Original subtitles

80 years ago, a war of an unprecedented scale

shook our planet and changed the face of the world.

Let's go!

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.

In the USSR after the German invasion five months earlier,

millions of Russians were living in fear

of the inexorable advance of the Nazis.

The Germans were only 30 kilometers from the capital,

but on November the 7th, 1941,

Stalin announced in a radio address

that the Red Army would proudly

parade in front of the Kremlin.

As soon as the event was over, the soldiers left Red Square

to head back to the front at the gates of the city.

World War II was having

an ever greater effect on people's lives.

Their futures depended on the outcome of the conflict.

In the war, competing forces faced one another.

Imperialist, Fascist, Democratic, and Communist.

The fate of millions of lives depended on

one or other of them being victorious.

Thousands of kilometers from Moscow, in the Pacific Ocean,

Japan was preparing a daring attack.

If it succeeded, it would change the course of history

and propel America into the war.

On November the 26th, 1941,

a Japanese armada was heading towards

the bay of Pearl Harbor,

situated some 6,000 kilometers from the coast of Japan,

in the Hawaiian archipelago.

Its aim, to neutralize the American fleet

which was threatening Emperor Hirohito's

desire for hegemony.

He had allied himself with Hitler and Mussolini

to divide up the world between them,

and his aim was to colonize Asia.

The United States was worried

and responded with economic sanctions

and an oil embargo, hoping to slow down

the Japanese war machine.

In response to the rise of dictatorships,

an alternative vision was taking shape.

In mid-summer of 1941, American President Franklin Roosevelt

and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill

appeared together for the first time.

They signed the Atlantic Charter.

The text outlined the principles of a new world order,

the right of nations to choose their government,

the end of forced annexations,

and the promotion of free trade,

a model that was destined to spread.

It was also the founding document of the United Nations,

which, after the war, would bring the promise

of peace and international security.

Nevertheless, by late morning-

The United Nations said it was a convoy

to avert a human catastrophe.

America was living proof of this.

Although not actually at war,

it was supporting all the countries

actively fighting the dictators of the Axis,

China, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union.

They delivered a massive $50,000 of aid,

as well as tanks, aircraft, and weapons,

but also blankets, food, and fuel.

Its worldview relied on the triumph of capitalism.

In the world to come, the United States

would become the nerve center of the world economy.

In contrast, in the USSR,

the Communist model placed all the weight

of the war on the shoulders of the masses.

At the gates of Moscow,

reinforcements were constantly being sent

to the Red Army to fight the Wehrmacht.

One and a half million soldiers.

A quarter of them came from Siberia

and were accustomed to the Arctic cold.

And half of them had been freed from the gulag

labor camps and sent to the front.

Each citizen was a vital cog in the Soviet war machine.

The USSR relocated 15,000 factories to the east,

far from the territory invaded by the Germans.

Women worked there day and night,

producing arms and munitions, working at a fearsome rate,

under the permanent threat

of the Soviet system of labor camps.

Propaganda made reluctant heroes

of dedicated workers and soldiers.

They were a reminder to their compatriots

that victory and the greatness of Russia

depended on their total commitment.

The Wehrmacht came up against another formidable adversary,

the immensity of Soviet territories.

Hitler's armies triumphed in Poland, then in France.

But Russia was 40 times bigger than France

and 57 times bigger than Poland.

The Germans underestimated the logistical difficulties.

Their supply line stretched over 2,000 kilometers.

The roads turned into bogs and became unusable.

In December, the winter became the USSR's ally.

The Arctic temperatures immobilized men and machines alike.

Vasily Grossman, a Soviet journalist and volunteer recruit,

was covering the fighting in Ukraine in the Donbas region.

He'd twice narrowly escaped capture by the Germans

since the beginning of the offensive,

but the biting cold, so familiar to Russians,

gave him renewed courage.

Facing him was a young German officer,

Walter Schaefer-Kehnert, 23 years old, frozen,

fearing he would die in the snow that jammed his weapon,

and the long nights that invited sleep.

More than ever, the war was becoming a psychological test

as much as a physical one.

Troop morale was essential for victory.

On December the 6th, 1941,

the Red Army launched a counteroffensive

and forced the Wehrmacht to abandon Moscow.

This abrupt turnaround marked the beginning

of a change in fortunes,

which put the USSR on the side of the victors.

The next day, on December the 7th at 6:00 AM,

Japan launched its raid on Pearl Harbor.

A first wave of 183 Japanese aircraft took off.

Radio silence.

The pilots communicated by gestures

to avoid their exchanges being picked up.

The surprise had to be complete.

In clear skies, Japanese pilot Mitsuo Fuchida

had his target in his sights.

Eight American battleships

lined up in the bay of Pearl Harbor.

He sent the signal, "Tora, tora, tora."

On the ground, Captain Eric Hackinson

filmed the apocalyptic scenes.

These images would change the destiny of the United States.

The Americans who believed themselves invincible

were attacked on their own soil.

A huge shock, which would only happen on one other occasion.

What the hell is that?

- Holy! - Oh my God!

Oh my God!

Yesterday, December 7th, 1941,

a date which will live in infamy.

The United States of America

was suddenly and deliberately attacked

by naval and air forces of the empire of Japan.

I ask that the Congress declare

a state of war has existed

between the United States and the Japanese Empire.

It was one of the most

important speeches in American history,

and it marked a turning point.

The United States military was now involved in the conflict,

and to protect themselves from any further aggression,

from then on, they became, for a very long time,

the world's police force.

He has toppled a bronze statue

of Saddam Hussein.

You gotta be more thankful.

On December the 8th, 1941,

the US Congress ratified America's entry into the war.

Within a few days, the course of history had changed.

December the 6th, at the gates of Moscow,

December the 7th, at Pearl Harbor,

December the 8th, in Washington.

The USSR was already fighting at Great Britain's side.

America now joined them.

The two future superpowers of the 20th century

were now committed to fighting the Axis.

A paranoid Hitler saw proof of a global conspiracy

in the alliance between the American and Soviet regimes.

Before an audience of faithful supporters,

he accused the Jews of controlling the allied governments.

His response was to extend the Holocaust

to the whole of Europe.

The methods to be used

were discussed at Wannsee in January, 1942.

33 countries were affected,

a total of 11 million Jews.

The war rendered the unthinkable possible,

genocide on an industrial scale.

The Nazis would call it the Final Solution.

America, like the rest of the world,

knew nothing yet of the Nazis' genocidal project.

After Pearl Harbor, the Americans united

around anti-Japanese sentiment.

♪ I a Japanese sap man ♪

♪ Sneaking on with the dew ♪

♪ Just a Japanese sap man ♪

♪ I'm a little crazy too ♪

Racist propaganda allowed them

to justify the severe repression of Japanese-Americans,

seen as the enemies within.

120,000 of them suspected of being enemy spies

were interned in camps.

The greatest democracy in the world

would always have to deal with the contradiction

between respect for individual liberties

and internal security.

The US was consumed by a desire for vengeance,

as well as by patriotism.

1,800,000 men were put on a war footing.

American society was changing.

The increasing need for manpower

forced women out of their homes and into jobs

that had previously been reserved for men.

In California, at Alameda Naval Air Station,

a model production line employee, Naomi Parker Fraley,

was repairing aircraft wings.

With her blue overalls and her hair held back

by a red polka dot scarf,

she became the model for a famous poster.

When the war was over, millions of women

would fight to keep their independence.

America was becoming increasingly involved in the war.

Convoys filled with equipment destined for the British,

the Chinese, and Soviets, sailed the seas.

At the heart of this total war,

one resource became more highly prized than any other.

Oil.

Essential for ships, tanks, aircraft, and factories,

black gold kept the war machine well oiled.

The Allies controlled 98% of oil fields.

Dependency on this resource dictated military strategy.

On the Eastern Front, the Italians

and Germans fought with the British

for control of the strategic route of the Suez Canal.

In North Africa, the Wehrmacht looked towards

the Caucasus Mountains and the oil in Baku,

one of the most important oil fields.

The Germans had motorized their armies

to an unprecedented extent,

but had greatly underestimated their need for fuel.

In the race for weapons and resources,

America was in the lead.

The Germans knew this.

And so to weaken their better supplied enemy

and to seize its resources,

they threw themselves headlong

into the Battle of the Atlantic.

Their submarines, the U-boats,

tracked them as far as the American coast.

They sent several hundred ships

and 6 million tons of goods to the bottom of the ocean.

To combat this threat, the British

and Americans focused on intelligence gathering.

Some months earlier,

the British pulled off a significant coup.

On May the 9th, 1941,

two English battleships attacked U-boat 110.

Its commander, Julius-Fritz Lemp,

gave the order to abandon ship

and attempted to scuttle the submarine,

but the explosive charges didn't go off.

Second Lieutenant David Baum went on board

and took possession of an Enigma machine

in perfect condition,

with its codes and vital coding documents.

This discovery, among others,

transformed the intelligence war between the countries.

Encryption, undercover agents, detection.

Secrecy was a key weapon.

Techniques were developing at the same time

as battles were being waged,

and they would change the result of the war.

Intelligence gathering played a vital role in warfare.

President Roosevelt understood this.

After Pearl Harbor, he created the OSS,

a centralized intelligence gathering organization,

a forerunner of the CIA,

because America was never going to be

caught by surprise again.

In the Pacific, early in 1942,

Japan was making the most of the shock of Pearl Harbor

to accelerate the pace of its conquests.

Like the Germans in Europe,

the Japanese wanted to establish their empire

across all the territories previously dominated by the West.

In January, 1942, Japanese troops

struck the British colonies of Malaysia and Hong Kong.

Japan also took control of the Dutch East Indies,

now Indonesia, which was rich in oil.

Then Burma, another colony of the British Crown.

In March, the Philippines,

a protectorate of the United States, collapsed.

Japan claimed to be the good guys,

freeing Asian people from the yoke of white colonialism.

In reality, the Burmese, Indonesians, and Malaysians

were forced from the domination of one regime to another.

for months, and in some cases, years,

250,000 workers were forced to build the Railway of Death,

a line linking Bangkok and Burma.

90,000 civilians and 16,000 prisoners of war died there,

victims of tropical diseases and inhuman treatment.

According to a racist ideology,

the Japanese believed they had the right

to rule over other Asian people they judged inferior.

Over the course of the previous century,

racial theory had become part of the natural sciences,

classifying humans into categories like plants and animals.

In World War II, it was used to legitimize

the dehumanization of the enemy,

as well as mass violence.

In Asia, as in Europe,

new empires were reaching their zenith.

In spite of America's entry into the war,

Russian resistance, and the steadfast involvement

of the British, Europe entered into a dark night.

Hitler pursued his plans for domination.

The old continent wasn't yet completely under Nazi rule,

but his dream of an Aryan Europe seemed to be coming true.

The so-called superior race ignored borders.

Scandinavians, Dutch, Luxembourgers,

Flemish, could all call themselves German one day

like the Czechs, Austrians, and Alsatians, who already did.

Annexed, occupied, and allied people

lived as best they could under the Nazi regime,

where the same rules were imposed,

the destruction of the Jews and widespread looting.

Behind the front, lands emptied by deportations and murder

were promised to 4 million German colonizers.

The Nazis also engaged in human trafficking.

The von Oelhafens were unable to have children.

The administration gave them

what they had dreamed of for years.

A little Slovenian girl, Erika Matko,

aged nine months, spotted by the Nazis

because of her blonde hair and blue eyes,

was snatched from her parents,

to be given to a German family.

From then on, she was called Ingrid.

She wouldn't discover her true identity

until a long time after the war.

Like her, thousands of children

with supposedly Aryan characteristics

would be taken from their families and raised in Germany.

The Lebensborns, they were the embodiment

of the Promethean project of a rejuvenated Germanic empire.

Nearly 15,000 Ukrainians

were brought into the Reich to be forcibly married.

Even though the Reich

had been guilty of widespread plundering,

it still had much lower industrial capacity than the Allies.

Every day in France, 400 million francs

swelled the coffers of the occupying forces,

which, along with the exploitation of the French economy,

kept the war effort going.

French workers were also sent to Germany.

And France wasn't an isolated case.

Under Nazi rule, more than 13 million Europeans,

prisoners, deportees, and requisition civilians,

were reduced to forced labor

in the service of the Reich's economy.

In Germany, factories, farms, and infrastructure

were kept running by workers from all over Europe.

Poles, Ukrainians, French, Belgians,

and Dutch underwent deprivation and rationing.

These years of sacrifice would leave

an indelible mark on people's memories,

and the countries that were exploited in this way

would take years to recover.

An irresistible force was driving everything in Europe

to the brink of destruction.

From one end of the continent to the other,

the Holocaust, the extermination of the Jews

which had been limited to the east,

now spread towards the west.

Local officials collaborated in raids.

They identified Jewish people by distinctive markers.

An arm band in Poland, Croatia, and Slovakia,

a yellow star in Belgium, the Netherlands,

and in occupied France.

Families sewed them onto their clothes,

unaware of the fate that was awaiting them.

In the Netherlands, Ruud Roddenberg, a Dutch dentist,

filmed the arrest of his neighbors, Israel De Jongh,

and his three daughters, Rachel, Bernardina,

and Henderina, from his window.

He then filmed trucks arriving, loading up furniture,

and heading back to Germany.

Seven days later,

following along an arduous journey by train,

the family was murdered in a camp.

The camp's gas chambers were already in operation.

When groups of old people, children, and women arrived,

if they were unfit to work, they were murdered immediately.

The others suffered forced labor.

By the end of 1942,

a million and a half human beings had perished

in the death camps in Poland,

the most murderous year of the Holocaust.

Railroad convoys crisscrossed the continent,

carrying their passengers to their deaths.

The rails seemed to know no end.

Meanwhile, the people of the Reich

were living a life of plenty.

In 1942, a German consumed

4,000 calories on average per day,

compared to 1,200 calories for a French person,

and less than 300 calories for a Jewish deportee.

Thousands of Germans lived beside these camps,

pretending not to know their deadly function.

Many profited shamelessly from looted Jewish possessions,

furniture, jewelry, works of art, apartments.

And later, clothes, shoes,

and hair.

One day, the artifacts stolen from victims

would bear silent witness to the horror.

Places of remembrance would display them

to remind future generations of the massive scale

of a crime that shocked the whole world.

In the wake of World War II,

a collective wake up call arose.

Never again.

With the might of the American military

industrial complex now in play,

the war would not be over soon.

On April the 18th, 1942, in Hawaii,

the Americans were planning a lightning strike

in revenge for Pearl Harbor, the bombing of Tokyo,

a distance of 6,000 kilometers from their shores.

This would be accomplished using aircraft carriers

which had replaced battleships in modern warfare.

American technical prowess enabled their bombers

to take off from the middle of the ocean.

The American air raid rocked Japan to its core.

The Japanese had previously believed

that they were safe from harm.

Humiliation combined with anger.

But they still hoped they could turn the tide of the war

by striking Midway, the most remote American base

in the Central Pacific.

The architect of the plan was the same

as for Pearl Harbor, Admiral Yamamoto.

He had a huge amount of military equipment at his disposal,

200 warships and 248 aircraft.

This time, America was ready for them.

The work of the intelligence agencies

meant that they were fully informed of the attack.

Their pilots destroyed the four aircraft carriers involved

and all of the Japanese aircraft.

In the future, espionage would play a role in every battle.

Thousands of kilometers away,

the war of attrition in the desert sands continued.

The day after the Battle of Midway,

Mussolini's troops and General Rommel's Africa Corps

headed towards the Suez Canal.

There they would face the British who, like them,

were suffering from thirst, the heat,

and a lack of supplies.

These two armies had been engaging in offensives

and counteroffensives for months.

Each town that was won

was immediately won back by the enemy.

At Bir Hakeim in June, 1942, French Gaullist forces,

two thirds of which came from French colonies,

confronted the enemy for the first time

since the debacle had begun.

They were outnumbered 12 to one

by the German-Italian forces.

They were forced to flee across enemy lines.

At the front of the column, Susan Travers,

the only woman in the Foreign Legion,

was driving the car of the commander of the French forces.

Determined to survive, she drove at high speed

in the midst of the chaos,

dodging mines and artillery fire.

Such heroism was a sign of a new spirit

of resistance on the allied side,

even if the road ahead was still long.

After Bir Hakeim, the Libyan port of Tobruk

fell into German hands.

Panic set in among the British,

fearing the worst for their Egyptian colony.

Mussolini was rubbing his hands in glee.

He wanted to take back the ancient Roman province of Egypt.

He set off for Cairo,

where he hoped to make a triumphal entrance.

But it was to be a mirage in the desert.

In reality, his empire was already crumbling.

Eritrea and Ethiopia had been taken by the British.

Libya was the last Italian colony in Africa.

And without Hitler, he would already have lost it.

The Fuhrer was making considerable efforts,

both militarily and politically.

For months, he'd been trying to stir up Arab nationalists

in the English colonies of Iraq and Palestine

to weaken the British Empire from the inside.

He directed his support to the great Mufti of Jerusalem,

the main religious leader in Palestine.

Meanwhile, the United States

was extending a warm welcome to David Ben-Gurion,

the founding father of the future state of Israel,

the state which would see the light of day

after World War II,

at the same time as the endless conflict

which is still tearing apart the Middle East today.

By the suicide bombing.

Rocket fire by Hamas.

For the time being,

war was continuing in the North African desert.

But a turning point was just around the corner.

The British had managed to block

the German advance in Egypt at the last moment.

In October, they inflicted a decisive defeat

on the Germans at El-Alamein,

due in large part to their tanks,

which outnumbered the enemies by two to one.

30,000 Germans were taken prisoner.

The rest of Rommel's troops retreated towards Tunisia.

This was not just a military victory,

but the beginning of the Allied fight back.

The Americans and British

were planning a large scale operation.

For months, Stalin had been demanding

the opening of a new front

to relieve the heavy burden on the Red Army in Russia.

The Americans were going to engage their troops

for the first time outside of Asia.

Along with the British, they were planning

a massive operation in North Africa.

The landing of 100,000 men

would force the Africa Corps to retreat,

and thus pave the way for winning back Europe.

On November the 8th, 1942,

two armadas set off for Morocco and Algeria,

which were both French colonies.

It was the first joint Allied operation.

Algiers was taken in a single day, without bloodshed,

due to the 400 French resistance fighters

who were, for the most part, Jews stripped of their

French nationality by the Vichy regime.

Assaulted on all sides, the Vichy authorities surrendered,

and the entire French-African army, some 80,000 men,

were finally able to join the Allies,

a turning point which strengthened the French resistance.

In retaliation, Hitler invaded the south of France.

Thousands of kilometers away,

his armies faced a massive task,

which was to change the course of the war.

Having failed to take Moscow,

the Germans turned to the Caucasus Mountains

and its oil fields.

On their way lay Stalingrad.

The city that bore the name of the Soviet leader.

Stalin intended to defend it at all costs.

He gave the order, "Not one step back."

Inside the city, the fighting went from

neighborhood to neighborhood,

street by street, house by house.

Hitler declared the victory was at hand.

As for Stalin, he wasn't crazy enough to fight over ruins.

The more the Germans dug in,

the more it helped the Red Army's plan.

The decisive counterattack was ready

and could well signal the end of Nazi military domination.

If the USSR won at Stalingrad,

it would establish itself as the power

that liberated Europe from the Nazis.

For the Allies, the race towards the endgame was beginning.

It would pave the way to the world after war.