Original subtitles

Poland, the 1st of September, 1939.

In the port city of Danzig, a German battleship opens

fire with her main battery on Polish military positions.

Waves of Nazi bombers head for the capital, Warsaw, turning the city into rubble

in a bombing campaign like nothing seen before.

Hitler wants to see Poland wiped off the map.

This all-out assault marks the beginning of World War II and the battle for Poland.

In this series, we investigate the most extraordinary events

of World War II from a brand new perspective,

matching rarely seen archive film, photography from the front line,

and declassified aerial reconnaissance images

to their original locations.

We reconstruct the crucial battles, daring bombing raids, and deadly terror weapons,

which changed the course of history.

Soaring over the battlefields, we reveal the secrets of World War II from above.

At Glewitt's radio station in Nazi Germany,

a small group of men wearing Polish military uniforms

storms the site and seizes control.

They broadcast a short anti-German message in Polish.

One of the men, Franciszek Honiok, a 43-year-old farmer who is known

for being a Polish nationalist, is found dead at the scene.

But what looks like an attack by Polish operatives

is in fact the work of German SS soldiers in disguise.

The whole operation was staged and the Nazis plant Honiok's body at the scene.

It is part of a series of Nazi-planned false flag missions

along the Polish-German border intended to give the

impression of Polish aggression against Germany.

Hitler needs a reason to justify a military invasion of Poland.

After World War I, the Allies impose punitive

territorial measures on a defeated Germany.

They reduce the size of the country by almost 70,000 square kilometers.

Germany loses Danzig, a prestigious deepwater port on the Baltic Sea.

The Allies declare it a free city, partly administered by Poland.

Hitler desperately wants to seize back control of the city.

The Allies allow a small garrison of Polish soldiers to fortify this peninsula

to protect the country's fleet and shipping operations.

On the 25th of August, 1939, German battleship SMS Schleswig-Holstein

arrives in Danzig Harbor for a seemingly routine visit.

It is greeted by jubilant crowds, unaware of its actual intentions.

Six days later, the German battleship opens fire

in a surprise attack and pummels the Polish garrison.

This marks the first shots fired in World War II.

Historian Guy Walters examines the peninsula in what is today Gdansk

to investigate this world-changing battle.

I am standing at the beginning of the Second World War,

mankind's most deadly conflict.

Right at this spot is where some of the first shells of the Second World War landed.

That pummeling by the Schleswig-Holstein was really, really punitive.

It was creating devastation all around.

Eight minutes after the initial bombardment,

hidden Marines race out of the ship and advance.

They expect a quick and easy victory.

What happens next is completely the opposite to what the Germans expect,

because they are met by the most ferocious resistance from the Poles.

German aerial reconnaissance photos reveal that the Polish forces

have been secretly reinforcing their position.

In addition to the barracks, they have built a further five guardhouses.

The guardhouses have overlapping fields of fire

that transform this port into an impenetrable fortress.

This intelligence fails to reach the German captain of the Schleswig-Holstein,

and the assault teams are completely unprepared.

In response to the bloodbath, the captain decides to delay further ground attacks

until they have weakened the Polish defenses.

The captain of the Schleswig-Holstein realizes,

well, the first bombardment didn't work,

that Marine assault didn't work, what am I gonna do?

The captain orders a second bombardment.

Shells once again rain down on the Polish positions, but with greater ferocity.

You've got massive heavy shells raining upon

you, massive explosions, trees just splintering

like matchsticks, huge chunks being torn out of guardhouses and fortifications.

It must've been absolutely terrifying.

The defenders hold out against overwhelming odds,

but after seven days, they run out of ammunition.

The commanding officer now has a difficult decision to make.

The Polish commander knew that there was no way that they could be resupplied.

The situation was ultimately hopeless, and so actually he does the sensible thing.

He puts up the white flag.

Hitler's ambitions in Poland run deeper than capturing Danzig.

His goals are much more sinister.

Hitler's regard of Poland couldn't be much lower.

He thinks it's a country that's vastly inferior.

He wants to wipe Poland off the map.

So this is a struggle for the future of a nation.

German forces attack Poland with over 400 fighter aircraft,

900 bombers, and 2,000 armored vehicles.

They launch massive concentrated strikes from East Prussia

and Germany in the north and Slovakia in the south.

The Nazi tanks smash through the Polish defenses with ease

and cover almost 100 kilometers in the first few days.

The key to Germany's intensive wave of attacks is the Panzer tank.

The Panzer I weighs 5.8 tons

and has two front-mounted machine guns.

But this tank has an Achilles heel.

It lacks a radio transmitter and has no way to communicate with other tanks.

To solve the problem, Nazi engineers upgrade the Panzer

to allow the commander to coordinate the vast formations of tanks in the field.

They remove the main guns and raise up the turret.

This creates space to pack in radio transmitters and a radio operator.

Military vehicle expert Krzysztof Jankowiak investigates

a replica of a Panzer commander tank in action.

Communication between vehicles on the battlefield

was the most important thing to achieve the goal.

Blitzkrieg was the new style of providing attack in this period.

It was designed to attack very fast in cooperation

with all units, airplanes, tanks, infantry, artillery.

The Germans understood that the commander

has to be in the battle to react on things happening.

The two-way communication between the tanks and their commander

allows the Nazis to launch huge coordinated attacks from both the ground and air.

Massive formations of Panzer tanks now strike into the heart of Poland.

One of the Polish officers on the ground, Witold Pilecki,

is mobilized as a cavalry platoon commander.

He is stationed near the city of Piotrków-Trybunowskie to guard

one of the main roads that leads to Warsaw from Nazi attack.

What Pilecki doesn't know is that he is positioned

in front of the German 1st and 4th Panzer Divisions who are attacking from the west.

The heavily armed tanks smash through their defenses

and almost completely wipe out Pilecki's platoon.

The road to Warsaw now opens up as the 1st and 4th Panzer Divisions

roll in towards the capital.

Pilecki survives the clash and heads for Warsaw.

He knows that all will be lost if his troops cannot defend the city.

The 17th of September, 1939.

Poland is under attack and the Germans are closing in on its capital.

Hitler wants to see Poland wiped off the map.

He wants to expand Germany to the east and seize the Poles as inferior.

For over three weeks, the Luftwaffe attacks Warsaw from the air.

Wave after wave of bombers unload their deadly cargo.

In just one raid, over 400 bombers dropped 486 tons of explosives down onto the city.

In this terror bombing campaign, the Germans not only

target military installations, but also civilians.

Hitler wants to crush the morale of the population to reach an early surrender.

The bombers strike the Royal Castle, the seat of the Polish head of state.

Incendiary bombs trigger fires that sweep through the historic building.

The raids reduce the city to ruins and kill 10,000 civilians.

On the ground, Poland doesn't have an answer for Germany's blitzkrieg

and German ground troops advance quickly towards the capital.

The fastest way for them to capture the city is by moving troops in from the north.

But the great fortress of Modlin protects this zone from attack.

To take Warsaw, the Germans must first neutralize this Polish stronghold.

Modlin Fortress was built in 1806.

It's one of the largest fortresses in the world.

The barracks measure 2,250 metres long, the longest

building in Europe and second longest in the world.

Former Royal Marine, Arthur Williams, investigates what it

would have been like to be a soldier stationed here in 1939.

There's clear evidence of pretty bitter fighting that's taken place right here.

These bricks were riddled with bullet holes.

In some places, artillery and even shrapnel damage too.

But the most obvious thing about Modlin Fort is its size.

It's massive and it seemingly just goes on forever.

More than 15,000 Polish soldiers are stationed at this fortress.

They pose a real threat to any army that wants to surround and occupy Warsaw.

The Germans can't have an unoccupied space behind their lines

and you just can't have 15,000 men that can jump

out at any point and attack your supply chain.

So the Germans had to take Modlin.

On the 22nd of September, after days of bitter fighting,

the Germans cut Modlin off from the Warsaw pocket and surround the fortress.

Modlin is now under siege.

But the fortress is heavily armed.

The defensive network of Modlin was pretty diverse.

It had around 90 artillery pieces.

It had provisions to last them for a while.

They even had, quite uniquely, an armored train.

The defense of Modlin relies on an armored train, śmierć, or death.

The train shuttles in heavy artillery support to the fortress.

This 70-meter long train has a full complement of artillery and an 80-man crew.

Smierć is a mobile platform of heavy firepower.

But even this mighty armament cannot hold off the advancing German army.

As the German net tightened around the fortifications here,

its usefulness became less and less and actually proved that armored trains

are pretty vulnerable to air attack, the tracks are vulnerable,

and really, in the end, it wasn't able to do too much.

The Poles fiercely defend the fortress from German ground assaults.

But the Germans are about to try something else.

Defensive position like this is designed, by

its nature, to be incredibly hard to attack.

And if you do so, you'll get the target quickly, but you're

gonna lose hundreds, maybe thousands of men in the process.

So in order to try to crack Modilin, the Germans use some of their best assets.

The Junkers 87, or Stuka, is the pride of the Luftwaffe.

A dive bomber equipped with three guns and 500 kilograms of

high-explosive bombs, it can hit targets with extreme accuracy.

Fitted with the Jericho trumpet, an air-powered siren,

the Stuka is designed to instill fear and loathing.

The Germans deploy a squadron of Stukas to the fortress.

Despite heavy anti-aircraft fire,

they deliver crushing blows to the Polish defenders,

hitting their targets with 30-meter accuracy.

The Polish defenders refuse to surrender,

even in the face of this intensive aerial attack.

So the Germans try one more tactic.

SS Sergeant Rokus Misch is part of a four-man group.

They approach the Polish lines to try to negotiate their surrender.

The talks fail, and the German party walks away.

As the Germans leave, the Poles fire at them,

sending a clear message that they are not ready to surrender.

But elsewhere, the battle for Poland

is about to suffer a major blow.

By mid-September, the Nazis capture almost half of Poland,

but then they stop.

The reason for this is that Hitler and Stalin have secretly

signed a pact to divide Eastern Europe between them.

Since the 17th of September,

the Soviet Union has been attacking Poland from the east.

With the Nazis closing in on the capital,

the Poles are overstretched and demoralized, fighting a losing battle on two fronts.

The siege of Warsaw lasts three weeks until the 28th of September,

when the Polish garrison finally surrenders.

The Germans are left with Modlin Fortress,

where we are today, and it's the toughest nut to crack.

So what they do is they find a Polish runner from Warsaw,

they allow them to pass through the German lines

into the fortress and convince the garrison here

that the only thing that they can do is surrender.

After 15 days of fighting,

troops at Modlin Fortress are finally defeated.

With the fall of Warsaw, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union

divide Poland according to their secret protocol.

Germany takes over 188,000 square kilometers, along with 22 million inhabitants.

The Soviet Union take 200,000 square kilometers,

along with a population of 13 million.

Warsaw has fallen,

but this is only the beginning of the German terror attack on Poland's capital.

The brutal air and land campaign

enables Nazi forces to capture Poland in just five weeks.

Hitler's aim is to crush all resistance.

He protects soldiers from being punished for atrocities,

claiming that he cannot wage war with Salvation Army methods.

A campaign of terror against the Poles begins.

In October, 1940, the Germans announced the establishment of a ghetto in Warsaw.

All Jewish residents must move into a designated area.

Hitler compares the Jews to germs.

He says that diseases cannot be controlled unless you destroy their cause.

The Nazi district governor orders the construction

of a ghetto wall to keep the Jewish population separate from the so-called Aryans.

The Nazis force 460,000 Jews from the city

and surrounding area into a space

of just 3.3 square kilometers.

This is a staggering 30% of Warsaw's population packed into just 2.6% of the city.

An 18-kilometer-long wall surrounds the entire district.

Today, much of the wall has been torn down, but a small section

still survives, hidden between two residential buildings.

Historian Alexandra Ritchie investigates

how this ordinary-looking wall divides the Polish population.

This wall was really like the creation

of a gigantic prison within the very confines of a once-thriving capital city,

the thriving center of Jewish life in Europe.

The wall cuts the Jewish population off

from any communication with the outside world, and there is little hope of escape.

Any person who was caught near the ghetto wall was simply shot, they were killed.

And so it was a place of great fear, of great violence,

and the wall really does represent this imprisonment

of the Jewish population in the city of Warsaw.

Grodno Street, an important east-west road

through Warsaw, is excluded from the ghetto, but divides it into two sections.

The area to the south is known as the small ghetto,

and the area to the north, the large ghetto.

German authorities halt traffic once enough people are waiting

to allow them to move between the two zones.

Nazi engineers build a bridge to connect the large and small ghettos.

This allows the so-called Aryan population

to move freely and prevents disrupting traffic.

Further down the road, Alexandra examines

some of the only remaining Warsaw ghetto buildings.

Here, inside these rooms, the Jewish population

experienced the worst living conditions imaginable.

It's unbelievable to think sometimes there were eight,

nine, ten, even twelve, sometimes even fifteen people per room.

And they were very often forced to live in the most squalid of conditions.

With the Jews confined to a single area of

Warsaw, Hitler is able to enact his hatred.

The Germans very deliberately wanted to starve the Jewish population.

The Jews trapped inside the ghetto

were officially given less than 200 calories a day.

This is only the beginning of the Nazi terror campaign.

In the summer of 1940, a secretive new camp opens.

Hundreds of Poles who've been identified

as enemies of the Nazi regime are sent there.

Rumors of heinous conditions at the camp slowly surface.

In a suburb of Warsaw, after his defeat at Piotrków Trybunalski, Witold Pilecki

is staying at this very house, which belongs to his sister-in-law.

But he is not here for a family gathering.

He has joined the Polish Resistance, an underground movement to resist German rule.

And he has information that a Nazi street roundup is soon to happen right here.

Witold volunteers to be arrested

to investigate where missing Warsaw residents are being sent.

On the 19th of September, the German SS arrive

and move from building to building, demanding that all men come out.

Witold is arrested, and his audacious plan is underway.

The country is now under Hitler's iron grip,

but the Fuhrer is not content with just controlling Poland.

His ambitions go much further.

Summer, 1941, Poland is defeated, and Germany and the

Soviet Union have divided the country between them.

But Hitler is about to betray Stalin.

After a successful campaign in Western Europe, Hitler turns his attention east.

He wants to expand German territory to create Lebensraum, or living space,

a Germanic empire in Eastern Europe that would grant

the Nazis access to the vast resources of the Soviet Union.

300 kilometres south of Warsaw, tucked away on

a sleepy road, is this mysterious entranceway.

It leads into the side of a hill and stands as a relic

to Hitler's ambitions to control Eastern Europe.

To support the planned invasion of the Soviet Union,

Hitler builds two enormous train bunkers here, close to the Eastern Front.

The first is a 480-metre-long bunker above ground.

It's topped with a two-metre-thick concrete shell,

shaped like a dome, to deflect bomb impacts.

The second bunker is underground, cut into the hillside.

It's 400 metres long and is hidden away from enemy bombers.

Historian Alina Nowobilska investigates what Hitler was doing at this secretive site.

Hitler wanted to have control over what was happening.

He was the one giving the generals the orders

of what he wanted and what he thought was the most important.

France was successful at the end of the day,

so because he believed France was successful because of him,

he believed that he could also conquer the Soviet Union.

Hitler scrutinises every security detail of the site.

I mean, wow, just look at the size of these doors.

They're about four metres high, one foot thick.

It's incredible.

I mean, this clearly reinforces Hitler's paranoia

'cause they were hermetically closed and sealed

in case of a biological attack or a chemical attack.

Soon after their construction,

the bunkers received their first visitor.

27th of August, 1941.

A mysterious train arrives at the underground bunker.

It belongs to Hitler himself.

Just two months earlier, on the 22nd of June, 1941,

Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

Now he is here to personally inspect the Eastern Front with his generals.

This complex in itself was specifically built because it's close to the airport.

Generals and staff could move quite freely from the

front line to the airport to here, back into Germany.

The site is kept in a constant state of readiness

to receive the highest command in the Nazi regime.

It would serve as a bunker and a base just in case something was to happen

that they could retreat back to and have a mobile command unit.

At first, Hitler's armies make astonishing

ground in the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Panzer tanks cover 40 kilometers per day, a resumption of the fast strike attacks

used to immense success in Poland and France.

And the Luftwaffe rule the sky.

But just 30 kilometers from their objective in Moscow,

Stalin orders a massive counter-offensive to catch the Germans on the back foot.

Whilst Hitler is bogged down on the Eastern Front,

plans to overthrow the Nazis' largest death machine are underway.

To deal with the sheer number of mass arrests in

Nazi-occupied Poland, Germany opens a number of prison camps.

The most notorious is Auschwitz.

The site starts life as a Polish army barracks.

It quickly expands to become World War II's largest concentration camp.

By April 1943, Witold Pilecki has been held

captive in Auschwitz for two and a half years.

Inside the camp, he organizes an underground resistance group.

His aim is to improve the morale of inmates, set up intelligence networks,

and investigate the camp to record the horrors he observes.

To manage the growing number of inmates, the Nazis open a second camp,

Auschwitz II, Bierkanau.

Pilecki and his underground organization

investigate the inner workings of both camps.

Pilecki reports on one gas chamber at Auschwitz I

and four in Bierkanau, only 3.5 kilometers away.

Each chamber is capable of killing hundreds at a time and is built with crematoriums

to burn up to 8,000 dead bodies per day into ash.

He also describes mass graves to bury enemy prisoners of war.

Outside of the camp in Warsaw, the Polish

organize a resistance called the Polish Home Army.

They forward the information from Pilecki

to the Polish government in exile in London.

These reports are the Allies' main source of intelligence on Auschwitz.

Auschwitz educator Paweł Sawicki has been working

to document events that took place at this site.

I think he hoped that the information that he would send out from Auschwitz

would maybe trigger some reactions that either the resistance around

or maybe the Allies to which this information can come could trigger something,

but we need to understand what was the reality at that time.

Despite the gruesome details in his reports, no help arrives.

Witold conceives a way to personally appeal to the Allies.

In spring of 1943, he started searching for an opportunity to escape,

also to pass information as the eyewitness, to become a messenger himself.

And of course, the possibility of escape

from the inside of the camp was basically zero.

With escape almost impossible from inside the camp, Witold devises a plan.

He works with his network at Auschwitz and two other prisoners to bribe their way

onto a bakery work unit, almost two kilometers

outside the main camp, where security is more lax.

From here, they plan to make their escape.

On the evening of the 26th of April, 1943,

the bakery shift is called to work and the breakout is on.

At first, they had to do some work

and then early in the morning, around 2, 3 a.m.,

when the SS were busy with something else, they tried their luck.

And first of all, they opened the lock and then they had to open the door.

They unbolted it, but they couldn't open it.

They tried it once, second, three times, and finally the escape began.

After an incredible 947 days inside Auschwitz,

Witold Pilecki is free.

But the world Witold left when he first entered the camp is now very different.

Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union ends in failure.

They are now on the back foot and the Soviets are counterattacking.

All of a sudden, the Soviets started to come up toward the Polish border.

Now, the Poles had been very worried about this because on the one hand,

they were very keen to be liberated from the Nazis,

but they also realized that Stalin wasn't necessarily a friend of Poland,

that they might find themselves being not liberated

so much as having one dictatorship replaced by another dictatorship.

On the 1st of August, 1944, the Polish Home Army initiates the Warsaw Uprising.

The plan is conceived to free the city

from German occupation and reclaim Polish

independence before the Soviets assert their control.

The odds are stacked against the Polish,

yet the Home Army quickly established control of most of central Warsaw

before the Germans can strengthen their garrison.

Bloody urban street-to-street fighting ensues for the next eight weeks.

The Nazis were very shocked by the number of people who were fighting against them

and this caused Hitler just incredible anger and fury

that the Poles would dare to rise up against the German master race.

And so he gave the order to absolutely destroy the city of Warsaw.

In the air, the Luftwaffe sent wave after wave of bombers.

The Home Army has no answer.

They have no anti-aircraft guns and Stalin refuses

to send his own planes in to assist the Poles.

Nazi commanders order in heavy artillery to crush the uprising on the ground.

The consignment of deadly weaponry includes the Karl Gerät.

This is a 126-ton self-propelled siege mortar.

Each of its shells weigh up to an incredible 2.5 tons

and are capable of obliterating anything in its path.

The Germans score a direct hit on the Prudential skyscraper.

This is the tallest building in Warsaw at the time

and was seized by the Polish Home Army just four weeks before the assault.

The siege mortar's two-ton shell shakes the building to its foundations.

The attacks reduce the city to rubble and kill thousands.

They leave many survivors homeless.

When the Soviets arrive on the outskirts of the city,

the Germans have withdrawn from their positions on the east of the river.

They blow up the bridges behind them to stall the advance.

Without backup, the uprising stands no chance.

And after 63 days of bitter fighting,

on the 2nd of October, the Home Army surrenders.

Nazi forces have crushed the uprising and gear up to

inflict unthinkable revenge on the city of Warsaw.

October, 1944. After the failed uprising in Warsaw,

Nazi forces expel the remaining Polish population from the city.

They send them to labor and concentration camps.

Hitler orders the complete destruction of the city.

Hitler gave this assignment to Himmler.

Himmler was incredibly brutal.

He sent in some of his most capable, if you will, in quotation marks, mass murderers.

They were let loose on the city of Warsaw simply to destroy

human life, first of all, and then to destroy Warsaw itself.

German engineers use flamethrowers and

dynamite to level the city, building by building.

Nothing is spared.

Warsaw is being wiped off the face of the planet.

Waiting for the opportune moment, on the 12th of January, 1945,

the Soviet Union launched their offensive on Warsaw.

They seize control of the city from Germany in just five days.

When the Soviet army enters the city, they are met with scenes of total devastation.

90% of the buildings in Warsaw have been leveled.

A once beautiful city of over 1,000 years old has been wiped off the map.

Nazi forces have flattened the historic city center,

deliberately destroyed in retaliation for the Warsaw uprising.

When the Red Army arrives, only 174,000 people remain in the city,

less than 6% of the pre-war population.

Almost six years after Hitler's invasion of Poland,

the Allied victory in Europe appears to be in sight.

France has been liberated, and the Allies have landed in Italy and have reached Rome.

The Soviets continue their march through Poland, and Germany retreats west.

The war in Poland is nearing an end, but for some, it is too late.

When the Red Army arrives in Auschwitz on the 27th of January, 1945,

the battle-hardened soldiers are shocked by the scenes they are met with.

They find 7,000 prisoners who are seriously ill

from the effects of malnourishment and mistreatment.

Between 1940 and 1945, over a million people are killed at the camp.

After five years of operation, Auschwitz,

the most notorious Nazi death camp, is finally liberated.

Witold Pilecki goes on to work as an intelligence officer based in Italy.

As relations between the Polish government

in exile and the Soviet-backed regime worsen,

Pilecki travels to Warsaw to gather intelligence.

He is arrested by the Soviet-installed government on the 8th of May, 1947,

and charged with espionage,

and after a show trial, is executed on the 25th of May, 1948.

Witold Pilecki was undoubtedly a hero.

In his life and struggle and fight, you can see that he escaped

that so many times and got out from horrible situations.

But ultimately, he lost the fight.

His report, his words, his lessons are still alive.

And I think, to a certain degree, this is the success of his mission.

The battle for Poland has seen over 5.6 million deaths,

with 90% of the Jewish population being murdered.

Its capital city has been destroyed and generations have been lost.

The war will go on for another seven months in the Pacific.

As the conflict comes to an end in Poland, the country enters another chapter

under the communist regime installed by the Soviets.