Original subtitles

80 years ago,

a war of an unprecedented scale shook our planet

and changed the face of the world.

Never had war been so widespread, so brutal,

or so destructive.

A torrent of fire and steel,

steeped in courage and cruelty.

From the Pacific Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea,

from the deserts of Africa to the Russian Steppe,

the war broke up nations and forged empires.

It redefined our borders, our ideals, our fears.

The Second World War shaped the world as we know it.

This is the story of a war that changed everything.

1939, World War II was stirring.

It would decide the fate of humankind,

because the world was a gunpowder keg threatened

by a rise in populism.

In the space of 20 years,

no fewer than 15 tyrannical regimes had been in power.

In the Spain of Franco, the Italy of Mussolini,

the Hungary of Horthy, the USSR of Stalin,

or the Japan of Hirohito.

The dictatorships refused the new order

that resulted from World War I

and promised a different future to their people,

a fascist order.

In Germany, Adolf Hitler, after six years in power,

stood out as the figurehead of totalitarianism.

He set out to build an empire

by dominating Europe and persecuting the Jews,

whom he cynically blamed for the war he was preparing.

Danger was rearing its ugly head,

but Europe's democracies favored appeasement over conflict.

They too were shaken by an upsurge in extremist movements.

In France and Belgium,

the far-right leagues paraded in the streets.

In the United Kingdom,

the British Union of fascists

was attracting thousands of new members.

It even appealed to members of the establishment

like the Duke of Windsor.

In New York,

20,000 American sympathizers yelled, "Heil Hitler,"

and gave the Nazi salute,

a salute which would forever be pregnant with meaning.

On the streets, protestors vented their anger.

You all have heard of me

through the Jewish-controlled press.

"Down with Hitler," yelled Isadore Greenbaum,

a 26-year-old Jewish plumber,

running onto the stage before being violently restrained.

As the extremist peril escalated,

some tried to raise the alarm.

But their efforts were in vain.

Hitler had already annexed Austria

and occupied Czechoslovakia

before turning his attention to Poland.

This was one step too far.

France and Great Britain promised to come to Poland's aid

if it was attacked.

To avoid having to fight on a second front,

the Fuhrer forged an unlikely alliance

with his ideological enemy, Joseph Stalin.

The tyrant had ruled as the absolute master

of the Soviet Union for more than 10 years.

He consolidated his power through fear,

imposing a regime that crushed its opponents

in the name of communism.

He too dreamed of expansion and wanted part of Poland.

His pact with Hitler created a new world order

and would reshape Europe.

For all of its neighbors, the USSR would remain a threat.

Russian military helicopters

in Ukrainian airspace.

In August of 1939,

Berlin and Moscow signed a non-aggression pact.

The two dictatorships presented their unexpected alliance

as a desire to guarantee peace.

On the contrary, it would pave the way for total war,

which would elevate violence to a planetary scale.

On September the 1st, 1939, lightning struck Europe.

The Polish cavalry charged,

but the German army crushed it with its tanks.

Safe in their cockpits, Luftwaffe bombers drop their loads.

Warsaw folded under 642 tons of bombs.

Machine gunfire from one German plane killed the sister

of 10-year-old d Kazimiera Mika.

American photographer Julien Bryan was there

to capture the scene.

The only foreign reporter still in the Polish capitol,

his pictures smuggled out of Europe revealed

to the rest of the world the scale

of the devastation in Poland,

marked by a new type of warfare.

Germany had just invented the Blitzkrieg,

the Lightning War,

a combination of armored divisions and aviation

to strike fast and heavily, breaking through enemy defenses.

It would forever change military strategy.

In Eastern Poland,

the Red Army moved into the areas

which Hitler had conceded to Stalin.

Sandwiched between the Soviets and the Germans,

the Polish army surrendered.

World War II had just begun.

France and Britain had promised to come to Poland's aid,

but in fact,

it was months before they finally entered the war.

Across the Atlantic,

the United States of America remained isolationist.

The country was yet to become the world's police force,

and its President Franklin Roosevelt,

marked by World War I,

had promised to never again sacrifice American lives

in such a distant conflict.

I hope the United States will keep out of this war.

I believe that it will,

and I give you assurance and reassurance

that every effort of your government

will be directed toward that end.

What's more, Roosevelt's concerns

were elsewhere.

His eyes were focused on the Pacific,

where the US had military bases and trading interests.

Japan, hungry for conquests and resources,

was threatening the stability of the region.

Three years earlier, Japan had invaded China,

first striking Shanghai, then Beijing.

For the Chinese,

this was a time of historical transformation.

Nationalists and communists,

who had been fighting a civil war for decades,

joined forces to repel the invasion.

Until then a minority force,

the communists used the conflict

to switch the internal balance of power.

Armed, trained, and organized during the war,

10 years later,

they would bring to power the man who changed

the fate of China, Mao Zedong.

In the meantime, China had become a quagmire

for the Japanese army,

which was swallowed up in the country's immensity.

From one side of the globe to the other,

the world held its breath.

And Europe, an order believed to be unshakeable,

was about to shift.

France, with the world's largest army at the time,

still thought it was protected by the Maginot Line

and took advantage of the so-called Phoney War to rearm.

After the invasion of Poland, it mobilized its forces,

working hand in hand with Britain.

200,000 men of the British Expeditionary Force

were sent across the channel to defend Europe.

But before facing each other directly in battle,

Germans, French, and British first engaged

in economic warfare with naval blockades, sabotage,

and the control of trade routes.

In Argentina, a German battle cruiser,

which had been hassling British merchant Navy ships

for weeks, was forced to scuttle.

Thousands of kilometers away, in Norway,

the Allies attacked a strategic target,

the Germans' iron ore supply,

a crucial material for the manufacturer of arms.

Cutting off the enemy's access to essential resources

was considered the surest path to victory.

In response, the Germans took the Blitzkrieg up a gear.

They mobilized a hundred thousand men on land,

sea, and in the air.

It was the first joint warfare campaign in history.

Combining Infantry, Navy, and Air Force, a logistical feat.

Norway fell in a matter of days, Denmark in a few hours.

Despite this German show of force,

the French and British, haunted by World War I,

weren't ready to return to the horrors of the trenches.

So, France mobilized its colonial regiments,

no fewer than 150,000 men,

to fight alongside French soldiers in Europe.

But the leaders were struggling

to define the objectives of war.

How could they have their men fight

without understanding why?

In May, 1940,

the Wehrmacht invaded Belgium and Holland.

The French were finally forced into action

and hurried to the aid of their allies.

With this diversion,

German Panzers swept around the Maginot Line

and sped through the Ardennes.

Despite fierce resistance from its troops,

France was on the point of collapse.

Like Luxembourg, Belgium, and Holland,

it suffered the shame of a lightning defeat

as ruthless as it was unexpected.

These established powers, uncontested for centuries,

came crashing down.

The trauma was immense.

One single word best resumed the whole episode, debarquer.

Towns and cities fell one after the other,

hundreds of thousands of Allied troops fled towards the sea.

The Port of Dunkirk became the only escape route

across the channel to Britain.

In London, Winston Churchill

was the newly appointed prime minister.

He had seen the Nazi danger approaching

and refused all compromise with Hitler.

Britain entrusted him with its fate.

He knew that the battle of France was lost.

The 400,000 soldiers stranded on the beaches

across the English Channel had to be saved.

In one of the darkest hours of history,

Churchill kept the light of hope burning.

He was one of the providential men forged by World War II

and continues to influence our political imagination today.

For 10 days, hundreds of British ships

and boats of all sizes braved the waves

to bring home the soldiers who had retreated to Dunkirk,

a whole country mobilized to come to their rescue,

pretty much unaware of what awaited them.

Amid strafing from German Stukas,

the men caught in the hell

of Dunkirk desperately struggled to survive.

As sea, Royal Navy Lieutenant, Philip Roderick Hall,

did his best to help.

In the air, German pilot, Helmut Mahlke,

relentlessly bombed British ships and finally hit a target.

On shore, French Colonel, Jean-Mathieu,

saw his last hopes of survival sink into the harbor.

He was taken prisoner on June the 2nd, 1940,

with 80,000 other soldiers, mostly French.

Among them, a large number were from the French colonies.

These men now knew that France wasn't invincible.

They had seen defeat with their own eyes

and weren't ready to forget it.

The record of across Africa.

For now, Europe was panic-stricken,

more than 10 million Belgians, Danes, Dutch,

and French took to the roads.

The migrants pled southwards,

hoping to escape the hordes of German soldiers sweeping

into Western Europe, a dramatic exodus.

Among them were Abraham and Eugenia Rosenfeld

and their six-year-old son heading for the south of France.

They had fled from (indistinct) in Poland.

In Bordeaux, they stood in line in the Portuguese consulate.

Aristides de Sousa Mendes,

disobeying the orders of his government,

issued Visas day and night.

He would save 30,000 people,

later earning him the title of righteous among the nations.

Thanks to this precious opening, the Rosenfelds,

like thousands of others, would soon set sail for America.

Those fleeing persecution in Europe tried to reach Brazil,

the United States, and even Palestine.

A tragic precedent.

Refugee flows would continue to increase with each war

and natural disaster.

Refugees of the Korean war.

On June the 14th, 1940,

the French Prime Minister resigned

and was replaced by Philippe Petain.

He announced the armistice.

The defeated French helplessly looked on

as the Nazis paraded on their streets.

The defeat would cause a shockwave.

London became the capital of the free world.

Polish airmen, French soldiers, ministers,

kings and queens from the Netherlands,

Norway, or Poland,

politicians who refused defeat, resolute officers,

the stateless accused of being traitors in their homeland,

gathered there in their hundreds.

Like Charles de Gaulle,

the former undersecretary of state for national defense

and war was determined to continue the fight.

Exiled in London, on June the 18th,

the Frenchman made his appeal for resistance.

Although his speech was barely heard in France,

the rebel made history

and forever tied his fate with that of his homeland.

On the same day as the appeal,

Mussolini met with Hitler Munich

to discuss how they would share out Europe.

The Fuhrer confided to Il Duce,

"Our interests are in the North, yours in the South."

Like his ally, Mussolini had dreams of hegemony.

He wanted to rebuild a Roman empire

to reign throughout the Mediterranean.

His ambitions were but a mirage.

Italy was ill prepared for modern warfare

and totally unable to compete

with a great industrial power like Germany.

But France was on its knees.

On June the 10th, Mussolini took advantage of its agony

to declare war.

The Third Reich, however, only left him some scraps,

the town of Menton on the French Riviera

and a few alpine villages.

Hitler claimed the lion's share.

With the armistice between France and Germany signed,

Petain's government, now installed in Vichy,

would collaborate with the Reich,

which occupied the northern half of France.

The next day, Hitler paraded through the streets of Paris.

A photographer in his cortege captured him

in front of the Eiffel Tower,

a symbol of his crushing victory.

Yesterday a world power,

France began its decline and its colonial empire wavered.

Its colonies in Africa hesitated between supporting

the Vichy government and resisting it,

while Japan took advantage of France's defeat

to invade Indochina.

The defeats in Europe

and the threats in Asia forced Roosevelt out

of his isolationism.

He was intent on making the United States

the arsenal of democracies

to help them fight back against the Third Reich

and the Empire of the Rising Sun.

Congress voted for a substantial budget

of $1.3 billion for defense.

American manufacturers transformed overnight.

Where they had made automobiles, refrigerators, and cameras,

they now produced fighter jets, tanks, and guns.

It was the birth of the military industrial complex.

The world's center of gravity had shifted.

Great Britain now looked across the pond.

Breaking with the old continent,

it established a special relationship

with the United States, the future superpower.

For the time being, the British enlisted.

250,000 volunteers signed up for the Home Guard,

encouraged by their Hardy Prime Minister.

We will go on to the end.

We shall fight on the seas and oceans.

We shall defend our island.

Whatever the cast may be, we shall never surrender.

Britain prepared for a German invasion.

School children had practice runs to air raid shelters.

Signposts were taken down to confuse the enemy.

Airmen were on the front line.

British of (indistinct), Belgian, Danish, Polish,

and French pilots got ready to sacrifice their lives

in the name of freedom.

Facing them, other knight of the sky,

daredevils like them onboard their killing machines.

The Luftwaffe was tasked with preparing the ground

for the future invasion by wiping out British air defenses.

It carried out raids on aircraft factories

and Royal Air Force bases.

For two months, a massive aerial battle was fought

for the control of British skies.

The dog fights approached London.

In the capitol on alert,

American reporter Edward Murrow described the events live.

This is Trafalgar square.

The noise that you hear at the moment

is the sound of the air raid sirens.

A search light just burst into action off in the distance,

one single beam sweeping the sky above me now.

It was a first.

Across the Atlantic,

the war entered the homes of millions of listeners.

News in real time would forever change the role of the media

and population's relation to war.

On September the 7th,

the Germans changed their tactics

by directly targeting British civilians.

An ominous precedent.

From then on, civilians were increasingly caught

on the front lines of warfare.

On September the 7th in the Mediterranean,

the British Colonial Empire also came under attack.

Mussolini ordered his troops to invade Egypt,

then a British protectorate,

from neighboring Libya, then an Italian colony.

The British forced back the Italians miles

from their objective, the Suez Canal,

the vital artery,

which led Britain to its empire and its resources.

Ignoring this failure,

Il Duce opened a third front without even informing Hitler.

In Greece this time,

where his troops came up against fierce national resistance.

Greek pilot, Marinos Mitralexis,

was caught in a dogfight with an Italian bomber squadron.

Out of ammunition,

he decided one last throw of the dice

and rammed the nose of his PLZ Fighter

into a Bomber's tail.

After an emergency landing,

he took the four Italian crewman prisoner.

Greek infantrymen were able to hold their positions,

thanks to large groups of women who kept them supplied

with ammunition carried on their backs,

pioneers of the role that women would play

in resistance movements all across Europe.

In Germany, a decisive event would turn the ongoing conflict

into a world war.

On September the 27th, Tokyo joined Rome and Berlin,

forming an axis of dictatorships,

all with the same dreams of hegemony.

For the Japanese, Asia,

for the Italians, the Mediterranean and Africa,

and for the Germans, Europe.

But first, they had to defeat Britain.

The British needed to fold under the weight of the Blitz.

Made possible by technical advances

in powerful long-distance weaponry,

terror bombings were carried out

to break the enemy's morale

in a form of psychological warfare.

Above the British capitol, German pilot, Peter Stahl,

dropped his bombs.

The explosions reached the ears

of 10-year-old Irene Mosley 20 meters underground.

For 57 nights on the run,

London has sheltered in the depths of the Tube.

Above them, a young British woman, Rosie Newman,

armed with her camera,

captured her people's incredible resilience.

The British united around their Prime Minister,

and around the Crown,

which protected civilians from the destruction of the Blitz

by sheltering them, helping them to rebuild their homes,

feeding them, and nursing them,

heralding the welfare state

that would be established after the war.

Then aged 14, Princess Elizabeth addressed

the nation's children in a radio broadcast.

We are trying to to bear our own share

of the danger and scaredness of war.

We know, every one of us,

that in the end, all will be well.

And when peace comes, remember, it'll be for us,

the children of today,

to make the world of tomorrow a better and happier place.

It was the first ever public speech

by she who would go on to rule the United Kingdom

for more than 70 years,

lastingly marked by the experience of war.

Despite 15,000 lives lost,

the Blitz failed to break British morale,

especially as Britain could now count

on growing American support.

In September, 1940,

a British scientific delegation crossed the Atlantic,

carrying precious industrial secrets

in an attache case.

These were key military technologies destined

for the United States.

The resources and support

provided by Washington paved the way

for unprecedented cooperation.

Radar, sonar, light, and heavy weaponry,

this strategic sharing resulted in phenomenal progress,

which would change the course of the war.

The United Kingdom wouldn't go down without a fight.

The British even met with several successes in Africa,

in Libya, but also in Ethiopia and Eritrea,

they forced back Mussolini's troops.

They were on the point of expelling

the Italians from Africa.

But just as victory seemed imminent,

Churchill decided to transfer 60,000

of his soldiers in Africa to aid the Greek army.

A huge mistake, which deprived him of immediate victory,

because the humiliated Mussolini begged aid

from the Third Reich and Hitler dispatched his soldiers.

A German expeditionary force,

the Afrika Korps, commanded by General Rommel,

arrived to support Italy in Libya.

Then the German army invaded Greece,

which succumbed within three weeks.

On their way to Greece,

the Germans had also broken Yugoslavia,

which had dared to side with Britain.

Bulgaria and Romania joined the Rome-Berlin Axis.

Save a few countries,

the swastika flew above the whole of Europe.

There was nothing now to prevent the Fuhrer

from looking eastwards.

From the USSR, Stalin looked on helplessly

as the Nazi empire was built.

He considered the Balkans to be his turf,

and now the Germans were camped at his door.

It was a pivotal moment.

If Hitler attacked,

he would force the Soviets onto his enemy's side.

Stalin remained convinced

that the Fuhrer wouldn't be crazy enough to break their pact

and open a new front in the East

while he was still fighting Britain.

And when General Zhukov,

the second in command of the Red Army,

demanded that his troops be placed on red alert,

Stalin was against it.

"Germany will never attack Russia," he affirmed.

Hitler proved him wrong.

He dispatched his troops to take the Russian Steppe,

a gigantic operation, five and a half million soldiers,

3,710 tanks, 4,980 aircraft were mobilized

across a front 2,000 kilometers wide.

This was Operation Barbarossa,

the largest military invasion in World War II.

Stalin was distraught,

but tried to get his country ready for war.

Hitler had one objective, a war of extermination.

It was no longer a matter of conquering territories,

but of annihilating entire peoples

and reducing communist ideology to ashes.

This was the starting point of an escalation of horror

and cruelty which would haunt humankind.

On June the 27th, 1941,

at the controls of his tank,

Oberleutnant Friedrich Sander,

advanced across the Steppe.

In his path, a wounded Russian soldier stood up and waved.

The pitiless Sander accelerated

and crushed him to death.

The Soviet cities fell,

Smolensk, Minsk, and then Kiev.

Hundreds of thousands of soldiers surrendered.

The German troops starved, extenuated, tortured,

or executed Soviet prisoners.

While to the rear, the Einsatzgruppen,

or execution squads, massacred Jews.

At Babi Yar near Kiev, more than 33,000 men, women,

and children guilty only of being born

were slaughtered in a vast ravine.

This massacre would become known as

the Holocaust of Bullets.

It set the precedent of a process

that nobody was yet able to imagine,

the systematic genocide of Europe's Jews.

In 200 days, more than five million Soviets were killed.

Hitler predicted that the war would be over by December.

The USSR was on the brink of defeat.

A lesson that its leaders never forgot,

never again would they leave

their territory open to invasion,

and all conquests close to its borders

would become a shield.

Even today, Russia has maintained this paranoid fixation

to protect itself behind a defensive glacier.

For now, panic overcame the Russian capital,

especially after Stalin ordered the evacuation

of the embassies and main government offices.

But the master of the Kremlin instilled calm

once he announced he would be staying in the city.

Moscow would be defended.

But at what price?