(band plays military tattoo)
(man speaking German)
(narrator) April 20, 1939.
Adolf Hitler's 50th birthday.
A giant military display.
On parade the army looked invincible,
but it had never been tried in battle.
lts generals didn't think it would be ready for war for years.
Not enough weapons, not enough fuel, not enough experience.
One unit had been tested in combat: the Condor Legion,
Air Force volunteers returned from the Spanish Civil War.
(cheering)
Airmen who had bombed Spanish cities, killed Spanish people.
(cheering)
(starter gun fires)
(translation) A world record
anh three new German record performances have been achieveh.
(narrator) Another test for next year's Olympic Games.
War threatened.
Germans cheered their sportsmen
and hoped that Hitler would win another bloodless victory.
(applause)
(woman) I think that one could say
at that period in August
there was the same doubt as to whether war would come,
whether it could be avoided,
and a general hope and wish that it would.
Hitler had got away without a war that far
and there was great hope that he would get what he wanted
without a war this time.
(narrator) But Hitler was eager for war.
His army had been ordered into position, ready to attack Poland.
The German people did not know this.
(Bielenberg) The general feeling about a war in Germany
amongst the ordinary public was one of great horror,
there's no doubt about that.
And it mustn't be forgotten they'd lost the First World War
and war was a really... traumatic, terrible feeling for them
that another war would break out.
(fanfare)
(narrator) Germans saw this newsreel during the last week of August 1939.
(translation) Germany is ready to assert her right and her freedom
by all means.
A strong Wehrmacht,
invincible on the water, on the land and in the air,
protecting Germany's borders, her honour and her security.
The German people live under the protection of the German sword.
(man) The tone of the German press was absolutely hysterical.
It was much more so than a year ago,
when the Czechoslovakian crisis had been.
And I had the feeling,
"Now Hitler means it in earnest."
"And he's preparing the nation by that sort of press,
propaganda and news,
he's preparing the nation for war."
(men sing in German)
(narrator) Last scenes from that last peacetime newsreel.
(men sing in German)
We were very young then.
But we didn't feel happy.
A year before,
when Chamberlain came to Munich,
my father made a speech and we drank a glass of champagne.
We were so glad there was no war coming.
And when it really came I was engaged to be married,
my husband and father went with the soldiers.
It was a dreadful feeling.
(engines start)
With my girlfriends I went by bicycle through the other villages,
because we were quite sure anything must happen now.
Maybe bombs will come also.
And nothing happened and we were very much astonished.
And we thought, "What is that war?" Later we knew.
(narrator) Not all Germans believed they would win.
Some even welcomed the idea of defeat.
(man) When the war started, we thought very soon Hitler would come to his end.
So our attitude to the starting of the war
was a little bit ambiguous.
On the one hand, we were horrified by now another war.
On the other hand, we thought all our hopes now lay in the defeat of Hitler.
By becoming politically interested in opposition,
we had to become so disloyal
to our own country's government,
even in the war.
In the beginning of the war in our group
it was such a matter of course, we didn't really discuss it,
it was a matter of course that we wished the defeat of Hitler's armies.
Which is a horrible thing to say for somebody
who has not gone through this kind of disloyalty to your own country.
(narrator) Loyalty was defined by the government
and reinforced by the propaganda machine.
Any criticism of the war was forbidden.
The press relentlessly drove the message home.
(man) A person who has never lived in a dictatorship
can't understand the power of propaganda.
If you just hear always the same,
if you always read
in every newspaper the same,
and if you have very few possibilities for other information,
then you become very impressed by the things which you are told.
And it's very difficult to make up your own mind and be critical.
(brass band plays)
(narrator) Loyal Germans had little to be critical about.
The military campaign against Poland was over in a month.
Here was victory's first fruits,
a display of real guns captured from a real enemy.
(man speaking German)
(narrator) Children loved it.
(men sing in German)
I myself was quite happy when I was called up
early in 1940 for the army.
And that suddenly left behind
all the oppression I had every day.
Being a soldier, you don't read newspapers,
you don't listen to the radio,
you're not always under the stress of the propaganda,
which was pointed at you every hour during the Nazi time.
And I felt quite suddenly in the army,
as much as I disliked being a soldier,
I suddenly felt much healthier than I did in the years before.
(singing in German)
(narrator) Everything for the soldier.
Radio was the link between them and the folk back home.
Germans were forbidden to listen to foreign broadcasts
and risked going to prison if they did.
Authorities had trouble
finding enough wholesome German material for them instead.
(translation) Go.
(narrator) When Jewish subversive music had been eliminated
there wasn't much left but Die Fledermaus.
(all sing in German)
(narrator) It was performed again...
..and again...
..and again.
A web of fear and denunciation enveloped people in Germany.
If you went to a party
it was the duty of your host to warn anybody coming to that party
if there was one person there whom he did not trust
or did not know about.
And when that happened the whole conversation changed
and the whole party altered its atmosphere, really,
to beware of this one person.
(engine chugs)
(woman speaking German)
(translator) We really were completely surrounded by unseen evil spirits
who watched what you did and then denounced you.
For instance, once I took in the baby of a school friend.
Both the father and mother were leading communists
and were taken away.
I had the baby less than an hour and they came to search my house
to find out about the child.
I told them openly,
"It's the child of my friend who was rounded up as a communist leader."
But then the mother sent me some baby things and they learnt about that too.
My home was searched to find out what was in the boxes. Baby clothes.
They really couldn't take the baby away from me.
Perhaps a year later they might have taken the baby.
We lived in Grunewald in a little house
with three little children,
the eldest boy was seven
and the others were smaller.
And near to us lived a lonely woman
with her about nine-year-old daughter or so.
And this Mrs Leidig was interested in spiritualistic matters
and she always had clairvisions and so on.
And after the attempt on Hitler
in 1939 in Munich, ja,
next morning she said to her little daughter,
"You see, I knew before that that would happen."
And little Helga proud on her mother, of her mother,
told that in school to her classmate,... classmates.
And one of these girls told that at home to her father.
And that father was a party member.
And he felt the chance to win some Ansehen in the party.
The next morning the little girl came to school
and said to Helga, "l told my father what you said about your mother,
that she knew what would happen."
"And now they will come and take your mother."
"You will see, she comes in prison."
And Helga, of course, desperate and in tears, didn't know what to do.
She couldn't call home because the Leidigs had no telephone.
So she called me and I said, "l don't know what to do,
but come to my house and I will go over and see what I can do."
And I went over and I told Mrs Leidig who didn't know anything about this
and was extremely... desperate.
And we arranged that at first she should go out for some hours
and I offered to stay in her house and die Leute zu empfangen,
see who will come and speak with them,
to receive them if they came.
It wasn't clear if they really would come,
because it was children's talk, yes?
And she went out and I went over
and took my little daughter of five years
and my knitting work and sat in her living room
expecting what would happen.
And, indeed, after a quarter of an hour the bell rang and I opened the door
and the local policeman with a dog came
and with him a nice young man in civilian clothes.
They asked for Mrs Leidig and I said,
"She's not in but she will come in a few minutes. Please come in."
And then we started a conversation and they asked what I was doing here.
I said we were good neighbours and when I need her help,
then she comes to me and when she needs my help,
when she has to go shopping
and her daughter might come home that time and have her lunch,
then I sit here and wait for her daughter to prepare her lunch.
"You see, we realise here what the Führer wants,
real Volksgemeinschaft and good neighbourship,
Gemeinnuntz geht vor Eigennutz and help each other," and so on and so on.
I started some phrases and so we came into the conversation
and I spoke about the school which was so wonderful
and I asked the policeman if his daughter also went to that school.
And he said yes. I said, "lsn't it a wonderful spirit in that school,
the nice songs they learn and the discipline?"
"l think it's really nice for the children today what they experience."
And that way we talked and talked and after a while, half an hour or so,
they felt they shouldn't wait any longer.
And... as they were about to leave,
they looked through the ajar door
and saw on the night table near the bed of Mrs Leidig
a thick book with a red binder, ja?
And that gentleman in civilian clothes said,
"Oh, I see there is also Mein Kampf by Hitler."
I said, "Of course. ls there any German house where you can 't find Mein Kampf?"
And so they left. And when I had closed the door
I looked at that book and it was Knauer's Conversation, a dictionary.
Well! But I didn't feel well after having lied so much.
It was a bad feeling.
And... of course, it was necessary to help her out.
But I remembered what a friend of mine had said once,
"What is freedom? Freedom means you are not forced to lie."
(narrator) In the spring of 1940, the German armies marched again,
this time against France.
The generals expected a fierce struggle.
The German people feared a long bloody war.
In six weeks the campaign was over.
It was a lovely, sunny afternoon.
We went out to a coffee garden
out in the woods.
And about three or four o'clock -
it was very crowded because it was a sunny, lovely day -
the loudspeakers were turned up
and a special announcement came with a great fanfare,
"Now France has capitulated."
Now Hitler had done it.
And the whole crowd rose and they jumped on the... chairs
and the German national hymn and the Horst Wessel Lied was being sung
and everybody was crying and singing and raising their hands.
I was totally paralysed by that and stood there with my hands down.
And then Dietrich shouted at me, "Will you raise your hand?"
And then slowly I did. After that we went out of the coffee garden
totally disturbed and he said to me,
"You were crazy not to put up your hand. Now we have to do something different,
not just protesting by not raising the hand."
We had to show, in order to plot, how good Germans,
how good maybe even Nazis, we were.
(laughter)
(cheering)
(Tucking) I just went shopping when somebody told me,
"Don't you hear the noise?"
And then I saw part of the army coming back just near us,
so I bought a bowl of cherries and ran there.
We all were so glad.
We had heard so much of the First World War
with those dreadful battles and the many dead.
I felt a sort of national pride that we ended the war so quick.
(cheering)
(singing in German)
(narrator) Triumph beyond belief.
(whistle)
(narrator) As the booty rolled home to the Reich, Germans exalted.
Their Führer had sought no more than simple justice for his people.
He had made them masters of Western Europe.
Their one remaining enemy, Britain, had been driven from the continent.
Surely they must make peace soon.
The masters began to rule,
taking whatever they wanted or thought they needed for the Reich.
The conquered enemies themselves delivered up the loot.
The war was as good as over.
(woman singing in German)
(screaming)
(narrator) The Nazis rewarded those who had helped to make victory possible.
At the Krupp armaments factory
the Führer's Award to lndustry for Outstanding Achievement.
German industry had grown rich building Hitler's war machine.
lts captains looked forward to a new European future.
(applause)
It was a job well done.
Heil Hitler.
(man) Just about August,
it was ordered that a lot of production was stopped or minimised.
And there was a kind of a euphoria
that the war was, so to say, over.
I didn't believe in that at all.
No, I thought I knew the British
and I had the opinion that they would see this thing through.
(narrator) The British did fight on in the only way they could.
A handful of aircraft dropped bombs on cities at night, blindly.
That winter Germans mourned their first few civilian dead.
The war was not over.
Secretly, from the first moment of victory in the West,
Hitler had been planning
the greatest historical confrontation the world would ever see.
On April 20, 1941,
he celebrated his birthday with his commanders in the field.
The decision had been taken.
The time was ripe to conquer and destroy the enemy
which had always obsessed him,
the enemy he feared and loathed above all others.
Hitler believed that his destiny was to lead his people
into an apocalyptic struggle with the Soviet U nion.
The victors would dominate the world.
"When the great confrontation began," he said,
"the world would hold its breath."
On June 22, 1941, Goebbels broadcast to the German people.
German people.
At this moment an advance is in progress
which stretches beyond anything the world has ever seen.
(narrator) The German people, too, held their breath.
1941. The third year of the war for the German Reich.
Street collections for Nazi charities.
Giving money to show solidarity with the men at the front.
(laughter)
As winter approached, the collections became more serious.
U niformed party officials went from house to house.
In December they were grim and earnest.
Germany's leaders had promised
the war with the Soviet U nion would be over by Christmas.
There was no hope of that now.
lnstead there was a call for warm clothes, boots, skis,
to keep the army in Russia from freezing.
(Tucking) We went to bring our skis and pullovers and...
I didn't have a fur coat,
so I couldn't bring it.
And we heard that the soldiers were only dressed
in their original summer uniform,
and winter, we knew winter was very hard,
so we hoped they would get it.
(narrator) No great sacrifice to give up an old fur wrap or a pair of skis
to save a son or brother from the Russian winter.
It was the fact that they were needed at all that was so ominous.
The war would be long and hard,
and there was more ominous news to come.
On December 11, 1941,
Hitler declared war on the U nited States.
He had not conquered Russia, he couldn't invade Britain,
and now he made an enemy of the world's greatest industrial power.
His generals couldn't believe their ears.
(music)
Official confidence was boundless.
1942 would be another year of German triumphs, Germany victories.
(chorus sings)
Few victories, no triumphs.
First the British, then the Americans sent their bombers over Germany.
Sometimes a thousand at a time.
1942 was the year the war came home to Germany.
Like the Londoners they had bombed a year before,
Germans discovered they could take it.
Death from the skies seemed to spur morale.
Factory buildings were shattered.
But they could be re-built, and they were.
In spite of the bombs, production increased.
Every worker sent to the army had to be replaced.
One way was with forced labour from the conquered lands.
Frenchmen or Poles or U krainians.
(Stern) I saw those girls
and I knew they were the same age that I was,
and I was thinking about, "ls this right
that the girls must come to Germany to work?"
"They are pupils like I am a pupil."
"And maybe this is wrong."
But finally -
very often happened this -
I thought, "It's war now,
and they are our enemies."
I personally have always thought
that it was a crazy and wrong idea,
an insane idea really.
It was sensible to let them work where they lived.
There was no necessity to bring them into our country.
We could have called up
much more women than we did
and had our own people working on the armaments.
(narrator) German civilians were not ordered into war production.
lnstead, housewives and Hitler Youth were told to volunteer
and newsreels were told to show them happily at work.
(German newsreel)
(narrator) It took courage to resist the constant pressure to "volunteer".
(Beese speaking German)
(translator) In 1942 my children were summoned to work in a munitions factory
instead of going on holiday.
I forbade it.
So my daughter said at school, "My mother won't agree to it."
And we went off on our bicycles to the Liepnitzsee near Bernau.
When we came home, five weeks later,
we were visited by three Nazi Party officials
who informed me that my children were to be taken away from me
because of upbringing hostile to the state.
My daughter was not to be allowed to take her exams,
she was to be sent to a National Socialist family,
and my son was to go off to a National Socialist school in Silesia.
Now, as I was not completely ignorant of legal procedure,
I asked them to produce a court order in writing first.
They balked at that.
Then, since there was nothing else I could do,
and they kept calling me a Marxist, I said,
"Very well. You mean to say that the Führer was lying
when he said not long ago that there are no Marxists in Germany any more?"
"Then tomorrow morning, I'll go to the Chancellery
and present myself to the Führer."
"After all, he's my Führer, too, not just yours."
"And I'll ask him if you have the right to take my children away from me."
Well, they said I couldn't do that. What could I be thinking of?
So then they went off rather perplexed
and a quarter of an hour later
two slips of paper were stuck through the letter box
and on them were numbers for my children,
who were thus meant to be members of the Hitler Youth.
I threw the slips away.
My children were old enough to say for themselves whether they wanted to join.
And I said to them, "lf they still force you,
then the uniforms will be hung on the steps outside the front door."
"ln my home there will be no Hitler Youth uniforms."
But no one came back. They'd had enough of us.
(hooter)
(narrator) The raids kept on.
War workers learned to maintain production even during attacks.
Machines could be left running
under the eyes of key workers sheltering on the shop floor.
Their workmates took refuge in cellars and bunkers.
(air-raid siren)
When American planes attacked, they bombed by day.
The British bombed by night.
Both had the same purpose - to destroy Germany's capacity and will to fight.
(Tucking) Sometimes you went to the cellar three times a day.
It was so difficult to lead your ordinary life,
to do your housework or to feed your children or to go shopping.
(narrator) At Christmas there was a special effort by everyone.
The short-wave radio brought greetings to the homeland
from the troops fighting on the distant fronts.
(German radio broadcast)
This is a U-boat base in the Atlantic.
This is the Mediterranean frontline and Africa.
(♪ "Silent Night")
(narrator) Home for Christmas.
A cold winter and rumours of disaster.
2,000 miles away, a German army, a quarter of a million men,
freezing, bleeding, starving to death.
In February the last survivors of Stalingrad surrendered to the Russians.
The defeat of Stalingrad was a kind of
underground shock for the nation.
But nobody really accepted it by really reflecting about it.
It was a kind of shock you experience
but you forget it as soon as possible again.
You don't reflect, you were not allowed to reflect.
All your reflections about it
were put into a certain direction
by Josef Goebbels, by the papers,
by the broadcasts,
and the influence of that propaganda was rather effective, I think.
Do you want total war?
(cheering)
(narrator) This was the Sportpalast,
February 10, 1943.
Are you determined
to follow the Führer in the struggle for victory
no matter how hard the personal sacrifices?
(narrator) A hand-picked audience of Nazi supporters.
(crowd chanting)
(Goebbels) Then let our cry be -
people arise and storm break forth!
(narrator) Their optimism a triumph of their will.
Now at last, some women were mobilised for war work.
(♪ "Rakoczy March" - Berlioz)
In the factories a kind of people's community -
sacrificing and sharing, not for each other, but for a war machine.
The concerts took place among the half-built tanks.
Germans were surprised that so few bombs fell on factories
and so many on houses.
They didn't understand that the British were bombing that way on purpose.
If enough houses were destroyed and enough people killed,
German civilian morale would break
and they would turn on their leaders and the war would end.
(woman speaking German)
(translator) The reaction was first of all fear.
And after the first terror had passed,
then people began to grumble,
some about the English, others about the Nazis, depending on their views.
But I must say, opinions really didn't matter at all in times of distress
because everyone helped everyone else.
The help from neighbours was enormous,
which had nothing at all to do with political beliefs.
(Bielenberg) If you were all under the same bombs
it didn't really matter whether your neighbour was a Nazi or what they were.
You went in, helped save their children,
helped...
remove their furniture if you like,
and suddenly you discovered they were Nazis.
(narrator) lndustrial towns were the hardest hit.
After each raid, there was first aid for stricken cities.
(speaking German)
(translator) The Nazi Party, really they organised all the work.
Everything was done through the party.
Setting up feeding stations, fire-fighting units.
That was all under the control of the party.
(narrator) One of the first priorities was food.
With gas mains shattered and water pipes wrecked,
townspeople couldn't cook for themselves
even if they still had a roof over their heads.
Special rations were sometimes distributed to survivors.
(man speaking German)
(translator) Cheese and butter were distributed
and everyone gobbled them up.
They tried to distract people from the misery
and many people thought, "It's over now."
They were told, "lt won't happen like that again."
They didn't entirely believe that but they hoped it was true.
(narrator) In July and August, 1943,
Hamburg was bombed day and night for over a week.
No single city had ever been bombed like that before.
Storms of fire swept the city.
Scorching heat killed thousands.
(Witter speaking German)
(translator) You have to imagine it was very hot.
On the streets in the summer it was hot.
The fires made it hotter still
and in the bunkers it was just as hot
because the ventilation system had completely broken down.
Hot, hot. It didn't cool off in there.
And most people fled out of the bunkers and out of the cellars
and these great communal shelters
right out into the streets.
Because inside the bunkers many people had gone mad.
They were screaming and they were confused.
They just wanted to get out.
And many of the air-raid wardens wouldn't let them out.
So that many people also suffocated
in the bunkers or in the cellars.
Some strong people forced a way to the outside
but outside everything was burning.
(narrator) The British fired the city by night with incendiaries.
During the day Americans bombed with high explosives,
disrupting rescuers and fire-fighters.
Three quarters of Hamburg was destroyed.
Over 40,000 people were killed.
(speaking German)
(translator) I came to the house and all the houses nearby had collapsed.
Next to the house was a doorway
and there were bodies lying there.
I looked for my grandfather but I couldn't find him at first.
My grandmother was quite a heavy-set woman, rather fat.
There lay a fat dead woman without a head
and I wondered who it might be and came to the conclusion it was her.
I didn't find my grandfather until later,
in a hospital, the Harbour hospital.
Many unidentified bodies had been brought there, and parts of bodies,
because everything had to be taken away, even pieces.
There were basins there and in the basins were bits of bodies,
and I looked through all of them
and in one basin there lay a stomach with a watch peeking out
and it was my grandfather's watch.
So that's all there was left of him.
That was the remains of my grandfather.
(narrator) Bewildered and panic-stricken,
nearly a million people fled Hamburg in three days.
People were shocked and stunned.
Those that remained in the city gathered in the parks
or wandered aimlessly through the broken streets.
(Witter speaking German)
(translator) The soldiers going back to the front
reported what it was like here.
And that was dangerous because the troops realised now
that things were not going at all well on the home front.
For the war leadership that was problematic and dangerous.
(narrator) Germans prepared for grim times ahead.
Children were evacuated from the cities.
They were Germany's blood and Germany's future.
In the eastern lands, safe from the bombs,
they could escape from the war, for a while.
(German children singing)
(boat hooter)
As the Reich came under siege, some Germans came home.
Badly wounded soldiers, ex-prisoners sent back by the Allies.
The new slogan was "Total war".
That made more sense now than "Strength through joy"
or "A healthy body means a sound mind".
The young men still offered themselves eagerly for the Führer and Fatherland.
But their Führer was nowhere to be seen.
lnstead there was Heinrich Himmler to tell them victory could still be theirs.
(band plays march)
If they should fail, Bolshevik hordes would sweep across Europe.
If they won, Western civilisation would be saved.
Goebbels was more down to earth.
He visited the ruined cities, kept spirits up,...
..told the Germans to hang on.
(singing in German)
(narrator) 1944.
The fifth year of the war.
In the bombed cities, Germans still carried on.
People had enough food to eat and clothes to wear,
but their future was dark.
The German armies were in retreat on every front.
But people still trudged along to rallies
to hear Nazi speakers boast of wonder weapons that would turn the tide.
U nless they came soon, Germany would be a nation of widows and orphans.
There had been an attempt to end the fighting.
Military conspirators, convinced the war was lost,
tried to kill Hitler and make peace.
They failed.
The war went on.
There was a new slogan - "Now we mean it, fight on to victory".
Suddenly the enemy was almost at the gates.
The men were all at the front. Boys dug anti-tank ditches.
Teenagers and old men were taught to use the Panzerfaust -
the wonder weapon that would stop the tanks.
(translation)..behind them marches the Hitler Youth.
All are ready to fulfil the German oath.
I may die, but be a slave and see Germany enslaved,
that I can never do.
(cheering)
(narrator) A slogan, a gun and a pat on the back,
and off they went to fight the Russians.
(band plays march)
By December, Germans were outnumbered five to one
on the Eastern Front and eight to one in the West.
Some believed that with new wonder weapons, victory would still be theirs.
Hitler demanded that his armies stand and fight.
Again and again they were forced to retreat.
The Germans were the refugees now.
The master race was fleeing back within the borders of the Reich.
Near the end of the war I had to travel from Berlin to the Black Forest
and I happened to travel
in the same carriage as an SS man.
A raid had just started and the train moved.
Most of the people had left the carriage
when I heard this voice saying, "l think it's better we stay put,
because the train will probably move out
and we'll have the carriage to ourselves."
And indeed I had it to myself
with this SS officer for many hours on this train journey.
He explained to me that he was on his way to the front now,
that all he wanted to do was to get killed,
and... but... he had tried again and again
but always he'd seemed to survive every battle he'd been in.
He'd transferred to the Waffen SS,
which was the military arm of the SS,
who were always in the thick of the battle, but he'd survived.
He told me that in Poland they had...
He had belonged to one of the commandos
which were called the extermination commandos,
and on one particular occasion
when the Jews were standing round in a semicircle,
with the half-dug graves behind them,
that the machine guns had been set up
and out of the ranks of the Jews that were standing there,
a wonderful figure had come towards him.
He said, "He had long hair. I suppose he was a priest of some kind."
"And he said, 'God is watching what you do."'
And he said. "We shot him down before he returned to the semicircle."
Another little boy, before they had set up this scene,
had asked him, "Am I standing straight enough, U ncle?"
And he told me these things he could never forget
and that he only, as I say, now wished to die.
I travelled with that man all through the night...
..and as the carriage had no windows, it was very cold,
and I can remember waking in the night,
strangely enough, my head resting on his shoulder,
and he'd covered my knees with his sheepskin coat.
The next time I woke, he'd gone.
(narrator) By the beginning of 1945
the war was being fought inside the Reich.
Even as troops moved in to help defend Germany's cities,
their inhabitants fled.
Breslau, the great German city in the East,
lay in the path of the Soviet army.
When it came under siege Hitler expected its people to set an example
to the rest of the Reich.
They must not surrender.
They must fight the Russians to the death
and when they could fight no more,
destroy everything rather than capitulate.
That was Hitler's message to his people now.
The troops pulling back before the Soviet army
had retreated 2,000 miles,
butchering and burning as they went.
The army and the Waffen SS had fought a war of extermination.
Now, exhausted, they faced Russian vengeance.
(Kehrl) They didn't have enough ammunition,
they didn't have enough gasoline,
they didn't have enough of anything, you know.
It was only, well,
an imitation of a war.
There wasn't really any war any more
and there wasn't any possibility whatsoever
that there could be even a halfway decent end.
(artillery fire in background)
You were waiting maybe for food,
or you were waiting for ammunition
or you were waiting for orders,
but most of the time you didn't know if you were behind the front line,
if you were in the front line or what was going on.
End of February, we were...
..all, all of our platoon,
were taken to a point
where hundreds of boys and hundreds of soldiers were
and we were driven by cars back to Cologne.
It was about 40 kilometres,
It was a long drive for hours.
I mean, usually you always moved only three or four kilometres,
but we didn't know where.
They said, "Yes, you go to movie." We said, "That's fine, see movie."
But the only thing we saw were newsreels,
or it wasn't newsreel.
They were special films
and they showed us towns and villages in East Germany
conquered by the Russians, and we saw the dead bodies of civilians.
(German newsreel)
(narrator) Special films and newsreels to horrify soldiers, and civilians too.
And then somebody in a Nazi uniform, we called them Politische Leiter,
he came and had a speech, maybe a ten-minute speech
and said, "Look. That is what happened when the enemy conquered Germany."
"Therefore you have to defend your home
and you have to obey... you have to do your duty."
"This is what happens to all Germans when the Russians conquer Germany."
(narrator) Rape and massacre.
Fight on or die horribly. There seemed no other choice.
Children enlisted.
Total war turned to nightmare.
Unser Führer, Adolf Hitler! Sieg heil! Sieg heil!
Sieg heil!
(narrator) Hitler still demanded total loyalty from his people,
but he did not return it.
If they would not bring him the victory he believed in, they deserved to perish.
(speaking German)
(translator) The people had done everything
the leaders had demanded of them, more than was humanly possible.
And I just could not understand.
If the people at the top knew the war was lost,
that there was no sense in fighting any longer, why did they keep fighting?
Why did they want to ruin the last remains of Germany?
How could any government be so criminal?
(narrator) Faced with their conquerors, Germans wanted to survive.
What they had done to so many others for so long,
was done to them.
They tried to explain.
No one listened.
Their conquerors brought fire and death, and moved on.
The lucky ones were captured.
Humiliated.
Some were less lucky. They met their victim's vengeance.
Death on every roadside.
We suddenly realised that we were eingekesselt,
which meant that we were surrounded by Allies on all sides
and there were three divisions, German divisions, locked in,
and that they had chosen our particular valley as a route of escape.
So the very end of the war,
suddenly, a very quiet Black Forest village
became a scene of such activity as one could hardly believe.
Our own little inn was occupied by the three generals
and a stream of military vehicles streamed up the valley.
By that time, with no petrol,
some vehicles were being drawn by Alsatian dogs,
some of them, horses, donkeys, oxen.
Anything that you could get. It was a very slow-moving... army.
And...
But the extraordinary thing was, this army still stuck to its rules.
And in our inn,
where the generals were,
one evening a boy was led in to be court-martialled
in the little dining room
where the officers, where the generals were housing.
At the same time they insisted
or asked a local man to arrange to do all the telephone wires.
He was an electrician. And he refused and said he wouldn't work on Sunday.
And these two, the boy and the man,
were condemned by court martial,
were led up the hill behind our inn and were shot.
(narrator) The death camps were opened.
Germans were confronted with evidence of terrible things
done in their country, in their name.
These had been men and women judged unworthy
to be members of the people's community.
(speaking German)
(translator) We heard the terrible things that happened in the camps
from the beginning to the end, till the liberation.
I can't tell you the source,
but word got to us and we believed it, we in the resistance.
But I believe that the public, if they had been told
or if they had heard about it somehow,
they would not have believed it,
because it was so terrible,
that if a person was himself decent,
he could not possibly believe that other people could be so bestial.
The first time I heard what was happening in Germany with the Jews,
it was the British Broadcasting, BBC,
at two o'clock. (sings BBC signal)
And I must say I couldn't believe it.
And I was thinking you heard so many things,
Goebbels said so many things, Germans say so many propaganda things,
and now the British also say they have war,
and they have war and they have propaganda and they have propaganda.
So I didn't know what I should believe.
(narrator) But it was true.
All over the country Germans were made not to just look at,
but to re-bury the broken bodies.
To touch, to handle them.
That way perhaps
they would never forget.
(explosions)
By April, the war was nearly over.
Only Berlin, where Hitler was, still fought on.
He commanded his city to fight to the death.
A quarter of a million Germans died obeying his last orders.
Hitler committed suicide.
I was working in the American headquarters
when there was a special news
on the wireless
that Hitler had committed suicide.
And...
l... even tears came to my eyes,
but not on the person, Hitler.
I was so disappointed that he was such a lousy... such a rotten coward.
He had started the war. Millions of dead people.
Everything was lost, in ruins.
Then he wanted to give up all responsibility
and he just committed suicide, just like his mouthpiece, Goebbels.
I still hear Goebbels in my ears, "Do you want the total war?" The yelling!
(narrator) When Hitler died there was no one,
nothing to fight for.
(Wortmann) I wouldn't like to go through all that again.
Everything was shattered.
I'd lost a brother, I've lost some uncles.
I have seen thousands of displaced persons,
Russians, Polish, walking through my village.
Others coming from East Prussia, or Silesia.
They had lost their home.
I've seen young soldiers dying in the church.
I have seen young pupils, 14-year-old boys,
they got flame-throwers and hand grenades
during the last days of the war to fight the American tanks.
And it was such a complete madness.
And Hitler didn't care about the people.
He sacrificed them all just for his madness.
(speaking German)
(translator) In Dachau
we were forced to look
at the so-called gassing installations.
They really put on a great show for us there.
They took camp inmates as models
and put them across a table to show how they were beaten.
They showed us normal shower installations
that were supposed to be gas installations.
Showed us two ovens used for the 6,000 people who were supposedly gassed.
But there were enough people in prison with us who knew Dachau intimately,
who told us that this was all a big show,
intended to generate a campaign of hatred against Germany.
In Dachau, people worked.
In Dachau, no one was gassed.
The two ovens were there to burn those who died naturally.
There were several thousands in the camp and it did happen sometimes.
The whole business was laughable to us
and proved to us that it was just a show going on.
In any case it was never intended to kill the Jews.
That was a development which came when the war was at its peak,
which cannot be justified, and which, God have mercy,
made many enemies for us after the war.
And the result? Hardly anyone nowadays thinks of the positive achievements
brought to Germany and to Europe by Hitler.
(narrator) Germans had followed Adolf Hitler for 12 years.