps]
[cannons firing]
Stalin was winning on all fronts.
He could now turn his attention
to the northern Russian city that
had suffered under Nazi assault for years.
[bombs exploding]
[cannons firing]
By the beginning of 1944,
the Russian city of Leningrad
had been under siege from German forces
for nearly two and a half years.
During the first winter, almost half
a million people had starved to death.
[woman crying]
Volunteers struggled to put out fires
and construct defences.
But by 1944, life in the city had become
almost unbearable.
[background music over dialogue]
Several attempts to relieve it had failed.
[fire crackling]
One effort in 1942 led to the capture
of more than 50,000 troops
of the Soviet 2nd Shock Army.
[tank engines roaring]
Another in 1943, had enabled a
trickle of supplies to get into the city.
But even so, throughout 1943,
up to 20,000 people continued
to die of cold, disease,
and starvation every month.
[background music over dialogue]
By January 1944, however,
with the Germans in headlong retreat,
Stalin now turned his attention
to the plight of the city.
That month, Soviet forces secretly
infiltrated the neighbouring peninsula
around Oranienburg.
[cannons firing]
The attack on the German position started
with a savage, 65 minute bombardment.
[cannons firing]
Then Russian troops ripped
into the startled German lines.
At the same time
another Soviet force attacked
from the northeast around the city.
They too, burst onto the German lines.
[cannons firing]
For three days the German commander,
Field Marshal Georg von Kuchler,
held out.
[guns firing]
Finally, he asked Hitler
for permission to fall back.
[machine guns firing]
Hitler, as always, refused.
[cannons firing]
Kuchler argued back,
telling the Fuhrer only a swift withdrawal
would save his army from a massacre.
Hitler sacked him.
[explosion]
He was replaced
by General Walter Model.
He was known as Hitler's fireman
for his fierce loyalty
and avid Nazi outlook.
[cannons firing]
But even to Model the danger
was obvious.
He now disobeyed Hitler
and pulled out.
After two and a half years,
the siege of Leningrad was finally lifted.
[woman crying]
Nearly a million Russian civilians
had died.
[woman crying]
Relief in the city was overwhelming.
[background music over dialogue]
The first fallout was in neighbouring,
pro-German Finland,
which now feared a Soviet invasion.
So in March 1944,
a secret Finnish delegation arrived
in Moscow to discuss peace.
Stalin's terms were harsh.
[audience applauding]
He demanded the Petsamo region
in far north of Finland.
An area rich in nickel,
an important ingredient
in the manufacture of metal alloys.
He also demanded reparations
of $600 million.
The Finns refused and prepared
for a Soviet invasion.
[background music over dialogue]
But Finland could wait.
[background music over dialogue]
The Soviet High Command, or Stavka,
as it was known,
had more pressing business
further south.
[tank engines roaring]
The Red Army offensives in the Ukraine
in late 1943 had trapped 120,000
German troops in the Crimea.
Hitler, as ever, had refused
to allow them to withdraw.
They now waited helplessly
for the Soviet onslaught.
[indistinct chatter]
In early April,
two months after the lifting
of the siege on Leningrad, it came.
The troops of the 4th Ukrainian Front
crashed into the Crimea from the north.
[cannons firing]
At the same time,
a diversionary attack landed
on the eastern end of the peninsula.
In less than a day, the Axis troops
in the west had given way.
They fell back on the port of Sebastopol
and Hitler ordered Fortress Sebastopol
to hold out 'til the last man.
[background music over dialogue]
They didn't stand a chance.
[cannons firing]
[background music over dialogue]
Within two weeks of the siege,
German troops
were being evacuated by sea.
Forty thousand men escaped.
But some 30,000 defenders
were still trapped in the port.
They retreated to the beaches south
of the city hoping
to be rescued by more German ships.
It didn't happen.
[background music over dialogue]
The evacuation was interrupted
by a Soviet artillery bombardment.
[cannons firing]
Three days later,
the Germans surrendered.
Meanwhile, back in
the northwest of the country,
the Germans still occupied
much of what is Belarus today.
But the Red Army had grabbed a vast
bulge of land stretching
into Poland and Romania.
It meant the Germans had
to defend a 1,400 mile front.
They were hugely over-extended.
Military logic suggested
it was time for the Germans
to withdraw to more manageable
defensive positions.
But Hitler, still obsessed
with territorial gain,
refused to allow any further retreat.
The German military would
continue to pay a high price
for Hitler's constant meddling
and unrealistic ambitions.
[missiles firing]
By the spring of 1944, Hitler's forces
were stretched to their limit.
All along the eastern front,
there as a desperate
need for reinforcements.
The problem for the German high
command was where
to place the few resources it had
to maximum advantage.
German intelligence reports suggested
the next big Red Army offensive would be
into Belarus.
But Hitler disagreed.
He was convinced Stalin
would strike south
and seize the Romanian oil fields.
Both were wrong, at least,
to begin with.
In the early summer,
the Red Army Command
finally turned its attention to Finland.
[cannons firing]
Russian troops attacked
across the Karelian Isthmus.
[cannons firing]
After two days fighting,
the Finns were forced to retreat.
[bombs exploding]
Slowly, over the next month,
the Red Army advanced north
into Finland.
By August 1944, it was all over
and the Finns sued for peace.
[audience applauding]
It was now that Stalin
showed the first signs
of a pattern that would
be repeated across Europe.
[indistinct chatter]
He seized land, in this case,
areas of Finnish Karelia
and the nickel-rich Petsamo region.
Next, Stalin's attention
turned to Central Europe.
In the summer of 1944,
he launched what he called,
Operation Bagration,
named after a Russian hero
of the Napoleonic Wars.
At 5 AM on June 22nd,
three years to the day
after Hitler's invasion
of the Soviet Union,
the guns of the Red Army began
a ferocious bombardment
of German forces,
in what today is Belarus.
[background music over dialogue]
[cannons firing]
[bombs exploding]
[cannons firing]
It was exactly where months earlier,
German intelligence
reports had suggested
a Soviet attack would come.
But because Hitler had ignored them,
the area was poorly defended.
[cannons firing]
It was another of his mistakes.
[background music over dialogue]
[bombs exploding]
The Germans were now being pounded
along a 350 mile front.
In some places, the Russians used
over 400 guns for every mile.
[cannons firing]
The barrage was followed, as always,
by a torrent of Soviet tanks
and infantry crashing
into the German defences.
[plane engines roaring]
To make matters worse for the Germans,
they had almost no air support.
Much of the Luftwaffe was still tied up
defending the German homeland.
It was now that Hitler's
folly of fighting a war
on two fronts became all too apparent.
The Red Air Force could
operate almost unopposed.
[bombs exploding]
Russian planes struck deep
behind German lines,
cutting communications
and harassing reinforcements.
[bombs exploding]
Within 36 hours the German Panzers
had been swept aside.
About 50,000 men faced encirclement
in the German held town of Vitebsk.
[cannons firing]
Hitler, as had become routine,
initially refused to let it retreat.
[bombs exploding]
Then, when on the following day
her relented,
it was too late for many of his troops.
Four days later, Vitebsk fell.
Twenty thousand Axis troops were killed
and 10,000 taken prisoner.
Further south, along the Belarus front,
the pattern was repeated.
Hitler, now furious, sacked his general,
Field Marshal Ernst Busch.
[speaks German]
Once again, he brought in his favourite,
the now promoted
Field Marshal, Walter Model.
But it made no difference.
Town after town fell.
[tank engines roaring]
The regional capital of Minsk
was now within reach.
Two days later, the Red Army encircled it.
Over 100,000 German troops
were trapped.
[cannons firing]
Soviet forces bombarded them.
[cannons firing]
Within a week,
the German survivors surrendered.
The unstoppable Russian
advance now pushed on
to the Baltic states.
First of all,
was the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius.
Across the entire eastern front,
the Germans were in retreat.
But they left behind them towns
and countryside laid waste.
[fire crackling]
They committed wide-spread atrocities
against local inhabitants.
[woman crying]
Nothing, however,
could have prepared the Red Army
for what it was about to discover.
On July 23rd,
1944 Soviet forces reached the small
Polish village of Majdanek near Lublin.
Here they came across their first evidence
of Hitler's final solution.
The Majdanek extermination camp.
It was a camp designed
for the murder of Jews
on an industrial scale.
But as the first Soviet reports
of what they found leaked out,
the Western Allies simply dismissed them.
[woman crying]
[indistinct chatter]
Three days after seizing Majdanek,
the Russians were approaching Warsaw.
But here the Red Army paused.
Stalin now stood ready to do
what Hitler had done before,
grab land, not in the name
of Lebensraum, but of communism.
[bombs exploding]
By the summer of 1944,
Operation Bagration had ripped the heart
out of the German army in the east.
More than 300,000
Axis soldiers had died.
One hundred fifty thousand
had been taken prisoner.
The Red Army now paused
and dug in along the River Vistula,
south of Warsaw.
Stalin was in no hurry
to bring the war to an end.
With Europe in turmoil,
conditions were ideal
for the spread of communism.
[soldiers marching]
[background music over dialogue]
The first victims of Stalin's
political calculations were the Poles.
On August 1st,
1944 the Polish Home Army
rose up in Warsaw
against its Nazi occupiers.
[cannons firing]
But it desperately needed help.
[background music over dialogue]
The Red Army,
camped just to the south,
was perfectly placed to provide it.
But Stalin regarded
the Polish Home Army as close
to the Polish government
in exile in London
and hostile to communism.
[cannons firing]
So he turned a blind eye to the plight
of the Polish fighters.
They were crushed with terrible brutality.
The Germans wouldn't finally
be pushed out of Poland
until the Russian army drove them out
in January 1945.
It was the start of a Soviet master plan
that would eventually see
communism governments
across most of Eastern Europe.
[cannons firing]
To the north, contingents
of the Red Army continued
to clear the Germans
out of the Baltic states.
These would be incorporated
into the Soviet Union.
Near the Latvian capital of Riga,
over 200,000 Germans
were trapped behind Russian lines.
[plane engine roaring]
But Hitler, still determined
to hold on to his Lebensraum,
refused to countenance a retreat.
[cannons firing]
Even so, gradually the German forces
were pushed back to the Baltic coast.
By mid-October 1944,
the Germans had been squeezed
onto the Courland Peninsula,
west of Riga.
They would remain marooned there
for the rest of the war when they
eventually surrendered to Soviet forces.
[audience applauding]
Stalin, meanwhile, was already sizing up
other territory in Eastern Europe.
He could have moved directly
west towards Germany.
Instead, units of
the Red Army moved south
in a vast thrust down
through the Balkans.
[tank engines roaring]
Nearly 1,500 tanks and a million men
pushed into Romania
in late August 1944.
The defending Axis forces
had less than 400 tanks
and just 800,000 troops.
[cannons firing]
Pro-German Romanian troops gave way
almost immediately all along the front.
Three days later,
large pockets of German troops
were surrounded near Kishinev.
Hitler issued his standard command,
"No retreat."
[cannons firing]
For nine days there was bitter fighting.
[cannons firing]
[machine guns firing]
Over 180,000 German troops
were killed or taken prisoner.
The remainder beat a belated retreat.
In late August,
Romania's pro-German dictator,
Marshal Ion Antonescu, was arrested.
Romania surrendered.
[people shouting]
By the end of the month,
the Red Army was in Bucharest
and it occupied
the strategically important
Romanian oil fields.
It meant Germany had lost
its main supply of oil.
Three Soviet armies now
moved south into Bulgaria.
Bulgaria had tried
to stay neutral but it, too,
would soon be swallowed
up by the Soviet Empire.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Russian forces
now moved west towards Yugoslavia.
German troops to the south,
in Greece, faced being trapped.
They began a hasty
retreat up through Albania
and southern Yugoslavia.
[cannons firing]
They were harried all the way
by Albanian and Yugoslav partisans.
[guns firing]
[missiles firing]
By mid-October 1944,
the Red Army had reached
the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade.
Only now did it begin
to swing north and west
towards Hungary and then Germany.
German reinforcements
poured into Hungary
to support the pro-Nazi
puppet government.
But the Red Army ground on.
[tanks firing]
Eight weeks later,
it laid siege to Budapest.
[machine guns firing]
The siege lasted over six weeks
before the German puppet government
collapsed.
By the end of 1944, most of
Eastern Europe lay in Stalin's grasp.
[people shouting]
His troops controlled
the Baltic states and Poland,
Romania, and Bulgaria.
Pro-Soviet forces ruled
in Yugoslavia and Albania.
Hungary and Czechoslovakia
were in his sights.
Stalin had successfully
laid the foundations
for the future Soviet block.
He could now, at last,
move on to Germany.
But in the west, Allied forces were
also approaching the German border.
The race was on
to be the first to take Berlin.
[guns firing]
[background music over dialogue]
[bombs exploding]
[cannons firing]
[woman crying]
[tank engines]
[narrator] Summer 1943,
and on the eastern front
Hitler's armies were in retreat.
[cannons firing]
Huge Soviet artillery barrages
and tank assaults were
shredding the German lines.
[cannons firing]
[bombs exploding]
[guns firing]
Hitler, by now,
was fighting a war on two fronts.
In Western Europe and Anglo-American
force was moving up through Italy,
menacing his southern flank.
The Germans had been forced to pull
some of their elite troops back
from the eastern front to help.
[missiles firing]
It left their forces in the east
dangerously over-stretched.
[background music over dialogue]
The exhausted German soldiers were up
against the enormous reserves
of the huge Soviet military machine.
[guns firing]
The Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin,
now seized this opportunity
to wreak his revenge
and move onto the offensive.
[tank engines]
By early August 1943
the Red Army had driven the Germans
from the cities of Orel and Belgorod.
[people shouting]
[bombs exploding]
[cannons firing]
To celebrate the victory,
Stalin ordered 12,
124-gun salvoes and a barrage
of fireworks in Moscow's Red Square.
[fireworks booming]
[cannons firing]
He proclaimed,
"Eternal glory to the heroes
who fell in the struggle for freedom.
Death to the German invaders."
[fireworks booming]
[background music over dialogue]
In Germany, Hitler's response was
to take greater personal control
of all important military decisions.
[background music over dialogue]
[tank engines]
The effects were felt almost immediately
by Axis troops occupying the
strategically important city of Kharkov.
[machine guns firing]
The Soviet forces approached
the city from three sides.
[background music over dialogue]
The German commander,
Erich von Manstein,
ordered a tactical withdrawal.
[background music over dialogue]
Hitler immediately countermanded it.
[guns firing]
Kharkov should be held at all costs.
Hitler would not accept anything
that would reduce what he called,
Lebensraum, the land he believed
Germany needed to ensure its greatness.
Just as importantly, he also believed
Germany would win the war,
if not by numbers,
then by the sheer will to win.
[tank engine]
The Germans dug in.
[background music over dialogue]
[bombs exploding]
At first, it seemed to work.
[bombs exploding]
For several days,
repeated Soviet assaults were repulsed.
[bombs exploding]
More than 300 Russian T-34 tanks
were destroyed.
[indistinct chatter]
[cannons firing]
But by the end of August 1943,
the German positions had been overrun.
[guns firing]
[indistinct chatter]
Eventually,
Manstein went against his Fuhrer.
He ordered his men to get out.
[fire crackling]
The Red Army drove into
the ruins of Kharkov the next day.
It marked the beginning of a massive
Soviet offensive along a 1,500 mile front.
It stretched from Rostov in the south
to Smolensk in the north.
[tank engines roaring]
[distant voices of troops]
At the southern end of the front,
near Rostov,
the Russian breakthrough threatened
to trap pockets
of German soldiers in the Crimea.
[guns firing]
[background music over dialogue]
Once again, Manstein asked
permission to withdraw.
All he got was a message from Hitler,
"Don't do anything. I am coming myself."
[background music over dialogue]
But he never did.
The German military was forced into
another last-minute, chaotic retreat.
The withdrawal was made worse
by bands of battle-hardened partisans.
Many were former Red Army soldiers
who had been cut off behind enemy lines.
[background music over dialogue]
[train sound]
[explosion]
They now ambushed
the retreating Germans,
cutting their communication
and supply lines.
The Germans responded
with predictable ferocity.
There was savage reprisals
against the civilian population.
The Germans also launched
a scorched earth policy.
[fire crackling]
[explosions]
Factories, power plants, railways,
and bridges were all blown up.
[loud explosion]
A massive hydro-electric dam,
which provided electricity
for the whole of the Ukraine,
was wrecked.
[water rushing]
Meanwhile, in the centre of the front,
the Germans fell back
across the River Dnieper.
As they fled, they blew up yet more
bridges turning the river
into a formidable defensive line.
They then dug in along the west bank.
Stalin's response was to offer
the Soviet Union's highest award
to the first Red Army soldier
to cross the river.
By the early autumn 1943 a number
of small Soviet bridgeheads
had been established
on the German controlled west bank.
[cannons firing]
[machine guns firing]
[cannons firing]
But they met determined
German resistance.
Fighting raged along the Dnieper
throughout October 1943.
[loud explosion]
Finally, at the beginning of November,
Soviet troops captured Kiev.
[water splashing]
All along the river,
the Germans were pushed out
of their defensive positions
and forced to retreat still further west.
By the end of 1943,
the Red Army had virtually cleared the
Germans out of Russia's historic home.
[people shouting]
They were now moving
west across the Ukraine.
The countries of Europe
were in their sights.
[machine guns firing]
[tank engines roaring]
By Spring 1944,
Hitler's armies were in full retreat.
[tank engines roaring]
The Soviet leadership now poured in ever
greater quantities of men and equipment.
The Germans had two excellent tanks:
The Tiger 1
and the Panzer Mark V Panther.
Both were well-suited to the sort
of mobile defensive warfare,
which was the only remaining hope
for the German armies
on the eastern front.
But the Red Army had
at least twice as many tanks.
Mostly, the battle tried
T-34 and armament factories
in Siberia were turning out
more at a rate of 2,000 a month.
While Hitler was forced
to divide his forces
between a war on two fronts,
Stalin's war machine
was working flat out.
Six million Soviet troops faced less
than three million Germans.
[guns firing]
In early January 1944,
the forces of the first Ukrainian front
moved in from the north
on the German held town of Korsun.
It was the last German toehold
on what they'd hoped would be their
defensive line along the River Dnieper.
Twelve days later, the forces of the
second Ukrainian front drove forward
on the southern side.
The attack followed a, by now,
well-established Soviet pattern.
First, there was a build-up
of an overwhelming number of troops.
The Germans were never quite sure
where the first assault would come from.
[cannons firing]
Then there was a devastating
artillery bombardment.
[cannons firing]
Next, the mass tanks
of the Red Army would punch
a hole through the German defences.
Finally, the infantry poured in.
[machine guns firing]
In Korsun,
it quickly became obvious to the Germans
they were about to be overwhelmed.
[cannons firing]
[background music over dialogue]
The German commander,
Field Marshal Erich von Manstein,
flew to Hitler's headquarters
in East Prussia to beg,
yet again, for permission to pull out.
[speaks German]
But Hitler, once more, refused.
[guns firing]
[tank engines roaring]
After a week of fierce fighting,
about 60,000 men were trapped in what
became known as the Korsun pocket.
The Soviet's called it,
"Little Stalingrad."
The German forces now
attempted to break out.
[cannon firing]
But the Russians were ready for them.
T-34 tanks
and Cossack horsemen harried
the Germans as they tried to escape.
[horses neighing]
[machine guns firing]
The fighting lasted two days.
[loud explosions]
By the time Korsun fell,
the Germans had lost some 30,000 men.
The Red Army forces were
now moving forward at speed.
Their advance was made
possible by fleets of trucks,
mostly provided by the United States,
that kept their forces supplied.
It was a much faster process
than for the Germans,
who still relied heavily on horses.
[plane engines roaring]
The Russians were also
dominating the skies.
[plane engines roaring]
The Luftwaffe had always been a key part
of the German war machine.
But Hitler had been forced
to divert many of his aircraft
to defend the homeland from
a US and British bomber offensive.
As a result, Russian planes outnumbered
the Luftwaffe five to one.
The Red Air Force's Sturmovik
fighter-bombers took a heavy toll
on German armour and supply columns.
[background music over dialogue]
Yet, Hitler refused to contemplate defeat
and now announced a new version
of his "no retreat" policy.
[background music over dialogue]
He ordered the German troops
to create what he called
"fortified areas" or "local strongholds."
These were to be defended
to the bitter end.
Only with his personal approval,
could any of these fortresses
be abandoned.
It was a desperate ploy and would come
to cost the Germans dearly.
[wind howling]
One of the first tests of the new strategy
was near the Ukrainian town
of Kamenets-Podolsky.
Here 20 divisions of Panzers
were threatened with being cut off.
But Hitler declared it a fortified area
and refused to allow a retreat.
[loud explosion]
[cannons firing]
In the face of bitter fighting,
there was a vitriolic argument
between Hitler and Manstein,
who could see the writing on the wall.
[missiles firing]
Finally, Manstein got his way
and the Panzers were given
permission to break out.
Ten days later, some 200,000 men
of the 1st Panzer Army safely reached the
German lines over 100 miles to the west.
But they had lost most of their
heavy equipment and weapons.
By now, Manstein's requests to retreat
had become too much for Hitler.
The Field Marshal was sacked.
[machine guns firing]
[cannons firing]
Further south the Germans attempted
to hold back the Soviet torrent
on the Yuzhny Bug River.
[guns firing]
They failed and a large force of Germans
was caught behind Russian lines
in the Black Sea port of Odessa.
They, too, faced being cut off.
In early April 1944,
Hitler declared it a fortress.
But the German troops ignored him
and slipped out of the city.
Several days later on April the 10th,
Odessa was liberated.
[soldier's footsteps]
[cannons firing]
Stalin was winning on all fronts.
He could now turn his attention
to the northern Russian city that
had suffered under Nazi assault for years.
[bombs exploding]
[cannons firing]
By the beginning of 1944,
the Russian city of Leningrad
had been under siege from German forces
for nearly two and a half years.
During the first winter, almost half
a million people had starved to death.
[woman crying]
Volunteers struggled to put out fires
and construct defences.
But by 1944, life in the city had become
almost unbearable.
[background music over dialogue]
Several attempts to relieve it had failed.
[fire crackling]
One effort in 1942 led to the capture
of more than 50,000 troops
of the Soviet 2nd Shock Army.
[tank engines roaring]
Another in 1943, had enabled a
trickle of supplies to get into the city.
But even so, throughout 1943,
up to 20,000 people continued
to die of cold, disease,
and starvation every month.
[background music over dialogue]
By January 1944, however,
with the Germans in headlong retreat,
Stalin now turned his attention
to the plight of the city.
That month, Soviet forces secretly
infiltrated the neighbouring peninsula
around Oranienburg.
[cannons firing]
The attack on the German position started
with a savage, 65 minute bombardment.
[cannons firing]
Then Russian troops ripped
into the startled German lines.
At the same time
another Soviet force attacked
from the northeast around the city.
They too, burst onto the German lines.
[cannons firing]
For three days the German commander,
Field Marshal Georg von Kuchler,
held out.
[guns firing]
Finally, he asked Hitler
for permission to fall back.
[machine guns firing]
Hitler, as always, refused.
[cannons firing]
Kuchler argued back,
telling the Fuhrer only a swift withdrawal
would save his army from a massacre.
Hitler sacked him.
[explosion]
He was replaced
by General Walter Model.
He was known as Hitler's fireman
for his fierce loyalty
and avid Nazi outlook.
[cannons firing]
But even to Model the danger
was obvious.
He now disobeyed Hitler
and pulled out.
After two and a half years,
the siege of Leningrad was finally lifted.
[woman crying]
Nearly a million Russian civilians
had died.
[woman crying]
Relief in the city was overwhelming.
[background music over dialogue]
The first fallout was in neighbouring,
pro-German Finland,
which now feared a Soviet invasion.
So in March 1944,
a secret Finnish delegation arrived
in Moscow to discuss peace.
Stalin's terms were harsh.
[audience applauding]
He demanded the Petsamo region
in far north of Finland.
An area rich in nickel,
an important ingredient
in the manufacture of metal alloys.
He also demanded reparations
of $600 million.
The Finns refused and prepared
for a Soviet invasion.
[background music over dialogue]
But Finland could wait.
[background music over dialogue]
The Soviet High Command, or Stavka,
as it was known,
had more pressing business
further south.
[tank engines roaring]
The Red Army offensives in the Ukraine
in late 1943 had trapped 120,000
German troops in the Crimea.
Hitler, as ever, had refused
to allow them to withdraw.
They now waited helplessly
for the Soviet onslaught.
[indistinct chatter]
In early April,
two months after the lifting
of the siege on Leningrad, it came.
The troops of the 4th Ukrainian Front
crashed into the Crimea from the north.
[cannons firing]
At the same time,
a diversionary attack landed
on the eastern end of the peninsula.
In less than a day, the Axis troops
in the west had given way.
They fell back on the port of Sebastopol
and Hitler ordered Fortress Sebastopol
to hold out 'til the last man.
[background music over dialogue]
They didn't stand a chance.
[cannons firing]
[background music over dialogue]
Within two weeks of the siege,
German troops
were being evacuated by sea.
Forty thousand men escaped.
But some 30,000 defenders
were still trapped in the port.
They retreated to the beaches south
of the city hoping
to be rescued by more German ships.
It didn't happen.
[background music over dialogue]
The evacuation was interrupted
by a Soviet artillery bombardment.
[cannons firing]
Three days later,
the Germans surrendered.
Meanwhile, back in
the northwest of the country,
the Germans still occupied
much of what is Belarus today.
But the Red Army had grabbed a vast
bulge of land stretching
into Poland and Romania.
It meant the Germans had
to defend a 1,400 mile front.
They were hugely over-extended.
Military logic suggested
it was time for the Germans
to withdraw to more manageable
defensive positions.
But Hitler, still obsessed
with territorial gain,
refused to allow any further retreat.
The German military would
continue to pay a high price
for Hitler's constant meddling
and unrealistic ambitions.
[missiles firing]
By the spring of 1944, Hitler's forces
were stretched to their limit.
All along the eastern front,
there as a desperate
need for reinforcements.
The problem for the German high
command was where
to place the few resources it had
to maximum advantage.
German intelligence reports suggested
the next big Red Army offensive would be
into Belarus.
But Hitler disagreed.
He was convinced Stalin
would strike south
and seize the Romanian oil fields.
Both were wrong, at least,
to begin with.
In the early summer,
the Red Army Command
finally turned its attention to Finland.
[cannons firing]
Russian troops attacked
across the Karelian Isthmus.
[cannons firing]
After two days fighting,
the Finns were forced to retreat.
[bombs exploding]
Slowly, over the next month,
the Red Army advanced north
into Finland.
By August 1944, it was all over
and the Finns sued for peace.
[audience applauding]
It was now that Stalin
showed the first signs
of a pattern that would
be repeated across Europe.
[indistinct chatter]
He seized land, in this case,
areas of Finnish Karelia
and the nickel-rich Petsamo region.
Next, Stalin's attention
turned to Central Europe.
In the summer of 1944,
he launched what he called,
Operation Bagration,
named after a Russian hero
of the Napoleonic Wars.
At 5 AM on June 22nd,
three years to the day
after Hitler's invasion
of the Soviet Union,
the guns of the Red Army began
a ferocious bombardment
of German forces,
in what today is Belarus.
[background music over dialogue]
[cannons firing]
[bombs exploding]
[cannons firing]
It was exactly where months earlier,
German intelligence
reports had suggested
a Soviet attack would come.
But because Hitler had ignored them,
the area was poorly defended.
[cannons firing]
It was another of his mistakes.
[background music over dialogue]
[bombs exploding]
The Germans were now being pounded
along a 350 mile front.
In some places, the Russians used
over 400 guns for every mile.
[cannons firing]
The barrage was followed, as always,
by a torrent of Soviet tanks
and infantry crashing
into the German defences.
[plane engines roaring]
To make matters worse for the Germans,
they had almost no air support.
Much of the Luftwaffe was still tied up
defending the German homeland.
It was now that Hitler's
folly of fighting a war
on two fronts became all too apparent.
The Red Air Force could
operate almost unopposed.
[bombs exploding]
Russian planes struck deep
behind German lines,
cutting communications
and harassing reinforcements.
[bombs exploding]
Within 36 hours the German Panzers
had been swept aside.
About 50,000 men faced encirclement
in the German held town of Vitebsk.
[cannons firing]
Hitler, as had become routine,
initially refused to let it retreat.
[bombs exploding]
Then, when on the following day
her relented,
it was too late for many of his troops.
Four days later, Vitebsk fell.
Twenty thousand Axis troops were killed
and 10,000 taken prisoner.
Further south, along the Belarus front,
the pattern was repeated.
Hitler, now furious, sacked his general,
Field Marshal Ernst Busch.
[speaks German]
Once again, he brought in his favourite,
the now promoted
Field Marshal, Walter Model.
But it made no difference.
Town after town fell.
[tank engines roaring]
The regional capital of Minsk
was now within reach.
Two days later, the Red Army encircled it.
Over 100,000 German troops
were trapped.
[cannons firing]
Soviet forces bombarded them.
[cannons firing]
Within a week,
the German survivors surrendered.
The unstoppable Russian
advance now pushed on
to the Baltic states.
First of all,
was the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius.
Across the entire eastern front,
the Germans were in retreat.
But they left behind them towns
and countryside laid waste.
[fire crackling]
They committed wide-spread atrocities
against local inhabitants.
[woman crying]
Nothing, however,
could have prepared the Red Army
for what it was about to discover.
On July 23rd,
1944 Soviet forces reached the small
Polish village of Majdanek near Lublin.
Here they came across their first evidence
of Hitler's final solution.
The Majdanek extermination camp.
It was a camp designed
for the murder of Jews
on an industrial scale.
But as the first Soviet reports
of what they found leaked out,
the Western Allies simply dismissed them.
[woman crying]
[indistinct chatter]
Three days after seizing Majdanek,
the Russians were approaching Warsaw.
But here the Red Army paused.
Stalin now stood ready to do
what Hitler had done before,
grab land, not in the name
of Lebensraum, but of communism.
[bombs exploding]
By the summer of 1944,
Operation Bagration had ripped the heart
out of the German army in the east.
More than 300,000
Axis soldiers had died.
One hundred fifty thousand
had been taken prisoner.
The Red Army now paused
and dug in along the River Vistula,
south of Warsaw.
Stalin was in no hurry
to bring the war to an end.
With Europe in turmoil,
conditions were ideal
for the spread of communism.
[soldiers marching]
[background music over dialogue]
The first victims of Stalin's
political calculations were the Poles.
On August 1st,
1944 the Polish Home Army
rose up in Warsaw
against its Nazi occupiers.
[cannons firing]
But it desperately needed help.
[background music over dialogue]
The Red Army,
camped just to the south,
was perfectly placed to provide it.
But Stalin regarded
the Polish Home Army as close
to the Polish government
in exile in London
and hostile to communism.
[cannons firing]
So he turned a blind eye to the plight
of the Polish fighters.
They were crushed with terrible brutality.
The Germans wouldn't finally
be pushed out of Poland
until the Russian army drove them out
in January 1945.
It was the start of a Soviet master plan
that would eventually see
communism governments
across most of Eastern Europe.
[cannons firing]
To the north, contingents
of the Red Army continued
to clear the Germans
out of the Baltic states.
These would be incorporated
into the Soviet Union.
Near the Latvian capital of Riga,
over 200,000 Germans
were trapped behind Russian lines.
[plane engine roaring]
But Hitler, still determined
to hold on to his Lebensraum,
refused to countenance a retreat.
[cannons firing]
Even so, gradually the German forces
were pushed back to the Baltic coast.
By mid-October 1944,
the Germans had been squeezed
onto the Courland Peninsula,
west of Riga.
They would remain marooned there
for the rest of the war when they
eventually surrendered to Soviet forces.
[audience applauding]
Stalin, meanwhile, was already sizing up
other territory in Eastern Europe.
He could have moved directly
west towards Germany.
Instead, units of
the Red Army moved south
in a vast thrust down
through the Balkans.
[tank engines roaring]
Nearly 1,500 tanks and a million men
pushed into Romania
in late August 1944.
The defending Axis forces
had less than 400 tanks
and just 800,000 troops.
[cannons firing]
Pro-German Romanian troops gave way
almost immediately all along the front.
Three days later,
large pockets of German troops
were surrounded near Kishinev.
Hitler issued his standard command,
"No retreat."
[cannons firing]
For nine days there was bitter fighting.
[cannons firing]
[machine guns firing]
Over 180,000 German troops
were killed or taken prisoner.
The remainder beat a belated retreat.
In late August,
Romania's pro-German dictator,
Marshal Ion Antonescu, was arrested.
Romania surrendered.
[people shouting]
By the end of the month,
the Red Army was in Bucharest
and it occupied
the strategically important
Romanian oil fields.
It meant Germany had lost
its main supply of oil.
Three Soviet armies now
moved south into Bulgaria.
Bulgaria had tried
to stay neutral but it, too,
would soon be swallowed
up by the Soviet Empire.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Russian forces
now moved west towards Yugoslavia.
German troops to the south,
in Greece, faced being trapped.
They began a hasty
retreat up through Albania
and southern Yugoslavia.
[cannons firing]
They were harried all the way
by Albanian and Yugoslav partisans.
[guns firing]
[missiles firing]
By mid-October 1944,
the Red Army had reached
the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade.
Only now did it begin
to swing north and west
towards Hungary and then Germany.
German reinforcements
poured into Hungary
to support the pro-Nazi
puppet government.
But the Red Army ground on.
[tanks firing]
Eight weeks later,
it laid siege to Budapest.
[machine guns firing]
The siege lasted over six weeks
before the German puppet government
collapsed.
By the end of 1944, most of
Eastern Europe lay in Stalin's grasp.
[people shouting]
His troops controlled
the Baltic states and Poland,
Romania, and Bulgaria.
Pro-Soviet forces ruled
in Yugoslavia and Albania.
Hungary and Czechoslovakia
were in his sights.
Stalin had successfully
laid the foundations
for the future Soviet block.
He could now, at last,
move on to Germany.
But in the west, Allied forces were
also approaching the German border.
The race was on
to be the first to take Berlin.
[guns firing]