Original subtitles

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find disturbing

First light on 6 June, 1944.

An armada of more than 5,000 Allied warships and landing craft,

protected by barrage-balloons, closed on the Normandy coast.

Among the thousands of Allied troops crossing the Channel that morning,

was a Hollywood director called George Stevens.

Stevens was aboard HMS Belfast,

in charge of the newsreel team recording the event for the US army.

But as well as the official version,

Stevens also took these unique pictures for himself - in colour.

Stevens had brought out from California

a private stock of the revolutionary new 16mm Kodachrome.

The colour and clarity are remarkable.

By half past five, the German coastal defences were within range of the guns.

The assault on occupied Europe was about to begin.

A few hours after the main assault force, Stevens himself went ashore.

He landed at Bernieres-Sur-Mer,

in the centre of the beach code-named Juno.

By breakfast time, the people of Normandy were waking to an historic announcement

from the Allies' supreme commander, General Eisenhower.

'People of Western Europe!

'A landing was made this morning in France

'by troops of the Allied expeditionary force.

'I have this message for you.

'Although the assault may not have been in your country,

'the hour of your liberation is approaching.'

A British tank crew, successfully across a German minefield, poses.

Stevens commanded the Special Coverage Unit, an elite team of about 30 cameramen and directors.

Attached to the Allied supreme headquarters,

they could move about as they wished.

It was this superb access which enabled Stevens to shoot

one of the most evocative home movies in history.

These 14 battered cans contain the colour footage

George Stevens shot during the last year of the war.

Buried in a Hollywood film archive,

forgotten for almost 40 years,

it now constitutes the most important colour record we have

of the war in Europe.

And none of it has ever been seen in public before.

George Stevens was appointed commander of the Special Coverage Unit by General Eisenhower

to improve the film reporting of the war.

Stevens himself died in 1975,

but we've tracked down some of the surviving members of his team,

including director Holly Morse,

cameraman Dick Kent

and Ivan Moffat, the English-born scriptwriter.

Using their memories and George Stevens' footage,

we've tried to re-create their journey across Europe.

Their story ends in Berlin.

It begins one summer's evening in June 1944,

when the unit pitched camp for the first time in Normandy.

RADIO ANNOUNCER: 'And now, Captain Glenn Miller!'

APPLAUSE 'Thank you and good evening, everybody!

'Our boys have fired the opening guns of the drive to liberate the world.

'Now music. Here are the boys with their rocket-gun version of Flying Home.'

MUSIC: "Flying Home" by the Glenn Miller Orchestra

The Special Coverage Unit called themselves The Hollywood Irregulars.

We had a sign up there

that started off as New York and Paris on it,

and gradually more and more was added on

until finally at the bottom,

it was Shirley 4,200 miles or something like that.

Shirley was one of the boys' girlfriends.

I believe it was Chicago, but I couldn't be sure.

George Stevens had the rank of lieutenant-colonel

and a reputation as a successful director.

Before the war, he made Gunga Din and after it, such famous pictures as Shane and Giant.

George was one of probably the best directors

that I've ever seen or worked with.

And George felt very strong about the war.

He knew what his mission was.

He knew what the war was about

and he was very dedicated

to the best motion picture coverage of this tremendous event.

We were all highly professional.

We'd all been in the motion picture business for some time.

And we'd all made many, many motion pictures.

We felt a little more qualified than some of the Signal Corps cameramen.

We had cameramen like William Miller

who was an Academy Award winner.

Joe Brock who is currently thumbing all the great shows of today.

We were all experts in our field.

The unit's camp was near Carentan,

midway between the two American beaches, Utah and Omaha,

which pumped men and material into the beachhead.

'The overwhelming impression was of an extraordinary logistical power.'

Of thousands and thousands of ships,

and hundreds of thousands of tons of material being landed 24 hours a day,

pouring inland across every lane and every road in that beachhead.

It was a sight you'd never dreamt of seeing.

'If there is victory, which we assume there would be,

'this is what it is going to be made of.

'These were the sinews of war.

'One almost felt that such things as regimental traditions, individual gallantry,

'elite brigades of soldiers and all that was hardly to be reckoned with

'against the scales of this amazing accumulation of stuff.'

Four weeks after D-Day, the unit was summoned to the Allied Armies

headquarters in France for a photo call.

General Bernard Law Montgomery, commander-in-chief, Allied Land Forces, was present

along with General Omar Bradley, commander of the American First Army.

While George Stevens concentrated on the official newsreel coverage,

he gave his colour camera to his sergeant, Bill Hamilton,

who took these pictures.

Among the commanders, on the left is George Patton,

a flamboyant figure with his famous pearl-handled pistol.

The generals were worried about the state of the campaign,

but, publicly, Montgomery radiated confidence.

MONTGOMERY: 'The pace has been hot,

'and it was clear that someone would have to give way sooner or later.

'It was also clear that the Allied soldiers would see the thing

'through to the end and never give up.

'So the Germans have been forced to give ground, which is very right and proper.

'The Allied armies fighting in Normandy have good grounds for satisfaction.

'So to every Allied soldier in Normandy, I say, "Well done! Well done indeed!"'

In reality, as Montgomery was well aware,

Normandy had become a battle of attrition.

In the campaign's first 12 weeks,

over 50,000 Allied troops were killed

and 150,000 were wounded.

On the German side, the suffering was even worse.

The ordinary German soldiers fought with great skill and tenacity.

They sustained a quarter of a million casualties.

One German commander was moved to call the battle "a monstrous blood bath."

The Allies tried to break out, using their overwhelming air superiority

to pulverise the German positions.

Day after day, the ancient towns and villages of Normandy

were turned into landscapes of rubble.

On 25 July, in one of the biggest raids of all,

2,500 Allied bombers

flew over the film unit's camp.

Their objective - to destroy the German positions

west of the town of Saint Lo.

Wave after wave of German bombers came in.

They were dropping their bombs on one particular little place, Saint Lo.

And the concussion was just terrible.

This push went on for hours and hours,

plane after plane.

The skies were full of bombers...

..coming over, everywhere you looked.

And dropping rows of bombs

just ahead of where we were.

To clear out that area...of Germans.

Saint Lo had been a peaceful and picturesque market town,

famous for its medieval churches.

Then came its liberation.

12 shattering Allied air raids destroyed the German garrison

not before they'd flattened the town.

800 of Saint Lo's civilians were killed in a single Allied raid.

Saint Lo's fate was typical of the fate wrought across Normandy

by the British and Americans

as they struggled to escape their bridge head.

After the thing was over, the bombing was over,

we pushed forward and you'd pick Germans out of foxholes

and things like that, they were just...

devastated by what had happened, they couldn't believe that.

And they were just out of their minds.

I'm sure it took them a long time to get back to reality.

The smell of death, I still smell,

once in a while at night. I wake up screaming.

And this is 1985.

And that was 1944 that that happened,

and it still bears with you.

The devastation was so extreme

that I'll never outlive it.

At last, in the final week of July, the German resistance began to break.

Thousands of prisoners surrendered,

to be herded into makeshift camps.

After two months of constant bombardment,

the Germans' fighting spirit had collapsed in the face of the Allied firepower.

For most Americans, this was their first contact with the enemy en masse.

An unforgettable impression of exhaustion and defeat.

There was an unmistakeable smell of leather and sweat.

They had a lot of leather, the Germans used a lot of leather in their equipment.

Much more than we did and there was a smell of sweaty leather,

and unwashed uniforms

and a peculiar smell one got used to,

came to recognise wherever they had been

among prisoners of war.

Columns of German prisoners jammed the Normandy roads.

By the end of August, more than 200,000 had surrended.

The Allies were now pushing the Germans back.

The American third army commanded by General Patton

swung west into Brittany.

The Special Coverage Unit went with them,

finally leaving their base camp in Carentan,

passing through Saint Lo and arriving on 18 August

at the port of Saint Malo.

Some buildings were still on fire,

the town had only been liberated the previous day

after heavy fighting.

EXPLOSIONS

Outside the harbour, on the tiny island of Cizembra,

the German garrison refused to surrender.

The Americans bombed it from the shore and the air.

EXPLOSIONS

Despite the shelling, the Germans held out for another two weeks.

Stevens and his unit moved on to join the American armour, now racing east towards Paris.

MUSIC: "Alouette" by the Glenn Miller Orchestra

# Alouette, gentille alouette

# Alouette, je te plumerai

# Je te plumerai la tete, Je te plumerai la tete

# Et la tete... Et la tete! Et le bec... Et le bec!

# Et la bouche... Et la bouche! Alouette... Alouette!

# Oh... Alouette

# Gentille alouette

# Alouette, je te plumerai

# Alouette... Alouette! Alouette... Alouette!

# Alouette! #

Stevens and his men crossed the Seine by the army's hastily-built pontoon-bridge.

They were now only 30 miles from the French capital.

On 23 August, Eisenhower agreed to give the Free French army the honour of liberating Paris.

Units of the French 2nd Armoured Division,

commanded by General Leclerc, began moving into the outskirts of the city.

As the plan was explained, Stevens saw an opportunity to record the crowning moment of the liberation.

In a field near Fontainbleau, he approached a Free French colonel,

and received permission to join them on their drive into the city.

'The atmosphere was halfway between a carnival and a bullfight.

'The whole purpose of the war seemed to be coming true.

'It was a rare moment for the soldiers to experience.'

'The streets were lined with happy, happy people...

'..Women, children, men, tight in the streets -

'just enough room to allow our jeeps and vehicles through.

'They were waving. They were kissing us.

'The women and girls were jumping on board the jeeps, tanks and trucks

'to kiss the boys.

'To ride into Paris through a gauntlet like that was a very exciting thing.

'To think that we were part

'of freeing the French people from this occupation by the Germans...'

Stevens had barely set up his cameras when Leclerc arrived at his headquarters

with the commander of the German garrison.

General Dietrich von Choltitz, to Hitler's fury, had agreed to surrender Paris

rather than see it destroyed by fighting.

A crowd began to gather.

Von Choltitz said he hadn't expected to get out alive.

When the two men emerged, Leclerc called the cameras over to record the scene.

The Germans' prompt capitulation had saved the city.

ANNOUNCER: 'BBC Home Service. Here is the News.

'Paris has been liberated.

'A communique from General Koenig announces that it has been liberated by French forces of the interior.'

In the confusion, however, not everyone had heard the news.

GUNSHOTS

Isolated groups of Germans continued firing.

GUNSHOTS

I think I ended up under a Jeep.

I don't know where Dick was, someplace else.

But Stevens was standing alone out in front.

And he looked around...

looked down at me,

and said, "You can't make any pictures from down there.

"This is where the action is."

You didn't know whether you were gonna get shot,

or whether you were gonna get kissed.

You didn't know which!

It was happening all about us.

To stop the shooting, captured German officers

were dispatched across the city to spread word of the ceasefire.

White flags provided protection to some extent.

Ivan Moffat was detailed to escort one nervous German officer.

We drove off with some difficulty through this enormous angry,

ferocious, rejoicing crowd which was on the Place de Rambuleau.

And he was spat at.

We were all drenched in spit.

And I had to sort of reassure him

that he wasn't going to be lynched or something.

At 4.30, De Gaulle himself, leader of the Free French,

arrived to confer with Leclerc.

De Gaulle was the dignity of France made flesh.

At his insistence, the Germans surrendered not to the Allies, but to the French government.

"We are living", he said that afternoon,

"through minutes which transcend our poor individual lives."

'It was intoxicating.

'No matter what would happen afterwards,

'nothing would ever exceed the emotional experience of 25 August 1944.

'And nothing did.'

'Unless you've lived through it or been there,

'you can't imagine how the Allies were greeted.

'The French populace went crazy and mad, absolutely wild,

'kissing you and giving you a drink, and "Come on over to the house".

'And you used to say, "No, I've work to do."'

There were girls and more girls! How can I explain it to you?

You had to beat them off!

CROWD SINGS "LA MARSEILLAISE"

MUSIC: "La Marseillaise" played by a military band

Four days later,

the Americans made a reviewing stand out of a bailey bridge.

General Bradley asked De Gaulle to take the salute at a victory parade.

MUSIC: "Over There" played by a military band

The moment the American 28th Division had passed down the Champs Elysee,

it accelerated out of the city to rejoin the Allied offensive.

It had taken less than 12 weeks since D-Day to reach Paris.

Watching the parade,

one member of Stevens' unit bet another a hundred dollars

that the war would be over by October.

The German resistance was collapsing all around.

Quite aside from the exhilaration and the wonder of Paris itself,

there was this marvellous feeling that the war was in fact over.

That winter, the German resistance did not collapse. It stiffened.

In the towns of Belgium and later in Germany,

the Allies were often forced to fight their way forward

street by street.

GUNSHOTS

This region was the scene of Hitler's last great offensive in the West.

He attacked through the Ardennes known as the Battle of the Bulge.

On 16th December, along a 60-mile front,

200,000 German troops attacked American positions

in Belgium and Luxembourg.

Their objective was to re-capture the port of Antwerp.

Six weeks of heavy fighting cut a swathe of destruction

through south-east Belgium.

Refugees fled their shattered homes to escape the fighting.

The Americans eventually stemmed the German advance,

but they paid a heavy price.

Over 19,000 GIs were killed,

47,000 wounded.

The mid-winter days were short and dark, and the weather freezing.

Such miserable fighting conditions seemed more like the First than the Second World War.

One of Stevens' cameramen was ordered to make a film about the dangers trench-foot,

to which thousands of men succumbed.

'It was mud and snow...

'and wet and uncomfortable.

'It was just... An army in winter is not very happy,

'especially at the Front where they're righting.

'It's just miserable, trying to keep warm,

'and trying to meet the enemy.'

Obeying orders...

..and Christmas away from home.

It was very demoralising in that sense.

CHOIR SINGS: "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen"

An American heavy mortar detachment, clearing out the countryside

for the infantry to move forward.

In the spring of 1945, after the frustrations of the winter,

the Allies were once more advancing into Germany.

On 24th March, the British and Americans mounted Operation Varsity.

22,000 parachutists and glidermen supported the land forces crossing the Rhine

in the largest one-day air-borne operation of the war.

Once across the natural barrier of the Rhine,

Stevens' unit followed the American 1st Army into Germany.

In two and a half weeks, they penetrated 150 miles,

until, on 11th April, they reached one of Germany's greatest

and most secret installations - Nordhausen.

Driven into the mountainside at Nordhausen,

the Allies found 40 miles of passages and tunnels, housing the world's largest underground factory.

This was Nordhausen's product - the V1 flying bomb.

Each flying bomb was capable of delivering a ton of explosive

a distance of 200 miles.

Nordhausen's factory line assembly was such

that each cost £125 - less than a Volkswagen car.

These sophisticated liquid fuel rocket engines belonged to the V2.

Nordhausen turned out V2 rocket bombs at a rate of 700 a month.

Another section of the factory was set aside for the manufacture of jet engines.

The Messerschmitt 262 was the first operational jet interceptor in the world.

But the brilliance of German science co-existed at Nordhausen

with the brutality of the Nazi state.

The factory had 13,000 slave labourers -

Czechs, Poles, Russians, Frenchmen, Belgians, and Italians.

The Allies brought men up from below ground to lie in the sun.

Some of them hadn't seen daylight for a year.

'Ken and I walked through one barracks.

'There was a man lying in a bed, with another two men in a bunk.

'We said we were Americans.'

This one man was very happy,

with a weak, sick face.

And we interviewed some of the people.

When we came back, that man had rolled over and died.

'We saw some ambulatory prisoners who had bandages on them.

'They were slowly walking around.

'There were many men left to die.'

In all, 20,000 of Nordhausen's slaves were killed.

Some died in the factory, but most were worked till they dropped

and then shipped to extermination camps for disposal.

Ivan Moffat spoke to one prisoner, a Belgian civil servant,

just before he died.

I asked him what he thought of the Germans

and he said, "Monsieur, you can take a thousand German children

"and bring them before me lying here, before my eyes,

"and you can shoot them, I wouldn't blink an eyelid."

German resistance in the West was now virtually over.

A week after the liberation of Nordhausen,

the German Army Group B was encircled.

The Allies had expected to take about 150,000 men prisoners.

Instead, by 18th April, they had captured 320,000,

including 25 generals and an admiral.

This was an even larger German force than the Russians had captured at Stalingrad.

'It was extraordinary to see them suddenly. They were in fields

'usually below the road.

'Masses and masses of them - some were admirals, generals,

'even field marshals, privates - everybody coralled there together.

'They were quite co-operative in a way.

'They wanted to get on with what was next.

'There was an odd feeling of all this enormous power

'having laid down its arms, standing there before us -

'a very strange sensation.

'Not of victory, but a feeling that this formidable machine

'was there like a whole mass of sheep.

'They were there, defenceless and unarmed,

'ready to do our bidding.

'I suppose all armies feel that in the face of prisoners,

'but that was heightened because the Germans

'were probably a more professional and better trained army than we were.

'And there they all were before us.'

Most of the German prisoners were happy to be in Allied hands.

They had at least escaped the Russians.

The Allied advance had reached the River Elbe on 15th April and halted.

East of the river was to be the responsibility of the Russians.

In the next nine days, they advanced over 100 miles,

until they too reached the Elbe.

The armies came face to face at Torgau.

The first contacts between the Americans and the Russians

began at about lunchtime on 25th April.

Despite language and culture differences,

there was an unmistakable emotional affinity.

Here were ordinary soldiers, thousands of miles from home,

within sight of victory over of a common enemy.

'The first Russian I saw

'was a rather hoary soldier.

'It sounds very corny and improbable,

'but he actually came up to me and grinned.

'He embraced me and said, "Kapitalisti! Kommunisti!"

'It sounds awfully unlikely, but it happened.'

'It felt like this was what we'd been working for.

'The link-up with the Russians

'signified the end of the German army.'

'They used many more women on front-line duty,

'or right behind the front lines, than we did.

'They were quite tough, but I guess you get tough

'when you get shot at long enough.'

General Emil Reinhart, the local American commander,

had been furious when he'd first heard of the fraternisation.

His men had been ordered not to stray beyond the Allied lines.

But by mid-afternoon, it was clear that nothing could be done.

The general swallowed his anger and joined in the ceremony

the press was insisting on stage-managing.

RADIO: 'This is General Bradley's headquarters. East and West have met.

'At 20 minutes to five on Wednesday afternoon, 25th April, 1945,

'American troops of General Bradley's 12th Army Group

'made contact with Marshal Koniev's 1st Ukrainian Army Group

'near the German town of Torgau on the Elbe.

'This is the news for which the Allied world has been waiting.

'Nazi Germany, toppling to their final collapse, has been split clean in half.

'The forces of liberation have joined hands.'

For thousands of Allied prisoners of war held captive in Germany,

now was the moment of liberation.

The Allied advance freed men of many nations - Africans,

Indians, Algerians.

Some men had been in captivity for more than five years.

Others, like these British paratroopers, had been prisoners for only a few months.

In 1945, the Allies repatriated more than 1.5 million men from German prison camps.

As Nazi Germany split apart that April, refugees and PoWs spilled onto the roads

until it seemed that the entire continent was on the move.

'The whole of Europe was like some enormous crossroads -

'dusty from all the vehicles churning up the roads.

'In the green of the spring, there was this dust

'and this constant stream of all the men of Europe going home,

'pushing perambulators and carts.

'Norwegians going north, Italians going south, Belgians and the French going west,

'people going to Russia and Poland.

'Everywhere, people were passing on this endless crossroads of Europe.'

The war in Europe was within a week of its end

when George Stevens and his team received orders to move on.

From Torgau in the north, they drove 250 miles south

to somewhere the Americans wanted recorded for posterity.

The place was near a small Bavarian town called Dachau.

Dachau was Germany's oldest concentration camp.

The following scenes still shock.

40 years ago, their impact on the camera crew photographing them was devastating.

First thing at Dachau was these open box cars

on a railroad track leading into the gate of Dachau.

Snow-covered bodies...

two and three thick, lying on the floor...

These people had been transported from another camp to Dachau,

probably for the crematorium... and the gas chambers.

And there was... Some of them didn't make it.

'Man lying at the opening of the box car was...

'head down, his feet dangling outside and his head over.'

So, there were probably 20 box cars with these bodies,

'snow-covered bodies, because it was winter.

'Prisoners only had their one prisoner suit,

'no overcoats or blankets.

This was a consignment of Hungarian Polish Jews

averted westwards to avoid the advancing red army.

At some point during the journey, more than 2,000 had died of cold and hunger.

There were hundreds, if not thousands, of bodies lying

exposed, or lying in striped pyjamas in these open box cars.

'Some of the flesh had been gnawed away

'because of desperate attempts of some people to get food.

'Some of it was raw, and that was absolutely appalling.

'Many prisoners there, probably 3-4,000 in barracks...

'some healthy, some very sick,

'dying daily.

'When they died, they were taken outside the barracks,

'laid on the...street with their head up against the curb,

'white...

'..very thin, white bodies, naked.

'Other prisoners probably took their clothing.

'Naked bodies...five feet high...

'..two deep...

'about 30 or 40 feet long,

'waiting to go to the crematorium.

Dachau was not a mass extermination camp like Auschwitz.

Nevertheless, in its 12-year existence,

it is estimated that upwards of 30,000 people died here.

Beaten, tortured, starved and subjected to medical experiments,

many of Dachau's 35,000 inmates were in a dreadful condition

when the Americans liberated the camp on 29th April.

Although years of war might have brutalised their feelings,

nothing had prepared the Allied troops for such a shock.

As a 20-year-old young man

with a sheltered life behind him...

..it was a terrible shock.

How can one human being do this to another human being?

Impossible to think of!

How does one justify...

this mass murder?

You just want to hate the Germans - all Germans - at this time.

The captured German guards were terrified - with good cause.

Furious and sickened, the GIs shot 122 of them on the spot.

Some of the SS disguised themselves as prisoners,

but their healthy faces gave them away.

The Americans held identity parades to pick out guards,

hiding among the inmates.

An American major, apparently barely in control of himself,

listens to the excuses of some of the guards.

It was this maddening self-assurance which provoked the GIs to acts of vengeance.

In addition to the SS guards killed by the Americans,

40 or 50 were murdered by the inmates themselves.

They were beaten to death with shovels, clubs and rifle butts.

For the inmates, the misery of Dachau didn't end with its liberation.

The camp was in the grip of a typhus epidemic.

The entire place was sprayed with DDT.

Prisoners were de-loused.

Even so, in the month after the Americans reached Dachau,

a further 2,500 people died.

Most succumbed to typhus,

others to the shock of over-eating after years of starvation.

Some simply died from the sheer excitement.

Relief was mingled with resentment.

The US authorities refused to let prisoners leave the camp

for fear they spread disease or crime.

Dachau was therefore still full, and Stevens and his crew still filming

when news came a week later of the Allied victory in Europe.

RADIO ANNOUNCER: 'Good morning from the White House in Washington.

'Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.'

PRESIDENT: 'The world has been freed of the evil forces, which, for five years,

'has imprisoned the bodies and broken the lives of millions upon millions of free-born men.

'The flags of freedom fly all over Europe.'

ANNOUNCER: 'This is the BBC Home Service.

'We're interrupting programmes to make the following announcement.

'It is understood that, in accordance with arrangements between the three greatpowers,

'tomorrow, Tuesday, will be treated as Victory in Europe Day,

'and will be regarded as a holiday. The day following, Wednesday...'

WINSTON CHURCHILL: 'Our gratitude to all our allies goes forth, from all ourhearts,

'in this island and throughout the British empire.

'We may allow ourselves

'a brief period of rejoicing.

'Advance Britannia!

'Long live the cause of freedom!

'God save the King!'

SINGING

ANNOUNCER: 'This is London.'

AMERICAN REPORTER: 'As you walk down the street, you hear singing from open windows.'

THE ANDREWS SISTERS: # I wrote my mother

# I wrote my father

# And now I wanna be sure Very, very, sure

# Of you

# Don't sit under the apple tree With anyone else but me

# Anyone else but me

# Anyone else but me No, no, no

# Don't sit under the apple tree With anyone else but me

# Till I come marching home... #

With the war in Europe over, George Stevens and the Special Coverage Unit

began the last leg of their journey.

Their final destination was Berlin,

but first, curiousity drew them east to Berchtesgaden.

This was the Berghoff, Adolf Hitler's private mountian home

with its tea rooms and terraces.

And this was Hitler's famous picture window

with its spectacular view over the Obersalzberg.

Scattered pictures, records and crockery were liberated by the crew for souvenirs.

'I captured most of Hitler's dinnerware up there.'

I took it back to Paris and traded it for cognacs,

so an awful lot of Hitler's dinnerware is around Paris.

At last in July, the unit received clearance from the Russians to enter Berlin.

'The Russians were very systematic about cleaning up the city.

'They'd take a block and then somebody who wasn't a true Nazi,

'they made him the boss.

'They'd form endless lines and they pass all these bricks out,

'from one to the other, and that's the way they cleaned up.

Some Berliners still showed remnants of fighting spirit.

Most did not.

'They were absolutely beaten.

'They were wandering around - most of them, not all of them - in a daze.

'They were more afraid of the Russians than the Allies.'

The Russians had more than 12 million men and women in uniform by the end of the war.

Four fifths of Nazi Germany's strength had been directed against them.

They had truimphed and now, they claimed their victory.

By the summer of 1945, Stalin had made it clear to the Allies

that the Soviet Union would not be dislodged from Berlin,

from Germany or from Eastern Europe.

The fragile Allied unity, like George Stevens' mission, had come to an end.

And here, with the Second World War over and the Cold War about to begin,

George Stevens' film record stops.

The final sequence was shot in the ruined heart of Hitler's Berlin,

the Reichskanzlerei, where in the 1930s, Hitler had plotted his war,

and where, in 1945, it finally consumed him.

His corpse burned in the garden, in a trench full of petrol.

The unit, its work done, split up.

Its members went their separate ways.

But 40 years later, something of the spirit of that last year of the war - its hopes and disappointments,

its happiness and horror - lives on in 14 rusting cans of colour film

and in the memories of the men of the Special Coverage Unit.

'I was fortunate to be able to photograph it,'

to be part of it and to live it.

Today, it's a great memory that I was able to be in on that.

I took part in history,

and recorded it as well.

MUSIC: "Halls of Montezuma" played by a military band