- [Narrator] January 30th, 1933,
Hitler is elected chancellor of Germany.
While he creates a void around himself,
eliminating all opposition,
Stalin, who has led the Soviet Union for four years,
tries desperately to make peace with him.
After repeatedly refusing, Hitler agrees in 1939
to sign the non-aggression pact proposed
by his Soviet counterpart.
The carving up of Poland represents the consummation
of their marriage.
The two dictators partition the country between them.
Despite promises of friendship from both sides,
there is an atmosphere of mistrust.
In his 1925 manifesto, "Mein Kampf",
Hitler outlined his desire to destroy the USSR,
but Stalin only becomes fully aware
of the danger in 1940, when Germany invades France.
However, Stalin hoodwinks himself and persists,
refusing to believe Hitler will betray him.
Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the USSR,
launched by Hitler on the night
of June 22nd, 1941, takes him unawares.
A clash is now inevitable.
(ominous music)
In fact, Germany's invasion is far from a surprise.
On December 29th, 1940, Soviet intelligence informed Stalin
of the contents of Directive Number 21, issued by Hitler.
(tense music)
There were reports
of troop movements near the Reich's borders.
Stalin refused to believe them.
Instead of mobilizing his army,
he requested confirmation from his spy
who had infiltrated Hitler's entourage.
This spy, who said there were no plans for an invasion,
was in fact a double agent loyal to the Reich.
At the same time, Churchill warned him
of an imminent attack.
Yet again, Stalin turned a deaf ear,
thinking that the British prime minister was trying
to drag the USSR into the war.
(ominous music)
Marshal Zhukov had confirmed Churchill's warning.
Four days before the invasion, he said to Stalin,
"Hitler is going to attack us.
Our troops must be on maximum alert."
Accusing him of wanting war simply to have more medals,
Stalin exploded.
"Are you trying to scare us?
You must understand
that Germany will never attack Russia on its own.
If you provoke the Germans
by moving troops to the border without my permission,
heads will roll."
Even Molotov, who met Hitler in Berlin
on November 12th, 1940, had warned him.
"Hitler is very smug and vain.
He's a fanatic, an extreme nationalist,
blinded by his own ideas.
We should not trust him."
Svetlana, Stalin's daughter, would later confirm this.
"My father had not guessed or foreseen
that the pact of 1939, which he had considered the outcome
of his own great cunning,
would be broken by an enemy more cunning than himself."
June 22nd, 1941, on the first day of the German invasion,
the atmosphere around the table at the Kremlin is gloomy.
"We are being shat on" yelled Stalin.
Is the USSR on its last legs?
Decimated by the Great Terror of 1937, 1938,
under-equipped and poorly trained, the Red Army is incapable
of halting the German offensive.
"It will not be operational for another two years,"
confirmed Zhukov.
(tense music)
Stalin turns to Beria,
who now heads up the NKVD, the secret police.
"Contact the German intelligence services.
We have no choice.
Given the situation,
you have to put out the peace feelers to Germany."
(tense music)
Meanwhile, the Wehrmacht's troops,
who've opened several fronts,
sweep into the Soviet Union.
In the north,
the Germans are less than 300 kilometers from Leningrad.
In the center, they are just outside Minsk.
To the south, they have captured Lvov.
(gun fire)
(dramatic music)
Shattered, the Red Army retreats in chaos.
(dramatic music)
During the first week of the German offensive,
a Soviet soldier dies every two seconds.
100,000 are taken prisoner.
For the German high command, it is a divine surprise.
No one was expecting so little resistance.
"In a month at most", boast the German officers,
"we will be in Moscow."
(tense music)
Hitler is jubilant.
His plan for the colonization
of Eastern Europe is being realized.
He has betrayed no one. It was all laid out in "Mein Kampf."
Beria's attempts to negotiate peace go unheeded.
Hitler does not want Russia at his heel.
He wants to reduce it to ashes.
As his troops race towards Moscow,
the idea is to eliminate the Reich's potential enemies
in their wake,
namely the political commissars and the Jews.
As General Jodl, Wehrmacht's operations chief puts it,
"The military campaign is more than an armed conflict.
It is the clash of conflicting ideologies.
The Jewish Bolshevik intelligentsia will be liquidated."
The propaganda machine goes into overdrive,
launching an attack
on the Jews trapped by the German invasion.
(speaking in foreign language)
(crowd applauding)
- [Narrator] In Ukraine and the Baltic states,
the people greet the Germans as liberators.
(crowd applauding)
The NKVD's mass deportations to the Gulag,
and executions, have left bitter memories.
Associated with the Jews, and as despised,
the Soviets have left them thirsting for revenge.
As soon as the Wehrmacht arrives,
anti-Jewish pogroms take place in Vilnius, Kaunas, Riga,
Kiev and Lvov.
(haunting music)
The Einsatzgruppen, the deployment groups,
tasked with eliminating the communists
and Jewish men of fighting age,
carry out the first mass executions.
(Stalin speak in foreign language)
- [Narrator] On July 3rd, 1941, for the first time
since the German invasion,
Stalin addresses the Soviet people over the radio.
(Stalin speak in foreign language)
- [Narrator] As he whips up the crowds,
Stalin regains his fighting spirit.
The Soviets unite behind him,
willing to die in their millions on the battlefield
to save the motherland.
(Stalin speak in foreign language)
(ominous music)
- [Narrator] A few days later, on July 16th, 1941,
Hitler summons his gang to the Reich Chancellery
to discuss the territories conquered in the East.
"In principle", he declares,
"We have now to face the task
of cutting up the giant cake according to our needs,
in order to be able, first to dominate it,
second, to administer it, and third, to exploit it.
The way to achieve this is
to exterminate everyone who opposes us."
(ominous music)
Hitler believes he is invincible.
In this month of July,
some unexpected news reinforces this feeling.
An artillery lieutenant in a tank division,
Yakov, Stalin's oldest son, has just been captured.
Hitler himself calls the intelligence officer
in charge of questioning Yakov.
The officer asks him a single question,
"Was Stalin's wife Jewish?"
Stunned, Yakov replies that she was not.
Stalin sees his capture as a betrayal.
In front of Vasily, his youngest son,
he screams, "The idiot.
He couldn't even shoot himself in the head."
Hitler makes it known that Yakov could be swapped
for a senior German officer.
"I will not exchange a field marshal for a lieutenant"
retorts Stalin.
He lets his son rot in a POW camp.
"I had to refuse" he explained,
"Otherwise, I'd no longer be Stalin."
Yakov was executed in 1943.
(haunting music)
In the summer of 1941,
the order to exterminate the Jews is passed on
to the German troops on the ground.
After men of fighting age,
it is now a question of eradicating women and children.
With the invasion of Eastern Europe,
Hitler can now pursue his master plan for mankind,
the final solution, the annihilation of the Jewish race.
Himmler goes there to encourage the death squads.
(train rattles) (train whistles)
In September and October,
Hitler talks openly about the ongoing genocide.
"The laws of nature require constant destruction,
so that only the fittest survive" he declares.
When the army complains that the deportation
of Jews is disrupting military rail traffic,
Hitler replies, "The Jewish question
is our highest priority."
(train rattles)
At the Wolf's Lair,
his military headquarters in East Prussia, Hitler adds,
"When we finally stamp out this plague,
we will have accomplished
for mankind a deed whose significance our men out there
on the battlefield cannot even imagine yet."
(haunting music)
The mass murder of the Jews rapidly intensifies.
Reports are sent to Berlin every evening.
Hitler reads them with delight.
(haunting music)
In December, 1941, Walter Stahlecker,
commander of Einsatzgruppen A,
declares the Baltic states Judenfrei, free of Jews.
In a few short months,
some one million people have been shot dead.
(haunting music)
(people applauding)
Stalin sees the genocide of the Jews
as the perfect opportunity
to restore the anti-fascist struggle so damaged
by the German Soviet Pact.
(Stalin speaks in foreign language)
- [Narrator] In April, 1942, Stalin creates the JAC,
the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.
Beria, the NKVD's chief, is put in charge of it.
He appoints a prominent member
of the Jewish community as chairman,
Solomon Mikhoels, a committed communist
and director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater.
The JAC is made up of the USSR's most famous Jews,
from film director Sergei Eisenstein,
to writer, Vasily Grossman.
The poet, Peretz Markish, makes an appeal
to the Jews of the world in Yiddish.
(Markish speaks in Yiddish)
- [Narrator] Stalin's aim is more down to earth.
By appealing chiefly to the Jews of America,
the JAC should enable him to obtain much needed funds
for the war effort.
Mikhoels is sent to drum up support
from the Jewish communities in the United States,
Canada, Mexico and Great Britain.
He raises some $45 million in donations, equipment,
clothing and ambulances.
It is far from enough, but a good start.
For Stalin, the chief virtue of the JAC,
is to make people forget about his questionable relationship
with Hitler and restore his reputation
among his future allies.
On November 7th, 1941,
with the Germans at the gates of Moscow,
Stalin addresses his troops leaving for the front.
(Stalin speaks in foreign language)
(soldiers chant)
- [Narrator] The Red Army cannot afford to make a mistake.
If the Soviet capital falls into the hands of the enemy,
it will be the end of the USSR and of Stalin as well.
(ominous music)
For the German general, von Bock,
the Commander of Army Group Center,
victory is a matter of days.
Hitler is jubilant.
"After three months of preparations,
we finally have the possibility to crush our enemy.
Today starts the last battle of the year."
Holed up in the Kremlin,
Stalin is about to flee the besieged capital,
and yet he hesitates.
If the Red Army manages to prevent the Wehrmacht
from taking Moscow, he'll be seen as a coward by the Soviets
and the Soviets are the only force
on which he can still count.
Stalin feverishly searches for the answer to his dilemma
in biographies of Ivan the Terrible,
which he spends days poring over in his study.
When he writes on the cover of a play by Aleksey Tolstoy,
"We will weather the storm", his mind is made up.
Stalin will not abandon his flagship.
Whatever the cost, his fate will be no different
to that of the Muscovites.
(ominous music)
Marshal Zhukov's counteroffensive
in early December, 1941, proves Stalin right.
(guns fire) (bombs explode)
The Germans do not take Moscow.
Driven back in extremis on the outskirts of the capital,
they become caught in the freezing Russian winter,
just as Napoleon's great army.
(guns fire)
A salutary, but brief respite,
the long, harsh winter will soon give way to spring,
and Stalin still lacks funds to finance the war effort.
He looks for support.
The US President Franklin Roosevelt,
on whom Hitler has just declared war, comes to his rescue.
- I've asked this Congress for authority
and for funds,
sufficient to manufacture additional munitions
and war supplies of many kinds,
to be turned over to those nations
which are now in actual war with aggressor nation.
- [Narrator] The Lend Lease system,
by which the United States committed
to financially and materially assist its allies,
enables Stalin to raise $11 billion.
A U-turn, a typical irony of history,
Stalin was depending on Hitler
to help him crush democracy and capitalism.
Now, democracy and capitalism will enable him
to bring down Hitler.
Despite the alliance formed between the United States,
Britain and Russia,
Hitler still believes victory is within sight.
He thinks his difficulties are due to the delay
in launching Operation Barbarossa.
He explains this to Mannerheim,
the Marshal of Finland, in June, 1942.
Their conversation is secretly recorded
by a Finnish sound engineer.
This recording is unique.
Only Hitler's official speeches were supposed
to be saved for posterity.
(Hitler speaks in foreign language)
- [Narrator] In July, 1942, a year after the invasion began,
Hitler finally gets the opportunity
to deal the fatal blow to Stalin.
The Germans and their Romanian allies
have entered Stalingrad.
The city, this symbol of Stalinism, is a strategic target.
Hitler wants to cut the supply routes of Stalin's army.
"By breaking traffic on the Volga at that spot",
he rejoices,
"We will cause the Russians the greatest difficulties."
(guns fire)
Late September, the 6th German army
has captured 90% of the city.
Only its industrial district is still holding out.
(guns fire) (bombs explode)
Just as Hitler is about to declare victory,
the city becomes the scene of fierce close quarters combat,
what the German troops called the War of the Rats.
Streets, blocks and individual buildings are fought over.
(dramatic music)
Stalin refuses to give up.
He knows how important this battle is
for his troops' morale.
Advising him to retreat,
his generals are hauled over the coals.
"Don't they realize if we abandon Stalingrad,
we will lose our main waterway and soon our fuel as well?"
Beside himself, Stalin blows up at Zhukov,
terrorizes his generals,
orders any soldier taking a step back to be shot,
then takes personal charge of military maneuvers.
Hitler is just as furious.
"Why is victory so long in coming?
I curse myself for having risked fighting
a war with such generals", he cries.
General Halder is relieved of his duties.
Like Stalin, Hitler takes command of operations.
The two dictators are now face-to-face.
In November, 1942, the early onset
of winter is a game changer.
In Stalingrad, the Soviets regain control.
The German army is in a rut and loses heart.
Ribbentrop, the Reich's foreign minister,
advises Hitler to negotiate peace
in exchange for territorial concessions.
"We do not negotiate with the enemy
from a position of weakness" retorts Hitler.
Exhausted, the führer takes a few days' rest
at his Bavarian mountain retreat,
but the war against Stalin obsesses him.
The tranquil atmosphere
of the Berghof does not dispel his anxiety.
He wants to push on.
"In the short or long run,
the Russians will simply come to a halt.
They'll run down.
Meanwhile, we shall throw in a few fresh divisions
that will put things right."
(tanks rumbling)
On November 19th, 1942,
the Soviets launched a decisive counteroffensive.
Marshal Zhukov is in charge.
(artillery firing)
Encircled by the Red Army,
Stalingrad becomes a rat trap for the Wehrmacht soldiers.
(guns firing) (ominous music)
Cut off from their supply lines,
Marshal Paulus' 6th Army freeze and starve to death.
(dramatic music)
Without consulting Hitler, Paulus and the 90,000 men
under his command, surrendered to the Soviet troops
on February 2nd, 1943.
Hitler is livid.
"When you consider that a woman has the pride to leave,
to lock herself in
and to shoot herself right away,
just because she has heard a few insulting remarks,
then I can't have any respect for a soldier
who is afraid of that and prefers to go into captivity."
(people applauding)
Stalingrad is the crowning military achievement
of the man henceforth known as the Father of the Peoples.
He alone had understood the psychological importance
of the battle.
Stalin declares himself Marshal of the Soviet Union.
Just as the Russian's faith in final victory
has been revived, an incident occurs
which threatens to shatter the alliance
with the United States and Great Britain.
(shovels scraping) (haunting music)
In February, 1943, the Germans discover mass graves
in the Katyn forest in Eastern Poland.
22,000 Polish officers and soldiers were shot
in the back of the head following the signing
of the German Soviet Pact and the division of Poland.
The massacre makes headlines around the world.
Hitler and Stalin accuse one another of perpetrating it.
They both appoint commissions of inquiry,
which unsurprisingly, find the adversary responsible.
An international committee of the Red Cross visits the site
to investigate as well.
By the advanced state of decomposition of the bodies,
it swiftly concludes that the Poles were killed
before the German invasion of this part of Poland,
and so it was the Soviets' doing.
(haunting music)
Roosevelt and Churchill are ill at ease.
Used by the enemy,
the information could destabilize the allied camp.
The Swedish forensic expert's top secret report
is swept under the carpet.
For Hitler, the revelation of the Katyn massacre,
of which he hoped to make a political capital,
is a dismal failure and a warning.
Although not responsible for the atrocities committed
at Katyn, he is behind many others on Soviet soil.
Their discovery could lead to reprisals
against German prisoners of war by the allies.
As most Germans have a relative in captivity,
the people are bound to express their discontent.
(haunting music)
SS units are deployed to find the mass graves.
(haunting music)
Jews are made to dig up
and cremate the bodies before being shot.
The mammoth task is never completed.
There are too many mass graves
and hundreds of thousands of bodies.
Paradoxically, although he was behind the massacre,
Katyn is a diplomatic victory for Stalin.
Another cause for satisfaction,
the Red Army is now stronger than the Wehrmacht.
(ominous music)
This is Hitler's last chance to regain control in the East.
"We are having a hard time on the military front.
The thought of it turns my stomach,"
he confides to his inner circle.
(lively military music)
His finest strategists, generals Manstein and Model,
are tasked with leading Germany to victory.
(dramatic music)
In July, 1943, after several delays,
the Wehrmacht launches an offensive in Kursk,
500 kilometers south of Moscow.
(artillery fires)
(mournful music)
The deployment of German troops did not go unnoticed.
Thanks to his strong intelligence service,
Stalin is fully aware of his enemy's plans.
(energetic music)
Backed by close air support,
he deploys half his tanks in the battle.
(guns firing) (aircraft roaring)
For the first five days, the battle of Kursk
is fought as much in the air as on the ground.
800,000 Wehrmacht soldiers face 2 million Soviets.
(dramatic music) (artillery firing)
After a week of fighting,
the tide turns in favor of the Red Army.
July 13th, Hitler visits the army high command's
forward headquarters.
The generals disagree about the best strategy.
Some want to continue the battle,
others believe it cannot be won.
In a flash of clarity, Hitler halts the offensive.
Stalin has regained the advantage in his duel with Hitler.
On July 25th, 1943, the Izvestia newspaper
publishes Stalin's communique
proclaiming the Soviet's victory at Kursk.
"Eternal glory to the heroes who fell on the battlefield
in the struggle for the liberty
and honor of our motherland."
Hitler looks at his former ally differently.
"The peasant is always despised.
Stalin is one of the greatest men alive," he confides,
"Because he succeeded in creating a state
out of this slob rabbit family.
We have encountered an adversary who, like us,
had a vision of the world, even if his is erroneous."
Goebbels notes in his diary,
"The führer had deep respect for Stalin,
whom he considers a true genius of the Asiatic people.
He sees him as his only serious opponent."
(ominous music)
In the winter of 1944, Hitler seems weakened and depressed.
He loses his temper whenever he receives news from the front
and all of it is bad.
To the generals of the Eastern front,
summoned on January 24th, 1944, he says,
"If providence should actually deny us victory
in this battle of life and death, then you,
my generals and admirals,
must gather around me with upraised swords
to fight to the last drop of blood
for the honor of Germany."
(tense music)
The German dictator can only keep going
thanks to the injections of cocaine
administered every morning by Dr. Morell,
his personal physician.
His immersion in military affairs is not served well
by his insomnia and his lifestyle.
(tense music)
As well as his daily injections,
Hitler takes up to 28 pills per day, abusing Pervitin,
a mass produced and highly addictive methamphetamine,
given to the troops on the eastern front.
(ominous music)
Göring expresses his concern to Goebbels.
"Barricaded in his bunker, the führer works and broods.
He finds it impossible to relax,
but he is determined to run the war in his own rigid way
and there's nothing we can do about it."
He has been recently diagnosed with arteriosclerosis,
which causes tightness in the chest and severe pain.
On top of that, he has difficulty controlling the shaking
of his left hand, an early sign of Parkinson's disease.
All of these symptoms trigger an acute fear of death.
Stalin is equally obsessed with death
and weakened by the war.
For years, he has tried to conceal his withered left arm,
which is shorter than the right,
but it is now impossible
to hide the limp he has had all his life.
Stalin also has a complex about his psoriasis
and his face pockmarked from childhood smallpox,
which his propaganda machine
does not always manage to conceal.
Like Hitler, he has become dependent
on his personal physician, Alexander Bogomolets,
a Ukrainian pathophysiologist,
who claims to have produced a life-prolonging serum,
except that Bogomolets' does not obtain the desired effects.
Despite the daily treatment he administers,
the serum has no effect on his patient.
(tense music)
Stalin's health may have been declining,
but he feels on top of the world in early 1944.
As the Wehrmacht retreats,
undertaking the scorched earth policy
on the führer's orders, the Soviets advance
towards a Germany pummeled by allied bombers.
Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states,
Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary,
Czechoslovakia and Poland are taken by the Red Army,
which discovers along the way,
the Secret Death camps built by the Nazis,
Belzec, Sobibor,
Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek.
(wind howling)
The discovery of the gas chambers reveals the full horror
of the Nazis' crimes.
6 million Jews were murdered
during the third Reich's extermination campaign.
April 30th, 1945, the Soviets are at the gates of Berlin,
ready to wage the final battle.
(guns firing)
Holed up in his underground bunker
near the Reich Chancellery, Hitler, hysterical,
threatens to shoot his generals one by one
and anyone else who, like Himmler,
attempts to open peace talks with the Western allies.
He lashes out at the German people too,
who are supposed to defend the capital to the last man,
a bunch of traitors and defeatists.
When the Red Army invades bombed out Berlin,
Hitler realizes the end has come.
After a final appearance in public on April 20th, 1945,
in the garden of the Reich Chancellery,
where we see him congratulate his last soldiers,
fanaticized teenagers, Hitler bids farewell
to his last remaining supporters.
To Vice Admiral Voss, he admits,
"I have understood I made a fatal mistake
by attacking Stalin.
You have to be a political genius
and a brilliant strategist
to organize your people in such unfavorable conditions
in the middle of an unprecedented war.
Stalin proved he was such a man.
If I could live over again and run the state,
I would take a leaf out of his book."
May 1st, 1945, Marshal Zhukov calls Stalin at 4:00 AM.
"Hitler has committed suicide."
"So that's the end of the bastard" replies Stalin.
"Too bad we did not manage to take him alive.
Where's his body?"
Zhukov, "We don't know.
The chief of staff of the German army high command
said that the body had been burned."
In the ruins of the Reich Chancellery,
the Red Army is stunned to discover the charred corpses
of Goebbels and his wife,
beside six small bodies, their children,
poisoned before the couple committed suicide.
Another corpse is exhumed
bearing a startling likeness to Hitler.
After a brief examination, the Soviet intelligence services
conclude it is not the führer.
His bodily remains are not found.
May 8th, 1945, the Reich surrenders.
Europe is liberated.
(upbeat band music)
(Stalin speaks in foreign language)
- [Narrator] Stalin has won the duel against Hitler
following the honeymoon period of the German Soviet Pact,
but winning is not enough.
He wants his trophy, the corpse of his former ally.
Even after his death, Hitler still obsesses him.
In 1946, a piece of skull
and a jaw fragment are dug up in the garden
of the Reich chancellery.
They're shipped in secret to Moscow.
By comparing them with X-rays of Hitler's skull,
the forensic scientists conclude
they are definitely the führer's remains.
Stalin is satisfied, but he keeps the information to himself
and instead spreads all kinds of rumors.
Hitler is alive.
He's living under an assumed identity
in Latin America or somewhere else,
all to perpetuate the threat of fascism,
against which Stalin is the last defense.
Eight years after Hitler,
Stalin dies on March 5th, 1953 at the age of 74.
His legacy of terror is condemned
in the days following his funeral.
Stalin's embalmed body, which lay next to Lenin's,
was removed from the Red Square mausoleum by his successor.
Stalin joins Hitler in the ranks of the damned.
What remains of the alliance between the two tyrants,
of the ensuing clash?
A gaping wound in the history of the 20th century.
A warning to anyone who sees themselves as God's equal.
Pride goes before destruction,
a haughty spirit before a fall.
(haunting music)