All language subtitles for World at War e36 The Making of the Series (2003).en

Television was in its infancy
in this country

when I joined it,
when I went to work in 1958,

and everything we did
we were doing for the first time.

The first historical documentaries,

one or two were made in the '50s.

The thing that revealed
to people like me

the possibilities of the medium
for dealing with history

has to be the BBC series
The Great War,

which was 26 episodes, 40 minutes
long, on the First World War.

And they combined…
those programmes combined

a desire to give people
the experience of war,

the oomph, the pity of war,

the suffering of war,
the heroism of war

with a rigorous historical thread

supplied as the sort of backbone
of the programmes.

And they combined,

and this is what led
to so many other people having a go,

they combined and juxtaposed
newsreel images of war

with eyewitness testimony

to the subject matter
that the newsreels were portraying.

And those two ingredients
are of the essence

of any history of a war
in the 20th century

and The World at War
followed that formula

with far more newsreel to choose from,

with sound-on-film newsreel
to provide variety

and with interviews with people

who were far closer to the war that
they'd fought between 1939 and 1945

than the BBC's interviews
could be in the early '60s

for a war that ended in 1918.

In order to do the series,

in order to get the point of view
of people from all sides,

in Germany particularly,

was a difficult enterprise
and we had set out…

We had told the people
who we went to see

that what we wanted to do
was to present

their point of view, their war,
their experience of the war

without being judgemental.

We wanted, for the first time,

to present a picture
which wasn't the old view

of Germany the Nazi villains

and the brave rest of the world.

The… That was the honest basis on
which we approached the whole series.

I wanted to tell a story

that made people
want to come back next week

and to that extent
we treated the subject matter

as a story with a beginning, with lots
of different middles, with an end.

To understand the way
that making this series worked,

the first thing to understand is

to look at the whole…

the place it has

in the history of making
multi-part historical documentaries

on television in this country.

And the point was that words
were used extremely sparingly

in The World at War.

(narrator) Russia, mid-June 1941.

A bewildered, uncertain country.

Rumours abounded
of invasion by Hitler's Germany.

Pictures can and must tell the story.

Basically it was the pictures
which were doing the communicating.

Get right away
from what was then regarded

as the boring old convention of having
talking heads explaining everything,

huge, laborious, prosy commentary
and just pictures as illustrations,

little grainy black-and-white clips
doing this and that. Boring.

(narrator) Here in the Kremlin,

Russia's leaders
seemed oblivious of the Nazi threat,

or if not oblivious, then complacent,

as if by ignoring it
it might disappear.

(Ascherson) The idea was that the
pictures are going to tell everything,

and you would do that by
huge film research into film archives,

getting out everything there is and
making it tell the story it can tell.

And only where the pictures themselves
can't tell the story

do you use, very sparingly,
commentary,

as few words as you possibly can,

and if you get to a point at which
you have to use a lot of words

to explain what's going on
because the pictures don't,

then you'd better drop
that particular passage altogether,

drop that clip and move on.

So that was a very strong ideology,

messianic faith in the power of
pictures to tell a historical story.

I was the boss.

It was my idea
and I was given the task of doing it

and I did two separate things.

The first was done in the very
beginning with Noble Frankland,

and that was to map out
the course the series would take,

what individual episodes
would be about.

A purely chronological approach
isn't adequate.

You have to get the architecture
of the series right

and that means, first of all,

that every single film
has to tell one story.

All good films tell only one story.

They don't try to tell three
or four or five or 100 stories.

If you try to tell 100 stories,
you've got an encyclopaedia,

not a film that exists in linear time.

So what I was doing initially,

my contribution
to the architecture of the series,

with the advice of Noble Frankland
and my colleagues…

We'd discuss things but nevertheless,

I decided what the 26 episodes
of the series would be.

The whole idea behind The World at War
as Jeremy had conceived it,

as we all were working on it,

was that it would be
the story of the war

told from the point of view
of the people

in the countries involved in the war,

that it was not going to be a history.

Jeremy, I think, felt very strongly

that we were not setting out
to do a history of the war,

but it was to tell the story
of the war

and the experience of the war

which had so shaped
the post-war world.

(speaking German)

(translator) What did he promise?

Work and bread for the masses,

for the millions of workers who were
unemployed and hungry at that time.

Nowadays, in our prosperous society,

work and bread
doesn't mean anything any more,

but then it was
an absolutely basic need

and this promise,
which wouldn't make any sense today,

then it sounded
like a promise of paradise.

There would be one episode
that was a preliminary to the war

and painted the scene in Europe
and the world before the war began,

that there would be chronological
episodes that told the story,

the narrative story
of different parts of the war…

…the battle for France,
the battle for Britain,

much later on the campaign in Egypt
that led to the victory at El Alamein,

Hitler's assault on Russia,

the Japanese assault in the East

that led to the capture of Singapore
and so on.

The series would partly consist
of these narrative stories

and of course those stories,
which sometimes overlapped,

would nevertheless be arranged
in chronological order.

And within these stories
I would intersperse episodes

which dealt with
the themes of the war.

How was the British war effort
organised?

How was the war at sea fought?

How was the bombing campaign
against Germany conducted?

Each of those stories might cover a
period that lasted two or three years,

but the trick was to arrange them
in such a way

that when you finished
watching one episode,

you were keen to watch the next.

Each of them had to seem
to move the story on.

If you tell the history of a war

that lasted a finite six years
just as simple narrative,

you miss a dimension,

you miss some understanding
of how the thing is organised.

But if you only deal with it
thematically rather than in narrative,

that's to say war weaponry,
war psychology,

war thinking,
war suffering, war bravery,

you'd end up with 26 episodes,

each of which spanned
the whole six-year period of the war

but never seemed
to move the thing forward,

each of them would begin it and end it

and you'd be facing the viewer
each week

with six, ten, 20 different ways
of looking at the war.

It was talking about a huge
physical and emotional experience

which was still very, very fresh
in British minds,

particularly British minds,

and it was the first time

that anybody had really put together
the whole war in memories,

interviews with survivors
who, of course,

were still, in the '70s, abounding,

thousands upon thousands of people
who remembered and could tell.

Many of them in Germany weren't
actually that keen to talk to you,

but certainly in Britain
and certainly among some of the…

certainly among the soldiers
in Germany,

it was almost as if
it was the first time

that anybody had asked them about it

because the feeling about the war
in post-war Germany

was such that their children…
you tended not to talk about the war

in the same way in Germany
as you did in Britain.

Therefore you got, often, perhaps,
a fresher feeling from the Germans

because they hadn't rehearsed
their glorious exploits.

The French had more tanks

and some better tanks, heavier tanks

than we have had Panzers,

but we managed our Panzer troops

what Guderian said
in his instructions.

“Strike hard and quickly
and don't disperse your forces.”

The importance of big series
is they cover the whole ground,

they show what can be achieved,

they give you a sense
of the balance of different factors

and a sense of proportion
about any one incident,

but they paint with a very broad brush

and they leave it
to others coming after

to fill in a great deal of detail
that there isn't any room for.

The audience responded
with tremendous emotion.

It was as if they said,
“They're singing our song.”

You know, “Singing our song.”

And in a sense
the whole series was carried on

by a deep assent
from the viewing audience.

I think Jeremy Isaacs and co,

they were smart enough to understand
that that's how it would be.

There was an absolutely
critical moment in February 1971.

The government
changed the taxation system

to which the ITV companies,

the commercial television companies
of Britain, were subjected.

Instead of their money
being taxed at source as revenue

before it came into the company,

the government agreed
that it could be taxed as profit

after it had been used in the company.

I went to my bosses
at Thames Television

the day after the postmaster general,

the great middle-distance runner
Christopher Chataway,

announced this in the House of Commons

and said, “Why don't we make
a history of the Second World War?”

Thames had no real idea
of what they had let themselves into

when they had agreed that Jeremy
should go ahead with the series.

Well, they had been told
that they could use

the revenues
from the sale of advertising

that came into the company
before they were taxed

provided they spent them
on programmes.

The budget that he presented
for the series, for the 26 one-hours,

was just over £400,000.

They fell over when I suggested this
and agreed to it immediately.

The final cost was just over £900,000.

Nobody believes it nowadays.

You think,
“You mean £900,000 per episode?”

No, £900,000 for 26 hours.

I never even had what today would be
regarded as a budget for the series.

We kept tabs on the direct cost of
what we were doing as we went along,

the cost of recording the music,
the cost of processing the film,

the cost of hotels,
travel and subsistence

in gathering the interviewees

and paying the expenses
of the film researchers,

who would spend weeks in an archive.

What we had on that series which I
don't think one would ever have again

is an enormous amount of time
and seemingly endless resources,

and Jeremy was incredibly encouraging.

I got a terrific tip from
a friend of mine, Muir Sutherland,

who was responsible for selling
Thames's programmes in those days.

He went to the Savoy Hotel

with the managing director of Thames,
Howard Thomas,

to sell the series before…

when only two out of 26 episodes
were ready, to Australia,

and he sold it to a wonderful man
called Packer, Clyde Packer,

who was Kerry Packer's father

and owned the Nines,
the Channel Nines in Australia.

And on the way back
from the Savoy to Thames,

Howard said to Muir, “Don't tell
Jeremy what Packer said he'd pay

or he'll go and spend more money.”

So I knew then
that the series was going to…

I didn't know to what extent but
I knew it would sell around the world.

After one trip I came back
and said to Jeremy,

“I actually haven't
got anything concrete.”

“I've sown a lot of seeds, I've met
a lot of people, some of them…”

“This is to get
the really big interviews.”

“I think in the end it will work.”

And he said, “Don't worry.
Don't worry. You can go again.”

And it was this ability
to go back again and again

which helped to build up the trust

and also to establish

a really firm groundwork of facts

and of knowledge
of that person's experience of the war

so that we also then very meticulously

checked and double-checked
the stories.

Thames had
wonderfully successful programmes,

always a higher share of the audience
than the BBC,

always a higher share of the audience
in Thames's week

than London Weekend's weekend,

and so they had to be seen
to aim high in their programming

and the director of programmes
at Thames, Brian Tesler,

and the managing director,
Howard Thomas,

instantly agreed to what I wanted
to do and backed it all the way.

Thames had a split-site operation
at that time.

The principal offices
were on Euston Road

but the production facilities,
the studio facilities

were down at Teddington.

And so we were found little offices

and little rooms
which became cutting rooms

which had been prefabricated, I think,
almost during the period of the war.

They were certainly very basic.

The important thing was that I knew
where everybody was at any given time

and had a schedule of sorts
of what was happening

because with 26 episodes they
could not be all shot simultaneously,

so we had to work out
who could do what when where.

And so that's where
the fact that there were 26 episodes

fitted in very nicely
with A through Z.

And I can still almost rattle off
every one.

A3 was the first episode
to be shot, A,

but number 3, France Falls,
was the third one transmitted.

It's called amongst the team A3.

Everybody knows
what you're talking about.

We set about researching
The World at War

in the way that you then researched,

and I'm sure still do research,
programmes.

You start with a broad remit.

You do a lot of reading
and you speak to people

who then give you
perhaps one or two names

and you then go and see those

and they will usually
lead you on to more.

People like the old soldiers
were fairly easy

because you just go through
the old soldiers'…

You find out which units
were in the…

which units were
in the different areas of battle

that you're interested in

and then you go through the
old soldiers' organisations.

I found, in Germany particularly,

the Institute for Military History
in Freiburg was really helpful.

The World at War
isn't a purely military history

of the Second World War.

I took the view that such a series…

There's plenty of fighting
in The World at War,

but I took the view
that if there were only fighting,

tanks rolling and firing,
planes diving and bombing,

shells exploding, troops advancing,

although the war was fought
on all sorts of different fronts,

I thought there would be
a homogeneity, if you like,

but I thought
perhaps a monotony of texture

if that was the sole content
of the series.

I wanted to show instead,
or in addition,

what the civilian experience
of the war was.

(man) Planes come over of a night,

and they was, in my opinion, trying
to break the backs of the houses.

I used to listen and shudder.
“The next one's mine.”

They'd have six bombs.

One, two, three, four…
“This is mine.”

No, over the next one they'd go,
miss my house.

And that used to go on all night.

Britain had the nearest thing
to a command economy,

with everybody working
in the war effort

and nobody working for anything else
during the Second World War,

almost than any of the other
combatant powers.

I was very shocked when I heard

on the news on Christmas Day

that I was to be directed to the mines.

I wanted to show how nations
geared themselves for war

and what civilians experienced in war

in Britain, in the United States,
in the Soviet Union

and in Germany and Japan.

I wanted a series
that didn't just show

what Britain went through in the war.

I wanted a series that showed

what all the great combatant nations
went through in the war

and which included
their attitudes, their experience,

their pride, their suffering.

We were very lucky in the timing
as far as the Germans were concerned

because they were just beginning
to be able to talk about the war

and seemed to welcome the opportunity
and did trust us,

that what we wanted was their story,
was their explanation, in a way,

of how it had happened

and how the Nazi regime

had come to control all their lives

and what they had experienced
during the war.

And we spoke to people who had been…

Our aim was… which is what we put…

We needed to talk to people
who had been convinced Nazis

and who had believed
in what they were fighting for…

…for them to explain to us
what it was at the time.

What we tried to do was to…

…to look at the war
without the benefit of hindsight.

What we were trying to do,
and I think that we managed to do,

particularly in the home front
in Germany,

was to show the progress and the fun

and the lightening up after a period
of depression and no money

and no work
and six million unemployed,

and to show how the ordinary people
perceived it,

who perhaps didn't think a great deal,

but suddenly
there were fun things to do.

If you were a very ordinary person
it was a very good time.

(speaking German)

(translator)
All this seemed ideal ground

for a prophet to say,

“I will lead you to the promised land.”

“I will deliver you from evil.”

Anyone who said that

would be greeted with enthusiasm.

Of course, there were people who said,
“This is a false prophet,”

but who was to know
whether they were right or not?

At that time no one did.

What we encouraged them to say

was how they had experienced it

without the fear of being judged.

And we tried not to be judgemental.

And I think
at times that was very difficult.

There was an element of trust

because in order to be taken
to see people

and meet people who were
going to give you their view,

and as a background,

it was important for them to know
that you were not going to just be

yet another Nazi hunter
in a different guise.

So it was to be…

If we had said that was the basis
on which we were doing it,

then yes,
we were in a position of trust.

Not that one in any way
supported what they'd done,

but that was not part of our job.

It was to be able to present
the story, which was the greater aim.

It would have been wrong

to have got caught up
in what is actually another issue.

I didn't make The World at War.

The World at War was made by 50 people
who worked together for three years.

Once we'd agreed the shape
and architecture of the series,

each programme
became the responsibility

of an individual producer.

Some produced and directed
their episodes,

some wrote and produced and directed
their episodes,

some worked with collaborators,

but they were entrusted with the task

of making one programme in the series,

though several of them
made more than that.

Each of them had some leeway,
some little leeway

to do it in their own sort of way,
in their own personal style,

and you can tell
by looking at the programmes

which director… producer-director
made each one,

but all of them had to conform
rigidly and properly

to a framework that was laid down.

The single most difficult question
as we went along

was where each programme stopped
and the next one began,

and there were territorial disputes
about that along the way,

but they were all, in the end,
happily settled.

Two people had a task, along with me,
of overseeing the whole of it.

One was the historical adviser,

a very considerable figure
called Noble Frankland,

who was director
of the Imperial War Museum,

and he was hugely helpful
in the making of the series

since he told us what we ought to do
and then let us get on with it.

We reciprocated
by showing him every outline script

and every rough cut of a film or fine
cut of a film before it was completed,

but basically he held my hand
in getting right,

or as right as we could,

the coverage
of different theatres of war.

Of 900 men in my battalion,

200 fell out because of freezing…

…in the first 14 days.

We tried to do justice
to the experience in the war

and the contribution to the victory
of the Soviet Union,

which was huge.

The war was won
by American firepower, if you like,

and Soviet manpower.

The war was not won in the West,
it was won on the Eastern Front.

And he was keen
not to forget the Pacific,

to show that once Japan was in the war

it was a war of two theatres,
Europe and the Far East.

And he helped us get that right.

And then my colleague Jerry Kuehl,

who was the associate producer
of the series,

I gave him the task of nit-picker,

of spotting errors and correcting us,

and whereas Frankland had a say
in the broad sweep of the thing,

Jerry helped us
get the pictures right,

not completely right
but as right as we could,

and the facts right.
He checked the detail.

Another absolutely key figure

was Alan Afriat,
the supervisory film editor,

because he set up the systems
that made the whole thing work.

You have to remember that the film
footage we were dealing with was 35mm,

and it was of very variable quality

in the libraries and archives
of the world.

And Alan…

Thames Television
was partly owned by Rediffusion.

Rediffusion owned Humphries
Laboratories in Whitfield Street,

just across
from where we're sitting now,

and Alan set up the systems

that meant that this film
was papered up by film researchers,

Raye Farr and John Rowe,

in the archives of the world,

ordered, brought in, copied…

He'll tell you all about it.

And then he worked
and worked and worked

with the film processing people
and with the grader of the final print

to get the last possible
pinpoint of quality out of the image

that cameras in very different and
difficult circumstances had captured.

And he did all that
and he set up a cutting room

and we began to get going

and we didn't hire
the other four or five film editors

until there was enough material,

which all had to be researched
and found and printed up

or shot and processed
and prints delivered

and logged so that
you never, ever lost anything

and you always knew
exactly where to get

any one of the hundreds of interviews
that we did

and the thousands of film stories
that were printed up.

Alan set up the whole of that,

and he needed other people
to help him in the end,

but he did
an absolutely tremendous job

and I would say that without him
and the system he created

the whole thing would have been chaos
and completely impossible.

I was probably the person at Thames

who was most experienced

in this kind of shooting.

I'd worked with Jeremy, not on The
Life And Times Of Lord Mountbatten,

but on The Day Before Yesterday.

Jeremy was also involved in that.

So I in fact left Thames,

because we were all freelance
on the series,

and my brief was to set up the whole
machinery for handling the film…

…making sure that everything
could be found easily

across several programmes which
might be using the same material.

So we had to set up all kinds of ways

in which the film researchers
could identify what film they'd found

and that could then be recognised
when it arrived in the cutting rooms

and could then be assigned
a card index

where it could be cross-referenced

so that if anybody wanted
anything on Burma in 1942,

regardless of whether it was
particularly for their programme

it was ordered,
that they could find it easily.

The actual first episode
of the series…

…the title of which
escapes me at the moment,

N1, was the 14th programme to be made

because Jeremy, I think,
felt that he wanted to get,

get some programmes made and finished

so that there was a feeling
and a style established

so that the first programme
could be created

as the right start
to what was going to follow.

I didn't know how to make the series

until the film researcher Raye Farr
found me some…

And I remember seeing it with her
in the German film archive in Koblenz,

some quite marvellous footage
that wasn't shot for newsreel

but was shot for documentary,

and it was shot behind
the German lines on the Eastern Front.

Actually we're almost
about to discover

precisely where that material was shot

because we can now compare it with
photographs that have been uncovered

and it looks as if
we know where it was now.

But we didn't know where it was then

and therefore it stood for generalities,

it stood for the experience
of these men, these women.

The very first words of the series
mean an enormous amount to me.

I went to Oradour-sur-Glane myself
to see this village

which was destroyed and burned

by a Nazi SS… German SS division

and which the French left preserved,

standing exactly as it was then,

near Limoges in the Limousin,

and I knew then that that could be
the opening title of the series

and the end of the series.

I'm not sure I realised immediately
I could use it again at the end.

And Neal Ascherson got the series off
to the best of all possible starts

with the commentary that he wrote
for that beginning of the series,

“Down this road the soldiers came.”

Not “the German soldiers”,
“the soldiers”.

And that gave the thing
a sort of claim to universality

that we hankered after and I like.

(narrator) Down this road,
on a summer day in 1944,

the soldiers came.

Nobody lives here now.

They stayed only a few hours.

When they had gone,

a community which had lived
for 1,000 years was dead.

This is Oradour-sur-Glane in France.

The day the soldiers came
the people were gathered together.

The men were taken
to garages and barns,

the women and children
were led down this road

and they were driven into this church.

Here they heard the firing
as their men were shot.

Then they were killed too.

A few weeks later, many of those
who had done the killing

were themselves dead in battle.

They never rebuilt Oradour.
Its ruins are a memorial.

Its martyrdom stands for thousand
upon thousand of other martyrdoms

in Poland, in Russia,
in Burma, in China,

in a world at war.

I think we got that dead right
because we said,

“This village stands for thousands…”

“This ruin…”

“This… What happened here stands for

hundreds upon hundreds
of other incidents

that happened
in every theatre of the war

in a world at war.”

That got us off to the start
and then Carl…

We had John Stamp's marvellous
main title and Carl's music

and we were off.

The title music
was really very interesting to do

and one which I did very quickly,

or sketched very quickly.

That was really inspired
by the ideas that Jeremy had given me

at our very first meeting.

I joked to myself at a certain point

that I chose a certain progression
that is heard in Czech music,

in particular Smetana,
Janáček and Martinů,

that line which always had
a particular cadence,

that moved from minor keys
to major keys.

And I like the idea somehow
that the Czech music…

Czechoslovakia, as it was then,

was a small country that had
aspirations towards democracy

but in its history always
had a struggle trying to have it.

Remember that when we made this series
we were at the height of the Cold War

and so attitudes
towards various places,

which would be one thing then,
were another.

The other aspect of a title theme
and creating music for a title theme

is that I always try and work
with the graphics people.

I had a really very interesting time
on The World at War

because one was involved in something
regarded as very crude then,

hand-drawn storyboards.

A storyboard, of course,
is like a comic strip

in which the principal visual elements
are drawn in a kind of progression.

And from that a composer
could work out,

“What is the character
of the visual elements going to be?”

Secondly, and this is all-important,

“How much time have I got?
How many seconds have I got?”

Fortunately, and this is rare now,

there was the opportunity
to create something of some dimension.

We had nearly a minute
of title music to play with

and it was
very interestingly integrated

because the programmes started
with what we called the “hooker”,

which is a sort of tease,
something ahead of the programme,

to give the audience something which
would carry them into the programme,

they would set up
the subject of the programme.

That would take you
into the title sequence,

so it was obviously…

It worked very well because
the first notes that I conceived

were very dramatic.

It was going to start with something

that was like an explosion
or a bombardment.

Indeed the idea of that
worked very well

because the first little picture
of the storyboard

was a sheet of flame

and then out of the flame
were going to come faces

which would represent everybody.

(title music)

And somewhere in the middle
of all that, of these faces,

was that of a young girl,
which I fantasised was Anne Frank.

Maybe it wasn't Anne Frank
but it was a young girl.

That was the moment I decided
it had to go from minor to major.

(laughs) Somewhere around there
the character of it would change

and there would be a ray of hope.

(title music)

Then it would go back
to the minor cadences.

There were other things. I tried
to use a lot of music from the period.

And some of the German films,
or some of all the films,

maybe I used a pop song of the period,

maybe it was film that was actually on
a newsreel that was shown at the time

or a documentary
that was made at the time.

But you couldn't use the music
that was on the soundtrack

because it was covered
with commentary or sound effects.

For example, there was the big parade
at the end of the first programme,

the big Berlin parade,

where there was this spectacular piece
of music, very dramatic piece of music

which I couldn't use off the newsreel

because it was covered
with commentary and sound effects.

But it was absolutely
the piece of music to use.

I didn't know what it was

and absolutely searched around trying
to find where that piece of music was,

playing it to all sorts of people and
saying, “What's this piece of music?”

And eventually we found out
it was Bruckner's Fifth Symphony.

And so I used it because
that was what was used at the time.

It was the way that
that parade was seen

in the German cinemas at the time.

It was worth using that.

I thought better than composing…

Wonderful as Carl's music was,

I thought it was better
to use music like that

than to use specially scored music.

Specially scored music works fine

when it's not trying
to impart anything particular.

Moving the story along, that's OK.

But for situations like that
it was nice to use the original music

that they'd chosen at the time.

If you were watching the film
you wouldn't know that,

you wouldn't know why
that piece of music had been used.

It was particularly difficult
at the start of this

to define what role
music was going to play.

The title theme was not such a problem

because Jeremy,
at our very first meeting,

talked about the qualities
that he wanted in the title music.

He defined his series as being one

which of course would take in
the enormous battles,

the landmark battles and so on,

but he was particularly interested
in emphasising the human problems

of what it felt like
to be bombed or bombing,

what it felt like to be occupied
etcetera.

In other words, what the individual
statement was going to be.

That was going to be different
from other series about the war,

that it was going to be
that particularised.

And so a lot of
the successful passages of music

actually had to do
with the individual experience,

trying to interpret
the individual experience,

whether it was arrogant
or tragic or lyric, sometimes.

Initially I wrote
very descriptive music

and that was found to be
less effective

than areas where a director
would actually clear the way

for some pictures
which would not have talking over it

and in which I would actually make
a very active contribution.

Olivier did all the recordings
at Preview Two,

in a little wood-lined booth,

and he tried initially
to do them to film

but found it too time-consuming,

so it was decided
that he would just record it wild

with the editors timing each sequence
so they knew they could fit.

Occasionally it would be,

“Excuse me, Sir Laurence,
could we do that a little quicker?”

“Sir Laurence, could you
just let that stretch a bit?”

And he was wonderfully good about it
and had no problems with doing it all.

I can still remember
going up to Larry Olivier

in the recording studio
in Oxford Street…

…and saying to him,
“You do realise, do you, that…”

He was wearing a big pair
of red suspenders, braces,

and he was about to put his jacket on
and come out of the booth.

He'd done it pretty well
but I said to him,

“You do know, don't you,

that those words
are the very first words

that will be heard
in the entire series?”

“Ah,” he said. He took his jacket off
and said, “I'll do it again.”

And he then did it
with the total wonderful mastery

that he does deliver,
making every single syllable count

and pronouncing the letter A

in at least three
and maybe four different ways

in the course of those few words.

I had to do the catering
for the lunch breaks in the thing

and his secretary,
who I checked with, said,

“Sir Laurence would just like a glass
of white wine and apples and cheese.”

And as we did most of the recordings
at Preview Two on Oxford Street,

it was very easy to go to Berwick
Street Market and Marks & Spencer's

and get white wine and good cheese.

The apples that he really liked were
golden russets, if I remember rightly.

And he was, of course,
a man of the war.

He had flown in the Fleet Air Arm,
if I remember rightly,

and he flew Skuas,
which he had a lovely story about.

Because he was an actor
and the press heard about it…

He was down at Worthy Down,
which is one of the bases,

and was taxiing his Skua
along the runway

and posing to the cameras
and crashed it.

And when the series was over,

there was a chap
at the Imperial War Museum

who made wonderful model aircraft
and so we asked him to make a Skua

which we presented to Sir Laurence
as a “Thank you very much”.

He was quite pleased about that.

To start with,
he was not the intended narrator.

He only…

We only recorded with him
in October/November of 1972,

after we'd been in production
for 18 months…

…because there had been
some change of thinking about it

and it was decided that
because it was going to be terrific,

it needed the best voice
in the business.

Originally we had gone
for Rene Cutforth,

the late, great war correspondent,

and he had recorded
the first four episodes.

And it was then decided that no,
we wanted something different.

And in the time between deciding that
Rene was not going to do the rest

and getting Olivier on board,

Allan Hargreaves,
who was the staff voice,

recorded quite a number
as guide tracks

so that the editors
could continue cutting to that.

And then, certainly, we started over
with Olivier in October,

recording Peter Batty's
France Falls, A3.

It's better on this kind of programme
if the producer doesn't get too close

because one has to get ideas across
as clearly as you can

and often you're not really quite sure
whether things are working or not.

And if the producer
is too close to the material,

neither of you are helping each other,
you're all… you're too close,

you need to see something
with a fresh eye

and say, “I don't know
what that's all about,”

or, “That's OK
but it's in the wrong place.”

So the editor's often too close

to be able to see things
that are more apparent

to somebody
who's not seen the material before.

The editor knows every single cut

whereas the director
is only really aware of sequences.

I think that the faith in the power
of the pictures to tell the story,

the primacy of the picture,
if you like,

was a moment in the history
of historical documentary making.

Doing World War Two was quite different.

You were in a world
which abounded with film,

in which research and archives

could turn up amazing film
which nobody knew existed,

which hadn't been looked at
for 30 years.

It was a period when people felt,
“Let us make film a new way.”

“Let's make documentaries
in a different way

and let the pictures do the work
because they can.”

The subject, of course,
made it possible to do that.

But it wasn't just the subject
that enabled this,

it was a general mood
which was, as I say,

faith in the picture itself
and a feeling…

I think it was a feeling
that you could escape

from some sort of editorial expert,
non-television control

by relying on the pictures.

If you rely on the pictures,

that absolutely confirmed the status
of the producer as the boss

and there was no getting away
from that.

I think that also played a role.

Later, much later,
after The World at War,

things changed again
for a lot of different reasons.

The way of making
historical documentaries changed.

The almost obsessive emphasis
on the primacy of the picture

began to dwindle,
particularly because people…

They started colliding with
really difficult, contorted subjects

in which you were trying
to tell people things

not only that they didn't know
but they didn't want to know.

At that point, the minimal commentary
and the total primacy of the picture

begins to be
much more difficult to operate.

You have to have lucid explication
of what's going on.

You have to say,
“You think this is happening

but I'm going to tell you that behind
the scenes it was quite different.”

“They told you that Berlin
was about to fall

and that the Soviets
were going to move in.”

“It never, ever crossed the Soviets'
mind to do this, actually.”

“You were being fooled
and they, the authorities, knew this.”

And that kind of example.

You can't do that in the way that The
World at War approached its subject.

Programmes like this
aren't tightly scripted.

The programme starts
with an outline brief

which might come
from the director and the writer,

it might come only from the director.

There would be a whole lot of briefs

which would come
for the various programmes.

We were not so much
going out with a detailed remit,

but a broad remit as to what we were
trying to achieve in each programme.

Jeremy sorted out what area was going
to be covered by which programme.

Each programme had an overall feeling

of what you wanted to achieve

as a view
for that particular theatre of war,

so there was the home front in Britain
and the home front in Germany,

which were kind of mirror programmes.

A producer would go away,

whether it was John Pett
inventing wonderful ways

of using voiceovers
in his episode on D-Day

or his episode
on the war in the Pacific,

or Peter Batty
who did six programmes,

five of which gave
an enormous narrative impulse

to the first half of the series.

They would finish what they had to do,

they would brief the researchers
that would find them interviewees,

though some of them,
Peter Batty for example,

preferred to chat up
his own interviewees.

He had a very good line
in German generals,

whom he seemed to get on with.

They would brief the researcher
to find interviewees

and they would brief the film researcher

as to the material they were looking
for visually to make up the episode

and this would come back

and it would be logged
under Alan Afriat's supervision

and go into the cutting room
and be assembled.

The film researchers would go out
and look for film to cover

whatever they could find

on the areas that
the outline script wanted to cover.

A BBC cameraman called Ronnie Noble,
who worked in newsreel,

he took pictures
of what happened there

and none of them were used

because the British people
couldn't be shown

what their troops, what their brothers
and husbands and lovers and sons

looked like on the beaches of Dunkirk.

It was just too rough to take,

so although Britain tried
to cheer everybody up

with, “Let's have another cup of tea,”
and, “We can do it,”

what we went through, even,

is not adequately portrayed
in The World at War,

let alone the appalling experience
of the people of occupied Europe

or of the war on the Eastern Front,

where the Russians
may have lost 25 million dead,

and where one third of every Pole
in Poland died

in the Second World War,
including the Jews.

Those experiences
would have been hard to take

and if you knew about them, even,
they were hard to take.

One tended to go
for a kind of blanket coverage,

like archive material.

The researchers would go out

and they would try and find
pretty well everything they could,

so you'd get a lot of duplicate
coverage from all different sources,

some of it exactly the same.

A lot of it came
from neutral countries.

Often the stuff from the neutral
countries was in the best condition

because nobody had looked at it
or done anything with it.

So you had German newsreels

which were sitting in archives
in Portugal, for instance,

and they were much better quality
than what you got from Germany.

There would be quite
a substantial amount of interviewing,

again covering the area, the broad
scope of a particular programme.

The factual correctness was something
we were very careful to get right.

The other thing was that by getting
to know people over a longer period

and speaking to them several times,

you did actually get
a very broad picture

of what their experience had been,

so that you were able then perhaps

to pick out the most representative
or most relevant part from that.

It was very important
that we had that amount of time

to build up the picture
of each episode

so that we could feed that in.

The process of editing then started,

of assembling the material

into a kind of manageable format

in some kind of predetermined order.

There would be a lot of repetition,

a lot of interviews where people
were saying the same thing.

Sometimes people were saying it
better than others.

A lot of people
were covering the same ground.

And a lot of the archive material
was, again, quite repetitious.

But the initial long process

was going through the material
to start with

and getting it into a programme

which might have run
five or six hours, probably.

I would think a first assembly
might well have run five or six hours,

probably out of about
12, 14, 15 hours of material, maybe.

So you were already whittling down
at that early stage,

getting rid of any duplication
of coverage,

looking for the best archive material,

leaving more of the interviewing in.

Although people
were saying the same thing,

it depended how it was put together
who you might use.

If you wanted to cross-cut
two people saying the same thing,

you might use
more of one than another.

You'd have quite a lot of repetition
of interview in that first assembly.

But then from that first assembly

you would gradually whittle it down

to the final running time
of 52 minutes.

The way these things were made
was perhaps unusual.

There are cases
in which somebody is invited

to write a script, a commentary

and then a reverent producer appears

who then films it, as it were,

provides pictures for it.

The World at War
was completely unlike that.

As I've said, this was a period
when there was this messianic faith

in the power of the moving image,

and so the producer was the boss.

And as a commentary writer…

…and I learned this trade,
I'd never done this before,

you were completely the…
not exactly the slave,

but the junior collaborator
of the producer,

who told you what he or she wanted
and then you did it.

You could fight
for your point of view.

What I do remember
about the ones that I worked on,

and I worked on some about Germany,
pre-war and during the war,

and I worked on some about
the Soviet Union at war, for example,

I remember arguments about content
with the producers

and the producers were, in fact,

acting as political commissars
as well,

or historians
or however you like to put it.

They said,
“Well, this is what happened.”

I could at times say,
“I don't think that is what happened.”

“It happened differently.”

Then we would have an argument
and sometimes I'd win

and sometimes the producer would win,

but the producer
was absolutely the boss

and the commentary writer was, in
the last analysis, his or her servant.

I quite liked that, I admired it

because I was impressed by this faith
in the power of the image.

The film researchers,
who would spend weeks in an archive…

John Rowe would turn up
on the doorstep

of the National Film Archive
in Washington

before it opened in the morning

and not leave until they threw him out
at night, day after day.

They'd never seen researchers
like the researchers that we had,

John in Washington, Raye Farr
in Koblenz and so on and so forth.

There are a lot of challenges
as an editor doing something like this

because were trying very hard,

and this is one of the things
we talked about a lot

when making the series,

we were trying very hard
to get something really authentic.

We didn't want to have
a lot of fake material etcetera.

We'd have endless discussions about
“Is this genuine? Is it training?”

“Was it shot after the action?”

“Is it actually a newsreel cameraman
out there at the front shooting?”

A lot of the British material
was all re-enacted afterwards.

They'd get soldiers
trotting through the sand,

firing off Bren guns
and artillery pieces etcetera.

A lot of the Russian stuff
was again set up,

but very much more elaborately set up.

Some of it was very hard to spot
that it was set up.

A lot of the German stuff
was much more genuine,

and the American stuff
was much more genuine.

But of course you're then
cutting all this material together

and you might have a lot of film

which you know came
from that particular battle

at that particular time.

You don't know
whether it's day one of the battle

and it was ten miles
down the front this way.

You don't know whether
it was day three of the battle

and it was 15 miles away
in the other direction.

So you're cutting material together,

you're trying to make a sequence
which is reasonably fast-moving

because you want the programme to move

and you're trying to be honest

but a lot of the material,
although it's absolutely genuine…

…it's… it might be less honest
than if you'd faked the whole thing,

if you see what I mean.

So you're always
weighing up these problems

of how to use the material
in an honest way

without making a really boring story.

You've no idea how intense
the action is of what you're using.

There are a number of people
I spoke to during the research trip,

or trips,

Obviously
we didn't interview everybody

There were a variety of reasons
why we didn't interview everybody.

Some were better interviewees.

One particular person
who I had interviewed,

who I spoke to,
who I then discussed in some…

And who was very difficult to find
and very unwilling to talk to me,

but he did eventually,

he was somebody who Mike Darlow met

and we then decided,
Michael decided really,

that he didn't feel
he was being honest with himself

and therefore that it would…

It was not achieving what we
were hoping to achieve in that series

and in that programme,

that people should be being
as honest as possible with themselves

and not making excuses

or… telling a…

…shifted story
with a shifted emphasis.

Almost imperceptible reasons.

There are other problems, you see,
like when you're editing interviews.

Some people talk very slowly and
have a lot of ums and ahs in between.

Sometimes the camera cuts
and you have to reload

and the question's been asked in the
previous magazine, the previous roll,

and you're tightening
the way people speak up,

editing it to make everything
come through clearly

and coherently,

which again is…

Sometimes you're actually,
without intending to,

you're distorting slightly
what people say

because they weren't that positive.

When you've finished
editing what they're saying

they've come over
as very articulate and positive,

and if you actually listen
to the interview

as it was originally recorded,

they weren't nearly as positive
or articulate

as they appear to be
in the final film.

I was helped in judging
what we could do…

“Yes, wait on a bit longer
to see if you can get that chap,”

“Yes, go back to that archive and
see if they've got anything in colour,”

or whatever

because I knew that my bosses

wanted the thing to be
as perfect as it could be.

The way we worked,
because we had a lot of time…

I had months,
or over a year in some cases.

For instance, Traudl Junge,
who was Hitler's secretary,

I came across entirely by chance.

I was talking to Ursula von Kardorff,
who was a journalist in Munich,

and she said, “I don't know
whether I can really remember much…”

She was of the generation
who'd lived through the war.

She said, “I don't know
that I can be much help.”

“The person you really need to talk to

is the woman who lives upstairs
from me in my block of flats.”

“But I don't think she'll talk to you
because she never talks to anybody

and she won't talk about the war,
she doesn't.”

She was then working as a secretary.

So I said, “Fine, what's her address?”

And… I was living round the corner
with some friends.

And so I bought a bunch of flowers

and went round to the block of flats

at a sort of late afternoon,
teatime time.

And I arrived on her doorstep
with a bunch of flowers

and said
that Ursula von Kardorff had suggested

that I might come and see her,
she lived downstairs,

and I explained what I was doing

and that I would very much…

Would she talk to me?

At first she didn't want to know

but I just chatted to her
on the doorstep

and I was fairly unthreatening

and she eventually said,
“Well, you might as well come in.”

And that was the beginning
of a very long…

She began to talk
the very first evening

about her experiences
in the bunker at the very end

and it was one of
those quite amazing experiences.

And she… We chatted and we just…
We got on.

And so we talked and then I left

and said could I come back and see her
again when I was in Munich next time

and, “Yes,” she said, “Fine.”

And I then went… That's what I mean
about having a lot of time.

I was backwards and forwards
to Munich,

which was quite an important base
during the research, a lot.

And every time I was there
I would go and see her and build up…

And I never mentioned the possibility
of her doing an interview

but I spoke to her.

I told her how we were getting on
with the series,

what it was all about,
what we were hoping to do…

…and I'd built up
a great deal of knowledge

of what her experience had been

and we also got to know
and like each other on a personal level

and established a trust
so that in the end I took…

I said to her would she think
about doing an interview

and she was very unsure about it

and I then suggested
that she should meet Michael Darlow,

who was the producer
I was working with very closely

on all the German interviews,
or one of the producers,

and I took him along to meet her

and he was able to explain to her
what it would involve.

She liked him as well

and we eventually persuaded her

that her testimony was so unique—

she had also
thought a lot about it since the war—

that her testimony was so unique

that it was something
that in a personal history,

in a people's history of the war
as we were doing,

that it was of enormous importance,

if she felt able to do it,
that she should be part of the series

because we were trying to understand
how the Third Reich had worked

and she had been very close
to the centre of it.

And she finally agreed

and she came to… She agreed…

Her flat was very small

and we were working
in the days of very large crews

and the thought of a large crew
in her small flat was pretty daunting.

She also agreed,
which was quite remarkable,

to do the interview in English for us.

So she agreed
that she would come over to London

and that she would do the interview
for us in London

and that she would stay with me
for a day or so beforehand

in order to get her English
really going.

And that's what we did,

and we interviewed her
at Thames for…

I think we did two sessions

and Michael and I
interviewed her side by side.

But that was based
on having known her for 18 months

and having had the time
and the resources

to be able to go back again and again

and to get to know somebody

and to work out the kind of
contribution that they could make

without there being
any pressure on them…

To meet them once and then
ask them if they'd do an interview.

And it was…

We worked very hard at the content

of what she felt able to tell us
and what she was able…

Which was fantastic,
what she was able to…

The light she was able to shed
on the more ordinary side of Hitler

and life in the centre
and life in the central command

and her own personal experience
of having married somebody

who was in central command

and then went off
and was killed on the Eastern Front.

And also, because I'd got to know her,

I stayed friends with her
until she died

and she came and stayed with me
and met my children.

He was very friendly and pleasant…

When they asked her
what Hitler was like

and she said, “Actually he was
a very nice man,” the two young…

I can't remember how old they were,
they were quite young boys,

they kind of shrunk back
and looked completely horrified.

She came out afterwards and said,
“I think I've upset your children.”

“They can't understand
that I seem fine

but that I found Hitler to be OK.”

And that, in a way, shows how lasting
the horror of people is

towards what Hitler was and represented
and the inability still to understand

that anybody could have thought
that he was a nice man.

Towards the end she did a very big
interview with a company in America

and they have sold it
as the first time she's ever spoken,

which actually is not true.

The tensions that people suffered
in the making of a series

in which
at least one marriage broke up

and people became…
had babies and you know…

We were together for three years.

The tensions were more experienced
by researchers

who, frankly, had nightmares

over the horrors
of which they'd become witnesses.

(man) I saw people lying there
with no head

and some with their arms blown off…

Researching the footage
and the interviews

for Michael Darlow's film
on Auschwitz, for example, Genocide,

it was harrowing beyond belief.

Particularly
when I came to talk to people

who had been very involved
in the final solution

and I had to sit there and listen

and encourage people to explain to me

what it had been like for them
as young men or women at the time…

…caught up by the ideal,

and I would then go from
that kind of thing, talking to them,

I would then go to talking to people
who'd been involved in the resistance

or who had been in some way or another
unacceptable to the regime

and who suffered as a result of that.

But it was very important
not to judge people

but to try and keep it

on a factual and honest level

from both sides.

And to represent them fairly,

not to cut the film in such a way

that they looked
like traditional baddies.

Finding, as Sue McConachy did,

the SS people who would talk
about killing as a routine,

or Michael Darlow's chap
who drove the train

right up to the door
of the gas chamber…

…those things, people dreamed,
they slept The World at War

and dreamed The World at War
while they were working on it

and for quite a while
after they finished it.

It took over our lives,
as history sometimes does.

The big interview in terms of SS
was Karl Wolff.

Karl Wolff was at the end
of a very long trail

which started, again,
in Michael Darlow's filming…

It was through a contact in Holland.

And again it was
a long, drawn-out process

where we met various people
and were clearly being vetted.

When I was on the trail
for Karl Wolff,

the initial contacts had to be done
through a series of intermediaries

and we then had to write a letter
to an ex-wife…

It was a very complicated trail
because he was clearly somebody

who they didn't want
to be exposed to anybody

and they needed to find out
what our intentions were.

That was an area where we felt

that he was going to be
a very important person

if we could get to him.

When I finally got to meet him,

he was, on the face of it,
a lonely old man

living in a nice flat on his own…

…with his medals behind him

and he was very…
actually very interested

to have somebody to talk to.

Because we really wanted to understand

how it was that as a young man
he had come to the SS

and what it was about the SS

that had captured his imagination
and his loyalty.

(speaking German)

(translator) He would inspire
a new awakening of the Germanic race

within the German people.

I asked him to explain
what the SS had meant to him

and he'd been…

He was an older person,
he'd been in the Guards Regiment,

and he was in the SS
because it was the elite.

And there was a tremendous amount
of vanity.

(translator) The man in charge

asked me, “Were you a soldier?”

I said, “Yes, indeed.”

“In the First World War?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Do you have awards for bravery?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“What do you have?”

Then I said, “Iron Cross,
first and second class,

and I served
in the Hessian Life Guard Regiment.”

The vanity was one of the things,
I think,

that made him
more ready to talk to me.

And also he had believed passionately
in what he was doing

and he'd been involved in working…

He'd been to Wewelsburg, the SS school

where each room was devoted

to a different myth
from German legend.

And in explaining it to me,

I did understand what it had been

that had made him
want to be a part of it.

And it was quite difficult

to stand there, or to sit there

for long periods of time
talking to him reminiscing.

He hadn't had the opportunity much

to reminisce
with somebody of my generation

because with hindsight
the people within Germany and outside

didn't particularly want
to sit and talk at length

about the good things about the SS.

And what was really important for us
and for the series

was to understand
what the motivation had been

and what the attraction had been.

And that was what made him
a very valuable witness.

And again, as with Traudl,
I got to know him very well

and spent a lot of time talking to him

and I did find, particularly
talking to him, that I needed…

I had a lot of good friends,
having worked in Germany.

…that I did need to come up for air

and get a grip on reality
as we now knew it

and in a way not to live…

Because I was living in the war
when I was talking to these people.

And so I needed to come back
and live in the present day.

In a way it was like our war
when we were researching it

because we were listening
to people's memories.

There was a structure
of a kind of assembly order…

…largely based on the interviews,

so one tended
to slot the archive sequences…

It was a little bit arbitrary

because after you'd seen it
a few times you'd decide,

“That ought to go before that,
that ought to go after that.”

You wouldn't have them
in the right order to start with.

You'd be looking for transitions

so that you would get a bang
into the next sequence

rather than a whimper,
if you see what I mean.

So maybe there's a sequence
which was about the same date

and took on another theme which could
follow quite well after that theme

and it started with a steam engine
or something hooting,

and so you get
quite a nice transition,

you suddenly get a whistle blast

coming through
the end of the previous sequence.

There were things which just felt that
that was the way that it could go.

Some things, it was quite arbitrary
which order the sequence could go in.

There was a visual variety
that you could put,

but on The New Germany,
on the first programme

there were things that could have gone
in more or less any order, really.

It wouldn't matter whether that
sequence went before or after that.

But you looked
for a variety of contrasts

and of getting good transitions
from one thing to the next.

There were other things,
sometimes you were using newsreels…

The material you were using,
sometimes it was newsreels

which had been edited
by the newsreel editor.

Sometimes you were using uncut footage

which was original source material
which you'd got,

rushes which hadn't been used
that had been shot at the time.

Sometimes you were working
from compilation films,

so there were sequences
that were already edited by somebody,

not in the way that we would
necessarily want to use them.

Sometimes you would want to mix
all different sorts of material.

You'd want to use some original shots

and you'd want to use
a bit of compilation

and you'd want to use
a bit of a newsreel story

on that particular event.

They didn't necessarily
gel together very well

because they would have been shot
with different contrast films,

some would be flat,
some would be contrasty.

You didn't want it
to look too jagged, you see,

so sometimes you had to throw out
quite good shots

because they were so contrasty,
they wouldn't blend in.

Well, I'll tell you
one of the drawbacks.

This sounds technical but as
a matter of fact it's very important.

One of the things about history
is that it's uncertain.

There are contested versions

and you can never be quite sure
what really happened.

Historical documentaries
have to face that.

They face the fact that you can't hold
up the flow of a film indefinitely

to say, “Well, we don't really know
why Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.”

“There are two versions, maybe three,
but we don't really know which is true.”

“The evidence… This is still being
argued out,” and so on and so forth.

Now, the difficulty
about The World at War

is that it came at a moment

when the television
and filmmaking profession in Britain

was also at the height of its craft.

Filmmaking in Britain became a craft
of quite extraordinary achievement.

They were like wonderful,
wonderful cabinet-makers, you know,

and they could craft
these beautiful artefacts

which shone and gleamed
and were lovingly polished

and above all
they were lovingly polished

so that they flowed
and you couldn't see the joins.

You couldn't see the joins,
so these picture-led episodes,

in which one sequence
flowed easily, movingly,

helped on by these few lapidary words
of commentary, into the next,

it was exquisite, you couldn't…

Everything was dramatically done,

dramatic sequences would slow down
a little and then start up again,

all paced and timed and…

You see,
history isn't really like that.

History is a mess.

It's got a horrible,
grainy, battered surface,

there are cracks and potholes,
spaces of gravel, darkness,

and that's what history is like.

And that way of making…

that sheer incredible craftsmanship
of the British film industry

in the end became, I thought,

a major enemy
to making a historical documentary.

And the fact that it was so good,
so moving,

that it flowed so beautifully,

it sang, as people often said,
looking at what they'd just done,

was, although I thought
it was wonderful,

was often so moved by the end product,

yet it was false to the way
that history really is

and sooner or later some of us knew
that making historical documentaries

would have to come to terms
with what history's really like.

It would have to stop
being so exquisitely crafted,

it would have to show the joins

and indeed make something of them
and point them out,

and that of course
is what has now come to happen.

Where there was a specific writer,
which was in most cases,

the writer would have come along
right from the beginning

to most major viewings.
So when you started off

you would have had a rough cut
running five or six hours.

So you would then
be shaping it from that.

So the writer and the producer
were aware

of what material was there.

Now, it may be that there was
some material needed that wasn't there.

It may be that
more material was required.

It may be that there was some material

which hadn't gone into that assembly
because it didn't particularly fit,

or the editors hadn't thought it was
particularly relevant at that time,

but maybe it would have
been better to include it.

So there would be,
from this very long opening assembly,

there would be a compressing down,

reordering and clarifying
operations going on.

The second great task that I had

was to intervene very near
the completion of the process

of finalising each programme
and make absolutely certain,

frame by frame
and split second by split second,

that we had got it dead right,

that there was clarity,

that the thing flowed,

that the balance between voice
and picture was the way it should be.

And so I went with a fine-tooth comb
over every single episode

as it got to the fine cut

and as it got, more critical
even than that, to the dub.

We used to try to make certain
that there wasn't too much commentary,

that the ear could always breathe,

that commentary didn't clash
with voiceover,

that voiceover didn't clash
with sound effects,

that sound effects
didn't clash with music.

Each of those had to have a kind of
limpidity, a kind of lucidity about it

with a tiny bit of space between

so that the ear could cope
as well as the eye.

Jeremy Isaacs
would often come in quite late,

when everybody else thought they'd
done something really quite good,

and we'd find that we were
more or less back at square one

and reshaping it

because he has a very good knack
of coming in

with great clarity and incisiveness…

…which can change the direction
of a programme quite radically

after you've already gone quite a long
way along the production process.

Which was a good thing.
It was no bad thing.

A lot of programmes
were radically improved

because of an incisiveness coming in,

often at quite a late stage
in the process.

I had the huge happiness, and I don't
think I've ever done anything

that gave me more satisfaction
in my life,

of having a hand
in the architecture of the building

and also having a hand
in the final detail

of every single room of the building.

And that's
what the series producer does.

I didn't have to bother
about the budget.

Thames was going to back this
all the way.

If I were asked what is

the most salient, emotional, to me,

episode of the Second World War,

I would say it is
the Jewish Holocaust,

it is what was done
to the Jews of Europe by the Nazis.

(wind whistles)

(man) What we went through

will be difficult to understand
even for our contemporaries

and much more difficult
for the generations

that have already no personal
experience from those days.

In the first post-war decades,
people thought about…

If you said, “What is
the most spectacular, important,

memorable event of World War Two?”

they would probably say
something else.

D-Day, they might say,

or maybe some British people would say

Battle of Britain
or whatever it might be,

or others would say
the liberation of occupied countries

and the restoration of independence
and freedom to peoples.

And the fate of the Jews wouldn't
have been salient in that way.

That changed really, I guess,
in the course of the 1960s,

and I think The World at War was made

at a point at which it had,
not all that long ago,

become a kind of consensus

that the final solution
and the murder of Europe's Jews

was an event which really towered over

almost everything else which had
happened in the Second World War.

It hadn't reached
its complete ascendancy

which it rather occupies today,

but you can see its importance
in The World at War,

but it doesn't yet absolutely dominate

the proposals
about what you should remember

which The World at War carried.

Because I'm a Jew I put in the series

the episode about the Nazi genocide
against the Jews

because I simply couldn't
leave it out.

It's not a military subject
but I felt it had to be done

and I think that Charles Bloomberg
and Michael Darlow again,

Michael Darlow did that marvellously,

and that has interviews in it
which rivet me

and are unforgettable.

(gunfire)

(translator) They're shooting.

People are already lying dead.

My daughter was in my arms

the whole time.

Somehow I found the strength

to carry her.

She was so close to me

that I couldn't undress.

She wouldn't let me.

She said, “Let's run away.
They're killing us.”

Obviously the most difficult one
was the final solution and the camps

and what we were to do with that.

(narrator) All occupied Europe
had a concentration camp system

based on the model camp, Dachau.

The camps were not only
an instrument of terror,

they were an important factor
in war production,

each with its cluster of labour camps
attached.

Now they were also to be the means
of the final solution.

In the occupied East,
new camps were specially built

and old ones equipped
with new industrial capacity.

They were to be machines
to kill human beings by the million,

utilise the by-products,
dispose of the waste.

The camps were sited on railway routes
to facilitate transportation.

Eichmann chartered rolling stock
from the state railways.

The biggest camp of all was built

astride the main railway line
from Krakow to Vienna,

in the outskirts
of the Polish town of Oświęcim.

Auschwitz.

Hermann Langbein, who was the head
of the Auschwitz survivors group,

he led us to, in fact,
one of the perpetrators, Richard Böck,

who is a remarkable man,
who had been made…

He was a very ordinary man
who found himself in Auschwitz

and he went one day
with one of his friends

who worked down near the gas chambers.

He went one day, for whatever
reason, curiosity, whatever,

but he went
and saw what was happening,

but he was then made
an honorary member

of the Auschwitz survivors group

because he tried not to be drawn in

to the real horror…

He tried to maintain his own personal
integrity within that situation

although he found himself there.

So you had
very interesting characters like that.

Obviously Hermann Langbein led us
to a lot of the victims as well.

And that was then pursued in Israel

by an Israeli colleague researcher

who followed up a lot of the victims.

I'd found the names and addresses
but most people were in Israel,

so she followed that up.

I had a lot of help when working
on the Auschwitz programmes

from the two lawyers who ran the
Frankfurt Auschwitz trial in the '60s.

And they not only put me in touch
with quite a lot of the people

who had been convicted
or had served their time,

and with one person
who was still in jail,

and I went to see him in jail,

but other people who were out,

and I would go and speak to them
and then I would be able…

because of the court documents

I was able to check
and double-check the stories.

It was very important for us
that we made absolutely sure

that everything that we got from
those people was factually correct

and that they weren't spinning us
some tale

with extenuating reasons,
circumstances,

for why they'd done these things.

I would have liked to have worked,
I think,

in fact I would have liked to work

on the one about the final solution
in concentration camps.

And I didn't get to do that

because it was done by one of the
very strange and remarkable figures

who appeared in this little
constellation of people making it.

He was called Charlie Bloomberg.

And Charlie was a very elusive, very
secretive, charming South African.

He was a sort of clandestine figure.

He, I think,
became banned from South Africa

and then I met him there.

Extraordinary.
He wasn't supposed to be there.

He would have been subject
to instant arrest and so on.

I met him, he just appeared.

He was a mysterious guy but he was
a brilliant, very, very gifted writer.

He's dead. He died very young.

And he did that particular one,

which was of course one of
the central items in the whole series,

about the Holocaust,
the concentration camps,

the deportations of the Dutch Jews
in particular,

which is where I think
Charles had roots of his own.

He certainly had Jewish roots

and I think they may have been
in the Netherlands.

But that's the one he did
and he did it quite wonderfully

and I of course couldn't not envy

having been involved
in writing commentary of that one.

Some episodes
I have always loved and enjoyed.

I love the sense of young men
going into battle for the first time

on D-Day to help liberate a continent

and I love the lad that says,
“I was 18 and I was afraid,”

as the parachutists go in the night
before the land and sea invasion.

I love the French woman
on the beach saying,

“We welcomed these people
who had come from so far

and we gave them calvados also,”
she says.

I remember that.

I love… I think Stalingrad
is a very fine, sombre film,

without a single interview in it,
by the way.

To me, two programmes
have a particular interest

because of their subject matter.

I very much admire the programme

that Michael Darlow and Charles
Bloomberg made about occupation

because I think that war
involves moral choices.

Indeed, I think that living in a world
in conflict involves moral choices

and I thought that programme
forced each of us to think,

“What would we do
if we lived under tyranny?”

Would we resist and risk our lives
and our families' lives?

Would we do nothing?
Would we perhaps collaborate?

(narrator) Anne Frank in her diary,
June 6, 1944.

“Would the long-awaited liberation,

which still seems too wonderful,
too much like a fairy tale,

ever come true?”

“Could we be granted victory
this year, 1944?”

“We don't know yet,
but hope is revived within us.”

“Now, more than ever, we must
clench our teeth and not cry out.”

The people of Holland had lived under
Nazi occupation for four long years.

I decided that we should
do that programme in Holland

rather than in Poland or Yugoslavia

because I thought
that the Englishness of Holland

and the fact that some of the Dutch
would speak English

would invite British people
to consider…

If that could happen in
that small country not that far away,

what would life had been like here?

I think one of the things
that made a big impression on me

was that I'd done the home front
in Britain

and we then did the home front
in Germany

and we spoke to a woman

who was working
in a Red Cross hospital

in Cologne, I think it was,

and she was saying how terrifying
it was hearing the bombers coming.

(speaking German)

(translator) And soon after
the first bombs fell around us.

We were all shaking with fear.

Some people nearly fainted.

Many of the patients were crying.

The roaring and crashing
came closer and closer.

We really thought
all hell was breaking loose.

We then had
a wonderful piece of newsreel

with the sort of gung-ho “Our brave
boys fly off to bomb the enemy.”

So you were experiencing the other end
of our bombing and our brave boys.

You began to feel
the universal awfulness of it

for the ordinary people,

which is not a particularly big point
to make and it's fairly obvious,

but having done
the home front in Britain,

to then realise that the home front
in Germany, for most people,

at that level of being bombed,
was exactly the same.

And the… Because we did the bombings
in Coventry and Plymouth

and I'd spoken to people
who'd been under the bombs there,

and the experience was…

If people are dropping bombs on you,

the experience is the same
wherever you are.

I'm interested, as I say,
in this question of how people behave,

and in the episode
that Phillip Whitehead made

about Inside The Reich,

there's a marvellous juxtaposition
of three people

talking about what they knew of what
was happening to the Jews in Germany.

And a great woman
called Christabel Bielenberg,

who was an English woman
married to a German doctor,

talks about how she tried
to save a couple of Jews

but was advised that she couldn't
keep them more than a couple of nights

because she was risking
her family's lives by having them.

And she tells them
they've got to be gone

and when she comes in the next morning
the bed is made up and they've gone

and she's wringing her hands
like this and saying,

“I knew then that Adolf Hitler…
Hitler had turned me into a murderer.”

I knew later that they were caught
buying a ticket at a railway station

and were transported to Auschwitz.

And why I say this is
the most painful and terrible story

for me to have to tell

was because after they left

I realised that
Hitler had turned me into a murderer.

And then there's Albert Speer,
and Albert Speer says,

“I didn't really know
what was going on.”

“I'd heard that terrible things
were happening in the East

and Gauleiter Hanke told me
not to ask, not to enquire,

to be careful not to turn that corner

and find out what was going on
in that camp.”

“And I should have gone.”

“I now think
that I should have gone to Hitler

and asked him what was going on
and I didn't do it,

and not doing it is, I think,
one of the worst mistakes of my life.”

Together with other hints I got,

I should have made…
should have made my decision

to go to Hitler immediately,
or to Himmler,

and to ask them what is going on.

And then I follow that
with Emmi Bonhoeffer,

who talks about standing
in a greengrocery queue

and saying to the other people
in the queue,

“You know what they're doing
to the Jews, don't you?”

“They're gassing them
and making soap out of their body fat.”

And they say,
“Frau Bonhoeffer, you're mad.”

“You mustn't say things like that
or they'll lock you up too.”

“You're crazy, you can't believe it.”

And she said,
“No, I know and I know for sure.”

“It's not true.
You shouldn't believe these things.”

“You heard them
from the foreign broadcasts or so

and they tell these things
to make enemies against Germany.”

And I say,
“No, that's not from broadcasts.”

“I know that directly from first hand,
you can be sure it is that way.”

Now, that story
tells you several things.

One, that she knew
but that not everybody knew

because they didn't believe her
when she told them,

and it also shows you
that Speer is lying because…

We don't say he's lying

but we put him between two people
who weren't afraid to know,

and it's the people
who weren't afraid to know and tell

that make moments of the series
utterly remarkable.

Christabel Bielenberg, who was
one of the people we spoke to,

was saying that
when she was living in Berlin

in an area with Nazi neighbours,

she would find
that she was helping people

to rescue stuff from their house

and that she would be running
out of a house

with a bust of Göring
stuck under her arm,

which is not something
she would normally do,

but in that moment of trying to…

You were all in it together,
whatever your ideas or politics were,

and it was that sense of
the bonding nature of a shared danger.

I made myself, and it's the one
programme that I did do myself,

I indulgently, self-indulgently,
allowed myself

to do the last programme
of the series,

which I knew, for quite a long time,

I wanted to be a programme
not about the war, but about war,

and I would collect
all sorts of interviews

that reflected
on the experience of war,

some of the experience happy,
some of it mystifying,

some of it lugubrious and shattering.

I think one of the questions you
can ask about The World at War is

to what extent did it tackle really
difficult, contentious subjects?

At what point did it try to say,
“You have been sold a false image

and what happened
was something quite different,

you were being fooled”?

One example of The World at War

trying to do a job of going against
received public opinion

was about the aerial bombing
of Germany and Air Marshal Harris,

and at that point,
in those programmes,

the series did try to say,

“They told you at the time that
this was destroying German morale

and German civil wish
to resist and continue the war.”

“In fact we can now tell you
this wasn't the case.”

If anything, the great bombings

like Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin,
Darmstadt and so on, the Ruhr,

probably marginally stiffened
German civilian wish to resist

rather than the opposite

and it was a complete failure,
almost total failure,

and its impact on German industry
was quite slight,

although that was mostly
the Americans.

But anyway, the impact on
civilian morale was surprisingly slight

and it was a failure.

If I were making the series again
at the time that I made it,

there's nothing I would do differently.

If you thought about
making such a series today

and it hadn't been made
and one had to embark on it today,

there are one or two things that
would certainly be done differently.

First of all there are things that we
know now that we didn't know then.

We didn't know anything
about Ultra and Enigma.

The papers that showed how effectively

the British were cracking…
the West were cracking German codes

weren't published until July 1974

and The World at War
finished its first run

on ITV in Britain in May 1974,

so the series had been broadcast
before we knew.

We refer in the series to
“We had cracked the German codes”

but precisely how it was done
we didn't know.

And I suspect that if we had known

we'd pretty certainly
not just have been able

to inform different stories
with that knowledge,

but we might have made an episode
to codes and so on.

And Richard Overy points out

in work that he's done
on the Second World War recently,

and indeed on The World at War,

that we know a great deal more
about the conduct of the German army,

we know how widespread was

deliberate brutality, cruelty
and genocidal behaviour.

It wasn't just confined to the SS.

The Wehrmacht was involved

in a way that we simply
probably didn't appreciate then.

The single technical matter

where I would have tried to argue
for a different approach today,

but I don't know
that I would have been successful,

is I think now

that subtitles
are a more effective way

of portraying the personality
and the tenor of an interview

than dubbing someone else's voice
over a foreign language

in which he or she
is expressing themselves.

But in those days
it was simply taken for granted

that a programme that was going to try
to reach the widest possible audience

always in Britain,

because the ITV companies
made their money initially in Britain,

and in the United States when
they sold it to the United States,

it was taken for granted
that you didn't subtitle.

If you subtitled something

people thought it was foreign
and didn't watch it,

and so you dubbed.

So in addition
to having Olivier to narrate it

and Carl Davis to write music for it,
we dubbed the interviews.

I think there's a case for subtitling
them rather than dubbing them.

Looking at The World at War,

there is a great deal in it
about generals and armies

and strategic decisions
by presidents and prime ministers

and Führers and all the rest of it,

but one of its strengths
is that there's a great deal

about the civilian population
and what happened to them.

And of course
that really is important.

It was in the second half
of the 20th century

that war really did change its nature
quite rapidly.

In the First World War most of those
who were killed were combatants.

In the Second World War

the overwhelming majority of people
who were killed were civilians.

The Cold War wars, it was also true.

Most of the people killed in Korea
and Vietnam were probably civilians.

Now we're in a period of doubt
about this,

and for all the appalling things that
they do in other parts of the world…

…statesmen in charge
of colossal military force

are nervous about what they may do
to civilian populations,

and if you compare what has been
happening in Iraq, terrible as it is,

the way in which Baghdad
has been bombed

with at least an effort not to plaster
centres of civilian housing,

that compares with, say, the Americans

who dropped 15,000 tons of bombs,

really within a week or so, on Hanoi

back in the '60s and early '70s,

there is a change of mood

and even military commanders
would like to show mercy.

I think there's something else
which goes with that

and people who watch The World at War
might register this change as well.

The human race has grown, particularly
in Europe and North America again,

what you might call the West,

has grown considerably more squeamish.

This is wonderful.

People have grown also more cowardly.

This is also wonderful.

It means that, compared above all to
the soldiers of the First World War,

but also to some of the soldiers you
see in action in the Second World War,

soldiers now are very unwilling
to get their heads shot off

at the orders of some public-school
pipsqueak with a whistle.

They are serving under officers

who are deeply, deeply unwilling
to risk casualties

and will husband, indeed, be miserly

about the lives and safety
of their own men,

and there is a deep aversion

to exposing yourself to danger
among soldiers.

That is good news.

In one sense it's bad news

because the temptation
to plaster the hell out of some area

by bombing from 35,000 feet
is a temptation which exists.

But on the other hand
it is in other ways good.

There is a wish to try to reverse,
to start moving away,

to get this curve to turn at last

away from mounting proportions
of casualties which are civilian

back to professionalising war,
if you like,

trying to limit it
to soldiers shooting at soldiers.

So that's good.

There are wars in the world today.

One has to think about war and
what it's for and what it can achieve

and whether it's worth the cost
in life and suffering that it exacts.

I don't have any doubt at all

that the Second World War
was a just war.

A lovely historian
called Steve Ambrose,

one of the few historians
we interviewed in the series,

he has this great white woolly sweater
and his lovely hair,

and he says the right side won.

The Nazis were crushed,

the militarists in Japan were crushed,

the fascists in Italy were crushed

and surely justice
has never been better served.

We felt at the end that we'd told
the story that needed to be told

and we were glad to have told it,

even if we encountered horrors
along the way.

When you're working
on a series like that

you're much more conscious
of its drawbacks and failures…

…except in one sense.

We knew that some of the ones
that we'd done were certainly…

I didn't work on all that many,

I probably worked on four or five only
out of all those programmes.

One or two of those we really knew,
as we finished them,

that we'd done something wonderful.

Red Star, for example,
whose producer was Martin Smith.

Red Star still makes people cry.

And I feel proud of that.

I don't think, on the other hand,
that we knew

that The World at War would have
this great lasting success.

We were very excited
when it was completed

and I remember Jeremy
talking optimistically

about how it would become
a great educational aid

and it would be put on discs
and cassettes

and every school ought to have one

and it would be part of the national
resource of memory and so on,

which we thought
was an adventurous idea.

None of us realised
that it would go on and on and on.

It's become like The Mousetrap.

It gets repeated and repeated.

A base thought,

if only we'd all signed up to take a
percentage cut instead of a flat fee,

we'd be rolling in wealth.

Still, good luck.

It was a team like no other team
I've ever worked on

and we still have a very close…

If we all get together again
it's the most fantastic team.

And a lot of that was down to Jeremy,

who had pulled us all together

and who held the series
very much in his hand

in a way that got
the most fantastic work out of all…

I think we all worked better
than each of us individually could

or had perhaps ever worked before.

So it was a great team
to have been part of.

It was brilliant.

If making the series took a toll
on the people who worked on it,

it's partly because they worked very,
very, very hard, obsessively hard.

The people who worked
on all the programmes

worked seven days a week
or six days a week for three years.

And partly because what
they were dealing with was fraught,

but I think in the end we were
the masters of our subject matter

and we felt we were shaping it

and we were very proud and happy
with what we did in the end,

so it was something
that meant something in our lives.

And I think that one of the privileges

of working in television or in history

is to do something that you believe in

and I think the people who worked
on The World at War

felt at the end of it that
they'd done something worthwhile.

The series which is known
all over the world as The World at War

didn't start off like that.

We didn't settle on the title
for quite a long way down

and it started off known everywhere,

and for all intents and purposes,

and this is the sticky yellow tape
on which everything was bound,

as The Second World War.

And the paper heading has got

an embossed Second World War on it,
very elegant.

And really it was some…
a couple of years before the title…

and indeed, while debate
about the title was going on,

so the graphics department
were trying to devise,

and we had all sorts
of different versions of the titles,

including sort of Action Man things
and things of that kind,

and then eventually it became
The World at War

with the fabulously good titles
that everybody knows.

The first transmission of the series
in this country

was 31 October, 1973,

and we decided to have a party
on the following Friday, 2 November.

And the invitations
went out to everybody.

“Thames Television requests
the pleasure of your company

to celebrate the outbreak
of The World at War.”

And there was also a press launch
and the lunch was of the period.

“Potato and leek soup,
summer supper dish,

jugged rabbit, corned beef fritters,

sliced spam, Lord Woolton pie,

bubble and squeak,
carrots in parsley sauce,

bread and butter pudding,
Bakewell tart with chocolate sauce,

tea and coffee and boiled sweets.”