Original subtitles

[Narrator] June 1941.

Cameras roll as Nazi Germany

launches an all out assault on the Soviet Union.

Operation Barbarossa-- a savage and dehumanizing mission:

to obliterate the Red Army.

And massacre its population.

[crowd chanting]

Now, newly colorized film and amateur home movies

will plunge us deep into this brutal conflict

to witness the Nazi killing machine cut a bloody scar

through the pages of history

in the deadliest campaign ever fought.

[theme music playing]

July. 1941.

Soviet soldiers tow balloons through Moscow.

They crawl through Red Square like a giant caterpillar.

But this is no parade.

These are barrage balloons, tethered with steel cables,

to foil low altitude bombers.

The Nazis are coming.

[indistinct voice on PA]

Civilians descend into the depths Moscow's subway system,

taking shelter on packed platforms.

The Moscow Blitz begins at night.

Searchlights scour the darkness,

as anti-aircraft gunners look to light up their targets.

[explosion]

Total warfare has hit the Eastern Front.

Just two years earlier in Moscow,

Germany signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union.

Joseph Stalin, believes the two countries are allies.

[Stalin] "The Soviet Union is very serious about the new pact.

I give you my word of honor

that the Soviet Union will not cheat on its partner."

[Narrator] Stalin's faith borders on denial.

[crowd cheering]

Ever since he began his rise to power in the 1920s,

Adolf Hitler has preached

about his desire to defeat the Soviet Union.

[Jeff] For Hitler, the decision to invade the Soviet Union

goes back to his writing about

the Soviet Union in his book, Mein Kampf

and his belief that securing this land of milk and honey

would allow Germany and its empire to expand.

It would allow the Germans

to become a healthier more powerful group of people.

[Narrator] By the summer of 1940, the Fuhrer is riding high.

[crowd cheering]

Celebrating the success of the German Blitzkrieg campaign

that almost wiped out the French

and the British at Dunkirk

on the packed street of Berlin.

Hitler now turns his attention East.

Images like this are used to

lure millions of young Germans to the Nazi cause.

Like Goetz Hirt-Reger, here swimming in the Austrian Alps.

He's 15 going on 16.

His father's just bought a 16mm Kodak camera.

A new gadget that will instill

in Hirt-Reger a lifelong passion for filming

that will see him capture some of the most

powerful images of the war

that will soon erupt across the planet.

Two years later, Hirt-Reger

begins compulsory basic training in the German army.

He films his fellow recruits learning the ropes.

At times it can seem like camp.

Initially, the rookies aren't issued guns,

so they drill with garden shovels.

[officer speaking indistinctly]

Six months later, Hirt-Reger and his unit,

shovels still in tow, are moving out.

Leaving Freiburg, in southern Germany,

on an 800 mile train journey east to Poland,

now under Nazi rule, following its invasion in September 1939.

The country's capital, Warsaw, is a shell of its former self.

The destruction a sign of things to come.

600 miles away, in a German countryside

unspoiled by the ravages of war,

ruthless plans are being made for the future of Europe.

Hitler's lover, Eva Braun, films him in the Berghof,

his mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps.

Hitler loves the region and embraces its traditions.

And it's here that Hitler comes to relax

with the children of visiting VIPs...

to play with his dogs...

[dogs barking]

...and to dream of his Nazi Empire.

In July, 1940, Hitler invites senior generals to the Berghof

and orders them to attack the Soviet Union the following year.

A war Hitler believes will deliver the land he wants

and the chance to wipe out the people

he blames for all the world's ills-- the Jews.

In the seven years Hitler has been in power,

the Nazis have been whipping up anti-Semitism across Germany.

Newsreels show baying,

swastika wearing thugs screaming anti-Semitic insults.

Jewish owned shops are daubed with the star of David.

And German civilians drag Jewish neighbors from their homes

and attack them in the streets.

[indistinct chatter]

Hitler, he saw world Jewry

as a threat to the German race.

Hitler is thinking about this in terms of biology.

He also sees communism as a threat to western civilization.

And from Hitler's perspective,

and many of those in the Nazi leadership,

Jews were behind the Soviet threat.

Jew equaled a Bolshevik.

So if he's able to destroy the Soviet Union,

he could kill two birds with one stone.

[Narrator] Nazi propaganda also focuses on another target of their hate,

the Slavs found in much of Eastern Europe,

portraying them as untermenschen,

sub-humans that should be kicked out, enslaved or killed.

In the autumn of 1940,

Hitler finalizes both his military campaign

and his genocidal one.

To annihilate the people of the Soviet Union

he orders a deliberate policy of mass starvation,

known as the Hunger plan.

The Nazi invasion is code-named "Barbarossa"

after the medieval German crusader, Frederick Barbarossa.

Barbarossa will be a three pronged attack,

Army group north will push through the Baltic states

to Leningrad.

Army group south will smash its way across

the Soviet southern plains into Ukraine.

While the largest of the Army groups, Center,

will attack Moscow

and wipe out the city and its inhabitants.

The plan is for the whole operation

to be over in just 16 weeks.

Hitler's decision to invade the Soviet Union

was his greatest gamble of the Second World War.

They needed a swift victory

to destroy the Soviet Union in the summer.

If it was a campaign that was drawn into the winter,

they weren't prepared for that psychologically,

technically, or in terms of their fighting methods.

[Narrator] Despite facing a Red Army

with almost three million men on its western border,

Hitler is confident of victory.

His Wehrmacht outnumber this Soviet vanguard by a million men

And there's another reason Hitler doesn't see Stalin

and his Red Army as a threat.

A Soviet propaganda film

shows Stalin surveying his military's collective strength.

But it's a force lacking leadership.

For the last decade, fearing the army as a threat to his power,

Stalin has ordered the death

or imprisonment of many of its leading officers.

[Jeff] Hitler and the German High Command

viewed the Red Army as a poorly led instrument,

one which had been decimated by Stalin's purges in the '30s,

Essentially, Stalin decapitated his own army

in the years leading up to the Second World War.

[Narrator] Hitler orders Operation Barbarossa

to begin in the summer of 1941.

Goetz Hirt-Reger is called into action.

He's now a radio operator

with the 29th motorized Infantry Division.

With camera in hand, Hirt-Reger and his unit roll toward

the Soviet Union's western border.

Tank units multiply.

Until three and a half thousand Panzers

gather along the Soviet frontier.

Johannes Schumacher also films his trip east.

His unit is traveling by truck

with signature license plates.

They're SS Einsatzgruppen.

[Jeff] The SS Einsatzgruppen,

essentially served as death squads

that followed the German army into the Soviet Union.

They were there to eliminate any possible resistance.

Their focus was on communist functionaries,

and male Jews.

And these were to be murdered by the Einsatzgruppen.

[Narrator] By the evening of June 21st

almost four million Wehrmacht troops.

three quarters of the entire German ground force,

stand ready to begin the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Despite reports of massing German military on his border,

Stalin refuses to believe they will attack.

[Stalin] Germany is up to her ears with the war in the West,

I'm certain Hitler will not risk attacking the Soviet Union.

He is not such an idiot

and understands that the Soviet Union is not Poland,

not France, and not even England.

[Narrator] Many Red Army units are demobilized,

far from the frontline...

[indistinct chatter]

Their guard is down.

In the early hours of June 22nd, 1941,

Operation Barbarossa begins.

It is the start of the largest and most

brutal conflict ever fought.

Dawn. June 22nd. 1941.

An eerie silence envelops the Soviet border.

German troops brace themselves for what's ahead.

It's the calm before the storm.

Operation Barbarossa,

the German invasion of the Soviet Union, has begun.

Nazi propaganda crews film as Howitzers

fire 250 pound shells at Red Army defenses.

Sending shockwaves along an 1800 mile frontline.

With the aftershocks still reverberating,

the Wehrmacht charges forward.

Soviet cameramen capture their troops' surprise

and the ensuing chaos.

[explosion]

[Lloyd] The early days of Operation Barbarossa,

saw the Soviets perform in a way that Hitler had hoped,

and indeed, expected.

It was a case of the Germans

being able to exploit

an underwhelming opposition very quickly,

and in a way that very much reflected the sort of success

that they had seen in 1940.

-[gunshots firing] -[explosion]

[Narrator] Stalin is horrified.

[Jeff] The German invasion shocked and surprised Stalin,

because according to his own perceptions of things,

it made no sense for Hitler to attack.

So, when the Germans do tear open these huge gaps,

these huge holes in Soviet lines,

it leads Stalin to...

some historians have suggested

that he had a type of nervous breakdown,

in which he kind of disappears

and falls from the scene.

[Narrator] The damage is not just psychological.

Major Wilhelm Emmerling films as his division

moves into the destroyed Soviet border town of Rawa Ruska.

Marveling at huge craters left by high explosive shells...

and the shreds of Soviet uniforms

literally blown sky-high.

Emmerling also records blasted-out pillboxes

and the corpses of the troops that once manned them.

[gunshots at a distance]

In the face of the cold-blooded German onslaught,

many Soviet divisions are wiped out.

A camera operator assigned to the 112th Rifle Regiment

films German units moving along open roads,

fields and through villages with no resistance.

The footage also shows bewildered looking Soviet POWs.

Their expressions leave little doubt

they know their fate is sealed.

[Hoepner] Every military action must be guided

in planning and execution

by an iron will to exterminate the enemy...

mercilessly and totally.

Hitler addresses his High Command in March of 1941,

in which he gives this long lecture

about that this has to be a war of extermination.

That officers need to leave their scruples behind.

So, this meant that on the word of a German officer,

all the men could be shot; the whole village could be shot.

This power of life and death

was passed on to German officers in the field.

[Narrator] It drives a merciless assault.

In the fortress town of Brest Litovsk,

defenders try to stand firm.

They're hammered with a near constant artillery bombardment.

Led by a Mörser Karl, an enormous rail-borne gun.

[explosion]

After eight days,

Soviet troops finally raise the white flag in surrender.

German propaganda camera crews

show the high price of their resistance.

Stables filled with dead horses,

and streets littered with human corpses.

Brest-Litovsk was a foretaste

of what was to come for the rest of the Soviet Union.

Complete destruction.

Men, women, children, animals; fields laid to waste.

The Soviet Union was not simply to be conquered;

it was to be destroyed.

[Narrator] By the end of the first week, all three German army groups

have achieved their initial objectives.

Lead tank units make the most of the open fields

and scattered Soviet infantry.

Within days, they penetrate over 200 miles into the Soviet Union.

Hitler greets the news with a bold proclamation.

To all intents and purposes the Russians have lost the war.

Exhausted and underfed, weakened Soviet soldiers

are captured in their hundreds of thousands.

The wretched sight of their downtrodden enemy

shocks even the German troops.

[Bidermann] The dusty road was lined

with endless columns of Russian prisoners

in ragged khaki-brown uniforms.

Some were barefooted and half-dressed,

they filed past us with downcast eyes;

many support others who are wounded, sick, or exhausted.

[Narrator] General Graf von Rothkirch visits one Soviet prisoner camp.

The emaciated state of the POWs is obvious.

The Germans make little provision

for the vast number of enemy prisoners

they regard as sub-human.

With many forced to drink fetid, stagnant water...

and use their own helmets and beanies

to hold the meager rations they are given.

Almost 3 million Red Army soldiers

will eventually die of malnutrition

at the hands of the Wehrmacht.

The Nazis ruthlessly execute their twisted ideological war.

The sign reads...

"These Jews agitated against the German Army."

It's a scene being repeated all across the Soviet frontline.

[Werth] The first day the Germans came,

they hanged eight people in the main street,

among them a hospital nurse and a teacher.

The teacher's body was left hanging there for eight days.

Because moral boundaries weren't in place;

because ideology was a major objective,

it was a case of

the German soldier feeling that

it was just an extension of a military campaign,

to move into unlawful acts;

to murder; to loot; to rape; to maim.

And they may have known that it was wrong,

but once the moral boundary had been crossed,

it was very difficult to pull back from that.

[Narrator] Footage shot in the summer of 1941

shows SS Einsatzgruppen forcing Jews into ditches

before systematically shooting them.

By the end of the year,

the SS will have murdered almost one million Soviet Jews,

a massacre known as the Holocaust by bullets.

The Nazis' genocidal campaign spares no one.

To solve their food shortage

and wipe out their ideological enemies,

the Germans implement The Hunger Plan,

an engineered famine.

-[speaking indistinctly] -[hens squawking]

Rather than cover up the plan

to systematically starve an entire population,

Nazi propaganda films celebrate laughing soldiers

as they steal poultry and livestock.

The Germans knew that a campaign of this scale,

they lacked the logistics and supplies.

And food and supplies from the Soviet population

were going to have to make up the difference.

To the Germans, it didn't matter;

these were sub-humans anyway;

lower races who could be killed.

They spoke openly of a Hunger Plan,

twenty to thirty million Soviet civilians

would have to be starved to death.

Barbarossa was not a normal military campaign.

It was a murder campaign.

[Narrator] Operation Barbarossa is now into its second week.

With the suffering and death toll of his armies

and people escalating out of control,

Joseph Stalin is forced to face reality.

He addresses the nation.

[muffled, speaking indistinctly]

[Erskine] When Stalin's speech began,

his words resounded from all directions,

with amplifiers carrying the message

to every nook and cranny of the city.

[Jeff] Stalin's first radio address to the Soviet people

was one that called on the Soviet people

to come together and rise up as one against the Germans.

He demanded that the Soviet people hound and harass

German units wherever they are.

It was no longer the Red Army versus the German Army,

but the Soviet Union fighting for survival

against Nazi Germany.

[Narrator] The Red Army scrambles to mobilize.

With Stalin's words ringing in their ears

and thirsting for revenge for the German atrocities,

hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops head to the front.

The counterattack is on.

[explosion]

Throughout July,

many Soviet forces fight with suicidal ferocity.

[Captain Ivan] If you are wounded, fake death, and when the Germans approach,

kill them with your rifle,

with the bayonet, with your knife,

tear their throats out with your teeth.

Don't die without leaving a dead German behind you.

[Narrator] The savagery of the Soviet counterattacks

catches some German units off guard.

For the first time

the invaders start to suffer heavy losses.

[Rick] Mother Russia opened her arms wide in embrace.

Welcome to the war. Welcome to hell on earth.

[Narrator] In the summer of 1941,

harrowing Soviet propaganda films

underline the deadly impact the Red Army's fight back

is having on Operation Barbarossa.

And following the massive Luftwaffe air raid against Moscow...

[sirens wailing]

Soviet newsreels revel in the fact

less than a dozen of the 200 German bombers

break through the city's anti-aircraft measures.

They show a burning plane plummeting to the ground.

But careful inspection shows the footage is fake,

the downed aircraft is a model plane hung from a fishing line.

[Lloyd] The Soviets use propaganda very astutely,

we see the war being used to bind

the Soviet people to the center,

and particularly to the personality of Stalin.

This was the great patriotic war; the war for Mother Russia,

and Stalin wasn't going to let anyone forget that.

[Narrator] By the end of July,

Army Group Center's blood drenched advance

has driven it to within 200 miles of Moscow.

But the intense opposition is knocking the German campaign

further and further off schedule.

And it's about to get worse.

Throughout July, heavy downpours hit the Soviet Union.

Dirt tracks transform into muddy rivers.

Fuel consumption and breakdowns soar

as engines strain to wrench trucks from the quagmires.

And armored half trucks are reduced to the role of tractors.

[Lt. Roth] Stuck under my cape with the rain running down my back

and my feet in a pool of water, I feared for the attack.

I had witnessed what mud could do to armor

and it filled me with dread.

[Narrator] Operation Barbarossa is drowning in mud.

For German units that were marching through this mud,

this could become a matter of life and death.

Because German soldiers were sinking down

to their shoulders in the mud,

and if no one helped them out, they would simply die there.

[Narrator] The German's state-of-the-art mechanized forces

have fallen into an age old trap.

If in the summer of 1941, we took a snapshot

of the German Army trying to

fight its way through the mud and the rain,

you'd be hard-pressed to know

whether it was the 1940s in the Second World War,

or whether this was a scene from the Napoleonic war,

or indeed, a scene from more ancient times.

[Narrator] Infuriated by the slow progress of his forces,

Hitler flies to Army Group Center's HQ just east of Minsk.

Propaganda footage reveals the Nazi leader's arrival

is met by jubilant troops

and the leader of Army Group Center, General von Bock.

To get the campaign back on track,

Hitler demands a change of tactics.

He tells von Bock

that Moscow is no longer the primary objective.

Barbarossa will now prioritize seizing Soviet resources

and use them to fuel the German advance.

To achieve Hitler's goal,

armored units from Army Group Center

are sent north to execute a speedy capture

of the industrial powerhouse, Leningrad.

And south, to the oil and agricultural rich

territories of Ukraine.

Hitler also reiterates his desire

to obliterate all that stand before him.

Hitler was now branching out away from that

one critical capital city objective

into an economic war,

as well as a military war on top of an ideological war.

It was becoming more complicated phase by phase.

[Narrator] As the autumn of 1941 closes in,

Operation Barbarossa is set to begin its bloodiest chapter yet.

Hitler orders the capture of the resource rich city,

and former capital of Russia, Leningrad.

[people speaking indistinctly]

The protection of the city and its three million inhabitants

is led by Marshal Georgy Zhukov,

a veteran of World War I and a close adviser to Stalin.

With the Germans fast approaching,

Zhukov orders the inhabitants of the city into action.

Men, women and children frantically dig

an outer ring of anti-tank ditches

and barricade the streets.

Tanks from German Army Group Center

join up with their northern counterpart.

The combined forces mass on the outskirts of Leningrad.

On September 9th,

the German armored units are ready to attack.

German guns fire at city defenses.

[explosion]

While the Luftwaffe mercilessly pounds away from above.

As shells explode all around them...

[explosion]

...Soviet camera crews record the carnage inside Leningrad.

And the desperate counterattacks

as the Red Army tries to stop the German advance.

[Kleist] The German Army fighting in Russia

is like an elephant attacking a host of ants.

The elephant will kill thousands,

perhaps even millions of ants,

but in the end their numbers will overcome him,

and he will be eaten to the bone.

[Robert] I think the Germans had an unrealistic expectation;

a Panzer division would motor its way to Leningrad

and blast into the city.

But the Soviet defenses have toughened;

the Germans have been weakened getting there,

and as a result, their plans turn to siege.

[Narrator] The Nazis cut Leningrad off from the world.

For over two years the its inhabitants are left to starve.

The city never falls,

but over a million of its citizens will perish.

It's the longest and deadliest siege in modern warfare.

While the deadlock around Leningrad plays out,

the 2nd Panzer Army heads south

to execute the other phase of Hitler's plan,

the conquest of Ukraine.

Villagers, all too aware of the Nazi's genocidal hunger plan,

set fire to their own property.

A scorched earth policy

to deny the approaching Germans shelter or supplies.

Erhard Schauman serving in the 20th Panzer Grenadier Division

films houses and fields

torched in and around the town of Vitebsk.

To further disrupt the German advance,

the Red Army targets the most ambitious engineering project

ever built in the Soviet Union: the Dnieper Hydroelectric dam.

At the time of its construction, the 2,500 foot long dam

was the biggest on earth.

Twenty tons of explosive blow a 500 foot hole

in this engineering masterpiece.

This rare footage shows nearby cities

flooded by the resulting cascades of water.

Roads, factories and resources are washed away.

[Knickerbocker] The Russians have proved by their destruction

of the great dam they mean truly

to scorch the earth before Hitler.

Even if it means the destruction

of their most precious possessions.

[Narrator] Ukrainian locals receive no prior warning of the blast.

An estimated 100,000 are killed in the flood.

Soviet disregard for Ukrainians is nothing new.

Many already hold a deep rooted hatred of Joseph Stalin's rule.

[Jeff] Many Ukrainians had suffered under communism,

we have the famine induced during the 1930s,

in which several million Ukrainians die;

this is followed by the Great Terror,

which kind of rips its way through Ukrainian society.

So, for many Ukrainians, when the Germans come in,

they see this as their opportunity to free themselves

from the yoke of Moscow.

[Narrator] A feeling reflected by this sign that reads,

"Long live Adolf Hitler and his army."

[indistinct chatter]

Filmed by his personal camera operator,

General Rothkirch and his men

enjoy ice cream with Ukrainian villagers.

Later, operating the camera himself,

Rothkirch films locals in traditional dress,

carrying Swastikas and making the Nazi salute,

as they parade past German officers.

Another sign reads,

"The liberators of Europe from Bolshevism.

Sieg Heil to Adolf Hitler and his men."

But this outpour of Ukrainian support

is met with Nazi contempt.

[Robert] The Germans don't view the Ukrainians as potential allies.

They view them as an inferior race, as part of this

sub-human racial grouping of Eastern Europe,

against whom they are campaigning.

They treat the Ukrainians with brutality;

murdering them en masse; raping women en masse.

It's an orgy of violence in Ukraine.

[Narrator] Sources estimate there are up to 10 million cases of rape

during the German occupation of the Soviet Union.

Few are punished.

To stamp their authority on Ukraine,

two Panzer divisions, one commanded by Heinz Guderian,

the hero of the French campaign a year earlier,

head towards the country's capital, Kiev.

For 10 days German artillery assaults the city

and pounds it into submission.

Endless lines of prisoners march down the streets.

Well over half a million Soviets

are killed or captured in the battle for Kiev.

It's a staggering loss, for the first time,

the Wehrmacht outnumber the entire Red Army.

Confident his forces have secured the resources they need,

Hitler redirects Operation Barbarossa

back to the destruction of Moscow.

Almost two million German troops advance on the capital.

Hitler's dream of obliterating the Soviet Union

looks set to become a reality.

In the first week of October 1941,

the German High Command

launches what it believes will be the final act

of Operation Barbarossa: the demolition of Moscow.

Footage from Soviet camera crews trapped inside Moscow

shows its residents filling sandbags

as they prepare for the Nazi attack.

Anti-tank barricades called iron hedgehogs

and other fortifications spring up across the city.

Muscovites fear a siege.

They bring livestock in from the fields,

and herd them right past the Bolshoi Theater.

[cattle moos]

Few expect mercy, but none know the true extent

of Hitler's plans for Moscow and its residents.

Hitler wants Moscow wiped off the face of the earth.

He wants its physical presence to be extinguished.

It will only be a memory; the death of Moscow

will mean the death of Bolshevism,

the death of communism.

The triumph of Adolf Hitler.

[Narrator] By mid October, the 10th Panzer Division

is just 40 miles from Moscow.

[Jeff] The Germans decide to concentrate all their resources

for one final drive on Moscow.

The goal here, is to end the Soviet campaign

in the calendar year of 1941.

It's kind of the last gasp attack on the capital,

in the hopes that Operation Barbarossa can be

brought to a victorious conclusion

before the onset of winter.

[Narrator] But on December 2nd, blizzards hit the area. Hard.

Temperatures plummet to 30 below.

Visibility drops to near zero.

It's the coldest European winter of the 20th century.

The Nazis' mechanized army freezes in its tracks.

[truck engine revving]

[Hans] Technology no longer played a role.

The elemental power of nature

broke the operation of our engines.

What do we do now?

[Narrator] German soldiers, ill-prepared for winter combat,

seize heavy coats, scarves and hats.

Locals, stripped of their warm clothing,

freeze to death in the streets.

Keeping warm is not the only problem.

Starving Germans, butchering horse carcasses for meat.

General Rothkirch witnesses the harsh reality

of the Eastern Front's winter first hand.

Frozen bodies cover the fields.

Rigid corpses are piled high onto sleds,

the ground is too hard to bury them.

Frostbite and disease

take as many German lives as enemy bullets.

Over 150,000 die in just three weeks.

[wind howling]

Even as conditions worsen,

the SS continues to execute its campaign of atrocity.

Amateur footage shows hanged Soviet POWs,

the sign declaring the soldiers beasts.

In Moscow, Stalin orders reserve troops

from eastern Siberia into the fight.

[indistinct chatter]

They specialize in winter warfare.

And drop right into the heart of the action.

Strapping on skis, the troops join up with divisions

of winter ready T34 tanks

Wave after wave of Soviet men and machines

target known German weak points.

Frozen and battered German troops raise the alarm.

The Soviet onslaught is a brutal and unexpected blow.

The shock of these fresh Siberian troops

proved devastating to German soldiers in many ways.

They had seen the battlefields littered with Soviet bodies

and Soviet equipment,

it seemed like they were fighting an enemy

with never-ending waves of troops.

It broke the German belief

that victory was attainable that year.

[Narrator] The shell shocked Germans are overrun.

They're caught cowering in barns.

And crawl spaces.

[indistinct chatter]

Or by pitchfork wielding villagers.

The Nazis merciless treatment

of their countrymen and women is fresh in Soviet minds.

[Werth] You cannot imagine the hatred the Germans have stirred up

amongst our people.

What we've got in the Red Army now

is men thirsting for revenge...

especially when they see some of these arrogant

fanatical Nazi swine.

[Narrator] Soviet executions of Nazis are commonplace.

[crowd clamoring]

Day after frigid day,

the Wehrmacht is pushed back in unprecedented disorder.

As December 1941 draws to a close,

the majority of German forces

have retreated over 100 miles from Moscow.

Operation Barbarossa is over.

Over 800,000 Germans

and almost five million Soviets are dead,

MIA, wounded or captured.

Numbers that make Barbarossa

the costliest military operation in history.

But its aftermath is to prove even deadlier.

[Jeff] From an ideological perspective,

Operation Barbarossa ushered in the Holocaust.

We see the evolution of Nazi policy towards Jews

in the Soviet Union,

beginning with the mass murder of all male Jews

then by the end of the campaign in December of 1941,

the Nazi leadership has made the decision

that each and every Jew in Europe is to be murdered.

[Narrator] The Nazis,

desperate to destroy their Soviet nemesis,

dig in for the long fight.

[explosion]

But in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,

America enters the war.

And begins to send weapons and supplies to the Soviets.

War on the Eastern Front is about to get even deadlier.