Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party
have dominated the hearts and minds
of the German people for over a decade.
But by the summer of 1944, the Soviet Red Army
and the forces of the Western allies
are tightening their vice grip on Hitler's Third Reich.
The Nazi's complete control is about to crack.
All wars change the world,
but none of them changed the world like the Second World War did.
Japan's on the march,
Germany's on the march.
No one can imagine the nightmare they're about to unleash.
The most destructive war in human history.
Suddenly the world is turned upside down
and all hell is let loose.
The West is stunned by the speed of the advance.
You get the allies led by the big three.
Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin;
men who are dealing with
immensely complicated questions.
It's the biggest military operation of human history.
The Allies have to come together
not just militarily, but industrial scale.
It's a global perspective.
They have to fight in every climate
from the Arctic to the jungles of the Pacific
to the deserts of Africa and the depths of the ocean.
But there was no certainty of victory.
It was going to be a horrific bloodbath.
We see humans at their absolute worst,
how they treat other human beings.
And we see them at their absolute best,
willing to give their lives that others might live.
World War II was a struggle in which there could be
one victor and one vanquished.
The biggest story in Western Europe today
is the attempted assassination of Hitler.
For the second time since this war began,
an assassin has almost succeeded in killing the Fuhrer
and perhaps changing the course of history.
July 20th, 1944.
A bomb hidden in a briefcase explodes at the Wolf's Lair,
Adolf Hitler's military headquarters.
It was the opening move in an elaborate plan
to kill the Nazi leader and overthrow his government.
Hitler is wounded but survives,
and the plot fails.
Surviving the July 20th bombing
convinces Hitler beyond a shadow of a doubt
that he has been chosen by heaven
or by providence to lead the German people.
He's on all sorts of medications.
He's under more pressure than most human beings can imagine.
He becomes even more paranoid than he already has been.
He is micromanaging even more.
Nazis take over armaments production.
Hitler and the Nazis mobilise even more men
and tighten their grip on Germany and its people.
There is no difference anymore
between the fate of the public and the German people
and the fate of the Nazi state.
The thing is, the German public
is not too happy about how the war goes on.
They are aware that Germany may lose the war,
but they think the only person who can bring
this to a close is Hitler himself.
As summer turns to fall,
Germany's strategic situation deteriorates...
...and every German is aware
that the allies demand unconditional surrender.
Hitler knows that that's an impossibility.
Surrender means humiliation,
being betrayed, ultimately executed.
Hitler also knows something about warfare.
A passive defence never works.
You have to show your adversaries that you're still dangerous.
Hitler quotes Frederick the Great,
who was in a similar war in the 18th century.
Frederick famously said, "We're gonna fight this war
till one of our goddamn enemies gets tired."
Hitler wants to come up with some Hail Mary.
He wants to come up with some plan that will bring advantage back
to a heavily disadvantaged situation.
In September, Hitler summons his generals
to the Wolf's Lair.
He outlines a plan that will return his troops
to the scene of his greatest triumph,
the Ardennes.
The Ardennes Offensive of 1944
is going to involve multiple German armies
across 100 miles of front.
They're going to crash through what they have identified
as a weakly held portion of the American line.
They're going to drive through the Ardennes Forest,
scene of the great victory of 1940,
and if all goes well, cross the Meuse River,
and from there, make it to Antwerp.
Antwerp is the major supply port
for the entire allied force in Europe.
If the Germans take Antwerp,
it will be a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.
Hitler sees this as a way to divide the coalition,
demoralise the coalition,
and force the coalition to make separate peaces with him.
But Hitler will have to strip whole divisions
from his Eastern front to execute his gambit in the West.
Not all of Hitler's generals are on board.
They just don't believe that given their current force levels
that they can blast across the West European continent
and take the major city of Antwerp.
Field Marshall Gerd von Rundstedt says "Antwerp, my God,
if we even get to the Meuse River," that's less than halfway,
"we should get down on our knees and thank God."
But Hitler, by this stage of the war,
he doesn't really trust very many of his generals,
and he does have this belief in luck.
He's gotten lucky at various points throughout this war,
and he might be lucky again this time.
So he decides to roll the dice.
Hitler will even eventually say that,
"If this doesn't end well, I'd see no other path
toward reaching a favourable conclusion."
The fate of Germany really hangs in the balance.
December 16th, it's a snowy morning
in the Ardennes for the allies.
It's overcast, it's freezing cold.
The weather was awful for everybody,
but it gave the Germans advantage
because the allied aircraft are mostly grounded,
and that's the perfect environment
for the Germans to launch this...
bold offensive.
Suddenly at 5:30, it seems that hell has opened up.
Every artillery piece the Germans own,
heavy artillery, light artillery,
rocket artillery, the famous Screaming Mimi's mortars.
The American position in the Ardennes simply gets shredded.
Trees are thrown through the air
with this just shell after shell.
Allied forces, they're caught off guard.
They are overwhelmed.
They certainly didn't expect the Germans capable
of launching something as big as the Ardennes Offensive.
Suddenly there's a couple of hundred thousand German infantry
with 600 German Panzers along 100-mile front.
One of the four divisions
holding the allied line in the Ardennes
is the newly arrived American 106th.
The 106th Division, who are just in the wrong place
at the wrong time, who have columns of German armour
coming at them from all directions, are just overwhelmed by this.
And within a matter of hours,
7,000 men are captured.
It's the biggest mass American surrender since Bataan.
At this point of time, the German troops
are in a state of euphoria.
For weeks or months or even years,
they had only known retreat,
and now for the first and for a long time,
they are on the offense again.
German troops are partly motivated
because they're being told, "Take no prisoners.
This is your chance. Now you get revenge against the Allies."
The result is that there is literally a trail of massacres...
...that will lead eventually to the most notorious
of about a dozen massacres, and that's the one that takes place
in the afternoon of December 17th
just outside the city of Malmedy.
The first SS Panzer division,
they've worked their way forward
under their battle group commander Joachim Peiper.
Peiper's built for speed.
He's been told to get ahead as fast as you possibly can
towards the Meuse, cross the river, get to Antwerp.
And he's just overrun a couple of rear echelon US detachments,
supply depots, administrative troops.
There's a brief firefight.
The Americans then surrender, about 120 of them.
They move them off the road into a field.
And the result is that 84 Americans,
they are murdered after having surrendered their weapons.
This is one of the largest war crimes against
US soldiers during World War II,
and it shows the ruthlessness
which this war has achieved at this point.
Some German units advance
as much as 20 miles on the first day.
The initial success of the Ardennes Offensive
confirms Hitler's sense
of divine destiny.
In Hitler's mind, he thinks,
"Again, I was right. I took the decision to launch this offensive
against the advice of my generals,
against the advice of my experts, but I was right."
So in the first couple of days of the Ardennes Offensive...
it seems for the Germans that they have regained the initiative.
The Wehrmacht's attack stretches
from Belgium to Luxembourg,
but the initial reports from the front are sketchy.
How to respond to the German assault is the responsibility of one man:
General Dwight Eisenhower,
the Supreme Allied Commander.
So Eisenhower has to determine whether or not this is a feint.
Are the Germans trying to essentially pull his resources
in the wrong direction?
Or is this a proper offensive?
Does he actually have to respond?
Eisenhower immediately defines the threat.
And he says, "This is more than a German feint.
This is a major effort."
And he thinks, let's not see this
disaster as anything but an opportunity.
The Germans wanna fight out in the open...
...let's take it to them.
Yeah, the Germans are advancing.
Yeah, the Germans have driven a deep bulge into my lines,
but that offers me this big German salient
that I can attack from the shoulders.
That's why we refer to this as the Battle of the Bulge.
The Germans advance across a 60-mile front,
but are held up by the US 28th Infantry Division
at the Belgian town of Bastogne.
Both sides know that Bastogne is the key.
If the Germans seize it, they can control the road network
and motor all the way to the West,
perhaps even reach Antwerp.
But if the Americans hold it,
the Germans are stuck in their tracks.
So it's a race. It's a race for the Germans to take it.
It's a race for the Americans to try and resupply it
before it's lost.
So all of a sudden,
Bastogne becomes this key road intersection,
not unlike Gettysburg or Waterloo or Thermopylae.
It is everything.
As the Germans attempt to surround Bastogne,
Eisenhower calls on the 101st Airborne Division:
the Screaming Eagles.
Their big contribution so far is
when they get dropped behind enemy lines before D-Day.
They've basically been in the game since June 5th of '44.
To say that the 101st is unprepared for this fight
is to understate the matter considerably.
They would usually jump into war zones
carrying what they can carry, which inherently means
they don't have a lot of armour,
they don't have any artillery.
They don't have the winter gear,
that equipment that would allow you to fight a tough battle
in the middle of December. It's a come-as-you-are war.
It tells you the degree to which this is a crisis,
that in the midst of this crisis, Eisenhower turns around
and looks and says, "I'll take them."
Because the one thing they are
is they are a hardened group of elites,
and they will go in there and do the job
despite all the limitations they face.
December 18th.
The 101st is trucked into Bastogne
to relieve the battered 28th Division.
The defence of this Belgian town is the key
to the allied effort against Adolf Hitler on the Western front.
And the key to the defence of this town
is in the hands of the men of the 101st Airborne.
For the Germans, this whole thing has to happen fast.
Every day they're standing in front of Bastogne is time they don't have,
time where the weather could clear up,
time where the rest of the allied armies
are starting to get reinforcements in there.
And so the Germans are determined
to throw everything at Bastogne that they possibly have.
There's an artillery bombardment.
They're attacking from all sides.
They're trying to push the Americans out.
For the 101st Airborne,
the fighting around Bastogne is as tough as any in the war.
It's out in the open,
it's bitterly cold, there's snow on the ground.
They're short on food,
and yet with almost just small arms,
bazookas and machine guns,
they're able to put up enough bluster and defence
that they're able to hold the line.
To reinforce the 101st in Bastogne,
Eisenhower turns to his most aggressive commander:
General George Patton and the Third Army.
Patton, you know, promises him
three divisions in two days for Bastogne,
which is something only George S. Patton would promise.
Promising three divisions. And you know, that's 40,000-plus men
ready in 48 hours.
Patton had already planned for precisely this contingency
and was ready to take the lead once he was given the operation.
But until the Third Army arrives,
the Screaming Eagles are virtually on their own.
The Germans encircle the city,
and that encirclement will be headline news
back in the United States.
There was this critical thought that we might lose
the entire 101st Airborne Division to the enemy.
It looks as if the Germans are really in control
and they send a message to the 101st Airborne.
They say, "You've got to surrender."
They're gonna give it to the acting division commander,
Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe.
McAuliffe will read the thing and he'll send back a one-word reply,
and it says, "Nuts!"
Now, you gotta imagine, you know, some savvy Airborne officer
gets to go give this to the German delegation.
Of course, they read "Nuts" and they're like,
"We don't understand the colloquialism."
And so he gets to stand there and he says,
"It's the same as go to hell."
And in a sense, the whole unit kind of reaches out
and they hit the collective "I believe" button...
...which is not so much that they can hold out forever,
but Patton's coming.
They're all coming.
All we have to do is hold out a little longer.
In Bastogne, the men of the 101st Division
had been under siege for almost a week.
But on December 26th,
Patton's Third Army reaches the outskirts.
Famously, it was the 4th Armored Division
that is given the task
of fighting up a narrow road corridor toward Bastogne.
And on the day after Christmas, on December 26th,
elements of C Company of the 37th Tank Battalion
pull up to the Bastogne perimeter.
The allies break the German lines,
and now supplies will be able to flow in.
And so for the Germans,
the Ardennes Offensive breaks over Bastogne.
Even though Bastogne is relieved,
fighting continues across the front for weeks.
The United States Army suffers more casualties
in the Battle of the Bulge
than in any other battle in its history.
But ultimately, Hitler's Ardennes Offensive is a failure.
For Hitler, the catastrophe of the Ardennes
is that it was the last round in the chamber.
The Germans really poured
their entire armoured reserve into it.
They could have used those troops perhaps to defend
more robustly in the east
and west simultaneously, but they threw them all away
on a gamble, and a gamble that failed.
As the Allies stop Hitler in the West,
the Soviets launch a massive offensive in the East.
The Red Army is a force of millions,
which has begun its advance everywhere
from Finland and the Baltics in the north,
all the way down to the Black Sea in the south.
The Soviet forces had advanced incredible speed,
incredible hard fighting,
and Stalin had stopped them between October and December
for a very clear strategic purpose;
to prepare a massive, massive buildup of armour.
So by January '45,
they are ready to go on the offensive.
Within weeks, Soviet forces cross into Germany.
The Red Army has breached the border of the Fatherland.
Having Soviet boots on German ground
is a major blow for the German psyche because
they consider the Soviets
as their mortal enemies,
and this is a disaster for them.
The war is finally being brought home to the Germans.
In theory, the Nazi authorities
would've had the time for months
to evacuate the civilians,
but that's something they didn't do,
because if you stay there, you'll show that you've got more confidence
and that you are defending your home territory.
But basically, the Russians come
with such overwhelming force
that the Germans can't stop them at the border.
And so this causes mass panic as the German civilians
take to the roads to try to escape this Russian onslaught,
knowing full well what awaits if they stay.
The Germans have fought a horrific war
of annihilation in the Soviet Union.
Now the Soviets are finally able
to take revenge against the Germans.
They looted and they pillaged and they raped
and they burned and they destroyed,
and they took pleasure in doing these things as they advanced.
There's 100,000 or more deaths on the German side
and something like maybe a fifth of the female population is raped.
This is the beginning of what the Germans can expect
to receive when Red Army break into Berlin.
Joseph Stalin engineers
the Soviet Union's final moves,
as the Red Army continues its march west...
...towards Berlin.
Berlin is really the be all, end all of the war.
This is where we have the Reich Chancellery,
where we have the Reichstag building,
where Hitler has his bunker.
Once the Red Army reaches Berlin, the war will be over
and it will be a great victory and a great triumph.
For someone who lives in Berlin,
it's not lost on them what happens in East Prussia.
The Soviets are getting retribution
and it's coming in the form of German bodies,
German blood, rapes, killings,
and that's coming your way.
Almost the image of an incoming tide that you cannot stop.
In the spring of 1945,
Germany is under assault from multiple directions.
In the east, the Red Army rapidly advances towards Berlin.
In the west, the allies continue on a broad front
as they approach the Rhine River.
The Rhine is the German's
last key strategic position
to try and delay the inevitable
of the allies getting into Germany and defeating the Third Reich.
It's a big, broad river, fast-flowing, deep,
and the Germans know this,
so they're planning to kind of defend every inch of it.
Their defence strategy in the west is
to blow up all the bridges across the River Rhine.
To use this huge natural barrier.
British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery
designs an operation that will take Allied Forces
across the Rhine and further into Germany.
But unexpectedly, the American 9th Armored Division
discovers another way into the German Reich.
Really, out of nowhere,
an advanced unit of Americans ends up at the Remagen Bridge,
the key bridge across the Rhine.
And the Germans, they failed to destroy the bridge properly.
That's not because the Germans were dumb,
the Germans tried to blow the bridge.
It's just that they didn't have enough explosives to do the job.
But it was very stoutly built.
The bridge just kind of jumps on these really heavy stone piers
and then settles back into place.
The Allies couldn't believe their luck,
so they raced forward and they took the bridge.
And they get across the Rhine three weeks earlier than anticipated.
Once you're over the Rhine, you're into Germany proper.
It's a crucial moment for the war in the West.
For the Germans, this is a huge blow
because now the Allies can bring in
reinforcements much quicker
and Hitler is absolutely furious about this.
Oh, Hitler is prone to rage at this time,
and he demands that everyone responsible
will be immediately court marshalled,
not brought to Berlin to explain,
but a drumhead court marshal in the field and shot.
Hitler retreats to Berlin.
He orders the destruction
of bridges, roads, railways, factories,
anything that can aid the allied advance.
This Nero order,
named in honour of the Roman Emperor
who famously allowed the city of Rome to burn,
would authorize German forces
to destroy absolutely everything as they retreated.
Blow up the bridges, blow up the sanitation,
blow up the power plants,
even if it doesn't do any good in the war effort.
There's no reason to worry about a post-war Germany.
He stopped caring about the individual people
'cause they're no longer worthy
of surviving the war.
Hitler commands his loyal
and capable minister of armaments,
Albert Speer, to carry out his order.
Speer refuses.
Because he sees that Hitler's,
you know, gone mad essentially.
And Speer actually comes to Berlin and says,
right before the end, and he says, "I haven't done it."
This shows that the bond between Hitler
and his leadership is being broken to a certain degree.
It's almost to the very last days, the crumbling Third Reich,
that this link finally starts to collapse.
Hitler has now lost control of the entire situation.
He's now focused only on the battle of Berlin.
In the garden outside the Reich Chancellery,
the Fuhrer reviews a formation of Hitler youth
who have been awarded the Knight's Cross
for bravery in battle.
Now, many will be ordered to defend Berlin.
The Hitler youth,
14 and 15 and 16-year-old boys.
By any analysis, this is insane.
And he comes up out of the bunker
and he pins medals on these
sort of beardless little boys.
Any rational onlooker can see that Hitler has lost
all attachment to reason.
It may be he's thinking of the last lost war,
but I think 1918
is enough of a obsession with Hitler
that he is determined that Germany will not give in this time.
There will be no surrender.
There will be total war to the end.
If Germany is gonna go down,
it's going to go down in a blaze of glory.
Allied forces rapidly advanced
through the Ruhr Valley and into the heart of Germany.
The British and Americans had agreed
that Soviet forces should capture Berlin,
but Stalin grows suspicious of allied success.
You have to remember that Stalin is
naturally and not unreasonably deeply mistrustful.
So when the Western Allies start pouring into Western Germany
far faster than anyone expects,
Stalin fears that there may be something that he doesn't see.
Stalin is always paranoid
that the Western powers are going to
make a deal with the Germans at the last minute
against the Soviet Union, against the Communists.
In Moscow, Stalin summons
Marshal Georgy Zhukov,
the hero of Stalingrad and Kursk,
and Marshal Ivan Konev,
who has led the first Ukrainian front,
a famed Red Army group, throughout the war.
He sits there with the map and he says,
"Who's gonna take Berlin?"
So Stalin effectively sets up
a kind of race between them
to see who will take Berlin first.
So this is a way of motivating his generals
because Stalin, of course, wanted to ensure
that the Red Army would be the first to reach Berlin.
And in an amazing scene,
both Marshals salute
and leave the room and run to their cars
to start the race to Berlin.
By mid-April, the Red Army is closing in on Berlin.
Zhukov's forces approach from the east.
Konev's troops will attack from the south.
The final assault on Berlin begins
with a ferocious artillery barrage.
Something like 9,000 guns
rained down 1.2 million shells.
To put that in context, the British fired one million
rounds of artillery onto the German trenches on the Somme
over like two weeks in World War I.
Now, in one day, more shells into the streets of Berlin.
Zhukov's forces meet
particularly fierce resistance in the Seelow heights,
an area the Germans consider the gates of Berlin.
The Germans are dug in.
They have no desire to surrender
because they know they would be viewed as traitors.
Berlin is meant to be a fortress city, Festung Berlin.
This means it has to be defended at all costs.
Hitler's order was to keep fighting until there's nothing left.
They're not gonna admit the war's been lost.
Hitler is now facing total defeat,
and he wants to drag
the entire German people into this total defeat.
The population has been pressed into service.
They've been, you know, building tank traps
and digging ditches. But I don't think you can
fool a bunch of people who are living in cities that are rubble.
You hear the artillery in the distance
that the Soviets are shooting at your city.
I mean, we're past the time of illusions.
You're people at the end of the rope.
The German troops that are left,
it's this bizarre assembly of
overage people that normally wouldn't be drafted, or underage.
You have a large number of very young
members of the Volkssturm.
They were divided into these tank hunting units
where they were 12 and 13-year-old boys that were equipped
with this very effective German anti-tank weapon
called the Panzerfaust.
These basically one-shot German bazookas,
and they're gonna be in these load of fighting holes
waiting for the Soviet tanks to come and take their one shot, and be,
you know, crushed into pulp under the treads.
The ideology of the Reich has gone out the window.
You don't know what you're fighting for anymore.
You are now protecting your street
and your friends and your family from the marauders that are coming.
If you're still in Berlin by April 1945,
you're not gonna get out.
So you're fighting for your life.
On April 19th, Zhukov's troops
break through the German lines at Seelow Heights.
Konev enters the Nazi capital from the south.
Battle of Berlin is brutal.
It's an urban battlefield,
which is the hardest sort of fighting and the most costly.
It's impossible not to take every building.
You can't leave buildings behind you.
You're under fire all the time from buildings on both sides.
Large amounts of civilians are killed,
and it's incredibly slow and dangerous.
This moonscape of Berlin that's already been
just shattered to rubble is now just being pounded
by companies of Soviet infantry filtering into the city
from all points. I mean, literally all points.
But in the end, this extraordinary battle,
the Soviet troops begin to converge on the Chancellery.
Beneath the Reich Chancellery,
Hitler is sequestered in a bunker
with his companion, Eva Braun,
and surrounded by aides, secretaries,
and Nazi party officials.
He believes that the military
and the German people
have let him down.
Hitler wants to keep the resistance going
for as long as possible to inflict
as much damage on the invading armies.
However, he does not want to outlast, to outlive the war.
He does not want to become a prisoner of war.
He does not want to become some type of curiosity
exhibited by his enemies.
And so he has to stay alive as long as possible,
as close to the bitter end as possible
so that there will never really be
an idea of Nazi Germany in people's minds
that does not include Adolf Hitler.
He's going to go down in Wagnerian fashion
and take a world with him.
On April 29th, Hitler is informed
that his longtime ally,
the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini,
has been executed.
His body put on display by Italian partisans.
Mussolini has just been hung upside down
in a gas station in northern Italy,
along with his mistress, Clara Petacci,
where he's like mocked and spat upon and vilified.
Hitler fears the same fate for himself.
The Soviets are right outside the Fuhrer bunker.
He's listening to the shelling happening above him.
And so Adolf Hitler, on April 30th, 1945,
commits suicide in the Fuhrer bunker along with Eva Braun...
...in a city that has been reduced to rubble.
When Hitler commits suicide,
Stalin is woken in the night by Marshal Zhukov,
and Marshal Zhukov says to him,
"Marshal Stalin, I've got news.
Hitler is dead and he's committed suicide in the ruins,"
and there's a long silence. And then Stalin says something like,
"So that's the end of the bastard."
Puts the phone down and goes back to sleep.
On May 2nd, the Soviets raised their flag
above the ruins of the Reichstag.
On May 7th, German General Alfred Jodl
surrenders to the Western Allies at Reims, France.
A day later, the Germans officially surrendered
to the Soviets.
With the stroke of the pen, Nazi Germany ceases to exist
on May 8th, 1945.
This is a solemn but a glorious hour.
General Eisenhower informs me
that the forces of Germany has surrendered
to the United Nations.
Here we are at the end of a brutal war
against a brutal adversary in Europe.
And there was such great costs
with so much exhaustion.
It's almost impossible to imagine what that must have been like.
Our rejoicing is sobered and subdued
by a supreme consciousness of the terrible price we have paid
to rid the world of Hitler
and his evil band.
Hitler was the ultimate reckless gambler.
Risking everything, even Germany, even Europe.
Let us not forget the sorrow
and the heartache, which today abide
in the homes of so many of our neighbours.
The Second World War, unlike the first,
is one in which the majority of the casualties
actually happened among the civilian population.
A lot of it was simply because of
the vast atrocities committed.
The war left terrible scars on the landscape of Europe
and in the memories of the populations.
We must work to bind up the wounds
of a suffering world.
The West is free,
but the East is still in bondage.
In the popular mind,
World War II tends to wrap up
with the glory of VE Day.
It did not happen that way
for the people who were fighting it.
In the Pacific,
there's no end in sight.
When the last Japanese division
has surrendered unconditionally,
then only will our fighting job be done.
Until that day,
let no man abandon his post
or slacken his efforts.
After VE Day, Europeans facing chaos and uncertainty
begin the long work of putting
their shattered world back together.
In the Pacific, the war is reaching a crescendo.
As the United States fights its way to the Japanese home islands,
a new weapon is tested in the deserts of New Mexico.
A noiseless flash
with a potential to change the world.
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