Berlin. The 20th of April, 1945.
Adolf Hitler's 56th birthday.
With the Soviet Red Army closing in,
Hitler came up from his bunker to make one last
appearance for the cameras,
to meet the boys who were now almost the only ones still fighting for him.
10 days later, Hitler was dead.
A few weeks later, the war in Europe was over.
The Second World War left 50 million dead,
many more civilians than military.
This series is the epic story of that war...
..as it raged across countries and continents,
as millions of soldiers fought from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
It is the moving story of the millions of civilians
whose homes were destroyed and lives disrupted...
..as they were caught up in the cataclysm of war.
To tell this story, the best footage of the war has been
painstakingly transformed, using digital techniques, into colour.
Along with original colour home movies, it gives a completely new
perspective to one of the greatest events of the last century.
This is the powerful story of the apocalypse and of the people who
fought the Second World War.
Berlin in the early 1930s.
A lively, vibrant city.
Marlene Dietrich sang The Blue Angel.
Artists and writers gathered to exchange ideas in the shade
of the lime trees on avenue Unter den Linden.
Berlin was a major cultural centre of Europe, one of the most open
and tolerant cities in the world.
SHE SINGS IN GERMAN
Then, in 1933, all that changed.
Through intimidation and violence, Hitler and his armed militias like
the SA seized control of Germany.
Their hymn was the "Horst Wessel" song.
CROWD SINGS HORST WESSEL
The Nazis took advantage of the fact that the socialist parties
in Germany were divided.
It almost seemed that Hitler, with his raised fist revolutionary salute,
wanted to win their support.
German Communists took their orders from Moscow.
The Kremlin saw the Social-Democrats as the true enemy.
No alliance was possible with them.
For the last time, German Communists sang The Internationale.
Hitler came to power, perfectly legally, on the 30th of January 1933.
Within a few months, his dictatorship was firmly in place.
He became the Fuhrer, the Leader.
All of Germany had to rise and chant, "Heil Hitler!".
However, not all Germans were convinced,
so Hitler continued to hammer home his simplistic nationalist slogans.
TRANSLATION:
CHEERING
And he eventually won people
over with his remarkable power of persuasion over the masses.
In his book, Mein Kampf - My Struggle -
Hitler clearly laid out what he called his "missions".
As one of the embittered veterans of the First World War, his first
mission was to destroy France, to wipe out the humiliation of
the Versailles Treaty of 1919 that stripped Germany of its army
and part of its territory.
He wanted to conquer what he called "lebensraum" - living space.
Germany had a population of 80 million, twice that of France.
He wanted to make Germany a world superpower.
A pathological anti-Semite, Hitler also took on the mission
of asserting the superiority of the Germanic Aryan race,
menaced, he believed, by the Jews.
For him, the Jews were the cause of the Great War, of Germany's defeat,
of inflation and unemployment.
The next war would be a war on the Jews.
To start with, they were sent to Dachau, the first concentration camp,
where Hitler also locked up the anti-Nazis - communists,
social-democrats and others.
Hitler also believed it was his mission to bring
all the German-speaking peoples into the Greater Reich, beginning
with those of his homeland, Austria.
In 1938, Austria was annexed and then submitted to the same reign of terror
as Germany, with the opening of one of the most infamous concentration
camps at Mauthausen near Linz.
Hitler visited the village of his birth in Austria and the schoolhouse
where, in 1899, like these poor, barefoot children,
he had been a pupil.
His next victim would be neighbouring Czechoslovakia,
where there was a German population, the Sudeten Germans.
But the country was under the protection of England and France.
A crisis followed.
Munich, temple of Nazism, September 1938.
An 11th hour peace conference.
On one side, Adolf Hitler,
and his ally, the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
On the other side, the western democracies.
Neville Chamberlain, the Conservative British Prime Minister,
and the radical-socialist French Premier Edouard Daladier.
They ended up accepting the unacceptable -
they gave up the Czech province of Sudetenland to Hitler
in exchange for his solemn promise
to make no more claims on any other European territory.
But just six months later,
in March 1939,
Hitler invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia
and entered Prague accompanied by Marshal Hermann Goering.
Goering, a former First World War
fighter pilot, one of the founders of the Nazi Party, was the Air Minister.
Hitler no longer needed the excuse of reuniting German-speaking people.
He could now take over all of Czechoslovakia's powerful industries.
The Allies did nothing to stop him.
The Soviet Union was the only nation left to counter Hitler.
It had signed a mutual assistance treaty with France.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was the official name
of Communist Russia.
Behind the mass parades in Red Square was the iron-fisted
dictatorship of Stalin, who had also thrown millions into his camps.
Industrialisation and forced militarisation
had made the USSR a major power.
Despite their fear of Communism, the Western powers relied
on the Soviet Union.
But Hitler and Stalin were about to stun the world.
Summer, 1939.
In his Berchtesgaden retreat, with his Minister of Foreign Affairs,
Joachim von Ribbentrop,
Hitler prepared an extraordinary diplomatic coup.
Hitler, who had sworn to destroy communism, sent Ribbentrop to Moscow
to sign a history-making treaty with his deadliest enemy.
When Stalin's Foreign Affairs Minister, Molotov, signed the German-Soviet Pact,
Communists in the West were totally taken aback.
The Soviets argued that Stalin was simply playing for time,
letting Hitler and the Western powers kill each other off.
Perhaps Stalin, who intended to grab the Baltic states and part of Poland,
even deluded himself that he could share Europe with Hitler.
Hitler himself had some explaining to do to the Nazi chiefs.
This pact with Stalin was a shock for them.
He explained to the heads of the SS and the Gestapo,
Heydrich and Himmler, to his right-hand man, Bormann,
and to a few close collaborators, that the temporary alliance
left him free to continue his expansion, this time into Poland.
For the rest of the world, the German-Soviet Pact meant war.
In 1936, the US Congress had passed the Neutrality Act
to avoid being dragged into a European war once again.
So, with nothing to fear either from the United States or from Russia,
Hitler decided to wipe out what he called the "worst monstrosity"
of the Versailles Treaty - the Danzig Corridor.
In 1919, German territory had been cut in two
in order to give Poland access to the sea.
Hitler launched his invasion of Poland at dawn
on Friday the 1st of September 1939.
The first shots of the Second World War were fired on Danzig.
Hitler was convinced that the French and British would not take action.
Yet the two governments met immediately and sent him an ultimatum,
demanding that he halt all military action against Poland.
Hitler declared,
"Our enemies are little worms, incapable of making a real decision."
And he added, "Who wants to get bogged down
"in a world war for Danzig?"
3rd September, 1939.
At 11am, the ambassador of Great Britain in Berlin
delivered a declaration of war.
At 5pm, France declared war on Germany.
Hitler could hardly believe it.
His interpreter, Schmidt, wrote,
"It was like he was petrified, staring into the distance."
General Jodl remarked, "For the first time,
"the Fuhrer's instinct was wrong."
German generals found themselves facing their worst-case scenario,
a war on two fronts. But the die was cast.
Hitler unleashed the Wehrmacht, the armed forces of Nazi Germany,
onto Poland.
ROCKET WHOOSHES
EXPLOSION
Going into battle as if in a bygone age,
the Polish cavalry charged the German tanks and was slaughtered.
Paris. General Mobilisation.
Nobody wanted to fight this war, not like the last time in 1914,
when everyone marched off to battle in high spirits
with flowers in their rifles.
This time there were no flowers
and no rifles.
Once again, men and women said tearful farewells to each other.
The French Army headed for the German border on foot
with their officers following on horseback.
At the time, armies still relied heavily on horses
and these were requisitioned everywhere.
Motorisation had not kept up.
Gaston Sirec,
a driver of one of these outdated trucks with solid rubber tires.
"There was such a shortage of equipment.
"We had one rifle for two per truck.
"We had one box of ten bullets, which we weren't allowed to open.
"It was pathetic!
"If we'd had what we needed, we'd have fought,
"because we're no great friends of the Boche."
The Boche, the pejorative nickname for German soldiers
during the previous war,
were also named Krauts, Jerries, Huns, Fritzes, Heinies.
They were also called Doryphores, meaning potato beetles, parasites.
But just who were these Boche?
They were young, highly-motivated Germans, marching as they sang,
"Our flag is waving before us.
"Our flag is a new age."
"Our flag is stronger than death."
August von Kageneck was a typical young German officer.
"I thought that a military career was the right choice.
"My parents thought so as well.
"My father would tell me, 'At least there you can still open your mouth and say what you like,
"'and you don't have to do that Nazi salute.'"
In September 1939,
von Kageneck was still training to become a tank commander.
"My father, who was a general,
"was telling me, 'The French have 40 divisions on the border.
"'We have 15.
"'All the rest are in Poland. 500,000 men against 200,000.'
"They outnumbered us two-to-one."
So, confident French forces attacked
on 7th September, 1939, four days after declaring war.
This offensive, launched to show public opinion that Poland had not
been abandoned, advanced five miles into German territory.
German civilians were the first to take to the roads fleeing the combat.
The French Army's cinema department
showed off the spoils of war -
bicycles.
TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH FILM BROADCAST
But the offensive soon came to a halt and degenerated into a series of skirmishes,
raids by elite commandos led by the hero Joseph Darnand,
who received the citation of "Premier Soldier of France".
Later, he became one of the most rabid collaborators with the Germans
and after the war he was executed.
The French Army,
in spite of its heroes and its superiority in numbers,
took no further action.
General Maurice Gamelin,
67 years old, was commander in chief of the Allied Franco-British Land Forces.
The French massively outnumbered the British, who also thought the war wasn't for real
and that it would all be over soon.
Gamelin himself had no desire to re-fight the war of 1914.
He wanted to avoid another bloodbath at any cost.
He wanted two more years behind the Maginot Line to rearm the country.
The Maginot Line was the vast complex of fortifications, built to stop
the German enemy once and for all.
It took 16 years to construct
and swallowed up one-and-a-half million cubic yards of concrete
and 150,000 tons of steel.
All these gun turrets were linked together by a labyrinth of tunnels
stretching 300 miles from the Swiss border to Luxembourg.
200,000 men were stationed there.
The Maginot Line ended at the foot of the Ardennes forest.
The French Military Command thought that German tanks could never cross
this extremely rough terrain.
The French hadn't extended the line to the sea because Belgium,
an ally of France, had opposed it.
This northern part of the front was manned by the French Army
and the British Expeditionary Force,
later reinforced by Canadians and troops from all around the British Empire.
CHEERING
They adopted a snappy theme song.
♪ We're going to hang out the washing
♪ On the Siegfried Line
♪ "Have you any dirty washing
♪ "Mother, dear?" ♪
The Siegfried Line was the string of fortifications constructed by Hitler
facing the Maginot Line.
Unfortunately, nothing was going to be as easy as the song suggested.
♪ We're going to hang out the washing... ♪
September, 1939.
During the invasion of Poland,
the Germans stationed on the French border
stared across at the French defences.
But they didn't attack.
They were desperate to avoid a second front.
The French still took some precautions.
They evacuated the population of Alsace and Lorraine
to the southwest of France.
These people had been thrown back and forth between France and Germany by the successive tides of war.
Strasbourg became a ghost town.
Its population had taken everything they could carry,
even from their churches...
..and synagogues.
On 20th September, Hitler ordered the bombing of Warsaw.
The city was surrounded but was still holding out.
BOMB WHINES
EXPLOSIONS
BOMB WHINES
SIRENS WAIL
The Fuhrer wanted to strike terror into the hearts and minds,
not only of the Poles, but of the French and British as well.
He wanted them to think, "This is what's in store for us."
The world was horrified.
In New York, the bombing of Warsaw was up in lights in Times Square,
and on the front page of all the newspapers.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, the President of the United States,
addressed the nation.
This nation will remain
a neutral nation.
But I cannot ask that every American
remain neutral in thought as well.
Even a neutral
has a right to take account of facts.
Even a neutral
cannot be asked to close his mind
or to close his conscience.
The bombing of Warsaw showed how vulnerable cities were.
Paris set about protecting its monuments
and transferring its museums' masterpieces into the provinces.
The Champ de Mars, at the foot the Eiffel Tower,
was dug full of bomb shelters.
And there were frequent air-raid drills.
AIR-RAID SIREN BLARES
Gas masks were compulsory.
Poison gases had been used in the First World War
and now everyone was afraid they would be used again.
Even the horses had to be protected.
Meanwhile, Poland was being ruthlessly carved up.
DISTANT EXPLOSIONS
As previously agreed with Hitler, the Russians had invaded
the eastern half of Poland.
Here, German and Soviet soldiers were fraternising,
so incongruous in the light of what would happen later.
The Nazis handed out flyers that read, "The German Army
"salutes the Red Army of workers and farmers, which it has always held
"in the highest respect."
The Polish Army surrendered in the west to the Germans,
and in the east to the Soviets.
Stalin then ordered the execution of 20,000 Polish prisoners.
He wanted to eliminate the elite of this country he intended to annexe.
4,500 Polish officers were executed with a bullet in the head
in the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk in Russia.
Two years later, at the Kremlin,
Stalin met with the head of the Polish government in exile,
General Sikorski, who delivered a list of missing Polish officers.
Stalin acted surprised and promised to investigate.
50 years later, in 1992, the president of post-Soviet Russia,
Boris Yeltsin, would present the Polish president
with the original order of execution
signed by Stalin himself.
But by occupying half of Poland,
Stalin was playing into the hands of Hitler,
who needed a common border with the USSR for his plans to invade Russia.
Hitler and Himmler, the head of the SS,
would now take care of Poland by naming the Nazi, Hans Frank,
as Governor-General of the occupied Polish provinces.
He declared,
"I have the power of life and death over the Polish people."
After the war, he was tried at Nuremberg and hanged
for crimes against humanity.
These gypsies, held in a pen, were filmed by a German.
For the Nazis, they were "non-persons".
The women were forced to undergo sterilisation
because "they did not deserve to reproduce".
The Nazis declared "open season" on gypsies.
Hundreds of thousands would be interned in concentration camps.
The ordeal of the Jewish people was just beginning.
The Nazis now had three million Polish Jews at their mercy.
Hitler was still uncertain about what to do with them.
As long as the war was going well for him, he considered
deporting them to the East or even shipping them to Madagascar.
It was only later, when the outcome of the war became less certain,
that Hitler and his henchmen unleashed a frenzy of hate and murder.
The Final Solution.
For the time being, the Jews had to be identified,
marked with a yellow star and herded into ghettos,
some of which were completely walled off.
From the diary of one of these unfortunate victims.
"It's heartrending to see the shameful scenes of violence
"that take place before our eyes.
"Women and old folks beaten right out in the streets by petty thugs.
"Tears come to my eyes. All our powerlessness,
"all our isolation is there to see
"right in the open, where not a single person takes our defence.
"We are so weak."
All the major cities of Poland would have their ghetto-prisons,
where German, Austrian and Czech Jews were also interned.
The Jews here still felt confident that perhaps, one day,
they'd be able to return to their homes.
They didn't know that they would die of hunger and cold.
That the Shoah was about to begin.
Warsaw was in ruins.
Hitler visited the city,
filmed by a propaganda crew seen here in a travelling car
in the background.
These victorious German soldiers marched their goose step
to the sound of the Grenadiers' March,
but in fact, all sorts of failings had emerged during the Polish campaign.
Poor preparation, a lack of fighting spirit
and even cases of indiscipline were the points
that the commander in chief, General von Brauchitsch, dared report to the Fuhrer.
Hitler was furious, but he was immune to doubt and ordered plans
to be made for his attack on the West, an attack on The Netherlands,
Belgium and France.
The generals thought it was madness.
Some of them began plotting to overthrow the Fuhrer.
It was a crucial moment.
The course of history could have been changed.
EXPLOSION
8th November, 1939.
Hitler narrowly escaped an assassination attempt.
It seemed as though he enjoyed some kind of divine protection.
By the time he attended the funeral for the victims,
his power over the army and the German people had grown even stronger.
He told his generals, "My decision is irrevocable.
"I will attack France when the time is right.
"I will be victorious or die in the attempt."
Eventually, he postponed the order to attack
and went back to his retreat in the Alps
to join his mistress, Eva Braun.
She shot this footage of Hitler's entourage,
of the Reich's architect, Albert Speer,
who went for long walks withHitler.
Speer later recalled...
"Hitler wanted to re-christen Berlin "Germania".
"We already had a mock-up of the future Adolf Hitler Square
"with a dome inspired by St. Peter's of Rome, but 17 times bigger.
"I said to him, 'My Fuhrer, wouldn't that make
"'an ideal target for bombers?'
"He answered, 'Not at all.
"'Goering has assured me
"'that no enemy aircraft will ever fly over the Reich.'"
From his barracks, the future German officer,
August von Kageneck, wrote to his mother.
"We're all eager to fight. We're ready for battle."
His mother answered...
"This war is a crime and we're going to have to pay for it."
Autumn, 1939.
The war had entered a new, bizarre phase.
The Germans called it the Sitzkrieg, the Sitting War.
The British called it the Phoney War.
And for the French, it was the "drole de guerre".
The Bore War.
It was a strange waiting period, especially hard on the women.
For them, there was not only the anguish of war,
but also the survival of their families to worry about.
Just as in the Great War, the soldiers dug in and
tried to make the best of things. The French soldier Gaston Sirec
wrote to his wife.
"It's 30 degrees below zero.
"The bread is frozen.
"I'm one of the lucky ones - they gave us some straw
"and with that we can sleep better."
The winter of '39 to '40 was one of the coldest of the century.
As would be many of the winters of this war, to make things even worse.
The commander in chief, General Gamelin, expected the Germans
to attack through Belgium and to move towards Paris
across this open plain, as they had done in 1914.
Gamelin planned to make his stand against the Germans on Belgian soil.
In France, Colonel de Gaulle, a tank officer who was beginning to
make a name for himself, criticised this strategy.
He called it the "Maginot-Line Mentality" -
simply waiting for the other side to make the first move.
In his book, Towards A Professional Army, he argued in favour of taking
the offensive, making massive use of tanks.
France's factories were producing 300 tanks a month,
but they were being dispersed to all regions to back up the infantry.
French aviation had also fallen behind.
France had ordered 4,000 planes from the United States,
in spite of the ever-growing isolationist trend
led by Charles Lindbergh,
the hero who had made the first transatlantic solo flight,
and who was now leader of the America First movement.
If you believe in an independent destiny for America,
if you believe that this country should not enter the war in Europe,
we ask you to join the America First committee in its stand.
This was a conservative voice of America and of public personalities
like Henry Ford, the anti-Semitic car producer.
Or like Joseph Kennedy, America's ambassador in London, a pro-German.
Whereas his son, John, the future President Kennedy,
supported the European democracies.
The very active American Nazis contributed to the impassioned
climate that ruled at the beginning of 1940.
In London, the British fascists
were also active, right up to the moment they were banned.
Oswald Mosley, "The English Fuhrer",
openly marched against the government in the centre of London.
He would spend the rest of the war in prison.
His slogan, "Stop War", was inspired
by the German Nazis who were seeking a separate peace with England.
But Winston Churchill had joined the British government.
"We have to take the offensive," he insisted over and over again
to the French generals on an official visit to London.
A Franco-British expeditionary corps was formed to help Finland,
which was suddenly attacked by the Soviet Union.
France prepared to send its elite soldiers, the French Foreign Legion.
The Foreign Legion.
For a century, it had been taking in the world's reprobates
no matter what their past,
as long as it wasn't too shady.
In their headquarters in Algeria, a good number of Spanish Republicans
now signed up, having fled their country
after Franco's fascist victory.
They were now eager to fight the Nazis who had supported Franco.
The Legionnaires embarked at Brest along with the "Chasseurs Alpins",
a mountain corps trained for action in the snow.
But Finland signed a peace treaty with Russia.
At the same time, Hitler launched a surprise offensive
against Denmark and Norway.
A Blitzkrieg, or "lightning war".
The Wehrmacht captured Oslo in two days.
Hitler wanted to protect the Iron Route.
Iron was indispensable to the German war effort, and 50% of its iron ore
came from Sweden, a supposedly neutral country, and was shipped
out of the Norwegian port of Narvik.
A Franco-British expeditionary corps arrived in the fjord of Narvik.
After a month of fighting and 5,000 dead and wounded, they took Narvik.
The Allies proudly announced, "The Iron Route is cut".
This victory did a lot to restore French and British morale.
"We will win because we are the strongest",
was the new French motto.
But within days, the expeditionary corps abandoned Narvik,
and for the rest of the war, trainload after trainload
of Swedish iron ore would feed the German war machine.
On 9th May, 1940,
Hitler left Berlin on his private train heading towards Norway.
Then, halfway there, the train changed direction
and headed for his new headquarters near the French border.
His generals had submitted their battle plan to him
during the winter.
It looked the same as in 1914.
Attack through Belgium.
But Hitler preferred General von Manstein's idea.
He explained...
"We have to make them believe we're attacking through Belgium.
"The Allies will go to the rescue.
"It's a trap. We'll cut straight through the Ardennes Forest,
"then we'll swing up and drive towards the sea.
"We'll encircle them with a sickle cut movement."
But this was a huge gamble because the Allies could turn
back and counter attack.
However, Hitler was confident.
He declared, "The main thing is to have good weather."
Lieutenant August von Kageneck.
"We are the Wehrmacht, the Armed Forces of Greater Germany.
"Victory is certain."
These soldiers embodied the Nazi fighting spirit.
They were the end product of the military discipline
inherited from the Prussian Army and now fanaticised by the Nazis.
For them, their homeland was in danger.
After all, it was the French and British who had declared war
on Germany.
10th May, 1940.
At dawn, German parachutists jump over key targets in Holland.
Their mission was to capture the airfields and bridges
around Rotterdam.
At the same time, Hitler unleashed his war machine on Belgium.
Hitler watched and waited.
Would the Allies fall into his trap?
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd