Original subtitles

[ominous music]

♪

- July 1942.

It's been over a year since Adolf Hitler

launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union.

After initial success,

the German campaign bogs down across all fronts,

so Hitler prepares to launch another offensive.

One of his objectives is capturing Stalingrad,

a city of great strategic and symbolic value,

particularly to the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin.

One of the titanic battles of World War II is about to erupt.

[dramatic music]

- All wars change the world.

But none of them changed the world

like the Second World War did.

- Japan's on the march, Germany's on the march.

- No one can imagine

the nightmare they're about to unleash.

The most destructive war in human history.

- Suddenly, the world is turned upside down,

and all hell is let loose.

♪

- The West is stunned by the speed of the advance.

- You get the Allies led by the big three--

Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin.

- Men who were dealing with

immensely complicated questions.

- It's the biggest military operation of human history.

-The Allies have to come together

not just militarily,

but industrial scale

it's a global perspective.

- They have to fight in every climate

from the Arctic to the jungles of the Pacific

to the deserts of Africa and the depths of the ocean.

♪

- But there was no certainty of victory.

It was going to be a horrific bloodbath.

- We see humans at their absolute worst,

how they treat other human beings.

And we see them at their absolute best,

willing to give their lives that others might live.

- World War II was a struggle in which there could be

one victor and one vanquished.

♪

[air-raid siren blaring]

[tense music]

♪

- June 1942.

Adolf Hitler travels to Finland to meet

with Finnish military leader Carl Gustaf Mannerheim.

♪

The Germans are about to launch

another major offensive against the Soviet Union.

But to do so, the Wehrmacht needs access to more oil.

- [speaking German]

- Hitler's main supply of oil is from his ally Romania,

but he confesses to Mannerheim

how dependent Germany is on that one source of fuel.

♪

- Hitler's also concerned the Romanian oil fields

are vulnerable to Allied air attacks.

♪

- Oil is always a problem for Hitler.

Unlike the United States or Russia,

Germany doesn't have an internal source of oil

or petroleum that it can tap into.

It must go get it from somewhere else.

♪

- The Caucasus, the mountainous region

of the Soviet Union's southwest,

contains some of the richest oil fields in the world.

If the Germans can seize them,

the Wehrmacht will have all the oil it needs

as well as depriving the Soviets' access.

♪

- The Caucasus is a vast mountain range

that spans Europe and Asia 750 miles.

This is going to be a serious obstacle

for any army that tries to traverse it.

- Hitler and his generals prepare a plan

to conquer the Caucasus: Operation Blue.

The southern army group first head towards the Volga River

to secure this vital supply route

and prevent the Soviets from moving in reinforcements.

Next, capture the fields.

- Can they get there?

If they could, could they go ahead

and pull all that oil out of there?

Do they have the logistical means necessary

to get it back to Germany?

This is Hitler's idea. It has to be successful.

♪

- Until now, Hitler's campaign against the Soviet Union

has proven to be far more difficult

than he and the German High Command anticipated.

♪

- In June of 1941, the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa,

the invasion of the Soviet Union,

the biggest military operation of all time.

Hitler's banking on a quick win.

The Germans take tens of thousands of square miles

and capture millions of Soviet soldiers,

but they don't take Moscow.

They don't get the quick win.

The war goes on into 1942.

♪

- Barbarossa did not meet its objectives

set by Adolf Hitler,

which was to capture vast amounts of land,

to get raw materials, also to wreck Bolshevism,

which needed the collapse of the Soviet Union

to happen rapidly, none of which happened.

♪

- Hitler is concerned he's gotten himself in trouble

in the Soviet Union, but he's convinced

that the situation can be righted.

He can continue this war forever

as long as he has a sufficient supply of oil.

And that's what the 1942 strike

is going to take care of,

a strike for the oil fields of the Soviet Union.

This is the world's first war for oil.

♪

- June 1942.

German forces begin their push south

towards the Volga as planned.

- Hitler is impatient and desperate

to get the oil fields as soon as he can.

♪

- But then he splits

the southern army group in two.

♪

- For Hitler, Operation Blue is an exercise in frustration.

The armies aren't moving fast enough,

they're not meeting the objectives.

And for that reason,

he decides to split them into two big groups.

♪

- It's a measure of his arrogance

that he thought he was just simply

going to be able to divide this force,

and in some of the most difficult

fighting terrain of Europe.

♪

- Hitler orders most of the southern army group

to push directly for the oil fields.

The job of seizing the Volga

will now be left to a single combat force,

one of the biggest and most experienced...

the 6th Army.

- The German 6th Army is the largest army

in the German order of battle.

At the beginning of the campaign,

the 6th Army had over 300,000 men in it.

♪

- By the middle of August,

they're closing in on the Volga

and the city that guards it, Stalingrad.

♪

- Stalingrad is named after Adolf Hitler's personal rival

and the personification of Bolshevism, Joseph Stalin.

♪

- It's Stalin's city.

It was named to commemorate a great victory he won

over the Whites in the Russian Civil War.

He doesn't want to surrender a city named after himself.

♪

- Stalingrad itself is also a major industrial center

which produces something like 20% of Soviet tanks,

including the famous T-34.

Along with a lot of other products

critical to the war economy,

Stalingrad is a prize in its own right.

♪

- Once again,

the Red Army is forced to retreat

by the Wehrmacht.

♪

- The German forces with their shirts off.

It's summer.

And they're just racing across the steppes,

and the Red Army is just collapsing.

♪

- Stalin understands that

if Hitler controls the Volga River,

that he will control the supply lines,

and therefore, there's a chance

he can defeat the Soviet Red Army.

- Stalin goes into a free fall panic.

♪

- Stalin is determined

that this is where Hitler must finally be stopped.

In late July 1942,

as the German 6th Army advances on Stalingrad,

he issues a directive from Moscow, Order 227.

♪

- As the Germans are advancing

and getting ever closer to Stalingrad in July 1942,

Stalin issues Order 227.

This is the so-called Not a Step Back

or Ni Shagu Nazad order.

No more retreat will be tolerated.

- He's reading a lot of Roman history

about how the Roman army

punished units for surrendering.

Stalin says, we've lost too many provinces.

We've lost all of European Russia.

The retreat must stop now.

Not one more step back.

Anyone who retreats in any shape or form

will be instantly executed.

♪

- There are going to be blocking units

made up of the secret police, NKVD, commissars,

people like that whose job it is

to kill soldiers that are coming back towards them.

- The reason Stalin gives this order, however, is revealing.

The Soviets were presumed at the beginning of the war

to have had these vast and almost endless

stores of manpower, of grain, of wheat,

a big country, after all,

a much bigger country than Nazi Germany.

But as many as 70 million former Soviet subjects

are now behind German lines.

And we shouldn't forget, of course,

that Nazi Germany is now drawing on the resources

of occupied Europe as well.

And in Stalin's calculations, Stalin no longer thinks

the Soviets have a manpower advantage.

So the essence of this order, Not a Step Back,

is that if they withdraw any further,

they will forfeit any possible material or manpower advantage

over the German armies.

- Both Hitler and Stalin understand the symbolic power

of Stalingrad.

♪

- Hitler gets fixated on Stalingrad, you know?

It bears Stalin's name.

Why don't I take Stalingrad?

And this will be just a, you know,

an unspeakable humiliation to Stalin

and it'll be, you know, a sign of, you know,

of German supremacy.

♪

- Stalin, he's under no illusions

that if Stalingrad is reached by the German forces,

this is going to be

an existential battle of annihilation.

♪

- The German 6th Army surrounds Stalingrad.

[tense music]

- Stalingrad, a city of 800,000,

is spread along 30 miles of the Volga River.

[tense music]

It has modern apartment blocks,

parks, and heavy industrial factories.

[air-raid sirens blaring]

♪

On August 23, the Luftwaffe bombardment begins.

♪

In the first 24 hours, thousands are killed.

[fires crackling]

Still, Stalin orders all survivors

to remain in the ravaged city.

- Stalin deliberately makes no organized attempt

to evacuate the civilian inhabitants.

Have the Germans attack, shell, bomb.

He wants to showcase German barbarism.

But he also figures that

this will stiffen the resistance of Stalingrad.

♪

- His thinking at this point is that

if I leave a Russian population in a city center,

that Soviet soldiers will fight

all that more heroically in their defense.

♪

- Stalingrad has been destroyed.

There is devastation everywhere.

But the German 6th Army, 1/4 million men, 500 tanks,

is ready to push in the city and conquer it.

♪

- Germany's 6th Army is led by General Friedrich Paulus.

♪

- Paulus as a character is quite weak.

He doesn't have the self-confidence

of a Manstein or a Rommel or anybody like that.

- Friedrich Paulus is one of Hitler's less able generals.

He doesn't have a lot of experience in battle.

He's a technocrat who's going to get the job done,

and Hitler doesn't think the job's going to be

particularly difficult.

[explosions and gunfire]

♪

- After two weeks of constant bombardment,

General Paulus orders the 6th Army

to enter Stalingrad.

♪

There, the German troops are confronted

with a unique battered landscape

that provides cover for thousands of Soviet soldiers.

[gunfire]

♪

- Imagine an urban warfare campaign in New York.

♪

Or London.

It's a partially destroyed, nightmarish ruin.

There's actually civilians still running around

and living, like, in little caves

that they've dug out of the rubble.

♪

The environment is surreal.

[gunfire]

- The Germans describe this savage close-quarter combat

as Rattenkrieg, war of the rats.

♪

- The German notion of Rattenkrieg,

rats scurrying between rubble,

soldiers maneuvering in and out of sewers,

it's open a door, there's an enemy.

Now all of a sudden, you're fighting with fists,

not with artillery and not with tanks.

It is a very face-to-face, personal,

and infantry energy-intensive battle.

[explosion]

- The Germans push through the mangled industrial debris

of factories and oil depots.

♪

Hiding within the ruins...

[gunshot]

Soviet snipers pick off individual soldiers...

[gunfire]

Sowing a sense of random terror.

[gunshot]

The most skilled marksmen become legends.

Men like Vasiliy Zaytsev,

who becomes a hero throughout the Soviet Union.

♪

Everyone, young and old, is expected to fight,

including women.

- Women are very much part of the Red Army effort anyway.

But in Stalingrad, they're trapped in the city.

And so they would just get in there

and start to fight equally with the men.

They dig tank traps, they learn how to shoot,

they become snipers.

♪

- But despite the Red Army's gallant defense of Stalingrad,

street by street, yard by yard,

the Germans are gaining ground.

♪

By the second week of fighting,

the Soviets are in danger of losing the city.

[explosion]

At the same time, German forces are closing in

on the oil fields in the Caucasus.

♪

- The Battle of Stalingrad is going badly.

The entire Soviet Union seems to be staring down the barrel.

Stalin decides he has to do something dramatic

to save the city.

- Stalin summons his first deputy commander-in-chief,

Georgy Zhukov,

who successfully defended Leningrad and Moscow.

At a meeting in the Kremlin,

Stalin confers with Zhukov on military strategy.

- Stalin had always wanted to be a military commander.

Long before World War II,

he dressed as a military commander.

But he's not a commander,

he's not a brilliantly talented strategist,

and he's still constantly overruling his generals,

ordering offensives that are unnecessary,

that are unprepared.

But now, Stalin begins to learn to listen to people he trusts.

- He's starting to find talented people.

Field Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who helped defend Moscow,

he's now going, hey, that guy, I think he knows how to win.

- Zhukov is broad-shouldered, he's short, he's muscular.

He's an incredibly tough person.

He literally clears minefields

by sending troops running across them.

The quintessential Stalinist general.

♪

- Zhukov presents Stalin with a new plan:

lure the 6th Army deeper into Stalingrad,

then surround them and counterattack

from the rear of the city.

- At the end of the meeting,

Stalin shakes hands for the first time with Zhukov,

something he's never done before,

because he realizes that if this works,

the tide of the war will change.

[tense music]

♪

[indistinct chatter]

- In September 1942, Soviet General Zhukov

had designed a new strategy to defend Stalingrad.

Relying largely on deception,

he opens up misleading radio channels,

orders fake defenses,

and starts construction on 17 false bridges.

- The Soviets are starting to learn the art of war.

This is not the Soviet army of 1941.

- Zhukov, a chess player,

is known for meticulous planning.

- Zhukov's plans for the operation are elaborate,

and they take weeks to prepare.

[explosions and gunfire]

- The army inside Stalingrad is completely unaware

of what its real role is.

Its role is to be the bait in the trap.

Their commander knows that the only way he can do it

is by sacrificing more and more men.

[gunfire]

♪

- By October,

both armies combined lose nearly 6,000 troops a day.

♪

And both sides are equally ruthless in their tactics.

♪

- German soldiers would bribe these poor orphans

to go and fill their water bottles in the Volga

with a crust of bread.

Soviet snipers were ordered

to shoot down the Russian children who were starving.

This was the pitilessness of the battle.

♪

- At his headquarters, Adolf Hitler is informed

that his army won't be able

to take the oil fields in the Caucasus.

His earlier decision to split his forces

has doomed the operation.

♪

- Hitler is told that actually,

we haven't got enough troops to seize the oil fields.

He explodes in rage.

He says he's been lied to.

He blames his generals.

So it completely changes the atmosphere

at Fuehrer headquarters.

♪

- Hitler shifts his focus to one goal:

capturing Stalingrad.

[gunfire]

By mid-November, it appears the 6th Army might just do it.

♪

They make their final push

to encircle Soviet troops on the Volga.

- The Germans are feeling confident

about the Battle of Stalingrad.

They already hold 90% of the city.

Hitler is getting reports from his commanders on the site

that the city is about to fall.

♪

- They're starting to fly swastika flags.

Hitler is boasting to his buddies

that Stalingrad's about to be mine.

[cheering]

♪

- Hitler seems confident that the Wehrmacht

is on the verge of victory.

♪

As fighting continues around Stalingrad,

the Red Army unleashes a deafening fusillade

from over 3,000 Soviet heavy artillery

and Katyusha rockets.

♪

- Katyusha rockets are one of the great weapons

invented by the Red Army.

They could fire these terrifying salvos.

The scream is completely unearthly.

[rockets wailing]

- The 6th Army's flanks

are defended by badly-equipped Romanian troops.

This is where Zhukov focuses his attack.

- They were whipped by their own officers.

They received virtually no pay at all.

Their morale was rock-bottom.

Why should they die for Germany?

♪

- The Romanians are quickly overrun.

♪

Hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers

encircle the 6th Army in a pincer movement.

On November 22, Soviet forces link up

in the town of Kalach on the Don River.

The 6th Army is now surrounded

and cut off from its supply lines.

General Paulus is in a desperate position.

- One of the most shocking documents

in the German command of the Second World War

is the memo that General Paulus writes back

to Fuehrer headquarters.

♪

It opens with two words.

[speaks German] The army is surrounded.

Words that no German commander ever believed

they would ever have to write.

- Hitler, when he hears about this,

is absolutely speechless with rage.

♪

As far as Hitler was concerned,

the capture of Stalingrad had been proclaimed as a victory.

It was only a few days before the great Soviet encirclement.

He could not admit that they had lost it.

- This crucial battle

has altered Stalin's approach to leadership.

- Stalin had been the headstrong, clumsy,

and obstinate commander

who constantly makes colossal mistakes

with catastrophic effects.

Stalin by now has learned to listen to generals,

to recognize the limits of his expertise,

and to let them plan the detail

while he sets the larger strategy.

♪

- You start to see this transition

of Joseph Stalin into political leader

and letting his military professionals

fight the battles.

Joseph Stalin is indeed

maturing as a war leader.

[gunfire]

- Stalin's forces have Paulus's 6th Army surrounded.

- Stalin's forces have Paulus's 6th Army surrounded.

The Russian winter is closing in.

[wind howling]

- November 1942.

[tense music]

Winter descends over the Eastern front.

What remains of the German 6th Army

is trapped in the city of Stalingrad.

250,000 men are completely surrounded by Soviet troops.

♪

General Paulus asks permission to attempt a breakout.

♪

Hitler refuses.

- Hitler is linked with the stand fast order.

Where the German soldier sets foot, there he stays.

Not taking Stalingrad is not an option.

It has to do with public opinion.

But Hitler knows the degree of the predicament he's in.

[wind howling]

- The Wehrmacht is now going to face not only a Soviet army

that is growing in capability, capacity, and credibility,

they're also going to have to face the Russian winter.

Soldiers don't have the right gear,

supplies become harder, vehicles are harder to start,

maintenance is harder to do.

Everything that should be easy

becomes more difficult because people are cold.

♪

- How long till the ammunition runs out?

How long till the medical supplies run out?

♪

- The Germans are hit by the full force

of the Russian winter.

- You're talking about bitterly cold weather,

people suffering from frostbite.

♪

- People are literally dying of cold where they stand.

The bodies are frozen solid.

♪

You could break off their arm, they're so frozen.

♪

- Soldiers are dying of dysentery,

typhoid, and tuberculosis.

♪

By the end of December, their daily food intake

is less than a handful of bread with weak, watery soup.

♪

The troops are starving.

- There are dead men lying everywhere.

There are rats everywhere.

There's no fuel. There's nothing to burn.

There's absolutely no thought of fighting anymore.

Even hanging on to life has become almost impossible.

- You see German soldiers and officers

asking the doctors for pills so that they could commit suicide.

- They are frozen.

They are desperate.

It's a scene of hell on Earth.

[somber music]

♪

- Back in Germany, the public is largely unaware

of how serious the situation has become.

♪

But now some are getting letters from their loved ones

detailing the horrors unfolding

in the ruins of Stalingrad.

♪

- Try to put yourself in the place

of these German troops.

You're very far away from home, right?

It's Christmas season

and you're listening to the radio

and they're playing "Silent Night."

At a certain point, you realize

that they're basically writing you off.

♪

- Again and again,

Paulus asked for permission to break out.

[wind howling]

Each time, Hitler's answer is no.

♪

- General Paulus's men are dying

in the thousands every day.

Any sense of military utility had long departed.

And yet, Paulus chose loyalty to Hitler

over loyalty to the men under his command.

♪

- Hitler has created a command culture

in which his commanders can't use their professionalism

and their expertise on the ground

to do what's best for their forces,

and so this is also a failure of Hitler's management

of his commanders.

♪

- By the end of January,

Paulus informs Hitler that they cannot fight on.

Hitler responds with a radio message

promoting Paulus to field marshal

and congratulating him on his new position.

- Hitler does this not out of any great love

or admiration from Paulus.

He does it because no field marshal

has ever surrendered in the field in German history.

- He feels that this is one way of basically

making Paulus commit suicide.

♪

- The next day, Paulus goes

to Red Army headquarters outside Stalingrad.

150,000 of his men are dead.

♪

- Paulus is trapped.

He faces an impossible choice.

- Paulus surrenders what is left of the 6th Army.

The remaining 90,000 German troops

are led away as prisoners of war.

Only a small number of them will ever see Germany again.

♪

- It really was a shock to the Nazi elite,

but also to the people of Germany.

Psychologically, it really was the turning point.

- All of the sudden, the unthinkable,

the idea that you might lose this war,

is right there in your face.

And everyone back at home would have known about it.

The morale is going to suffer.

That's a turn-the-tables moment.

♪

- There's very few families in Germany that didn't have

some tie to the 6th Army--

a son, a father, a neighbor's son.

The 6th Army was the largest army

in the German order of battle,

and now it's been completely destroyed.

♪

- When Hitler receives the news

of Paulus's surrender,

he's silent for several hours.

♪

Then he explodes.

- He actually says,

why didn't Paulus put a bullet in his brain?

It only takes a second,

and he would have been immortal from then on.

But instead, he chose

what Hitler said was the coward's way out.

But Hitler knows the gravity of this defeat.

♪

- To lose 250,000 men in a moment, essentially,

in other words, to have that military force

wiped off your ledger,

that hadn't happened to the Germans in the war.

It changes the political calculation entirely,

and this myth of invincibility is going to be shattered.

♪

- In a single campaign, Hitler has lost an army

- In a single campaign, Hitler has lost an army

and began to lose the faith of the German people.

[tense music]

♪

- Following the defeat of Stalingrad,

Adolf Hitler withdraws to his mountain retreat in Bavaria.

On April 20, 1943, his inner circle

throws a party to mark his 54th birthday.

♪

- After Stalingrad,

all the indicators are running against Germany.

The campaign in North Africa has clearly gone bad.

Increasingly, Hitler is losing control of himself.

The entire 1942 campaign had been marked

by gigantic tantrums against his officers.

He is no longer up to the stress

of running a global war.

But Hitler knows

that he has to launch an offensive in 1943

or he risks losing control of the war completely.

- The Germans have enough armor

and enough energy and enough manpower

to mount one final offensive on the Eastern Front.

- The Soviets have advanced into an area to the south,

creating a salient

around a region called Kursk.

Hitler sees an opportunity to seize the initiative.

- The salient around Kursk in 1943

was such an obvious target that basically,

both sides knew some type of offensive was coming.

- Hitler is basically putting all of his chips on the table.

- But his resources are already stretched

across Europe.

♪

- Everything is getting harder by 1943.

The Soviet artillery is better,

their tanks are better, their leadership is better.

So it will take a lot of resources,

it'll take a lot of armor,

and it will cost in order to do this.

♪

- Considering the resources of Nazi Germany at this point,

its economic reserves, its soldiers,

this is a ridiculous thing to attempt.

- Hitler is particularly excited about his giant tanks,

the Tigers and Panthers,

which he thinks are game-changers.

♪

- In Moscow,

the Soviet High Command is receiving intelligence

about the Germans' upcoming offensive.

♪

Unlike earlier in the war,

Stalin is now utilizing the intelligence he receives.

- Stalin's instincts are always just attack now,

attack on all fronts, attack at any cost.

By the time of Kursk, he's learned that actually,

this is not the way to win a war.

Now he's taking the intelligence on board.

He's trusting it.

The German attack is going to be massive.

Zhukov persuades Stalin, we're going to dig in,

we're going to prepare,

and we're going to draw the Germans in.

♪

- As Zhukov prepares for the coming offensive,

Soviet factories increase their production.

♪

- By this stage of the war, the Soviet economy

is vastly outproducing the German economy.

Stalin was now producing massive amounts of weaponry.

- The United States has also been sending military supplies

to the Soviets through its Lend-Lease plan,

which was designed to get American materials

to Great Britain and the Soviet Union.

By 1943, tons of military hardware

are rolling off Allied ships each month.

♪

- The Soviets were especially impressed

with the Willys Jeeps, the American Sherman tanks,

along with more than 12,000 warplanes.

♪

- The Soviets are also receiving

hundreds of thousands of tons of food.

♪

- The Soviet army is actually being fed

by the American economy in 1943,

everything from the famous tushonka pork

Americans refer to as Spam

to millions of packets of dehydrated borscht.

- One of the ways that Hitler wants to defeat these people

and whittle down their numbers is through starvation.

But if they're being fed from outside sources,

you can't do that.

♪

- The supplies help the Soviets build

one of the largest defensive forces ever seen,

1.3 million troops.

♪

At Zhukov's command,

civilians dig several thousand miles of trenches

and tank traps outside Kursk.

Nearly one million mines are laid.

- It's the most densely defended area

of the whole Earth

in the course of the Second World War.

[explosions and gunfire]

♪

- The Soviets are prepared

- The Soviets are prepared

for the full weight of the German Wehrmacht.

[tense music]

♪

- July 1943.

♪

The Germans launch their colossal offensive

against the Red Army in the Kursk salient.

♪

[gunfire]

♪

Quickly, the German advance

runs into Zhukov's fortifications.

♪

- It's the countermove to the idea of blitzkrieg.

♪

If you break through the front line,

there's another line behind there

with antitank efforts and trenches and men.

If you break through that one, there's another one.

♪

Your forces as the German Wehrmacht

are getting smaller and weaker and damaged.

And eventually, you just sort of

whittle away the spear point here.

- For eight days, the Germans grind against Soviet defenses.

♪

Two vast tank armies collide.

♪

- Astonishing intensity.

♪

Tanks helm-to-helm, hull-to-hull.

♪

- The German tanks are better built,

have bigger guns, better armor.

But if you've only got a few of them

and you've got a mass of T-34s coming at you,

you have a big problem.

♪

- Hitler's miracle weapons,

the Tigers and Panthers,

which are these giant, diabolical metal machines,

actually don't work too well.

♪

- Hitler's tanks are destroyed

by the more maneuverable Soviet tanks.

♪

After two days, the Wehrmacht is forced to withdraw.

- Hitler has failed.

He's rolled the dice three times inside the Soviet Union,

Operation Barbarossa in '41, Operation Blue in '42,

and now, the great offensive at Kursk,

and he's failed each time.

Hitler's final gamble on the Eastern Front

has been crushed.

♪

- They get nothing out of the Battle of Kursk.

It's a huge defeat for the Germans.

They're always going to be going backwards

from this point on.

- Kursk destroys enough of the German combat power

that they can never take the offensive

for the rest of the war.

Therefore, the Soviets maintain

the initiative to pick the time and place of the choosing

where they're going to take their next act.

- This is a decisive moment in Stalin's development

as a supreme commander.

Hitler is undergoing precisely the opposite transformation.

- By this point in the war,

Hitler is really losing his grip on reality.

And people thought he made some madcap moves in 1940,

but they paid off.

As the war lengthens,

his decisions become more and more suspect.

- The two great warlords of World War II

are passing each other as one develops and one deteriorates.

♪

- In November 1943, Joseph Stalin meets

with Prime Minister Winston Churchill

and President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

♪

It's the first meeting of the group

that would become known as The Big Three.

♪

- The Big Three sat down in Tehran,

around the table with their teams.

Each of them said something, and Stalin really put it best.

He said, history has spoiled us.

Never have three men had the vast and massive powers

that we have today.

Let's get to work.

♪

- Stalingrad creates a tradition

that eventually spreads to the rest of the Red Army.

Soviet soldiers passing each other in the street

say blind swap, and exchange the items in their pockets

without looking.

Soldiers swap a single cigarette for a watch

or money or a scrap of paper.

In Stalingrad, life is so uncertain,

soldiers could be dead in an instant,

that nothing has any value at all.

The battle for Stalingrad is the turning point of the war

on the Eastern Front.

Never again would the Wehrmacht take the offensive in the East.

And in the West,

the Allies prepare to cross the Mediterranean,

the next step in their attack against the Third Reich.