All language subtitles for The World at War - S01E16 - Inside the Reich Germany (1940 - 1944).eng

[CHEERING]

NARRATOR: Berlin in the summer of
1940 welcomed victory beyond belief.

The soldiers of the Third Reich
came home after only a year of war.

They had conquered France.

Central and northern
Europe had fallen, too.

These crowds were delirious
with exultation and relief.

They turned to their Führer
in a frenzy of gratitude.

They had not fancied war.
They had feared defeat.

Now they thought
the war was over

and they rejoiced.

NARRATOR: The men came home.

They were brown and fit and
only a few of them had died.

WOMAN: I just went shopping

when somebody told me,
"Don't you hear the noise?"

And there I saw this part of the
army coming back just near us.

So I bought a bowl of
cherries and ran there.

We all were so glad.

We heard so much of the First
World War with those dreadful battles

and those many dead.

I felt a sort of national pride
we ended the war so quick.

NARRATOR: In cities
untouched by war,

the German people had hardly
begun to give up the ways of peace.

There was rationing,
even shortages,

but to make up for it, the regime
preached enjoyment, luxury.

[♪ "ROSAMUNDE"]

While the British had declared
frivolous things immoral,

the Nazis tried to show
that luxury flourished.

Promises were their propaganda.

Those who ran the war effort
came to believe their own promises.

Only a few saw further.

Just about August it was ordered

that a lot of
production was stopped

or minimized or
things like that.

And there was a kind of euphoria
that the war was, so to say, over.

I didn't believe in that at all.

No, I thought I knew the British

and I had the opinion that
they would see this thing through

and that the United
States would join the war,

and therefore every
effort should be made

to prepare for a long blockade.

[CROWD CHEERS]

NARRATOR: Hitler had
no plans for a long struggle,

no preparations for the total
mobilization of all productive capacity.

German industry had been
geared to a blitzkrieg war.

The regime still let the factories
turn out peacetime goods.

The workers, subjugated
but not fully converted,

watched the comings and goings of
the Nazi princes without enthusiasm.

Wanting to be loved,
the Nazis gave and gave.

For 1940, propaganda minister
Dr Goebbels was Father Christmas.

He gave to children.
He gave to mothers.

NEWSREEL: In Berlin wurde der
neue Film "Mutterliebe" uraufgefürht.

Auf Veranlassung von
Reichsminister Dr. Goebbels

lud die NSV 1.200 Trägerinnen...

NARRATOR: Ladies
with larger broods

were invited to the film
premiere of Mother Love,

the regime's hymn to
family and folk community.

Das heißt, er wird uns ja vom
Himmel aus helfen, so gut er kann.

Er wird mit dem
lieben Gott sprechen.

Und well er so lustig ist und
alle Engel lachen macht...

NARRATOR: On their breasts
they wore the Nazi Mother Cross.

The pram was the
tank of the home front.

The government hoped for a
breakthrough on the birth rate.

Happy babies,
happy future mothers

and very specially happy
music soused the nation.

[♪ MARCH]

The big smile glued across
the face of the people,

still often dubious and nervous,
was stretched even wider.

[SINGING IN GERMAN]

Everybody must learn to enjoy the
happy teamwork of Hitler's folk community.

Vierzehn Uhr und eine
Minute. Der Wehrmachtsbericht.

NARRATOR: Radio
was the instrument

which the Nazis made
their own from the beginning.

Their foreign-language
broadcasts,

technically marvelous but
grotesquely unconvincing,

reached greedily
out to minds abroad.

Today's official German war
communiqué reads as follows.

NARRATOR: But listening
to foreign radio was forbidden.

Many, like the propaganda
comics Tran and Helle,

argued the toss between getting
a glimpse of the outside world

and the risk of a jail sentence.

WOMAN: If we listened to
foreign radio, which we always did,

we turned it very low and we
used to sit right up close against it.

And I remember one
particular moment when my son,

who was a little schoolboy,

told me that he had a
very funny story to tell me,

that his friend's mother
also listened to the radio

with her ear right up
against it the same as we did.

I suddenly realised that I
could have her imprisoned

and she could
have me imprisoned,

because these two children
had been talking about it.

NARRATOR: As well as
geography and the rest,

Nazi schools were obliged
to add a special subject.

Children were taught with
pictures and measurements

the dimensions of a
healthy Aryan race.

Official films
prepared the Germans

for the consequences
of keeping the race pure.

The mentally incurable,
condemned as the bad seed,

went to experimental
gas chambers.

[MAN SPEAKS GERMAN]

NARRATOR: But now, for once,

the Germans learned what
was going on and protested.

Bishop Galen of Münster
attacked euthanasia from the pulpit.

For a time, the
program was stopped.

A controlled press
avoided such misgivings.

Some newspapers were mere
party sheets of hate and lies.

Some slipped criticism
between the lines.

None of them satisfied a people
which was still highly educated.

MAN: It was terribly frustrating

never to be allowed to
say your opinion openly.

I myself was quite happy

when I was called up,

early 1940, to the army,

and that suddenly left behind

all the oppression
I had every day.

Being a soldier, you
don't read newspapers.

You don't listen to the radio.

You're not always under
the stress of the propaganda

which was pointed
at you every hour.

NARRATOR: European war
became world war in June 1941.

The Nazi leaders had secretly resolved
that the conquest of Russia must come.

NEWSREEL: Reichsminister Dr. Goebbels
verliest die Proklamation des Führers.

Deutsches Volk.

In diesem Augenblick vollzieht
sich ein Aufmarsch, der...

NARRATOR: For many,
the attack on the Soviet Union

brought fear and bewilderment.

Of course I'd heard
of certain preparations

but it was all...
well, hushed up,

and till the last moment,

I didn't think that the
war would come about.

NARRATOR: For a long war,

Germany would need to have the
south Russian oil fields for her own.

Russia had delivered a million
tons of oil the previous year

under the Nazi-Soviet
Pact, now flung away.

KEHRL: As a matter of fact

we had the greatest trade
agreements with them that we ever had

and they delivered promptly,

and from an economic point of
view everything seemed to be in order.

I personally had,
through my men,

negotiations with them of putting
up a synthetic fiber mill in Russia

and the treaty was
signed on 15 June, 1941,

and the first ten
million marks in gold

should be shipped
on July 1, 1941.

[WOMAN SINGS IN GERMAN]

NARRATOR: The Germans drove eastwards
over disintegrating Russian armies.

Victory looked like a matter
of weeks, another blitzkrieg,

and morale at home revived.

Göring inspected what was now
the German colony of Ukraine,

intended to be a serf
region of agriculture.

Nazi experts on the Slavs
hoped that this simple folk

with simple customs
would enjoy this prospect.

Six months later, in the
blinding snow before Moscow,

the Germans were stopped.

They lacked winter clothing

and the government appealed
for furs and warm coats.

An den letzten Tagen
der Sammlung drängen

drängen sich vor den
Annahmestellen die Gebefreudigen,

um ihre Spenden abzuliefern.

Tut Ihnen das nicht leid? So einen
schönen Pelz? Oh, ist das warm da drin.

NARRATOR: No amount
of rehearsed enthusiasm

could conceal that this was
the Reich's first military reverse.

The minister of munitions and
head of the war effort Fritz Todt

flew to inspect the construction
work on the Eastern Front.

One of the men who should have
been on the plane was Hitler's architect,

the producer of the
Nuremberg rallies, Albert Speer.

I heard in the headquarters
that Todt's plane crashed.

He was dead. And half an hour
afterwards I was asked to come to Hitler

and to my great
surprise he told me,

"You shall be his
successor in all his offices."

Todt got the funeral of
a National Socialist hero.

By now nearly 250,000 Germans
had been killed on the battle fronts,

but Todt was the first of Hitler's close
comrades to meet death in the war.

Hitler was shaken. The war
had reached him personally.

Speer had already seen
the chaotic, disconnected way

that Nazi war industry worked.

Transport, munitions - all had to
be brought under a single control.

One of his first targets
was the labor supply.

Nazi Germany had never
mobilized its full workforce.

SPEER: I tried to get the women
in the war production machinery,

but it was opposed by Sauckel
who was in charge of all the labor.

And the thing came to Göring
and Göring flatly denied, too.

Then it came to
the decision of Hitler,

and Hitler also said, "No, the
women must be preserved."

"They have other tasks. They are for
the family. They have to bear children

and it would spoil their
health and their morale

if they are working
in the factories."

NARRATOR: But Ukrainian women
were being imported as maids -

foreign conscripts
for slave labor.

Under Speer, a great
irony was fulfilled,

for Germany was becoming exactly
what the Nazis said it would not become.

They had promised a return to
the land, an end to great capitalism.

Instead, the armaments drive

was strengthening the
vast industrial monopolies

and swelling the cities with
German and foreign labor.

In two and a half years,

Speer multiplied armament
production nearly four times.

80% of industry
came under his control.

He brushed aside bureaucracies
and worked through his own experts.

KEHRL: He had ideas
and he put all his energy

behind these ideas

and put them through
with very much success.

He didn't know how things

had been done in the past.

He hadn't anything
to do with it,

so he didn't know what was
impossible and what was possible,

and he succeeded sometimes
in doing the impossible, too.

SPEER: It is
astounding for everybody

who didn't live in our
authoritarian system

to hear that it was difficult
to get through with orders.

But it was difficult

Because Germany was divided
into many districts, 32 districts.

At the head of every
district was a Gauleiter.

He was strong political man and
had absolute power in his district.

He was only subordinated
to Hitler himself.

So when my orders didn't
please one of the Gauleiters,

possibly they
weren't carried out.

NARRATOR: Tank production showed how
even Speer failed to get all of his way.

He could not slice through
the competing hierarchies

in Hitler's chosen
style of government.

There were too many types
of tanks. Too few tanks in all.

Too many calibers of gun and
different sizes of ammunition.

SPEER: Hitler thought he was
far superior to such problems

and what for others would have
been discussions of weeks and weeks

for him was a decision of
just a fraction of a minute.

Of course, there
was a change, too.

One can never say that a
man is always the same person,

and Hitler changed
a lot from '42 to '43.

In '43 he was more
and more convinced

that he didn't need any
more advice of anybody

and he made the decisions
by himself without listening.

NARRATOR: Hitler spent more
and more time at the Wolf's Lair,

his melancholy, remote
encampment at Rastenburg

in the East Prussian forest.

Those around him
were obsequious.

The better advisers lost touch.

Hitler's personal SS adjutant
was Richard Schulze-Kossens.

SCHULZE-KOSSENS: Nearly all
ministers were stationed at Berlin

and some of them had contact
officers in the headquarters.

Only Ribbentrop, Himmler and sometimes
Göring had their own headquarters,

not so far from
our headquarters.

Speer was very often
in the headquarters

because his ministry was
very important for the war.

Only Bormann was
always in the headquarters

where there was the
only direct contact to Hitler.

SPEER: Bormann, as the secretary,
was the most powerful man -

more powerful, I think, than Hitler,
because when the power was divided,

all those men who were in
power had to go via him to Hitler.

Except me. I had
direct access to Hitler.

There wasn't much cooperation.

The cooperation was in the lower
levels of the smaller technocrats.

We didn't have
anything like a cabinet.

Ministers met, if
at all, very seldom

and didn't talk about
very important matters -

so was my impression.

Every ministry worked for itself

and sometimes they got orders
from Hitler, but very, very seldom.

NARRATOR: Foreign visitors
like Mannerheim, the Finnish leader,

could see that Hitler was
living in a world of illusion.

He still trusted the reassurances
of Göring, head of the Luftwaffe.

Göring, a few months later,

claimed that his aircraft
could supply the Eastern Front

even when a whole army
was cut off at Stalingrad.

MAN 1: Achtung, ich rufe
noch einmal Stalingrad.

MAN 2: Hier Stalingrad.
Hier ist die Front an der Wolga.

MAN 1: Achtung, die
U-Bootfahrer im Atlantik.

NARRATOR: Christmas 1942.

MAN 1: Achtung, Catania.

MAN 3: Hier ist die
Mittelmeerfront und Afrika.

NARRATOR: The man at Stalingrad

had come through on the
radio link-up loud and clear,

but the brave words were
faked in a Berlin studio.

[♪ "STILLE NACHT"]

For the last time the
cathedral stood undamaged

as the Christmas fair
took place in Berlin.

But Stalingrad was still cut off

and deep down the nation
sensed what was to happen.

MAN: Dritter Februar.

Das Oberkommando der
Wehrmacht gibt bekannt:

Der Kampf um
Stalingrad ist zu Ende.

NARRATOR: "The Battle of
Stalingrad has come to an end."

For once the radio spoke the
truth, and with some dignity.

91,000 survivors surrendered.

Only a few 1,000 ever
saw Germany again.

I was not long in
the headquarters

but I felt very significant
the atmosphere on this day.

All people were depressed

and Hitler himself
was very serious

and he started on his soup

without saying any word, and...

He was... He was very depressed.

NARRATOR: The world realised

and the Germans realised
that this was the turning point.

This was the tragedy
which could not be hidden.

And Stalingrad did not come
alone. A week before the city fell,

the Germans learned that the Allies
would demand unconditional surrender.

There was, then, to be
no mercy for the Germans.

Nazi and non-Nazi
both lost some illusions

and drew a little
closer together.

The escape hatches
had been bolted.

This was to be a total
war, fought to the finish.

BIELENBERG: The general
feeling was, well, we can do nothing.

It doesn't matter what we
do. We'd better stick it out.

Ausharren was the word, I
remember, on everyone's lips.

There's no alternative. We've
got to fight to the bitter end.

And this Goebbels used to
the uttermost in his propaganda.

[CHEERING]

NARRATOR: Two
weeks after Stalingrad,

Goebbels brought a picked Nazi
audience to a last mass frenzy.

NARRATOR: It was his supreme
moment, the proclaiming of total war

and the invoking of the
nation's hidden power.

NARRATOR: "Now, folk,
rise up and storm, break loose."

They were the words of 1812,

of the national uprising
against Napoleon.

They were empty now.

[♪ FANFARE]

In 1943 it was better
listening to music than to news.

[SINGS IN GERMAN]

NARRATOR: It was total
war and retreat on all fronts.

Total war meant that even
German women must work.

It brought its own sour humor.

TUCKING: There was a slogan,
"Do enjoy war. Peace will be dreadful."

NARRATOR: There
was a new equality

among the boys drafted
to the mines and factories.

The Hitler Youth was mobilized into
production and eventually into battle.

The barriers between people crumbled
as they had crumbled in the London Blitz.

People wanted to huddle
together, to sing and forget.

By the morning,
they might be dead.

[GUNFIRE]

By day the American bomber
fleets ranged over the Reich.

At night came the British.

In the shelters the
people waited for dawn

and wondered if their
cities would still be there.

TUCKING: When we had the
first bombs, we were shocked.

We saw all the sky
lighted up from the fire.

It was an enormous
and a dreadful sight.

We were very angry when we saw

that so many residential
areas were destroyed.

There were so few men left

that everybody who had
the strength was firefighting.

NARRATOR: One by one the German
cities were incinerated by firestorms.

Ten days' raids on
Hamburg left 40,000 dead.

Goebbels noted,
"The people in the west

are gradually beginning
to lose courage."

"Hell like that
is hard to bear."

BIELENBERG: I
think that the bombing

hadn't the effect one
would have thought.

It had the effect of
bringing people together.

If you were all under
the same bombs,

it didn't matter whether
your neighbour was a Nazi

or what they were.

NARRATOR: To
avoid seeing the ruins,

Hitler's rare visits to
Berlin were made by night.

And yet banners were
ordered for his birthday.

They read, "Our walls have
broken, but not our hearts."

JUNGE: Hitler lost more
and more his sense of reality.

He never, never had the will

that he must see with his
own eyes what the war was.

We had no
information from outside

and so I had the feeling
to live in a monastery,

in a concentration camp.

One of the generals once said,
"I feel like a concentration camp."

"We are included

and we all use
the same phrases."

"We are all thinking the same.
We are all hearing the same."

"We are all led in our thoughts

and our feelings by Hitler."

We all were playing
in a play, each his role

and he was the only
one who knew the script.

He made us all do our
play and speak our text.

Nobody else knew
how it would end.

Neither Hitler nor Göring nor Himmler
were seen in public. Only Goebbels.

Whenever there was
a very heavy bombing,

Goebbels stood there on the
marketplace and held his speeches

and tried to say ausharren.

I personally had respect,

because there was
a sort of inspiring.

You were sort of in a trance.

[♪ "THE MASTERSINGERS
OF NUREMBERG" - WAGNER]

NARRATOR: A strained, exhausted
nation could still lose itself in music.

The orchestras still gave
what was great and true

in the tradition of German art.

In the galleries there was
only the empty grimacing

of Nazi painting,
Nazi sculpture.

True Aryan models
simpered and scowled,

their features carefully designed
to portray the victorious Nordic race.

Race was the empire
of Himmler and the SS.

But now the SS
was itself an empire.

Himmler, the ex-chicken-farmer,

ruled the death camps and
the concentration camps.

The SS had its own schools
and factories and courts.

It administered huge
tracts of the occupied east.

It was the instrument of German
dominion over Europe. It was even an army.

The generals had little control

over the hundreds of thousands
of elite troops in the Waffen-SS.

Into the SS training schools were
drawn Aryan-looking volunteers

from the occupied countries,

for the SS state was to be not
merely German but European.

SCHULZE-KOSSENS: All had volunteered
for active service in the Waffen-SS

because they regarded
the fight against Bolshevism

as the most important
task in Europe.

New was the point
of European education

because we were of the opinion

that only an imaginary contrast

existed between the nations

who had the same or were
from the same origin, yes.

NARRATOR: For those of different
race origin, there was no place.

For the Jews there was
deportation to eastern ghettos

and then the gas
chambers of the SS.

The official word
was "resettlement".

Most Germans preferred to believe
that it meant no more than that.

SPEER: Hitler often mentioned
that he is hating the Jews

and he gave many examples already
in an early time when I was with him,

and I should have been
warned that he is serious about it

because he proved to be serious
about other things he predicted too.

[SPEAKS GERMAN]

TRANSLATOR: One night, it must have
been around midnight, the doorbell rang.

I opened it and in front of me

there stood a Jewish couple.

This was how I began
to help persecuted Jews.

All of a sudden I'd entered
into an invisible circle

of people who
smuggled Jews about.

As soon as one hiding
place had been detected,

they were quickly passed on.

They'd always
move about at night.

That's how I came to belong to
a group who had to put up Jews

when they were
passed on like this.

I've never found out who it was
who'd sent them to me in the first place.

Decent people, I'm sure.

The problems started with the
feeding of the Jewish people.

They neither had food rationing
cards nor did they have any money,

so we in our turn
made use of friends

who exchanged their
cigarette ration cards

for the odd potato
or some bread.

One day a friend of ours who used
to collect food cards for these Jews

came to me and she
came with another woman

with dyed blonde hair.

I can see her sitting there
now twisting her wedding ring

and telling me that it
wouldn't be for long,

that she would help me in the house
and her husband need never go out.

He could live in the
cellar or wherever.

NARRATOR: But Christabel
Bielenberg's husband was away

and was involved in a
plot to overthrow Hitler.

She consulted her trusted
neighbour and friend Carl Langbehn,

another conspirator.

Langbehn told her
compassionately but firmly

that the risks to herself and her family
and to the conspiracy were too great.

I was astonished -
overcome, really -

at the response that I
got from my neighbour

who told me that under no circumstances
whatsoever could I house these people,

that housing of Jews
meant concentration camp

not only for myself but for my
husband, possibly also for my children.

I can remember going
through and out into the road

and out of the darkness came a voice
- I knew there was somebody there -

came a voice saying:

"Frau Doktor... Frau Bielenberg,

haben Sie einen
Schluss gefasst?"

Which means, "Have you decided?"

And I simply couldn't say no.

I just said, "Well, I can't
for longer than two days."

And I let him into the cellar.

They stayed for two days

and on the second day

or rather in the evening,
they must have left

because in the
morning she was gone,

the cellar was empty,

the little bed I'd put
up all tidily arranged

and they had gone.

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

is because after they left

I realised that Hitler had
turned me into a murderer.

One day in '44,

Gauleiter Hanke came
in my office and told me

that he was visiting a
concentration camp in Upper Silesia

and warned me never to go
in a concentration camp there

because horrible
things would happen.

This together with
other hints I got

should have made my decision

to go to Hitler
immediately or to Himmler

and to ask them what is going on

and to take my own steps.

But I didn't do it and not
doing it was, I think nowadays,

the biggest fault in my life.

We felt that people should know

what was going on,

and maybe typical
is this little experience

which I had one day

standing in the line for
vegetables or something like that.

I told my neighbours
standing around me

that now they start to kill the
Jews in the concentration camps,

that it is not true that
they only are brought there

and can live there as they
live here, as it was told them.

They are killed and they
even make soap out of them.

I know that.

And they said, "Frau Bonhoeffer, if
you don't stop telling such horror stories

you will end in a concentration camp
too and nobody of us can help you."

"It's not true what
you're telling."

"You shouldn't believe these things.
You heard them from foreign broadcasts."

"They tell these things to make
enemies against Germany."

I said, "No, that's not from broadcasts.
I know that directly from first hand."

"You can be sure
it is that way."

And coming home I told
my husband in the evening

and he was not at all applauding
to me - on the very contrary.

He said, "My dear, sorry to say,

but you are absolutely
idiotic, what you are doing."

"Please understand,

a dictatorship is like a snake."

"If you put your
foot on its tail,

as you do it, it
will just bite you

and nobody will be helped."

"You have to strike the head."

NARRATOR: Only the
commanders of the army

could strike
effectively at the head.

Others had struck bravely
at the tail and perished.

In Munich, a few students
around the Scholl brother and sister

had protested with leaflets
and been slaughtered.

In Berlin a communist spy team

led by Harro Schulze-Boysen
and the Harnacks had been crushed.

Communists, socialists, Christians,
anonymous men and women

defied the dictator
in tiny groups.

150,000 Germans suffered prison
or worse for political resistance.

The plot against the snake's
head was a federation.

There were conservatives like
Goerdeler, aristocrats like Moltke,

churchmen like Bonhoeffer,
diplomats like Trott.

Faced with defeat, many
staff officers joined in.

All were slow to accept
that to strike at the head

demanded the
physical murder of Hitler.

But in 1944, there
appeared a man for action -

Colonel Count Claus
von Stauffenberg.

MAN: All the difference
was brought in, of course,

when Stauffenberg
came to Berlin.

He had lost his left eye,

his left hand,

or three fingers
of his left hand,

and his right hand altogether.

Originally he was only the
planner of the coup d'état,

but he had to report
to Hitler's headquarters

and to attend conferences there.

This enabled him to get near to
Hitler and then to make an attempt,

which he did on July 20, '44.

[EXPLOSION]

JUNGE: Suddenly there
was a very alarming bang.

We heard voices
crying for a doctor

and we saw some generals
with bloodstained uniforms.

Then came one of the adjutants

and said, "There was a bomb
explosion, but the Führer is not hurt."

"He's still alive."

We went towards Hitler's bunker

and we met him.

Maybe it was an hour
after this explosion.

He looked funny

because his hair
stood up like a brush

and his trousers were slit

in small stripes.

He said, "You see, fate has
saved me for my mission."

"I am to do what I must do."

NARRATOR: At the
War Ministry in Berlin,

the plotting generals
believed that Hitler was dead.

JOHN: When I came to the headquarters,
Stauffenberg was busy with telephoning

the various army commands, and
Haeften informed me of what had happened,

how they'd thrown the bomb,
and then he said, "Hitler's dead."

We did believe it because
Stauffenberg then came in.

We had a short talk with him - he
was much too busy to give details.

He said, "Hitler's dead.
Leave everything alone."

"We'll see what can be done."

NARRATOR: The man the plotters ordered
to occupy the city was Major Otto Remer,

a fanatical soldier programmed
to obey any superior order.

At first he obeyed the plotters,
then Goebbels got hold of him.

[REMER SPEAKS GERMAN]

TRANSLATOR: Goebbels was really
very pleased to see me. He was beaming.

He said, "Remer, what
do you know about all this?"

"What's going on here?
What orders have you got?"

I said, "Minister, I have come to you
so that you can clarify the situation."

Goebbels replied, "They're trying
to pull the wool over your eyes."

"Hitler's alive. I've
just spoken to him."

I was so astonished that I said,
"Please, let me speak to the Führer,"

and this was done.

On the other end of the line Hitler
said, "Herr Remer, you see I am alive."

"I am Adolf Hitler. You
recognise my voice."

"Now do you believe I'm alive?"

NARRATOR: Now
Remer was reprogrammed.

He marched back to the War Ministry
and arrested everyone he found.

The plot collapsed. The
wavering army returned to its oath.

MAN: Der Angeklagte
von Witzleben.

NARRATOR: Many of the
plotters, after prison and torture,

were to face a
ghastly sham trial

conducted by Roland Freisler,
the star judge of Nazi Germany.

Their families were seized and
their children sent to orphanages.

The luckier conspirators,
among them Stauffenberg,

had been shot out of hand
in the War Ministry courtyard.

Some attempted to
explain their motives in court.

Count von Schwerin was an
officer who had served in Poland.

JUDGE:

JUDGE:

NARRATOR: The condemned
were hanged slowly on meat hooks.

A film of their agony was
made and shown later to Hitler.

But the plot left Hitler a
frightened, damaged man.

The repression after 20 July
broke the power of the aristocracy

and of the Prussian
tradition forever.

But there was no ruling
class to take their place.

To Hitler, all generals
now seemed suspect.

Only Goebbels, Bormann and
Himmler could get close to him.

JUNGE: Slowly but
steadily he became weak.

The doctors went in and out
and he became totally apathetic.

Not interested in anything.

It was a very critical
situation on the West Front

and on the East Front, too.

And some days it was
like Hitler didn't exist.

He was deteriorating
suddenly in his health,

but I wouldn't go
so far as to say

that he was no more
responsible for what he was doing.

In some ways he was...

I have the experience
of a prisoner of 20 years.

In some ways he was
behaving like a prisoner.

NARRATOR: Through the devastation
the Germans somehow kept going.

Down ruined streets, the workers
made their way to ruined factories

where a few machines
could still be made to turn.

Life retreated to the cellars.

People learned that eight bombs
fell in a row and then you were safe.

They learned to
live a day at a time.

TUCKING: It was really
dreadful to endure it.

We were so tired.

You were always in a hurry.

All the railways were destroyed
and the lorries had no petrol.

We had rations
from the beginning

and step by step it
was worse and worse.

NARRATOR: Germany itself
was near the end of its tether.

Seven million foreign forced
laborers were not enough.

Everything - oil, metal,
food - was running out.

Everything from clothes to planes
was patched and made to serve again.

Men, too.

The war cripples were
recycled for the factories.

The brain-damaged soldiers
were taught to speak again.

Nun wollen wir
einmal das hauchen.

Was ist das für ein Laut?

A.

Hauchen wir das
A, dann heißt es?

Ha.

Nun werde ich Ihnen
dieses Buch hier zeigen.

Was sollen wir hauchen?

Ha, ha, ha.

-Schnell hintereinander.
-Ha, ha, ha.

NARRATOR: Now the enemy was approaching
the very frontiers of the Reich.

The Volkssturm, the home guard

of the elderly, the underaged
and the unfit, was sworn in.

[MEN REPEAT OATH]

Männer des Berliner
Volkssturms, ihr habt soeben...

NARRATOR: They listened with
closed faces to oratory from Goebbels

about fighting
to the bitter end.

GOEBBELS: ..wehrbereiter und
wehrentschlossener Männer verfügt,

die den festen und
unerschütterlichen Willen haben...

NARRATOR: The Volkssturm trudged
out through that same Brandenburg Gate

which had seen the soldiers march
back from Paris four years before.

They went towards the Russians,

keeping their
thoughts to themselves.