Original subtitles

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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 amassed ranks of

Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's 21st Army Group.

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

It included the U.S. Third Army

commanded by General George Patton.

On February the 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 eastward, looking for a route across the river.

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

But Hitler had ordered all the bridges to be destroyed.

Then as the U.S. 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.

U.S. 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 martialled.

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 Remagan.

None of them succeeded.

Then suddenly, on March the 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 the 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 commanders 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 U.S. 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, hundred 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 defences along the Rhine collapsed.

In the north, Montgomery now pushed deeper into Germany,

towards Munster.

In the south, Bradley's forces,

including Patton's Third Army, pushed east

towards Marburg and Lauterbach.

The major German city of Frankfurt am Main

were 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 realise 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 eleven 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 the 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 the 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 Breslaw.

These would later be mocked 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 travelled 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 pinned 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 neighbouring 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 neighbouring Latvia.

But in another bizarre decision, Hitler refused to

allow it to break out and provide assistance.

He was still committed to holding on to 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 a thousand 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 send 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 defence of Vienna

as the Red Army advanced towards the Austrian capital.

But 6th SS Panzer Army was a spent force.

Its commander, SS General Sef Dietrich, had no illusions.

We call ourselves, he said, the 6th Panzer Army

because we have only six Panzers left.

On April the 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

along 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 the 1st, U.S. 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 diehard 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 the 18th, 1945, the U.S. forces

had punched a corridor through to the Czech border,

splitting Germany in two.

Meanwhile north of the Ruhr,

Montgomery's Canadian First Army began

the liberation of Holland.

The Dutch had suffered horrendously

during the bitter winter of 19441945.

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 the 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 cease fire was negotiated.

Allied aircraft now roared over the Dutch countryside

dropping food and medical supplies.

At the same time the British Second Army,

also under Montgomery's command,

pushed fast across the north German plain.

Osnabruck fell on April the 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, U.S. 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 procession

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 Apennine Mountains.

Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander, the Allied commander

in the Mediterranean, now launched a spring offensive.

On April the 9th, 1945, British troops attacked,

pulling German forces in from along the front.

Five days later, U.S. 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 the 29th surrendered unconditionally.

It would take effect from May the 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 rowed 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 the 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 arising 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 Reich's Chancellery 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.

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 the 13th, 1945, the U.S. 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, Josef 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 defence had anticipated

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 their 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 the 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 the 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 the 1st, 1945,

the event was restaged for the cameras.

But by then Hitler was already dead.

On April the 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 Brown,

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

Their partially burned bodies were buried

in the garden of the Reich's chancellery.

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 the 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 Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann

tried to negotiate a city wide cease fire 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 1990's, 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 the 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 Roosevelt

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 the 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 labourers 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 Yodl 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 parcelled up between the Allies in the same way.

The peoples of Europe would also find themselves divided.

Some would now live under the control 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.