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.

The spring of 1944.

For several weeks, an uninterrupted flow of troops

and equipment had been crossing the ocean to Great Britain,

where the most formidable armada

in history was being put into place.

Its mission, to break through the Nazis' Atlantic wall

and establish a second front on European soil.

Its code name, Overlord.

Convinced that the Allies would target northwest Europe,

Hitler built the so-called Atlantic wall,

which he hoped would repel the Allies back to the sea.

The British knew that it was pointless

to deny the imminence of D-Day,

so they set out to deceive the enemy

into expecting them anywhere but Normandy.

Fake radio traffic and phony press articles.

They did everything

to suggest the operation would take place

along the coast around Calais.

Phantom divisions amassed in the southeast of England

to fool German aviation,

fitted out with dummy rubber tanks and wooden aircraft.

At the same time,

the French resistance would sabotage the railway network

to prevent the Nazis from sending reinforcements

to northern France.

On June the 3rd, the preparations were complete.

The soldiers waited, gripped by anxiety.

In the West, steel was about to rain down

on the beaches of France.

In the east, the Red Army was preparing

to sweep through central Europe.

The war had one last act to play.

Despite the Allies having a common enemy,

a silent rivalry was already brewing

over who would reap the spoils of victory.

Because behind each advance,

another battle was being played out, that of influence.

During the night of June the 5th to the 6th, 1944,

thousands of parachuters fell from the sky.

Go!

They're tasked to destroy enemy gun batteries,

to take bridges, and secure areas inland of certain beaches.

The bombers of the Royal and US Air Forces joined in

to destroy the formidable Atlantic wall.

Finally, a vast armada emerged from the sea mist.

D-Day began.

With it, America wasn't just sending its GIs

to European soil, it was asserting its influence

and ushering in a new era.

At 5:30 AM, a torrent of fire rained down

on the Normandy coast.

Tens of thousands of men braved the waves and their fear.

Americans, British, and Canadians, along with 177 Frenchmen,

advanced towards the beaches.

Men who had crossed the Atlantic

to defend a continent which wasn't their own would become

the stuff of legend.

Their sacrifice would forge the image

of an America that saves the world.

By noon, the beaches were taken, a miracle.

With one exception, Omaha.

Later nicknamed Bloody Omaha,

it would leave deep scars on both sides.

Above the dunes of Omaha Beach,

German Sergeant Heinrich Severloh had his eyes fixed

on the shore.

He relentlessly fired his machine gun,

spreading death among the enemy ranks.

Suddenly, a couple of dozen meters away,

he spotted a young American soldier.

The sergeant aimed his rifle and shot.

The young soldier dropped down dead.

This image would haunt Sergeant Severloh

for the rest of his life.

World War II was a horrifying experience for all soldiers

and left many of them with severe trauma.

The Allies set up psychological support units

to counsel the men.

Soldiers of all armies suffered

from the same symptoms caused by war.

But post-traumatic stress wasn't always taken seriously.

Most of the afflicted were still treated as fakers,

executed as a warning by the Wehrmacht or the Red Army.

By the night of June the 6th,

all of the beaches had been taken.

The heaviest losses were at Omaha,

but despite the tragedy, the Allies counted 10,000 victims

as opposed to the expected 25,000.

The Atlantic wall hadn't lasted a single day.

156,000 men had landed in Normandy.

The GIs advanced through the French countryside,

handing out cigarettes and chewing gum

to the people who gave them a hero's welcome.

The landing sealed the fate of Western Europe.

Its liberation would align half of the continent

with the United States.

From rock and roll to blue jeans,

from the movies to Coca-Cola,

the old and new continents blended

as the 20th century became the American century.

♪ Gimme cheating, drinking, and outlaw songs ♪

♪ Hard times, foolish pride, done me wrong ♪

♪ Flirting with the devil, get right with the man ♪

While in the East,

the Soviet Union was leaving its footprints

on the ruins of the Nazi empire.

The noose was tightening around Germany's neck,

but Hitler categorically refused to surrender.

The Red Army went on the offensive in Belarus.

On June the 22nd, Stalin launched

the operation he had promised the British and Americans.

Three years to the day after the Nazi invasion of the USSR,

it was finally time for revenge.

Millions of men hurled themselves into battle.

But the Soviet forces were far superior to those of Germany.

In just five days, the Wehrmacht was swept aside.

Operation Bagration was a decisive turning point.

The Red Army's advance preceded that

of the Allies in the West, laying the foundations

for the Soviet Union's domination of Eastern Europe.

For Stalin, it was not only a question

of defeating the Third Reich, but of seizing territories

where communism would ultimately take hold

for decades to come.

Czech leaders like Milos Jakes are trying

to keep their feet in a minefield

of Middle European communism that threatens to engulf them.

On July the 3rd,

after Minsk had fallen into Soviet hands,

the Red Army pressed on

through the Baltic states and Poland.

Its advance suggested the future Iron Curtain,

the invisible border that would one day become real.

Stalin savored victory with the parade of the vanquished.

On July the 17th, 57,000 German prisoners of war were forced

to march across Moscow as Russians looked on.

Unlike the Soviets,

who owed their success to the concentration of their troops,

American forces were divided between Europe and Asia.

Gathered around President Roosevelt,

US high command began planning another landing

like the one in Normandy.

In Asia, GIs continued their progress from island to island,

gradually approaching Japan.

From the coast of New Guinea to the Marianas,

from Guam to the Philippines.

But the fighting resulted in blood baths,

as Japanese resolve did not waver despite the defeats.

On the island of Saipan,

soldiers and civilians fought down to the last bullet

in caves and tunnels

before succumbing to grenades or flamethrowers.

Through fear or fanaticism,

many preferred death over surrender.

4,000 of the island's inhabitants, men, women, and children,

flung themselves from the clifftops.

Facing defeat in the Pacific Islands,

the Japanese set about showing their strength

on the mainland with Operation Ichi-Go,

a campaign of major land battles in China,

which would seriously disturb

the country's political balance.

The Japanese crushed the Chinese guerillas.

It was a heavy blow to Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek,

who lost a huge number of soldiers.

Unlike his ally of convenience, the Communist Mao Zedong.

In fewer than 10 years,

Communist troops would definitively defeat the Nationalists

and seize power.

This forced Chiang Kai-shek into exile,

giving birth to a second China

which owed obedience to capitalism, Taiwan.

Spared by Operation Ichi-Go in the south,

the Communists took advantage of the Nationalists' defeat

to claim its territories.

Communist assistance

to the ailing populations helped them make inroads

among the peasants.

China slowly began its advance

towards a new type of communism, Maoist, popular, and rural.

After Stalinism, Maoism became a new ideal

for part of the youth and the third world.

In the summer of 1944,

Nazi Germany was on the point of collapse.

The highest ranked military officers anticipated the end

and hoped to negotiate an honorable defeat,

which was impossible under Hitler.

At his HQ in East Prussia, his officers gathered around him.

It was 12:37 PM on July the 20th, 1944.

Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg discretely placed

an attache case containing a bomb beneath the table.

He was part of a plot aiming to kill the Fuhrer.

Five minutes later, an explosion rocked the conference room.

Somehow Hitler survived.

Increasingly paranoid,

he brutally punished those responsible for this affront.

Suspects were arrested and the plotters summarily executed.

The German people remained united behind their Fuhrer,

prepared to defend the empire he had built,

not for an instant believing it could be defeated.

In mid-July, Soviet soldiers entered Poland.

The citizens of Warsaw had been under Russian occupation

since 1939 and had suffered the massacres carried out

by the Red Army in 1940

and domination by the Nazis after that.

In August of 1944, they rose up against the Germans,

hoping to avoid Soviet tutelage.

The Polish resistance wanted to liberate Warsaw

before the Red Army's arrival.

Positioned on the other side of the river Vistula,

Stalin's troops abandoned the insurgents

to play out the fight lost in advance

without coming to their aid.

The Germans won, razed the capital,

and decimated the citizens or sent them to the camps.

At the same time, in France,

the Allies progressed from Normandy

towards the south and east, helped by the resistance.

To speed up the liberation of France,

a second invasion was put into action.

On August the 15th,

the Allies landed on the beaches of the Riviera.

2/3 of the troops were French, mainly men from the colonies,

riflemen from Western North Africa taking

their very first steps on the mainland.

Thanks to them, France took part in its own liberation.

An ambition shared by Paris.

The capitol had to free itself.

This was the condition demanded by General de Gaulle

so that a defeated nation could rise from its ashes

and crucial to maintaining its voice in the post-war world.

On August the 19th, 1944,

Parisians rose up in the city of light.

Most of them were communist members of the resistance.

If they could chase out the Germans,

they could impose their authority on France

and challenge de Gaulle.

To impose himself as liberated France's new leader,

the general negotiated with the Allies

for General Leclerc's Second Armored Division

to enter Paris first.

A few days earlier,

young resistance fighter Madeline Riffaud shot

a German officer on the bank of the River Seine.

Two bullets to the head.

Sentenced to death, she was waiting in her cell

when the first gunshots of the uprising rang out.

She was freed on August the 19th,

on the same day as the capitol.

On August the 26th,

General de Gaulle paraded before cheering crowds.

He'd won the crazy gamble he made with his appeal

of June the 18th, 1940,

and convinced the Allies, who had long distrusted him,

to recognize his legitimacy.

United during the war and then after the liberation,

Gaullists and Communists formed

a national constituent government,

which would bring in unprecedented political

and social measures,

like social welfare.

And at last, the right to vote for French women.

The Third Reich was in its death throes.

Allied bombers struck targets in Germany unrelentingly

and the Soviets marked up victory after victory.

In Romania and Bulgaria,

after an offensive lasting only three weeks.

In Yugoslavia, with the help of its resistance movement.

While in Greece,

taking advantage of the widespread collapse of Germany,

the British marched in as liberators.

A victory for Churchill,

who since 1940 had refused to abandon the Greeks.

Against all odds, the Fuhrer remained convinced

he would turn the situation around.

He had faith in his engineers

who had built the first jet plane in history capable

of flying at 1,000 kilometers an hour.

He was also convinced

that with his new V1 and V2 rockets exploding over London,

he would bring the British to their knees.

But the Fuhrer's miracle weapons served only

to maintain the illusion

that a German victory was still possible.

Self-deception that was shared

on the other side of the globe by the Japanese leaders.

In the Pacific, the Japanese army was in desperate straits.

The American forces were about

to launch their offensive on the Philippines.

So Japan invented a new way of fighting.

Young pilots in the prime of life would defy death.

The first kamikazes were ready to kill themselves

by voluntarily nose diving into the hulls of American ships.

In truth, the majority of them simply yielded

to hierarchical or group pressure.

On October the 25th, 1944, close to the island of Leyte,

23-year-old Yuki Oseki flew his Mitsubishi Zero,

loaded with 250 kilos of bombs,

directly into the USS St. Lo.

Onboard the aircraft carrier,

third class electrician, Orville Bethard,

looked up just in time to see the plane crash into the deck.

The psychological effect was huge, the attacks devastating.

Horrified, American sailors lapsed into psychosis.

In their eyes,

this morbid spectacle resulted from extreme fanaticism.

Used as a last resort at the end of the war

by a regime on its last legs, in the following decades,

the suicide attack became a favorite means of destruction

of terrorist organizations.

Madness relentlessly repeated to this day.

World War II had reached breaking point,

an ascent to extremes

where moral considerations had all but disappeared.

And the kamikaze attacks were the ultimate manifestation.

But after this shock,

the US Navy came to its senses, counter attacked,

and crushed the Japanese Imperial Navy for good.

30 seconds!

The conquest of the Philippines lasted

several months more.

The next step, the invasion of Japan itself,

would be a blood bath.

In the United States,

analysts placed the figure at 500,000 American losses.

Contrary to the tyrannical regimes, democracies had scruples

about sacrificing the lives of their soldiers.

Their only preoccupation was to obtain victory

at the least possible cost.

The first results of the Manhattan Project,

begun two years earlier, were running late.

At this point, nothing could guarantee

that the atom bomb would be ready

in a reasonable amount of time.

Early in 1945, the Allies had liberated all of France.

By taking Alsace, German since 1940,

they were at the gates of the Third Reich.

But on January the 12th, 1945,

it was the Russians who first marched onto German soil.

From Ukraine and Belarus,

the Red Army pushed on to 70 kilometers from Berlin.

The balance of power was disproportionate,

one German to three Russians.

Driven on by approaching victory,

the Soviet troops had acquired

fearsome, battle-hardened efficiency,

forged in the brutality of ever more devastating offensives.

Their progress was marked by destruction and fear.

German civilians bowed down before this new offensive,

particularly women,

whom the Red Army raked in their hundreds of thousands.

In Berlin, the Fuhrer seemed

to have lost all sense of reality.

On January the 16th,

he and his most loyal officers locked themselves

in the Chancellery bunker.

Appointed Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War,

Joseph Goebbels conscripted valid men in factories,

emptied the administration offices,

and closed down theaters.

Landlocked sailors

and grounded aviators were turned into infantrymen.

16 and 17 year olds were called up

to fight under the swastika flag.

It was these men and boys, poorly prepared and barely armed,

who would die in the final battles.

Hitler was prepared to lead his people into the abyss.

He ordered that his soldiers hold the lines

at the cost of their lives and destroy any infrastructure

that could be useful to the Allies.

Hitler clung on to one last hope,

which bordered on obsession.

Amid the chaos, he was convinced that the alliance

between the Soviets and the Americans was about to collapse,

a turning point which, to his mind, would change everything.

On the contrary,

none of the big three Allied powers envisaged

a divided peace.

In February 1945, their leaders met again,

this time at Yalta in Crimea.

Just two months before his death,

the increasingly sick Roosevelt thought only

of maintaining peace between Moscow and Washington.

They wouldn't be allies forever.

Roosevelt and Stalin both knew this.

The USSR agreed to join the United Nations.

Against Churchill's advice,

the US President accepted the viewpoints

of the Soviet dictator.

Stalin obtained guarantees regarding Eastern Europe,

which he was in the process of conquering.

In return, the USSR would allow America

to regain its sphere of influence in Asia.

For nearly 50 years, former allies turned rivals clashed

over their spheres of influence,

striving to avoid all out war,

haunted by the fear of a third World War.

The big three did agree on one point,

the German people must take stock of their country's defeat.

Peace would only be obtained through force.

Two days after Yalta, in the east of Germany,

the Royal and US Air Forces dropped almost 4,000 tons

of bombs on the historic city of Dresden,

causing 25,000 deaths.

In the days that followed,

similar raids were made on other German cities.

During the German Blitz of London in 1940,

bombings had specifically targeted civilians.

As the end of the war drew nearer,

the Allies put a temporary hold

on their own moral considerations.

For months, British and American bombs had ravaged

German positions across occupied Europe.

From the French coast to the heart of the continent,

Europe would soon lie in ruins, unable to rise on its own,

giving way to a crushing dependence

on Washington and Moscow,

two giants that would impose their rules and vision.

But from this blank slate would also emerge a drive

for unity, the ambition to rebuild a democratic order.

Which will bar ancient rivalries

and the causes of war.

Since marching onto German soil,

the Red Army had vented its anger.

Rapes, pillaging, murders.

Stalin's troops brutally made the Germans pay

for their barbarity.

The paranoid master of the Kremlin urged his forces on

towards Berlin, fearing that the Americans

and British would beat him to the finishing line.

And this despite a promise from the United States

that Soviet troops would have the honor

of entering the German capital alone,

reward for the great sacrifices made in the previous months.

In April, the Allies conquered northern Italy.

On April the 28th, a few days before the capitulation,

Il Duce paid for his alliance with Hitler with his life.

He was summarily executed by partisans,

along with his mistress and a handful of loyal supporters.

Their bodies were put on display in Milan

and given over to popular anger.

Throughout liberated Europe,

so-called wild purges broke out.

Lynches, public shaming,

and settling of scores came as brutal revenge

against real or supposed collaborators.

After a period of intensive shelling,

the first Soviet divisions entered Berlin on April the 21st.

The Fuhrer finally gave into despair,

causing disarray among his entourage.

Goring claimed total command of the Reich.

Himmler told the British and Americans he was willing

to negotiate Germany's surrender with them.

They were both disavowed by Hitler,

who remained as a recluse inside his bunker until the fall.

On April the 30th,

he committed suicide with a bullet to his temple,

having bitten into a cyanide pill

like his mistress, Ava Brown, the Goebbels couple,

and their six children.

Victims of the Nazi regime's propaganda machine,

hundreds of Germans, women, the elderly, whole families,

preferred to join their Fuhrer in death

rather than witness the fall of the Reich.

Berlin surrendered to the Soviets

in what had once been Hitler's majestic capital,

the German parliament building, the Reichstag,

was once again in flames.

At its summit, three Soviet soldiers,

one wearing wristwatches, maybe stolen from German corpses.

Nazi Germany was no more.

On May the 8th, Germany's surrender was celebrated

in every big city in the western world.

President Roosevelt, who had died a month earlier,

never saw his triumph,

but grief for their president didn't stop Americans

from celebrating victory.

2 million New Yorkers gathered on the streets

around Times Square.

In London, millions joined in street parties,

singing and dancing and burning Hitler effigies.

In Paris, a huge parade was held on the Champs-Elysees,

civilians mixed with soldiers and prisoners of war

and a few rare deportees rescued from the Nazi camps.

Allied soldiers liberated the camps one by one.

Germans who continued to deny their existence were forced

to face the reality they had chosen not to see.

The mass graves,

the gas chambers, the ovens,

and piles of thousands of bodies

that the Nazis didn't have time to process.

A crime so unnameable

that justice would invent a new term to condemn its authors,

a crime against humanity.

As organizers or accomplices

in a common plan or conspiracy commit crimes against peace,

war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

Slobodan Milosevic faces three trials in one

for war crimes in the Croatian, Bosnian,

and Kosovo conflict of the '90s.

At the White House,

Harry Truman had replaced Franklin Roosevelt.

The determination of the Japanese was still of great concern

to the Americans.

They were about to take an irreversible decision.

In the desert of New Mexico,

the atomic bomb had become reality.

On July the 26th,

the US, the UK, and China signed the Potsdam Declaration,

demanding Japan's unconditional surrender.

In case of refusal,

they promised prompt and utter destruction.

Washington interpreted Japan's delayed response as a refusal

and gave the order to use the atomic bomb.

In the upper echelons of American power,

the A-bomb was not only a means of obtaining victory,

but also of imposing American supremacy on the world.

The Soviets had already infiltrated the team

of scientists behind the bomb,

and soon they too would become a nuclear power,

plunging the world into fear.

On August the 6th, 1945,

teacher Ogura Toyofumi looked skywards.

A flash of white ripped through the sky, blinding him.

As the bomber, Enola Gay, flew away,

it was violently shaken by the shockwave.

Its copilot, Robert A. Lewis, wrote in his log,

"My God, what have we done?"

In a fraction of a second, Hiroshima ceased to exist.

70,000 people died on the day itself.

Tens of thousands of others would follow them

in the weeks, months, and years to come.

Three days later, at 11:58 AM,

the United States sent its second warning.

This time, the city of Nagasaki was wiped off the map.

Humankind had just entered the nuclear age.

Fear of the bomb would become a structuring feature

of international relations,

leading to an arms race of a new kind

and a permanent threat in case of conflict.

On hearing the news, Stalin was furious.

To his mind, the Americans had triggered the apocalypse

to dispense with his support.

Since the defeat of Germany,

tensions between the Allies had been mounting.

Regardless of the promises made by Russia,

communist regimes with increasing power had been installed

in Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria.

Stalin had no intention of stopping there.

For fear of being denied victory,

on the night of August the 8th, 1945,

he ordered his troops into Manchuria,

still under Japanese occupation.

Surrounded on all sides, Japan laid down its arms.

Three months after the defeat of Germany,

Emperor Hirohito announced his country's surrender.

World War II was finally over,

but the price of peace was staggering.

In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, humankind had taken a path

on which there was no turning back.

After six years of horror,

humankind stood together to celebrate victory.

In New York, photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt crisscrossed

Times Square.

All around him, a euphoric crowd partied

on hearing of Japan's surrender.

In this human tide,

a uniformed sailor enthusiastically kissed a young nurse,

an iconic photo that symbolized shared hope in the future.

With its long list of losses and destruction,

war gave way to a world desperate to live once more.

Driven by the dream of a peaceful and prosperous life,

the baby boom produced the generation

that built the world of today.

War destroyed everything, but also gave rise to a new world.

As the generation

that lived through World War II gradually leaves us,

its memory survives in pictures and writings.

A shockwave whose tremors are still felt today

and a reminder that peace is always fragile.