Original subtitles

By the summer of 1944,

Allied troops were racing towards Paris.

The final phase of the war in Europe

was about to be played out.

The Western Allies were squeezing in on Germany through France.

The Soviet Union was approaching from the east.

Hitler, caught in the middle, made a last desperate attempt

to break out of the Allied stranglehold.

While he was doing so, Stalin was beginning to redraw

the political map of Europe in an attempt to secure

the Soviet Union's future.

But as the Russians now advanced into German-occupied territory,

they came across the most shocking discovery in modern history.

A series of camps that would call into question

the very nature of humanity.

The world was about to discover

the true horror of the Nazi regime.

In August 1944,

Allied troops arrived in Paris.

Even as Hitler desperately signaled to his generals,

"Is Paris burning?",

the German forces occupying the city surrendered.

Paris free again,

and the beginning of the last act and its amazing story.

The surrender of Lieutenant General von Choltitz,

German commander of the Paris region.

At a dingy office in Montparnasse station,

a formal end of German rule.

Paris threw itself into an orgy of celebration.

The following day, Charles de Gaulle,

the leader of the Free French government in exile,

arrived in the city to claim the glory for its liberation.

Meanwhile, as De Gaulle claimed the credit,

the Allies continued the fighting.

They crossed the River Seine and moved east towards Germany.

As they did so, the German army was retreating in confusion.

But the Allies were running into severe logistical problems.

The fleeing Germans had trashed the French ports.

That meant Allied supplies had to be brought in from Britain

across the beaches of Normandy

and then transported several hundreds of miles

along tortuous roads.

Truck convoys, nicknamed the "Red Ball Express"

from their identification sign, rolled forward day and night.

But it was impossible to bring in enough supplies,

particularly fuel, to maintain the Allied advance.

A US armored division drank up to 25,000 gallons of fuel a day.

Meanwhile, as supply problems slowed the Allied advance,

Hitler was planning a new fightback.

His plan - to destroy Allied morale by attacking

civilian targets, particularly in Britain.

His method - a new "miracle" weapon, the flying bomb.

On June 13th, 1944, ten were fired at London.

Six struck home.

The Germans called it Vengeance Weapon 1 - the V1.

The British simply called it the doodle-bug.

Armed with a warhead of just under 2,000 pounds,

it could be launched from sites 130 miles away

and could fly at 400 miles an hour.

For the next few weeks, up to 100 doodle-bugs a day

were fired at British cities from launch sites

along the German-occupied Channel coast.

They caused panic and confusion.

More than 20,000 people were killed or wounded.

The British set up a screen of anti-aircraft guns around the capital.

Many flying bombs were shot down.

The British also sent up fighters to intercept them,

including their first operational jet,

the Gloster Meteor.

But still the V1s kept arriving.

Only when the Allies tracked down their launch sites

in northern France did they stop.

But the reprieve was only temporary.

The German's had a second "miracle" weapon up their sleeves.

Hard on the heels of the V1

came the much more sophisticated V2 rocket.

The first fell on London on September 8th, 1944.

The V2s were launched from easily-concealed,

mobile launchers 200 miles away.

They traveled at 3,500 miles an hour

and carried a one ton warhead.

For six months, Britain had no response.

Over 1,100 V2s landed on defenseless British cities.

They only stopped when the German positions in Europe

were pushed so far back, the launch sites were, once again,

out of range of Britain.

Yet despite the horror and damage the V2s caused,

British morale remained unbroken.

Meanwhile, in mainland Europe, the Allied advance

reached Brussels on September 3rd, 1944.

The next day, British forces

took the huge Belgian port of Antwerp.

It was still intact.

Here at last seemed an answer to the Allies' logistic problems.

New supplies could pour in through the port.

But it was not to be so simple.

Antwerp is 40 miles from the sea, up the River Scheldt.

As the Germans pulled out of the city,

they dug in along the waterway,

turning it into a corridor of death.

The river was also mined.

It meant the port was unreachable from the sea.

The Allied advance, now desperately low on supplies,

was in danger of grinding to a halt.

By autumn 1944, the Allied advance across Western Europe

was running short of supplies.

They needed a new plan if it was to move forward.

It was now that the methodical and ultra-cautious

British commander Bernard Montgomery

came up with a bold, even reckless, idea.

Instead of large numbers of troops advancing

across a wide front,

why not send a smaller force to punch a single hole

through the German defenses?

It would be faster and much more economical.

The idea was drive a narrow corridor from east of Antwerp

across southern Holland to the Dutch town of Arnhem

near the German border.

The Allies would then push across the Rhine into Germany,

outflanking the huge German defensive positions

of the so-called Siegfried Line,

and drive deep into the heart of Hitler's Reich.

Montgomery's boss, General Dwight Eisenhower,

the Supreme Allied Commander in the west,

had until now favored a broad, steady, advance.

But he unexpectedly agreed.

However, it was never going to be easy.

The route went over a mass of waterways.

Airborne troops would have to be sent in to seize

strategic bridges behind German lines

at the towns of Veghel and Zon;

Grave and Nijmegen;

and finally across the Rhine at Arnhem.

Their task would be to hold the bridges

while the main attack, led by a column of tanks,

drove up from Belgium.

Timing was critical.

If the tank column took too long,

the airborne troopers holding the bridges would be overwhelmed.

Operation Market Garden

began early on the afternoon of September 17th, 1944.

30,000 British and US airborne troops,

equipped with gliders, landed in German-occupied territory.

The US 101st Airborne - the Screaming Eagles -

swiftly captured the bridge at Veghel.

But their second objective, the bridge at Zon,

was blown up by the Germans just as the Americans approached.

Further north, the US 82nd Airborne - the All Americans -

successfully seized the bridge at Grave.

But stiff German resistance prevented them from capturing

the second crucial bridge at Nijmegen.

Meanwhile at Arnhem,

two brigades of the British 1st Airborne Division

landed safely about eight miles west of the town.

But as the paratroops advanced towards Arnhem's vital bridge across the Rhine,

they ran into two German Panzer divisions.

The British dropped reinforcements

of men and machines.

But as they drifted down to earth

they were cut to pieces by German fire.

Finally, by eight in the evening,

after a day of fierce fighting,

an Allied battalion reached the northern end of the bridge.

But the Germans still held the other end.

Operation Market Garden was in trouble.

At the same time the tank column,

advancing up a single-track road,

was also running into difficulties.

As it drove towards the Dutch border on the first day,

the lead vehicles were ambushed by German troops

using the lethal hand-held Panzerfaust anti-tank rocket.

The advance was halted

while infantry was brought in to clear the way.

The following day, the tank column reached Zon,

but was delayed overnight while the bridge was replaced

with a temporary structure.

By the third day, it had crossed the bridges

Veghel and Grave.

But was held up again by fierce resistance at Nijmegen.

Finally, four days after starting out,

the column was at last within striking distance of Arnhem.

But it was too late.

The British paratroops holding the northern end of the bridge had surrendered.

Montgomery's daring plan had failed.

Arnhem had proved "a bridge too far".

The war on the Western Front

seemed to have ground to a standstill again.

Then, ten days later,

the Allies launched a new effort to break the deadlock.

The plan was to clear the seaway into Antwerp

so that urgently needed supplies could be brought in.

It was slow going.

The Germans had flooded much of the area.

It took Canadian troops three weeks to clear the riverbanks

of German soldiers and machine-gun nests.

But still the Germans clung on

to the strategically important Walcheren Island.

It had massive guns that commanded the river entrance.

On November 1st, 1944, British Commandos

were sent in to flush the Germans out.

They were supported by two World War One Monitors

with huge 15-inch guns.

The Germans held on for another week,

before they were finally overwhelmed.

Allied mine sweepers could now clear the seaway.

Three weeks later, on November 28th, 1944,

the first supply ships reached Antwerp.

Now, at last, the Allies could move on towards the German frontier.

But then, just as the supplies had begun to flow,

the weather changed.

Autumn rain turned the battlefield into a swamp.

By late 1944, the Allied advance had to stop again.

The final defeat of Germany would have to wait until the spring.

But even as the Allies waited,

Hitler was preparing a massive response.

By autumn 1944,

the Allied armies were virtually lined up

along the Belgian/German frontier

waiting for the winter weather to clear before they pushed on.

Germany's situation was disastrous.

Her forces were hugely outnumbered,

they lacked air support,

and they were desperately short of fuel.

Nevertheless, Hitler, against the advice of his senior commanders,

decided to launch a huge counterattack.

It was a desperate gamble but if it paid off,

it might just change Germany's fortunes.

His plan was to burst through the Allied lines

in the Ardennes hills and head for Antwerp.

If he could retake the port,

the Allied supply lines would be cut once again.

Some 200,000 German troops and 950 tanks and tank destroyers

were assembled in total radio silence.

Hitler was calling on what was, in effect,

his last remaining strategic reserve of troops.

The Allies missed the build-up completely.

As a result the lines facing the German positions

were only lightly manned.

On December 16th, 1944, the Germans opened fire.

Soon afterwards German tanks and infantry crossed the US lines.

The Americans were caught completely by surprise.

In fact, during the first day, General Omar Bradley,

commander of US 12th Army Group,

even refused to believe a major German assault was underway.

American confusion was made worse when the Germans sent in

English-speaking special forces,

in captured US uniforms and jeeps,

to carry out sabotage behind the US lines.

American troops became so nervous

that even General Bradley, was stopped and asked

to produce his identity papers

to prove that he was not a German.

But despite this, the US forces regrouped.

Any Germans captured wearing US uniforms

were summarily shot as spies.

Fire!

The Americans began to fight back.

But the German advance had created a huge bulge

in the Allied lines.

The attack would become known as the Battle of the Bulge.

It was now, on the northern flank of this bulge,

that the Germans committed one of the worst atrocities

of the war in north-west Europe.

SS Colonel Joachim Peiper captured

some 150 members of a US artillery observation battalion

near the village of Malmedy.

When, later, US forces re-took the village,

they found 85 bodies.

Their comrades had been shot by their SS guards.

It was a sign of how desperate the fight had become.

As the German advance near Malmedy continued,

US combat engineers blew up bridges to slow it down.

The Germans were forced to use precious supplies of fuel

to look for alternative crossings.

Meanwhile, on the southern flank of the bulge,

US troops blocked road junctions to slow the German tanks.

One of the most important crossroads

was at the small Belgian town of Bastogne.

Here the Allies sent in reinforcements.

The Germans were forced to bypass it,

but the US forces holding Bastogne

blocked their supply lines.

Two days later, however, the Germans were approaching

the town of Dinant, some 30 miles further west.

Despite the setbacks,

Hitler's gamble appeared to be paying off.

The German bulge was moving forward.

But their supply lines were now dangerously over-extended

and they were running desperately low on fuel.

The advance slowed.

For almost a week, in the biting cold,

the two sides remained deadlocked.

Neither could gain the upper hand.

Then on New Year's Day 1945,

the Luftwaffe launched a do-or-die assault on Allied bases.

Over 300 Allied planes were destroyed.

But the Luftwaffe lost several hundred too,

far more than it could replace.

As the weather now improved,

the Allies took advantage of their overwhelming air power.

US troops, temporarily under Montgomery's command,

pushed in from the north.

US General George Patton's forces squeezed from the south.

Allied air power pummeled the German lines.

The German bulge was slowly pushed back.

By early February 1945, Hitler's gamble had failed.

The Germans had retreated to their original positions.

The attack had taken a heavy toll

on their already depleted resources.

Over 120,000 men were killed, wounded or taken prisoner.

Meanwhile, on the other side of Europe,

Stalin now began to move on Germany's eastern border.

In doing so, he would begin to redraw

the political map of Europe.

During the summer and autumn of 1944,

as the Allies overran France and Belgium,

in the east the core of Stalin's Red Army

was camped outside the Polish capital of Warsaw.

For the Russian leader, the aim of the war had by now changed.

It was no longer a matter of survival

or even of pushing the enemy out of the Soviet Union.

It had become a political affair.

Top of Stalin's agenda was building a buffer zone

between the Soviet Union and Germany.

One of the keys to this was Poland.

The Russians and Poles had long hated each other.

Soviet armies had collaborated with the Germans

in carving up Poland in 1939.

Then in April 1943, German soldiers found

the bodies of more than 4,000 Polish army officers

in the Katyn woods near Smolensk in the Soviet Union.

They had been murdered by the Russians.

Stalin denied any involvement and blamed the Germans.

But the Poles never believed him.

Then in the summer of 1944, the Polish Home Army in Warsaw

rose up against its German occupiers.

It was now that hostility between the two countries came to a head.

The Home Army had been spurred on by a broadcast from Moscow

on July 29th urging a popular uprising.

In the first few days of the rising,

it seized some two-thirds of the city.

It had about 40,000 men and women,

armed mainly with captured German weapons.

There were also more than 200,000 unarmed helpers.

But they lacked any weapons capable of repelling

the German heavy armor.

The Poles looked to the Soviet Army,

still camped just to the south, for help.

But Stalin ordered it to do nothing

and dismissed the Home Army's leadership

as "power-seeking criminals".

German reinforcements poured into Warsaw

under the command of SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski.

He was an expert in crushing and slaughtering partisan groups.

The situation in the city became desperate.

Savage house-to-house fighting raged for two months.

The Home Army was forced back into an ever smaller area.

The German advance was accompanied by rape and murder.

Wounded prisoners were burned alive.

Women and children were used as human shields.

The Polish forces were forced back into the cellars and sewers.

But still the Red Army sat back.

Stalin's reasoning was simple.

He saw the Polish Home Army as pro-Western and anti-communist.

He reasoned that if it and its supporters were destroyed,

it would clear the way for the Polish communists to take power.

By October 2nd, the Germans had done just what Stalin had hoped.

The Home Army and its sympathizers were crushed.

Over 15,000 army members and 200,000 civilians died.

Some 15,000 people surrendered.

Hitler now set about the complete destruction of the city.

Warsaw was razed to the ground.

The remnants of the Home Army went underground.

Later, when the Red Army finally moved into Warsaw,

they would be hunted down by Soviet secret police.

Stalin's scheming had worked.

Pro-western Polish forces had been smashed

and the country would, after the war,

become a key buffer state between Russia and the West.

In London, the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill,

was appalled by Stalin's conduct.

But he was also a pragmatist.

In October 1944, Churchill went to Moscow.

It was several months after the crushing of the Warsaw uprising.

There he agreed with Stalin on a division of the European spoils.

According to a document Churchill scribbled down,

the Soviets would have 90 percent of the influence

in Rumania, and the British 90 percent in Greece.

In Bulgaria, the Soviets would have 75 percent influence,

and 50 percent in Yugoslavia and Hungary.

The future of Poland was left vague, probably deliberately.

Churchill described it as the "naughty document".

The wording was confusing and nobody was sure

quite what it meant, but Stalin happily agreed to it.

He was probably aware that the winner would take all,

and he intended to be the winner

in most of eastern Europe and the Balkans.

Churchill never told the Americans about the document.

He knew that they would be horrified by such

old-fashioned imperialism between the European powers.

But the US found out soon enough.

In late 1944, the Germans pulled out of Greece.

The country descended into a civil war

between the monarchists and the communists.

Churchill wanted his 90 percent influence

and sent in British troops to support the pro-Western monarchists.

Stalin, mindful of the "naughty document", did not object.

But the Americans were at outraged

at what they saw as such blatant meddling

in another country's affairs.

But by the end of 1944, there was a more pressing issue.

Western and Soviet forces

were about the same distance away from Berlin.

The race was on to be the first to get there.

But even before it began,

new and shocking news came out of the east.

On July 23, 1944,

as Soviet forces advanced through eastern Poland,

they overrun a small village called Maidanek.

Nearby, they found a prison compound.

They quickly realized it was no ordinary camp.

They found specially built gas chambers and incinerators.

Near them were piles of corpses.

It was a camp designed for the mass murder of Jews.

Adolf Hitler had always been anti-Semitic.

When, in the 1930s, he had come to power,

many German Jews had been forced to flee.

Those who couldn't were persecuted

and deprived of their rights.

Then, in the summer of 1939,

the Germans invaded Poland.

Suddenly the German Reich found itself ruling

two million more Jews.

So the Nazis sent in special SS squads,

the Einsatzgruppen, whose job was to round them up.

Many Jews were immediately shot.

The remainder were herded into walled ghettos

in the major cities, while the Germans worked out

how to solve what they called the "Jewish Problem".

Life in the ghettos was harsh.

People were systematically starved and beaten.

Two years later, the German army entered the Soviet Union.

Millions more Jews suddenly found themselves under Nazi rule.

Here, the Einsatzgruppen were helped by the local population,

which was often anti-Semitic

and only too willing to carry out pogroms of its own.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews were rounded up and exterminated.

The most notorious pogrom occurred at Babyi Yar in Kiev.

33,000 Jews were shot in cold blood.

But machine gunning was an expensive way

of dealing with the "Jewish problem".

Nor was it popular with many German soldiers.

So at a conference in January 1942,

the SS leadership cast round for more "efficient" solutions.

First, it tried using carbon monoxide fumes.

But that didn't kill enough people quickly enough.

The conference eventually agreed to set up

a series of camps where Europe's Jewish population

would be systematically exterminated.

There would be six of these death camps, all in Poland.

They were at Maidanek, Sobibor, Treblinka,

Chelmno, Belzec and Birkenau.

As the camps were being built,

the Jewish ghettos were liquidated.

One notorious example was in Warsaw.

Here, as the Germans moved into the ghetto to clear it out,

the inhabitants fought back.

They held out for nearly a month.

7,000 died in the fighting before they were overwhelmed.

Those who had survived it were rounded up

and sent to Treblinka.

Here, they entered what was rapidly becoming

a highly organized system of slave labor

and extermination.

New inhabitants arrived at the camps in cattle trucks

from all over Europe.

At places like Birkenau, the extermination facilities

were next to work camps like Auschwitz.

At facilities like this, the new arrivals were sorted.

Able-bodied men and a few women

went to the work camp to be worked to death as slaves.

Children, the old and most of the women

went straight to the gas chambers.

They were stripped and their heads shaved.

Next, they were herded, up to 2,000 at a time,

into sealed rooms disguised as showers.

SS officers then poured Zyklon-B crystals

through a trap in the roof to form a deadly gas.

It was far more effective than carbon monoxide.

At Auschwitz-Birkenau the gas chambers

could kill over 10,000 people a day.

Small groups of prisoners, known as Sonderkommandos,

were used to clear the bodies out of the chambers.

Some bodies were burnt in pits, some in crematoria.

The camps could also be profitable businesses.

Major German companies built factories near them

and paid the SS, which administered the camps,

to hire Jews as slaves.

The belongings and hair of those gassed were sold off.

Their gold teeth melted down and hoarded.

For most Jews resistance was almost impossible.

At Treblinka, Sobibor and Birkenau, however,

the Sonderkommandos mounted brief and doomed rebellions.

But in July 1944, most of this was still unknown.

As news began to seep out of the Russian find at Maidanek,

most people simply found it unbelievable.

Yet today, we know that people in the West, like Churchill,

almost certainly knew more than they admitted.

During 1943 and '44, several reports reached London

about what was going on inside the extermination camps.

But nothing was done.

Today, it is estimated some six million Jews

were exterminated in Hitler's camps.

What the Allies had never understood,

until the war was over,

was the vast scale of the Nazi extermination campaign.

Not did they grasp the sheer quantity of resources

the Germans were prepared to devote to it

when Germany was facing its final days.