All language subtitles for Last Secrets of the Third Reich Series 1 1of5 Deadly Missions 1080p

(dramatic music)

Some key battles are fought in the shadows.

Secret strikes in hostile territory or no man's land,

where details can be hidden or exaggerated

to suit the dark arts of propaganda and espionage.

These are the intriguing stories of four infamous

Second World War special operations

that were not what they seemed.

The seemingly swashbuckling snatch of Mussolini

from a mountaintop, that was little more

than one man's swagger.

How Hitler's notorious henchman were saved

by a woeful choice of weapon, then ultimately downed

by his own arrogance and a minute microbe.

A leap into a lair of thousands of German troops,

they were deceived by a secret agent who dressed

as a shepherd and against all odds,

herded their decorated commander into captivity

and an unlikely lifelong friendship.

And the werewolves who dropped out of the sky

and emerged from a dark forest, their nightmare war

of resistance was no more than an apparition that ended

with a futile murder in the dying days of the war.

(gun firing)

Our first story starts in 1938, the Italian dictator,

Benito Mussolini, was one of few leaders who supported

Hitler when he annexed Austria.

(foreign language spoken)

Italy's fascist supremo stood by his fellow dictator

and Hitler would not forget his loyalty.

This was a decisive moment for Hitler

and Hitler said at 36, "I will never forget this.

I will never forget this that you turned sides

from the victorious powers from the First World War

to my side", which was really a crucial date

in this relationship.

A few years later, the sun was setting

on the Axis empire that had threatened

to take over the world.

(canons firing)

British and American forces landed in Sicily in July, 1943.

The first key allied toehold in Western Europe

was blasted into the tip of the Italian boot.

(canon firing)

Hitler's ally was vulnerable.

The Italian peninsula was a back door

through which the allies could smash their way

into the Balkans and into the Reich itself.

From Sicily, British Commonwealth and American troops

advanced onto the mainland.

(machine gun firing)

German troops were sent to reinforce the vulnerable

soft underbelly that lay below the Reich.

Many were captured by an enemy

that advanced further north towards Rome.

(tense music)

The Italian King, Victor Emmanuel III,

had collaborated with Mussolini, he'd signed laws

that condemned thousands of Italian Jews,

but when the tide of the war turned,

the king switched sides.

He appointed a former general and colonial governor,

Pietro Badoglio as prime minister.

Those who once marched with Mussolini, turned against him.

(dramatic music)

Dismissed and under arrest,

Il Duce disappeared in captivity.

Hitler kept his promise, he would not abandon his fascist

ally, the feuver wanted a Panzergrenadier regimen

to storm Rome and arrest the entire Italian government.

His generals persuaded him to wait until more troops

could be sent as a backup, but Hitler was hell bent

on rescuing his comrade.

He was the partner from the old days,

and I have to rescue him.

Hitler's plan would elevate the reputation

of an obscure fellow Austrian Nazi with little training,

but much ambition, SS-captain Otto Skorzeny.

When it became clear we must rescue Mussolini,

then the German pantry was offered, we can do this.

But then Himna decided, and also Hitler,

and now Skorzeny has to take part just as an observer

in this operation.

Italy was changing sides,

but Nazi Germany still had ears and eyes across the country.

Agents tracked Mussolini to the Apennine Mountains

of Central Italy.

The Germans had a very good intelligence service

and they also intercept wireless telegrams,

they had spies on the ground, so it became quite clear

where Mussolini was at on every day.

And so after a couple of days, they knew,

oh, he's in the Gran Sasso Hotel.

Standing over the Gran Sasso plateau,

the skiing hotel, Campo Imperatore,

commanded strategic views.

Mussolini's jailers could see any potential attackers

coming, extracting him would be a challenge,

(loud blast)

even for modern commandos.

Helicopters were not available to German paratroopers

in World War II.

Ulrich Wegener founded a West German anti-terrorist unit

in 1973, the Special Forces veteran has looked back

beyond his service to assess the operation

to rescue Mussolini.

From a technical point of view,

the location wasn't a bad choice.

It was almost impossible to approach the hotel,

the Duce's prison without being noticed.

The new Italian administration

may have felt that its prisoner and future was secure.

(loud explosion)

Conventional German troops were battling an allied advance

up the Italian peninsula.

British and American forces moved forward

from landings at Calabria and Salerno.

With their former fascist allies in disarray,

much of the fighting was left to the German occupiers.

(loud explosions)

(aircraft engine whirring)

Another critical blow landed in September, 1943,

when the allied commander, General Eisenhower,

dropped a bombshell.

(dramatic music)

The Italian administration had capitulated

and agreed to hand Mussolini over to the allies.

But much of Italy was in chaos, Rome was not secured.

(guns firing)

The crucial point was that the Italian leadership,

the military and political leadership left

and nobody knew what to do, so they didn't announce

you have to fight against the Germans,

then that the allies are now our partners, nothing of that.

So there was chaos.

And the Germans were always very good

if there was a surprise situation

and they reacted very quickly.

German forces seized control in Rome.

The Italian king fled with his new prime minister

to the safety of the allied occupied port of Brindisi.

The people were left to fend for themselves.

With his troops in control of the capital,

Hitler could concentrate on rescuing his old comrade,

the fallen dictator, Benito Mussolini,

from his mountain top prison.

Elite fallschirmjäger or parachute troops would be flown in

to snatch Il Duce from the traitors

holding him in the Central Italian peaks.

(dramatic music)

West German Special Forces veteran, Ulrich Wegener,

had helicopters to move his men.

(foreign language spoken)

But in the Second World War,

paratroopers had to rely on a more basic craft

to drop them out of the sky.

The military glider was the only mode

of transport in those days that could be used

to get soldiers to a certain point

without dropping them in with parachutes.

It was a pretty primitive construction,

but up to a certain distance, could approach relatively

silently, now that was a clear advantage.

Of course, today you wouldn't use a glider,

you would use a helicopter or airborne units

which can be dropped in using steerable parachutes.

(foreign language spoken)

On the 12th of September, 1943,

12 gliders were towed into the air from an airfield

south of Rome.

One of them held a special observer on board,

a relatively obscure SS-captain, Otto Skorzeny.

The rescue mission would catapult the Viennese SS-man

into the limelight.

Skorzeny would ensure that he was center stage

when the propaganda cameras rolled.

(dramatic music)

The paratroopers on board braced for landing

and a pitched battle with Italian traitors

who were supposedly about to hand over their former dictator

to face allied justice.

(scuffling noises)

(soldier panting)

(foreign language spoken)

The apparently gallant, brave and most importantly,

successful rescue was recorded

for triumphant Nazi newsreels.

(triumphant music)

(foreign language spoken)

In the German youth reel, everybody thought,

"Oh, it was all done by Skorzeny."

So, you could say well, the whole operation was run

by Luftwaffe paratroopers and he was just an observer,

but there is a but.

So Skorzeny was the first guy who spoke to Mussolini

and so yes, he turned from an observer into somehow

a key role because he was the first at the entrance

of the hotel.

The apparently fearless raid

was not what it seemed.

Otto Skorzeny stole the limelight and the paratroopers

took the Duce without a shot being fired, yet photographs

clearly show that his Italian captors were armed.

Well, they could have at least fired

or they could have killed Mussolini.

There was still time for that.

So when the German gliders landed there,

there was just about 10 minutes time.

So, but nothing happened.

Well, nowadays we know that there was the decision taken,

we're not going to fire shots,

we don't want to have any German reprisals.

If we're going to kill Mussolini, I mean,

the reprisals might be really, really, very, very bad.

So let's have the Germans, have Mussolini,

and then they will be happy with that.

Heavy machine guns on the hotel roof

had been dismantled, rather than resist,

the Italian guards posed with the Germans for photographs.

The commander, Giuseppe Gueli, was clearly unprepared

for combat dressed in a civilian suit.

Gueli received a telegram from Rome

telling him to exercise extreme care

in relation to Mussolini.

He told the officer in charge that this code word

had been agreed in advance, it was an order

from the ministry of the interior to leave Mussolini

to the Germans and definitely not to fire a shot.

The show wasn't over.

Mussolini was to be flown to Rome in a small reconnaissance

plane, his rescuers were supposed to stay behind.

But one of them squeezed his considerable bulk

next to the fallen dictator.

Nobody was not allowed to sit in this small

little airplane, the airplane was overloaded.

Skorzeny was quite a big man, so 100 kilos

and it nearly crashed the aircraft and then the pilot

was able to fly them then to Rome.

So it was a really dangerous situation,

but Skorzeny then recognized, this is my chance.

"This is my chance, the cameras are on Mussolini

and I have to use and take advantage of this situation",

which he absolutely did.

The previously obscured SS-captain

had taken off as a mere observer and returned as a hero.

From Rome, Mussolini was eventually delivered

to Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia.

The mission was proclaimed as one of the most daring

and successful commando raids of the war.

In reality, Mussolini's captors had not bothered

to fire a single round, the Italian leadership

was perhaps glad to be rid of a potential liability.

In 1922, the king had transferred power

to Mussolini and had signed all the laws

the new dictator gave him, including the race laws

of 1938 and the Declaration of War.

Marshall Badoglio had made his career in a fascist regime

and above all, he had used poison gas during the colonial

war in Egypt in 1935.

He could have been convicted as a war criminal.

They could both have been prosecuted for this,

something like a small Italian Nuremberg trial.

And Mussolini was bound to give statements

about the king's and Badoglio's shared historical

and political responsibility.

Desperate to deflect attention from defeat

in the east, Nazi propaganda elevated the brazen

Otto Skorzeny to a kind of national hero.

(foreign language spoken)

There was no such glory for Benito Mussolini.

He was installed as a puppet ruler

of what remained of Nazi-occupied Italy.

Mussolini then met Hitler and he persuaded

Mussolini to become head of the new fascist state

in Northern Italy, with the headquarters

in Salò at the Lake Garda.

In the end, he had almost no influence.

His humiliation ended in capture

and execution by partisans in 1945.

His corpse was strung up together with that of his mistress

outside a petrol station in Milan.

Otto Skorzeny's remarkable fortune continued,

even when he admitted fighting in an American uniform,

he was spared by his allied captors.

He wrote about his wartime exploits and became

a wealthy retiree in sunny Spain,

an unrepentant Nazi to the end.

(foreign language spoken)

(dramatic music)

Many senior SS men like Otto Skorzeny survived the war

and prospered, but in Nazi-occupied territories

like the former Czechoslovakia, thousands were tortured

or murdered by German occupiers.

(dramatic music)

In 1941, SS security chief, Reinhard Heydrich,

ruled the so-called protectorate with an iron fist.

History has to describe at Reinhard Heydrich

as a monster.

Reinhard Heydrich was a key figure of the SS.

So he was head of the secret police,

of the political police,

he was the organizer of the Holocaust.

He chaired the Wannsee Conference in January, 1942.

Then he mapped out in the morning

how to dispense with the Jewish people of Europe.

Hundreds of miles away in London,

a plot was hatched to eliminate the ruthless Heydrich.

He was a key figure, a key symbol of the Nazi regime.

And they said, "Well, we have to kill him."

The idea to kill Heydrich was devised in London in 1941

and the idea was stemmed very much from the thinking

of the Czech government and exile.

So that's President Beneš and particularly

his intelligence chief, Moravec.

If you ever mind what was going on in Prague,

for example, in spring '42, so it was rather a peaceful time

and the whole Czech economy was working for the Nazis.

And especially the almond industry, we must do something.

It can't go on like this if the Czech people in the end

have a peaceful cooperation, collaboration with the Nazis,

so we must do something.

Beneš and Moravec and other Czechs in London

at the time, felt that the Czech population

was not resisting, perhaps, obviously enough.

They were not as overt with their resistance

as other populations were and there was a feeling in London

that the Czech government in exile was losing value

and was losing credit in the eyes of the hours.

To re-establish their anti-Nazi credentials,

the administration in exile turned to

the British government, in particular, the SOE

or Special Operations Executive.

So SOE was set up in 1940.

Its job was to encourage resistance

and carry out sabotage in enemy territory.

And when it was set up, as Churchill instructed

that SOE should set Europe ablaze.

In this case, one of Hitler's

most notorious henchmen would be set ablaze

by Czech agents trained in Britain.

After intensive SOE training, two men were selected

to lead the assassination, Sergeant Jan Kubiš

and Jozef Gabcik.

Their target, Reinhard Heydrich,

the dreaded governor of Prague.

(aircraft engine whirring)

The long-range bomber took them back towards their homeland,

deep into what had become enemy territory.

(dramatic music)

But after much time, effort and expense,

the Czech assassins were supplied with a relatively cheap

and sometimes unreliable weapon, the Sten gun.

(gun firing)

Former counter-terrorist chief, Ulrich "Ricky" Wegener,

knows a thing or two about the importance of reliable

weapons in a crisis.

He led the successful storming of a hijacked Lufthansa plane

in Somalia in 1977, three of four terrorists died,

all passengers and crew were saved.

The security advisor is scathing in his view of the weapons

supplied to the Czechs.

It's the most primitive weapon I know,

I can say that openly.

Some of the time it was homemade in workshops

and it performed accordingly.

That means if it wasn't loaded precisely, it tended to jam.

(foreign language spoken)

The Czech agents made it into Prague

with their primitive weapons, unnoticed.

By May, 1942, they had been in the capital for six weeks,

observing and learning the route that Heydrich took

through city streets.

The SS security chief insisted on traveling

in an open top car without armor or escorts.

Hitler would later fume that Heydrich was stupid

and idiotic to do so.

(railroad crossing bell ringing)

The assassins were waiting at a sharp bend

where the driver had to slow down.

Reinhard Heydrich was supposed to die

in a hail of machine gunfire.

The Sten gun did seem to be problematic

because normally it would, when it did jam,

it jammed because it overheated.

But through continuous use, however, it jammed

at the very moment where they attempted to fire.

The Sten gun was absolutely unsuitable

for use by Special Forces under these conditions.

They had a backup weapon.

When the Sten gun jammed, the other agent, Jan Kubiš,

hurled a bomb of plastic explosives.

He tried to shoot him and that failed.

They threw a grenade at him and although he was wounded,

he wasn't exceptionally badly wounded

to the point of being killed, he had a shrapnel wound.

Shrapnel passed through the car seat

and into Heydrich's body, taking minute fragments

of upholstery with it.

(dramatic music)

Despite his wounds, Hitler's henchmen tried to shoot

at his attackers, but the Czech agents escaped on bicycles.

Heydrich was taken to the Bulovka Hospital.

Top Nazi doctors, including Hitler's personal physician,

Theodor Morell, was sent to Prague.

Surgeons removed his spleen.

In 99% of the population,

removing the spleen is easily tolerated

and doesn't lead to any complications,

at least not acute ones.

At first, the emergency surgery

seemed to have worked.

The Reich's protector of Bohemia and Moravia

was sitting up in bed, enjoying breakfast

when he suddenly collapsed into a coma

from which he would never re-emerge.

He was the ruthless SS security chief, yet insisted

on traveling in an unarmored open-topped Mercedes.

His arrogance proved fatal.

A tiny fragment, possibly some of the plush upholstery

from the leather limousine interior, felled one

of the most feared fanatics in the Third Reich.

What we now believe is that the shrapnel

took some horse hair from the actual car that penetrated

the wound and although they took the shrapnel out,

that small piece of horse hair effectively developed

into septicemia, blood poisoning,

and that is what killed him.

So it's ironic that the mission was accomplished,

albeit longer than he thought.

Records from Heydrich's postmortem

show that doctors knew about the contamination

of his wound and the dangers of infection.

But was the Reich's protectors poisoning an accident?

The secret British chemical weapons center

at Porton Down, near Salisbury, began experimenting

with biological weapons in 1940.

One of its offices suggested it may have played a part,

that it supplied SOE agents with toxic botulinum grenades,

the bacteria we call Botox.

There's a belief that SOE was operating

in a particularly ungentlemanly way

and the warfare that it did, that it was irregular,

that it was underground, they used methods

which were not acceptable or perhaps even legal.

But I think it's unlikely that they used toxins

in the case of the Heydrich assassination,

the evidence doesn't, just doesn't add up.

Botulinum must be stored carefully.

The agents who stayed in Prague for many weeks

before the attack, would have been unable to do so.

The bomb used to kill Heydrich was a basic device

and the way he died was not consistent

with botulinum poisoning.

The poisoning with Botox,

as it is known today, would normally have led

to a speedy respiratory paralysis within hours,

maybe two days.

But the fact that he got better and then worse again,

completely contradicts this theory.

Hitler's loyal disciple,

an architect of the Holocaust,

was honored with a state funeral in Berlin.

(dramatic music)

A frenzy of revenge killing was unleashed on the Czechs,

flawed intelligence linked the village of Lidice

to the assassins.

It was destroyed, regardless.

One and a half thousand people were executed,

thousands more were sent to the death camps.

These people would not have been killed

if Heydrich would not have been assassinated.

And in the end it doesn't change anything.

I mean, there was still a collaboration,

the almond industry in Pearson for example,

Skoda and so on, still worked for the Third Reich.

I think that they must've expected reprisals

that was part of an operation like that.

I mean, you can't kill somebody of the profile

of a man like Heydrich and expect nothing to happen.

Three weeks after Heydrich's assassination,

the killers were still at large.

Prague was locked down under a strict curfew.

The Nazis offered a million Reichmarks reward

to anyone who would betray them.

It worked, the agents were trapped

in a church and paid the ultimate price.

(dramatic music)

According to SOE files, they knew their mission

was a likely death sentence.

Statements read, "The agents know that there is nowhere

to run and they are prepared to share Heydrich's death."

Personally, I think it's remarkable

they got that far, but they even got to that stage

to have survived and occupied Czechoslovakia

for five months without being caught.

And then to actually get as close to Heydrich as they did.

(dramatic music)

Such life-or-death missions

were a leap into the unknown.

Unlike conventional soldiers, British special operations

executive agents could not expect any mercy if captured.

SOE agents ran very serious risks in enemy territory.

If they were caught, they knew that they would run

a very high possibility of being executed.

Now, especially after 1942, and SOE knew this,

the command order, Hitler's famous command order

was issued in which he laid down that commandos

caught behind enemy lines were liable to be executed.

Agents needed to master a range of skills,

everything from foreign languages to being able to derail

a train and kill with their bare hands.

I think SOE was certainly looking for individuals

who stood out, who had drive and determination,

who were able to act independently and to work well

with other people, work with other cultures.

And who were also courageous and were able to have

that self-confidence to operate well in enemy territory

where danger was ever present.

Ordered to set Europe ablaze,

many brave SOE agents perished in the conflagration.

The life expectancy of a wireless operator

in occupied France was just six weeks.

But British saboteurs recorded several stunning successes

in the war and an audacious kidnap operation

in German-occupied Crete was one of them.

For the Germans, Crete was a vital strategic asset.

It was a stepping stone to Africa and a potential air

and Naval base to protect oil fields to the North.

(dramatic music)

A huge garrison of some 30,000 troops were stationed there.

But their time under the Mediterranean sun was spoiled

by British agents like Patrick Paddy Leigh Fermor.

He spent one and a half years on Crete disguised

as a shepherd harassing the enemy before he was sent back.

(dramatic music)

He was used to living amongst other cultures

and in other countries and learning languages

and getting on with people from a wide variety

of backgrounds, now that is exactly what he was expected

to do in Crete and when he was parachuted in

and he spent many months there,

that's exactly what he was doing.

Fluent in Greek and German,

he had the knowledge and skills to pull off a stunning coup.

Now, this plan was eventually devised

to kidnap General Müller, a particularly brutal

and unpleasant commander on Crete.

He left the island and was replaced by General Kreipe.

Generalmajor Kreipe was a respected veteran

of both the First and Second World Wars

and had served with distinction in Russia.

Kreipe was less unpleasant and yet the propaganda value,

the publicity value of a successful kidnapping

was considerable, this was at a time when the British

and the allies were planning the invasion of Europe,

these sort of operations, these eye-catching operations

in the Mediterranean all helped with the deception value,

the idea of withdrawal of, attracting German forces

and attracting German attention away from Western Europe

and tying down German forces in the Mediterranean

and the Balkans and that sort of theater.

After the horrors of the Eastern front,

Generalmajor Karl Heinrich Kreipe settled

into the comforts of a sun-splashed villa

near the ancient ruins of Knossos.

The garrison commander went home for dinner every night

at eight, unaware that his routine was being watched

by British agents and their local contacts.

(car engine running)

Oh, without doubt, the mission could not

have been successful was it not for the partisans.

I mean, they were absolutely crucial in the success of it

from, you know, from scouting out, you know,

possible routes from getting the men in and out.

Dressed as German military police,

Patrick Paddy Leigh Fermor and his fellow agents

stopped the Generalmajor's car.

The decorated wehrmacht commander who had led

and survived heavy fighting in France

and Russia was captured with ease.

His unfortunate driver was also seized and later killed.

(dramatic music)

Under today's technical context,

you would say, how can you act so recklessly?

As a division commander in an occupied country,

you would today expect to be under threat.

You need constant protection, which means

that you can't go anywhere without security.

(foreign language spoken)

Kreipe's then security detail was not extensive,

it was effectively, you know, him and his driver.

And looking back, if you were in that position

you know, during wartime, it would make sense

that you're more heavily protected.

He would have been a target, he must've been aware of that.

General Kreipe was bundled under the backseat.

Impersonating him and his driver,

the British agents in the front bluffed their way

through a staggering 22 checkpoints.

In terms of the security there, it's interesting

that you know, the general who was captured

and he himself insisted that all checkpoints be

well manned and everyone be checked, everyone except him.

He resented people questioning his authority

or insisting that they check his paperwork.

Once out in the wilderness,

the British agents dumped the car and left a vital message

in a bid to protect the local population that helped them.

Often with SOE operations, there was a consideration

for local populations and a desire to minimize reprisals.

Now, in the case of the Kreipe operation,

the means that Leigh Fermor chose to do that,

was to leave the car abandoned, the car in which he had,

he and Moss had taken the German general

and leaving the car, certain items

that would incriminate the British.

The kidnappers left a calling card.

"Your general has been kidnapped by British Commando.

Retributions against the Greek population

are not warranted."

It ended with a veiled warning, "See you again, soon."

They were aware of the German's, kind of, retaliation

on missions, they would execute villagers and they were

to make the point that this was not partisan activity,

but activity by the special operations executive.

It didn't work.

One mountain village suspected of collaborating

with the British was emptied of its inhabitants

and obliterated, a massive island-wide manhunt

failed to find the commander or the SOE agents holding him.

The British agents marched their captive

across isolated and rugged terrain,

over the two and a half kilometer high Mount Ida.

(dramatic music)

It was a marathon journey.

Despite the threat of reprisals,

local villages fed the British agents

and sheltered them from the German manhunt.

(dramatic music)

Thousands of troops scoured the country below

while spotter planes searched from the skies above.

(plane engine whirring)

The rest of the officers and agents could do very little

without the assistance of the local population,

they had to have people to hide them and to feed them,

to guide them, to assist them in getting stores together,

to assist them in laying ambushes and laying attacks.

So the role of the Cretin population was key.

The character of the two British agents,

Patrick Paddy Leigh Fermor and Stanley Moss, was also key.

(dramatic music)

Their captive was almost 50 years old.

Despite the heavy going, they managed to cajole

the senior German general to carry on with them.

After being on the run for three weeks,

they finally reached the South coast

and a rendezvous with a boat bound for Cairo.

(dramatic music)

The Egyptian capital was the headquarters

of British operations in the Middle East.

Once in custody there, the war was over

for Generalmajor Karl Heinrich Kreipe.

There was great publicity.

You see the story of Kreipe appear on the front page

of British newspapers, he's reported all around.

British certainly made the most of this.

And Moss and Leigh Fermor are both awarded gallantry medals.

After interrogation in Cairo,

Generalmajor Kreipe was transferred to a prison

of war camp in Britain.

He was eventually released in 1947.

It's clear that his interrogators

thought that he was not a significant individual.

They didn't find him particularly impressive

on a personal level and I think this underlines the fact

that he wasn't targeted for the intelligence value

that he could offer, it was the publicity value

of the operation.

Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Long after the war was over,

an unlikely bond seemed to have endured

between a kidnapper and his victim.

And of course we know you speak Greek fluently,

maybe better than us.

Patrick Leigh Fermor was famously reunited

with Karl Heinrich Kreipe on Greek television in 1972.

It was an apparently warm reunion for the two former foes,

both congratulated the other on how well they had aged

since their ordeal over the mountain tops of Crete.

(foreign language spoken and sung)

(dramatic music)

Of course, few wartime experiences have a happy ending,

especially those involving espionage and murder.

(loud blasts)

Towards the end of 1944, allied forces had advanced

to Western German cities like Aachen.

(gun firing)

Nazi defenders were beaten back after pitched battles

on the frontiers of Hitler's Reich.

Aachen was the first German city to fall to the allies.

But as defeat loomed, a desperate Nazi regime

exerted an ever tighter grip on the population.

(loud blast)

The Nazi movement, Nazi party,

was able to get much, much more control of the state

and the people, it was terror.

And everybody who said, well, now the war is over,

get really in serious trouble.

So they sometimes even believed yes, the war's over,

we might be killed, but we will take the German

people with us.

The medieval city was in ruins.

Only a fraction of its shell-shocked population remained.

This was Aachen the day after its fall.

The job of rehabilitation would not be easy,

the chief rail station would have to be repaired.

The military government section went to work,

establishing order, restoring communications.

As well as roads and railways,

the occupiers needed to repair the civil administration

to restore some kind of order amid the devastation of war.

German civilians were pressed

under service for this and other tasks.

(dramatic music)

The Americans decided to appoint a mayor.

(dramatic music)

A Catholic lawyer, Franz Oppenhoff, who was seen

as relatively untainted by the Nazi regime.

For allied administrators, Germans like Oppenhoff

were vital to establish order in captured cities

while the war continued elsewhere.

His appointment was announced in the press,

but to fanatical Nazis like SS chief, Heinrich Himmler,

such collaborators were traitors who deserved

to be eliminated.

The German people were compelled to join a last,

desperate do-or-die battle against the allies.

They tried to move that idea of an ideological war,

a war to the lost child, the lost men and the things

to the West.

The problem was the German people were not very convinced.

They perceive the West, I mean, it's bad that we lost

the war but it's not the worst thing if you are captured

by the Americans or the British.

Diehard Nazis aimed to crush

such defeatist attitudes with terror,

they dreamed of a resistance movement dubbed werewolf.

(dramatic music)

The fairy tale castle of Hoofkracht near Dusseldorf

became a lair for werewolves, a group of would-be assassins

ordered to slaughter the American-appointed mayor of Aachen.

(dramatic music)

The so-called werewolf commando would spread fear

and terror, sending a stark message to traitors

who dared to collaborate with the allies.

Heinrich Himmler had the first victim in his sights,

the hapless mayor, Franz Oppenhoff.

If you are going to collaborate on that scale,

we are going to kill you.

So we are in a very big struggle, we are not,

we have not lost the war ready, we will win.

There will be a final victory and if you're going to cover

up we are going to kill you.

A commando unit, including members

of the Hitler youth, an SS officer and a woman,

Ilse Hirsch, plotted the murder of Franz Oppenhoff.

But the American-appointed mayor was in occupied territory,

the werewolves would have to find a way

past the allied lines.

There was this problem, how do you get

to the occupied territory?

So you must cross the front line.

And there was a special Bombo wing, the KG200,

and they did special operations behind enemy lines

and they had a captured Flying Fortress, a captured B-17.

And they used this captured B-17 to parachute this people,

this command operation, behind the enemy lines,

near of Aachen.

(dramatic music)

The assassins were flown

over the border into Belgium.

(dramatic music)

They parachuted into a forest,

killed the Belgian border guard,

crossed back into Germany and set up a base camp.

(dramatic music)

From there, it was the key woman in the group,

Ilse Hirsch, who led the killers to Franz Oppenhoff's home.

(dramatic music)

(metal clinking)

(knock on door)

Oppenhoff was summoned from a party at a neighbor's house.

The assassin's pretended to be downed German pilots

looking for the front lines.

When Oppenhoff urged them to surrender to the Americans,

SS radio operator, Zed Leitgeb, is said to have screamed,

"Heil Hitler" before shooting the father of three

in the head at point blank range.

(gun firing)

The werewolf commandos slipped away in the night.

It was the first and only headline success of a so-called

resistance movement that ultimately failed.

This was a good example of explaining,

yes, there's a will of resistance from the German people.

So look, the German werewolf organization have killed

the mayor of Aachen, so there is a danger to everybody

who's going to collaborate with the allies.

So he used this for his propaganda campaign

and in the end, the outcome was nothing

and nobody was interested in that.

The man who pulled the trigger,

SS radio operator, Zed Leitgeb, was later said to have died,

caught in a blast after fellow saboteur, Ilse Hirsch,

stepped on a mine.

(dramatic music)

Hirsch and three of her co-conspirators survived.

They were eventually arrested, tried and sentenced.

But none of them would spend long terms behind bars.

(dramatic music)

The perpetrators were not punished

for the murder, but for manslaughter or aiding manslaughter.

They received prison sentences of up to four years

in their first trial.

In 1952, the sentences were reduced

to a maximum of one and a half years.

The brutal murder of Franz Oppenhoff

was little more than a brief propaganda coup.

Like the other clandestine commando-style operations

featured in this program, it was all about sending

a stark message.

(dramatic music)

None of them made a significant difference

to the outcome of the war, a war that was won

through conventional front line fighting and victory

in the skies and over the ground of Hitler's Reich.

(dramatic music and canons firing)

Modern warfare is waged differently.

Sometimes by remote control or by small strike teams

slipped in and out of hostile territory.

The rules have also changed.

IEDs.

(dramatic music)

And suicide bombers are employed in places like Afghanistan

where the enemy lurks among the local population.

(dramatic music)

Where is the battlefront these days?

It's very hard to be able to see in many cases

a battlefield on which to fight.

A lot of the legislation that was drawn up,

a lot of the conventions and laws that were drawn up

to govern the fighting of warfare, are 60, 70,

a 100 years old and arguably, perhaps,

do these still apply today?

It's hard to tell when you have, for example,

you know, the commander of Al-Qaeda living in Pakistan.

Arguably a legitimate target, the head of a global network,

but not the head of a nation's state.

Are you allowed to target him?

Can you kill him?

The world is changing and so is modern warfare.

A new kind of secret war is emerging.

A war without front lines,

where eliminating the enemy may involve operating

far from home where legal and political boundaries

are blurred.

But like the commando raids of old,

modern so-called special forces operations

have a common aim.

To show an enemy that there's nowhere to hide.

(helicopter blades whirring and crickets singing)