Original subtitles

By early 1945, Hitler's Third Reich

was entering its death throes.

In the west, Allied forces had pushed to within

striking distance of the Rhine.

In the east, the Red Army was crossing the Polish border into Germany.

As the Allies battled their way towards Berlin

from east and west, the Germans fought them all the way.

But it was a hopeless task.

By May 1945, Hitler would be dead

and Germany finally defeated.

February 1945,

and the Allied forces in the west had assembled

near the Rhine for the final push into Germany.

In the north were the massed ranks

of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's 21st Army Group.

To its south was General Omar Bradley's 12th Army Group.

It included the US 3rd Army commanded by General George Patton.

On February 8th, Montgomery's Army Group

launched a two-pronged assault on German forces

defending the Rhine.

The northern prong had to fight its way through the wooded countryside.

The southern prong was delayed when the Germans released

water from a series of dams, flooding the surrounding area.

It would be over two weeks before the two prongs

met up on the west bank of the Rhine.

By early March 1945,

Montgomery's forces were in control of some 60 miles

of the west bank of the river.

The next task was to cross it.

South of Montgomery, Bradley's armies

were also moving eastwards

looking for a route across the river.

On March 7th, 1945, they reached the Rhine at Cologne.

But Hitler had ordered all the bridges to be destroyed.

Then, as the US forces explored further south,

they found one bridge still intact

near the small town of Remagen.

They made a dash for it,

brushing aside German resistance.

Then, just as they were about to cross it,

there was an explosion.

But, against the odds, the bridge remained standing.

A small group of Americans raced across it,

desperately cutting any wires that looked like demolition cables.

US commanders began to push men across as fast as possible.

The Allies had at last penetrated the German heartland.

In Berlin, news of the capture of the bridge at Remagen

infuriated Hitler.

Five junior officers were court-martialed.

Four were shot.

In addition, the long-suffering German commander in the west,

Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, was sacked.

It was the second time it had happened to him

in less than a year.

He was replaced by veteran commander

Field Marshal Albert Kesselring,

who'd been in overall charge in North Africa and Italy.

Over the next week, the Germans launched

desperate air attacks to try and destroy the bridge at Remagen.

None of them succeeded.

Then suddenly, on March 17th while combat engineers

were repairing it, the bridge unexpectedly collapsed.

Twenty-eight men plunged to their deaths.

The first Allied thrust into Germany had been blocked.

Meanwhile, further north, Montgomery was preparing

the first full-scale Allied crossing of the Rhine.

On March 23rd, 1945, he launched an aerial bombardment

on German forces defending the east bank of the river.

Some 200 RAF Lancaster bombers

virtually flattened the town of Wesel.

Then British Commandos in Buffalo amphibious vehicles crossed.

They met little opposition from the dazed German defenders.

Other divisions followed.

The crossing lasted all night.

The following day, in the largest airborne operation of the war,

17,000 men of British 6th

and US 17th Airborne Divisions

were dropped to seize key positions east of the river.

They were met by heavy German anti-aircraft fire.

A newsreel report told the story.

In a short time, hundreds of gliders make their hazardous landings.

Their men beginning the fight as soon as they land.

One glider has its wing shot away

when only 50 feet from the ground.

More than half the gliders were destroyed or damaged before landing.

But within hours, the paratroopers

linked up with Montgomery's land forces

and the Allied bridgehead was secured.

It should have been, for the ferociously competitive Montgomery,

a moment of glory.

But he'd been upstaged.

The night before, his great rival,

General Patton, had unexpectedly crossed the Rhine

near Oppenheim and had already entered Germany.

It was a sign of the intense rivalry

between Montgomery and American commanders

as they competed to be the first into Germany.

Over the next few days, there were more Allied crossings.

German defenses along the Rhine collapsed.

In the north, Montgomery now pushed

deeper into Germany towards Munster.

In the south, Bradley's forces, including Patton's 3rd Army,

pushed east towards Marburg and Lauterbach.

The major German city of Frankfurt Am Main

was circled and bypassed.

Die-hard German troops fought back ferociously.

But by now there was no question that the Germans were finished.

The only issue was when they would realize it.

As the Western Allies battled their way across west Germany,

Stalin's Red Army in Poland prepared to launch

a major offensive on Germany's eastern border.

Hitler's forces in the region were poorly equipped

and ill-prepared to repel an attack.

Supplies of weapons had run so low

they were reduced to using First World War rifles.

German intelligence estimated the Red Army's infantry

outnumbered them 11 to one.

The Russians also had vastly more tanks and artillery.

But the Germans had nothing left.

Hitler's strategic reserve had already been used up

on the Western Front.

On January 12th, 1945, the Russian offensive

began with the usual artillery barrage.

It stretched along a 300 mile front.

A week later, the Red Army drove into

the devastated remains of Warsaw.

They then pushed westwards towards the German border,

300 miles away.

To the south, a second Soviet force

took the Polish town of Krakow

on January 18th.

As the Soviet forces now raced westwards on a broad front

across Poland they left behind pockets of German resistance

in cities like Poznan and Breslau.

These would later be mopped up.

By the end of January 1945,

Soviet troops had crossed the German border

and reached the River Oder.

The Russians were now just an hour's drive east of Berlin.

For the veteran Russian commander Georgy Zhukov

it had been a triumph.

He had traveled 300 miles in just 14 days.

It was one of the fastest and longest

Blitzkrieg advances in military history.

Zhukov's troops now paused to catch their breath

and bring up supplies.

They were soon joined by a second group of Soviet armies

that dug in to their south on the River Neisse.

Meanwhile, a third Russian force penned the remnants

of the German armies in East Prussia

into the Baltic port of Konigsberg, Kaliningrad today.

Hitler had appointed the SS chief, Heinrich Himmler,

to command his forces in the neighboring region.

It was a sign of how deeply he had come to distrust his army generals.

But Himmler had no military knowledge or experience.

During February 1945,

troops under Himmler's command were torn apart

by Russian forces moving west.

This time Hitler could have sent reserves.

A large force of German troops

still occupied the Courland Peninsula

in neighboring Latvia.

But in another bizarre decision,

Hitler refused to allow it to break out

and provide assistance.

He was still committed to holding onto land,

his "Lebensraum",

however irrelevant or wasteful it might now be.

It meant some 200,000 German troops

spent the final months of the war doing nothing.

The Red Army now prepared for its final assault on Berlin.

It lay less than 50 miles away.

In Germany, the imminent Soviet invasion

caused mass panic among the civilian population.

The Russians had seen, first hand,

the horrors perpetrated by the Germans in the Soviet Union.

They'd witnessed whole towns and villages destroyed,

their inhabitants massacred.

They were now very clearly looking for revenge.

There were horrific tales of Russian rape,

murder and pillage.

In snow and bitter sub-zero temperatures,

more than five million German civilians on the Eastern Front

fled their homes and flooded west to seek refuge.

Two million people were evacuated by sea

from German-held ports along the Baltic coast.

They were easy pickings for Soviet submarines.

Twenty-four German passenger ships were torpedoed.

They included the cruise liner "Wilhelm Gustloff",

which had over 10,000 people on board.

Barely 1,000 survived, the worst loss of life ever

in a single incident at sea.

Hitler's acting Chief-of-Staff, General Heinz Guderian,

now urged the Fuhrer to bring back any units

that could be spared from the Western Front to defend Berlin.

Hitler agreed and brought back the elite 6th SS Panzer Army.

But he didn't sent it to Berlin,

he sent it to Hungary.

He had become obsessed with defending

Germany's last remaining source of oil,

the Hungarian oil field west of Lake Balaton.

It was an ill-considered decision.

In Hungary, the Panzers were hopelessly outnumbered by the Russians.

To make matters worse,

the weather conspired against them.

A sudden thaw turned the ground into a sea of mud.

For several days the Panzers struggled

to hold back the advancing Russians.

But they were steadily forced back into Austria.

Soon they were drawn into the defense of Vienna

as the Red Army advanced towards the Austrian capital.

But Sixth SS Panzer Army was a spent force.

Its commander, SS General Sepp Dietrich,

had no illusions.

"We call ourselves," he said,

"the 6th Panzer Army because we have only six Panzers left."

On April 10th, the Red Army swept them aside and took Vienna.

As they did so, the question now became,

who would be the first to reach Berlin?

Would it be the Red Army or the Western Allies?

The race for Berlin had become not just a military

but a political issue.

By March 1945,

the Red Army was lined up alone the River Oder,

awaiting a final assault on Berlin.

It presented the Allied military command in the west

with a dilemma.

Berlin was less than 300 miles from their advanced positions.

Most Allied commanders wanted to race to the city

to beat the Russians.

But at a conference a month earlier

in the Black Sea port of Yalta,

the Allied leaders had divided up Germany

into zones of influence.

Berlin was firmly inside the Russian zone.

So Eisenhower was instructed to tell his commanders

to ignore Berlin and spread out to take the rest of the country.

On April 1st, US troops surrounded

the German industrial cities in the Ruhr.

German soldiers occupying the area

put up a stiff resistance.

When, two weeks later, the area fell,

more than 325,000 troops were taken prisoner.

It was one of the largest number of German prisoners

taken in the war so far.

The German commander, the die-hard Nazi

Field Marshal Walter Model, committed suicide.

Elsewhere in the country, resistance was more patchy

and General Bradley's armies stormed across Germany.

By April 18th, 1945,

the US forces had punched a corridor

through to the Czech border,

splitting Germany in two.

Meanwhile, north of the Ruhr,

Montgomery's Canadian 1st Army

began the liberation of Holland.

The Dutch had suffered horrendously

during the bitter winter of 1944-1945.

The German occupying force had deliberately taken

supplies of food and fuel from the country to use elsewhere.

There had been widespread deaths from starvation and cold.

The Dutch town of Arnhem was seized on April 15th, 1945.

Progress was rapid and on the following day, the Canadians

had liberated Groningen, close to the Dutch north coast.

That left a German army virtually intact

but surrounded near Amsterdam.

Soon afterwards, a ceasefire was negotiated.

Allied aircraft now roared over the Dutch countryside,

dropping food and medical supplies.

At the same time, the British 2nd Army,

also under Montgomery's command,

pushed fast across the north German plain.

Osnabruck fell on April 4th.

The British were soon at the German port of Bremen.

Here, there was fierce German resistance.

It took nine days of house-to-house fighting

before the port was secured.

Two days later, Montgomery's British forces

reached the Elbe at Lauenburg.

As the Allies advanced across Germany,

they now came across horrific new evidence

of the Nazi's "Final Solution".

In early April 1945, US troops overran

a concentration camp at Ohrdruf near Weimar in central Germany.

A visibly shocked General Eisenhower paid a visit.

The SS had evacuated most of the prisoners

but they had left behind piles of bodies.

Eight days later, British troops overran

another concentration camp at Belsen, north of Hanover.

Here they discovered over 70,000 prisoners.

Thousands were already dead.

The remainder were starving and disease-ridden.

A radio broadcast by the BBC correspondent Richard Dimbleby

gave the horrific details.

I passed through the barrier

and found myself in the world of a nightmare.

The living lay with their heads against the corpses,

and around them moved the awful, ghostly precession

of emaciated, aimless people

with nothing to do and no hope of life.

Unable to move out of your way,

unable to look at the terrible sights around them.

It was as though they were waiting their turn.

This is what the Germans did.

Let there be no mistake about it,

did deliberately and slowly.

Meanwhile, far to the south, in Italy,

the German front was also starting to collapse.

The German forces were dug in across the Appenine Mountains.

Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander,

the Allied Commander in the Mediterranean,

now launched a spring offensive.

On April 9th, 1945, British troops attacked

pulling German forces in from along the front.

Five days later, US troops also moved forward

and swiftly reached the south bank of the River Po.

The Germans retreated to the north bank.

But Hitler's commander in Italy,

General Heinrich von Vietinghoff,

had no illusions that he could hold back

the Allied advance for long.

So he now made approaches to the Allies

and on April 29th surrendered unconditionally.

It would take effect from May 2nd, 1945.

This was the first formal surrender

of German forces anywhere in Europe.

The war was moving swiftly towards a conclusion.

Back in Germany, American and Russian forces

had by now met up on the Elbe near Leipzig.

The moment the world has been awaiting so long,

when ally from West meets ally from East.

The meeting was achieved on April 26th when

a detachment of the American 69th Infantry Division,

under Major General Reinhardt was rolled across the Elbe

to the Russians assembled on the far bank.

The stage was set for the final assault on Berlin.

Hitler was desperate.

He now turned to the old and very young

for help in defending the city.

His "Thousand Year Reich" was preparing for its final,

apocalyptic struggle to survive.

On April 1st, 1945,

Joseph Stalin summoned his top commanders to Moscow

to receive their orders for the capture of Berlin.

Marshal Georgy Zhukov,

Russia's most successful commander,

would make the main assault from his bridgehead

on the Oder river.

A second group of Soviet armies,

under Marshal Ivan Konev,

would cross the River Neisse further south

and push deep into Germany,

bypassing the German capital.

Between them they represented a massive Soviet force

of over two and a half million men.

They were equipped with 6,000 tanks and self-propelled guns

and 40,000 guns, mortars and rocket launchers.

But the Germans were never going to make it easy.

The city was defended by about a million troops.

Many were dug into strong defensive positions,

particularly along the Seelow Heights -

a steep escarpment rising out of the Oder Valley

and slap in front of Zhukov's point of assault.

The defenders were a mixed bunch of combat veterans,

SS fanatics and inexperienced conscripts,

some as young as 14,

as well as elderly members of the Volkssturm or People's Army.

By now, Hitler had retired to a bunker

under the Reichschancellery in Berlin.

He was a heavily medicated and shambling figure,

who spent much of his time issuing increasingly

unrealistic orders to largely imaginary armies.

His public appearances were becoming ever more rare.

But in early March, he was persuaded to visit

some of the troops preparing to defend the Oder line.

Seig Heil! Seig heil!

Later in the same month, he emerged to inspect

a small group of Hitler Youth soldiers.

It was his last ever appearance before the cameras.

Then on April 13th, 1945,

the US President, Franklin Roosevelt, died of a heart attack.

He had been one of the architects of the war,

responsible for throwing America's might

behind the Allied offensive.

The Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels,

seized on the event to encourage

his increasingly befuddled Fuhrer

to believe the Allied alliance would collapse.

A German victory could still be snatched

from the jaws of defeat.

But any illusions were rapidly dispelled.

Three days after Roosevelt's death,

Zhukov began his assault on Berlin.

He had one gun for every 13 feet of the front.

But the German defense had anticipated it

and pulled back to avoid the bombardment.

As a result, when Zhukov's infantry advanced,

they met unexpectedly heavy resistance.

Desperate to retrieve the situation,

Zhukov threw in his tanks.

But they too were soon bogged down.

Meanwhile, to the south,

the assault by Konev's second group of armies

had gone better.

His troops had crossed the Neisse river

and were well on their way to the next obstacle,

the River Spree.

Stalin stoked the rivalry between his two commanders,

by authorizing Konev to swing his tanks north towards Berlin.

He was only too happy to see a race to take the city.

After three days of savage fighting,

Zhukov's troops managed to enter the eastern suburbs of Berlin.

At the same time, Konev was approaching the city from the south.

There was desperate German resistance.

But on April 25th, the Soviet armies met up

and the final assault on Berlin began.

As the fighting moved on from district to district,

civilians began to emerge from the cellars.

But the Russians took little notice

of the flags of surrender.

The rape of German women and girls was widespread.

After three more days of fighting,

the city's remaining defenders were pinned down

in a narrow strip of central Berlin less than two miles wide.

Every street and house was contested.

Then, on the morning of April 30th,

Soviet troops began an assault on the Reichstag,

the German parliament building.

Stalin regarded it as the symbol of Nazi power.

They were stopped by heavy fire.

So they blasted the building at point blank range

with heavy artillery.

That evening, the Russians stormed it.

Fighting raged from room to room

and up and down corridors and staircases.

It would take four hours before the red flag

could be hoisted on one of the towers.

The next morning, on May 1st, 1945,

the event was restaged for the cameras.

But by then, Hitler was already dead.

On April 30th, as fighting raged overhead,

the man whose insane ambitions had embroiled the world in war,

laid waste a continent and led to the extermination

of millions of Jews, took his own life.

His long-time mistress, Eva Braun,

who he'd married the day before, died with him.

Their partially burned bodies were buried

in the garden of the Reichschancellery.

But the fighting continued.

Hitler had appointed Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz

his successor, and for the next few days

the new leadership attempted to salvage something

from its nation's cataclysmic defeat.

On May 1st, 1945, the day after his death,

German people were told that their Fuhrer

had "fallen in battle".

But they were told to continue the fight

against the Bolshevik menace.

But the German leadership was falling apart.

In Berlin, Josef Goebbels and Martin Bormann

tried to negotiate a city-wide ceasefire with the Russians.

But the Russian commander, Marshal Zhukov,

demanded unconditional surrender

of all German forces, everywhere.

It was more than Goebbels and Bormann could deliver.

Fighting in Berlin continued.

Later that evening, Goebbels and his wife

killed their six children

and then committed suicide themselves.

That same night Bormann disappeared.

Eventually, in the 1990s,

DNA testing confirmed that a body found in Berlin was his.

The next morning Berlin surrendered.

By mid-afternoon all fighting in the city had stopped.

Across the country, the pace of the German surrender

now gathered momentum.

The following day, Doenitz sent a delegation

to the British commanding officer, Field Marshal Montgomery.

He offered to surrender all German forces in northern Germany.

Montgomery sent a reply saying

he didn't have the authority to accept a surrender

on behalf of the Americans or the Russians.

He could only accept the surrender of those troops fighting him.

Doenitz had no choice but to agree to Montgomery's terms.

But that left Germany still fighting in the rest of the country.

Doenitz now sent another delegation to General Eisenhower,

the Supreme Allied Commander,

to discuss a peace deal with the West.

But it carefully avoided any reference

to a surrender to the Russians.

Eisenhower rebuffed him

and insisted that only the unconditional surrender

of all German forces was acceptable.

Once again, Doenitz was forced to back down.

At 2:41 in the morning of May 7th, 1945,

at Eisenhower's headquarters in France,

General Alfred Jodl, Hitler's chief of operations

throughout the six years of war,

signed a document of unconditional surrender.

Eisenhower's Chief-of-Staff, Walter Bedell Smith,

signed for the Western Allies.

General Ivan Susloparov signed for the Soviet Union.

The only member of the Allies' side not happy

with the arrangement was Stalin.

The Soviet Union had suffered too much

to miss out on its own humiliation of the Germans.

So Stalin countermanded Susloparov

and declared Russia would only accept a surrender in Berlin.

It meant that the following day, Hitler's former Chief-of-Staff,

Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel,

signed a second surrender document to satisfy Stalin.

Marshal Zhukov signed for the Soviet Union,

with Air Chief-Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder

signing on behalf of the Western Allies.

In January 1943, the late President Rosevelt

and Premier Churchill met in Casablanca.

There they pronounced the formula

of unconditional surrender for the Axis powers.

In Europe, that formula has now been fulfilled.

Across Europe and the United States

crowds began to celebrate the end of the war in Europe.

From now on, the day after the German surrender,

May 8th, would be known as VE-Day - Victory in Europe.

But as the celebrations continued,

many were aware of two, very sobering, issues.

In the east, Japan was still fighting.

And in Europe, the continent lay in ruins

and huge problems needed to be solved.

Millions of Germany's concentration camp victims

and slave laborers would need help to rebuild their lives.

Millions of captured German fighting men

had to be screened before being allowed to go home,

to identify and arrest major war criminals.

The SS was a particular target.

It had been responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the war.

Leading Nazis like Hermann Goering,

head of Hitler's air force, were rounded up

and paraded in front of the cameras.

Other top Nazis arrested

included civilian leaders, like Albert Speer,

and military leaders, like Jodl and Doenitz.

They would be put on trial in the German city of Nuremberg

for crimes against humanity.

You must plead guilty or not guilty.

Rudolph Hess.

You must plead guilty or not guilty.

Nein!

That will be entered as a plea of not guilty.

The Nazi leadership received sentences ranging from

the death penalty to ten years in prison.

Goering committed suicide before he could be hung.

Two months after the German surrender,

the Allies met in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam.

Germany was divided into four zones of occupation -

Soviet, British, American and French.

Berlin, although deep in the Soviet zone,

was parceled up between the Allies in the same way.

The peoples of Europe would also find themselves divided.

Some would now live under the control of the Western Allies,

some under Communist Russia.

But before any of this could be faced,

there was still the war in the Pacific to be won.