Original subtitles

The Second World War's violent, disturbing images

have been constantly replayed for decades.

Sometimes it seems there is little

we can see that we haven't seen before.

But buried in archives and tucked away in private collections,

an astonishing set of 3D films and photographs

with the power to erase time and transcend space

will now be seen for the first time in nearly 70 years.

Leading historians of the war put on their 3D glasses

and view the great conflict in a way even they have never seen it.

I'm looking at Hitler, and he's looking at me.

It's fantastic.

I've been looking at images of this conflict my entire life.

Over 30 years of seriously studying this conflict,

and I've not seen images from World War ll look like this.

Unknown to most people today,

Adolph Hitler used the clarity and depth of 3D

to glorify his 1,000-year Reich.

And as you will see, in the only known footage of its kind,

restored and shown here for the first time,

the Nazis used 3D to film their soldiers in live action.

The Allies successfully exploited 3D in aerial reconnaissance

to lay the groundwork for D-Day

and ultimately, to lay waste to Germany.

A brave Frenchman, still active today at age 97,

even used 3D to document

one of the most thrilling moments of the 20th century,

the liberation of Paris.

Now, for the first time ever, you are about to experience

the Second World War as it has not been seen by anyone,

except those who actually lived it.

World War ll in 3D.

Adolph Hitler stands in an open car as troops thunder past.

The photograph seems somehow familiar, yet somehow startlingly new.

Every detail, from the Fuhrer's reflections in the foreground

to his swastika armband and commanding posture,

has been carefully composed in three dimensions

to enhance his God-like stature.

Such images were made at the behest of a man

who, despite his almost unimaginable cruelty,

had a profound understanding of the power

of visual imagery to mold history.

The Nazi ideology that led to World War ll

has been called a vast eruption of evil into history.

The author of that evil, Adolph Hitler,

began life as an artist,

and used art, sculpture, symbolism, and photography

to mesmerize his nation.

I remember in school in every classroom,

we had a picture of the Fuhrer and the flags.

You saw his picture everywhere.

Even today at a Munich art museum,

traces of Hitler's eerie symbolism survive.

He consistently involved himself in the process

of developing the artistic look of the National Socialist Third Reich.

I don't think there's ever been

anybody in history that's used mass communications

and propaganda as successfully as Hitler,

and he chose and promoted the most talented people, he thought,

to carry out that propaganda mission.

One of those people was photographer Heinrich Hoffmann.

Here in this Munich square, on the day the First World War broke out in 1914,

Hoffmann photographed a cheering crowd.

In the 1920s, after Hoffman met Hitler and joined the Nazis,

he discovered that a young Hitler himself was in that photograph.

They became fast friends.

He actually introduced Eva Braun to Hitler,

so he was probably about as close as you could get to Hitler.

To further Hitler's propaganda goals,

Hoffmann turned to Germany's leading publisher of 3D photography,

Otto Schénstein.

He had a publishing company

and they wanted to order books and use his facilities.

Schdnstein had begun innocently enough publishing the types of 3D photos

that had been a popular form of entertainment for decades.

But after the Nazis seized power in 1933,

Heinrich Hoffmann took over Otto Sch6nstein's publishing company,

and together they took the concept of 3D photography

to a sinister new level.

This is a typical Raumbild book

of the type that the Otto Schdnstein publishing company

finally came up with for their product,

and inside the very thick covers,

you have a pocket which has a folding 3D viewer,

and each pocket has 25 photographic prints

and they called it the Raumbild,

which is a German word that translates literally as "spatial image."

So it's a space image book, or a 3D book.

Hoffmann and Schdnstein launched their new publishing endeavor

with the Berlin Olympics of 1936.

Well, the 1936 Berlin Olympics were the ideal God-given opportunity

to showcase the new Third Reich, and to do so in front of the entire world.

Hitler was enraged when African-American Jesse Owens

emerged as the star of the games.

In a sense, the games backfired,

at that moment at least, in terms of showing that

the white superman wasn't the best athlete in the world.

In fact, it was a black guy from America.

Within months of the Olympics, Schénstein and Hoffmann were

issuing lavish books that glorified the Nazi stranglehold on Germany.

And nothing illustrated that stranglehold more

than the annual events that happened here.

On this weed-strewn field, a parking lot today,

vast spectacles once dazzled Germany and chilled the world.

The Nuremburg Rallies were huge mass rallies

which were organized to celebrate the new Germany,

the Third Reich, and Hitler in particular.

Mass rallies of over 400,000 people,

fantastically elaborate, brilliantly staged mass spectacles.

I saw one news reel with the rally,

with thousands of people, the swastika flags,

and everybody, you can see the faces.

They loved this man. We knew damn well

that something's going to happen very soon.

Today, children play near bleachers where top Nazi anti-Semite

Julius Stretcher, on the right, once sat.

Men who murdered millions.

The 3D imagery brings something very powerful to this experience.

Few people alive have seen more imagery from the Second World War

than research historian Martin Morgan.

But even he has never seen the war in 3D until now.

Faces that are in the background of the shot

that I would probably not really pay attention to in 2D,

I lock on to them in 3D. It's not really just faces, either.

World War ll historians, we love to inspect photographs for detail,

everything from the airplane in the background

to the details on the uniforms. The details, it tells you so much.

This is clearly the Reichsparteitagsgelénde,

or the Nazi party rally grounds in Nuremberg in Germany.

And each day of the Nazi party rally

celebrated a different aspect of German culture,

the worker, the soldier, the youth.

Here we have Adolph Hitler

receiving the salute and about to shake hands

with a representative of the German labor force.

Because if you'll notice, he's not armed aside from his dagger.

Even down to the level of game wardens had a dagger.

Everyone had a dagger, that's who this is.

A rebuilt city today,

Nuremberg was once decked out with the Nazi's triumphant insignia.

In Nuremberg's Market Square, Sunday strollers browse for vegetables.

But the Nazi's 3D cameras captured a starkly different scene.

And if you look, the gentlemen that are in these wheelchairs

that look like bicycles and wheelchairs,

these are World War I veterans,

and that they've been brought to the forefront of this crowd

for Adolph Hitler, who was also a World War I veteran.

In 1938, at the height of his popularity,

Hitler staged an extravagant seven-day visit

to fellow dictator Benito Mussolini in Italy.

With his 3D photographers in tow, Hitler sought to link

the glories of ancient Rome with his own 1,000-year Reich.

This is fascinating, this is Hitler the artist visiting Italy.

And when a tourist goes to Italy, what is it that you do?

You go and you visit the museums

that hold all the fantastic examples of Greek and Roman art.

Hitler was a great admirer of Italian art,

and particularly the Romans and the Roman culture.

And it's simple things like,

for example, the German salute where you raise the right arm.

That was actually taken from the ancient Romans.

Back home, Hitler instructed his artists to craft

a new German art inspired by Rome but glorifying the Aryan ideal.

Here, one of his favorite sculptors, Josef Thorak,

labors on an image of the Nazi superman.

Until 1938, the 3D photography

of Heinrich Hoffmann and Otto Schdnstein

had glossed over the dark side of Hitler's meteoric rise.

But the megalomania lurking in these photos

would soon erupt across Europe,

and Nazi 3D photography would go along for the ride.

By 1938, Adolph Hitler's 3D photographers

were celebrating the almost unimaginable success of their Fuhrer.

He was riding a wave of popularity

that could be likened to no one else in German history.

Adolph Hitler had presided over

the rearmament and remilitarization of Germany.

He had reoccupied the Rhineland.

Otto Schdnstein and Heinrich Hoffmann's 3D propaganda

had celebrated each of the Fuhrer's triumphs.

But nothing cemented Hitler's hold on Germans more than

the audacious seizure of neighboring Austria, known as the Anschluss.

Everyone thinks that Hitler was German. Hitler actually was Austrian.

It was obviously very important for Hitler

that those Austrian Germans belong to the Third Reich.

Austria had belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire,

and after the First World War it was dismembered

and really lost its power and its glory.

Many Austrians yearned for that great past,

and Hitler offered that in terms of the future.

In 1938, Austrians cheered

as Hitler marched unopposed into his native land.

Things like the Nazi salute, greeting people with "Heil"

and signing letters with "Heil Hitler,"

it's interesting to see how quickly these things

then were taken over in Austria.

Today, Salzburg, Austria is a quiet cultural center,

home of a famous Mozart festival.

But in this square in 1938,

thousands erupted with delirious joy at Hitler's arrival.

Squares were quickly renamed for the conquering hero,

as Hitler and his henchmen launched a triumphant tour.

At historic cemeteries like this,

joyous Austrians heaped flowers on the graves of the Fuhrer's ancestors.

But not all Austrians cheered.

The homes of Jews and leftists were ransacked.

They met an extremely unhappy experience in the Anschluss in 1938,

and many of them were the first inmates

at the concentration camp at Mauthausen.

Mauthausen, which lies just 12 miles from Hitler's boyhood home of Linz,

was legendary for its cruelty.

It was where people were not gassed in the millions

but where they were worked to death more often,

and there was a famous quarry where mostly Jewish inmates

would have to carry rocks up what were called The Stairs of Death.

In an orgy of sadism, prisoners who could not carry the stones

were hurled to their death from these steps

and from this cliff known as The Parachute Jump.

Hellish sights like Mauthausen

were omitted from Schdnstein and Hoffmann's

sanitized 3D celebration of the Anschluss.

But they managed to find room for a sinister photo of an ancient lie.

The notorious Jews' Stone of Rinn depicted the supposed ritual murder

of an Austrian boy by Jews in the Middle Ages.

It became a sight of pilgrimage for the conquering Nazis.

German soldiers and officers would go to visit the village of Rinn

and go and look at the Judenstein, the rock upon which

this 3-year-old child was supposed to have been killed.

By now, Germany had created the most formidable military on Earth.

Nazi propaganda was eager to impress this fact on everyone,

and 3D was a powerful way to do it.

As of 1938, the German army was

one of the most well-equipped and modern armies of the entire world.

Within roughly four years, an army of just over 100,000 men

rose to a standing army of several hundred thousand.

A series of 3D images showed off Germany's military hardware.

This is a Dornier Do-18 float plane.

It's an amazing aircraft.

It could be catapult-launched off of a ship,

and then it could be recovered by winch

and placed back on that catapult.

This is such a great photograph for anybody

that's interested in the technology associated with World War ll,

because what you're seeing are Panzerkampfvvagen ll.

This is an earlier version of the Mark ll Panzer.

You can see it looks like white crosses.

The Germans marked their armored vehicles with the Balkenkreuz,

and this is an earlier version of it than what you're used to seeing.

These tanks would appear puny

in comparison to tanks from later in the war.

With this vast arsenal in hand

and having marched into Austria and Czechoslovakia without firing a shot,

Hitler was about to launch his fateful invasion of Poland.

It would lead to initial success in a new kind of war

and give Schdnstein and Hoffmann remarkable opportunities

to show the power of 3D as it had never been shown before.

In September 1939, as Hitler invaded Poland

and Europe descended into the Second World War,

Otto Schdnstein and Heinrich Hoffmann faced a unique challenge,

documenting the Nazis' rapid onslaught with cumbersome 3D cameras.

It's a little trickier.

On the roll film, you're getting six stereos on one roll,

so you're changing film a lot if you're gonna be using it,

because you only got six stereo pairs on a roll.

They overcame these drawbacks by training

the Wehrmacht propaganda troops to shoot in 3D.

The result is a visceral record of the rape of a nation.

You can clearly tell that this is 1939 Poland.

This is not summer '40 in the low countries. This is Poland in '39.

And what I'm triggering off of is these are German army.

They're wearing what we typically call the jack boots, the high leather boot.

That's an item of footwear that was issued in the German army,

more in the early part of the war than in the late part.

And you can see they've all been allowed

to remove their helmets and put on their soft cap.

The 3D photographers documented

the tragic destruction of the Polish air force and navy

and the ruin of Poland's cities and infrastructure.

It was a case of total war.

No one in history had ever seen such merciless attacks on civilians,

such concentrated bombings, such use of terror.

The Polish military was no match for the world's most mechanized army.

We were powerless against Hitler's mechanized forces,

and Poland had great casualties, especially half of the country was

finally overrun by the Russians who invaded from the east.

So, Poland didn't have any chance.

Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were marched off to oblivion.

This photo is clearly 1939.

You can tell by the German officer's tunic,

and he is interrogating Polish prisoners.

I would imagine that those prisoners on the left side of the photograph

were a little bit concerned about what the future had in store for them.

It was a sad moment. People cried,

and we saw them going to the prison camps.

It was a really horrible thing.

On a wall that still held a mobilization poster

for the Polish army, civilians now peered

at ominous pronouncements from their new masters.

This is the first time Polish resistance veteran Andre Ulankiewics

has seen 3D photos of a moment burned into his memory.

You could not have a radio, you could not have weapons.

You could not buy illegal food. Everything was punishable by death.

You give refuge for a Jew, you were killed right on the spot.

Not you, the entire family was wiped out.

Hitler staged a triumphal parade in Warsaw,

ecstatic in part because he now held captive three million Polish Jews.

Schdnstein and Hoffmann captioned this photo,

"Lice-infected Jewish beds being burned,"

a caption fraught with ominous meaning.

In Nazi ideology, the Jew was often compared to some sort of pest.

Another caption sneered, "Jews doing unfamiliar work."

That statement obviously plays with the prejudice

that Jews were not used to manual labor

and that all they did was rip off the population.

Almost as soon as the Germans moved into Poland

and occupied the country, they began to round up Jews.

90% of the Jews in Poland

would end up being killed during the Holocaust.

Then, on May 10th, 1940, German armies and their 3D cameras

swept across the borders of neutral Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg.

It's problematic terrain because it's criss-crossed by rivers and canals.

It can be extremely difficult for the movement

of a modern, mechanized army.

However, the German military was ready for it.

The leading descriptive word

that characterizes the 1940 campaign, fluidity.

They did that by bringing in engineering units,

by bringing in units that were capable of fording rivers

and building bridges on the fly,

and it allowed the Germans to move swiftly.

Never had a European army moved so fast

and so quickly and with such devastating effect.

After failing to stem the Nazi onslaught,

the British pushed back to the French town of Dunkirk,

which was devastated by German fire.

But despite being surrounded, the Allies were miraculously

ferried back to England on anything that could float.

Three hundred and fifty thousand men

were pulled off at Dunkirk, but they left

all their armament and their machinery and their tanks behind.

This photograph is definitely showing Germans

on the beach at Dunkirk in France.

Look at that. I have to say, as an Englishman,

I love the Union Jack up to the right here, fluttering.

That's fantastic. It's a great picture.

Now, the road to Paris was wide open.

Paris was declared an open city by the French government,

because they didn't want to see the destruction of the capital.

So the Germans actually marched into Paris

without any real resistance by the French forces.

Today, Paris's Arc de Triomphe

and Place de la Concorde hum with traffic.

But on June 14th, 1940,

the only sounds were the echoes of German jack boots.

In nine blood-drenched months,

the Nazis had subjugated the greater part of Europe

and documented their rampage in 3D.

But their interest in 3D would soon reach beyond still photographs.

Newly discovered motion picture footage

not seen since World War ll

reveals Nazi soldiers in live action 3D for the very first time.

In 1941, as Germany attacked the Soviet Union

and ramped up its war machine, the Luftwaffe responded

with perhaps the most remarkable 3D imagery

that has survived the fall of the Third Reich.

This film, never before seen by the public,

and newly restored for this program,

is the only known 3D footage showing German soldiers in action.

A hundred thousand meters of such 3D footage was shot.

For safekeeping, it was moved

to a Dresden church in the war's waning days.

When Dresden was firebombed in 1945, most of it was destroyed.

But this unique footage somehow survived.

Filmed outside a German city, it shows how to aim and fire

Germany's most effective flak gun, the dreaded 88 millimeter,

which also doubled as one of its top all-purpose artillery weapons.

This is the legendary and infamous 88 millimeter gun.

This is a weapon that could project a 30-pound projectile

to an altitude of 20,000 feet against bombers flying in formation.

An extremely lethal, and a very, very dangerous anti-aircraft weapon.

A well-trained crew could fire 15 to 20 rounds per minute

with devastating results.

Here, a Luftwaffe artillery lieutenant,

clearly identifiable by his silver wreath and seagull collar tabs,

demonstrates how to aim and fire the 88

against the relentless Allied air fleets decimating Germany.

Height and distance are calculated. Orders are repeated down the line.

When the 88 fires a shell, it explodes

into a lethal cloud of flak in the path of the target aircraft.

This device is actually a stereoscopic range finder.

These soldiers being filmed in 3D

were using 3D technology themselves to track their targets.

Flak crews themselves took heavy casualties.

So a film like this was likely part

of the Luftwaffe's desperate race to train replacements.

The film also shows a soldier learning to aim and fire a Mauser,

the most important rifle in the German arsenal.

Always efficient, Germans even produced a film

showing precisely how to project this footage

and view it with the Nazi's 3D glasses.

The Nazis had used 3D mainly for propaganda.

Now, with the Allies struggling to take the offensive,

the British and Americans would use 3D to fight back.

The key lay in its ability to revolutionize aerial reconnaissance.

Three-dimensional photo reconnaissance images

provide the ability to reveal structures on the ground,

how big they were, how tall they were, and then more importantly,

they were able to reveal topography.

How high a ridge was, or how deep a ravine cut.

Aerial 3D was used to its most devastating effect

on the effort to bring the war home to the German people.

For three or four years, the Allies

could not land troops in occupied Europe.

They had to use war from the air, what was called strategic bombing.

So aerial reconnaissance and photography

was absolutely paramount to the defeat of the Third Reich.

German cities began to be incinerated in the fiercest maelstrom in history.

In June of 1944,

the Allies prepared to storm these beaches in Normandy,

and 3D came into play again, this time in support

of the largest amphibious assault mankind has ever attempted.

We were photographing those beaches a year before we landed on them.

As the sun peeked through the gray dawn of June 6th, 1944,

Germans stared in disbelief from these bunkers

as a quarter of a million men in over 5,000 ships

blanketed the English Channel.

The Allies faced an inferno, especially here at Omaha Beach.

Casualties were extremely high. The Germans were capable of laying

withering fire on the beaches themselves.

After the war,

the American company, View-Master, released a set of 3D images

showing the toll Normandy paid for liberation.

3D photography had given the Allies an important edge

in the bombing campaign over Germany and the victory on D-Day.

Now, as the war raced to its conclusion,

3D would record, in color,

one of the most exhilarating moments of the 20th century

and ultimately preserve a haunting 3D record

of the tragic consequences of war.

As Germany collapsed around him,

Nazi 3D publisher Otto Schdnstein stopped publishing

and started racing to save his archive from the bombs.

But as the Allies sped across France,

one dapper young Frenchman was in the right place at the right time

to create a remarkable record of the liberation of Paris,

the only 3D photos in color known to have survived the war.

Today, in an airy house in the Parisian suburb of Boissy,

97-year-old orchid grower Marcel Lecoufle

photographs one of his prize specimens in 3D.

He's been taking such pictures for over 80 years.

I started photographing orchids in 1928.

My family's been involved in cultivating orchids

for five generations.

The German occupation had made his hobby

not only difficult but potentially dangerous.

The Germans totally prohibited any photographs,

but the other problem was finding the film.

There were some stores that had it, but it was difficult to find.

Still, on his daily bike rides to the Paris flower market,

Lecoufle couldn't resist defying the Nazi ban.

His photos portray a deceptively lovely Paris

that hasn't changed much today,

but was groaning under a brutal occupation.

Then, in August 1944, American bombs and even some planes

began crashing around Lecoufle's suburban doorstep.

We heard that the Americans were landing at Normandy on the radio,

on radios that were jammed by the Germans

who didn't want us to find out what might be happening.

With the Germans fleeing and the Allies approaching,

destruction rained from the skies around Boissy.

The photograph of the big fire was taken after a bombing attack,

and that was gasoline burning, so the smoke was horrendous.

Then Boissy erupted with joy as the Yanks poured in.

Locals were curious to see black American soldiers

billeted in the woods nearby.

I have taken this photo in the bois de la Grange

three kilometers from here.

One morning, these Americans were washing up

and I just so happened to take that photo.

But while Boissy rejoiced,

Paris was roiled in a desperate insurrection just a few miles away.

The barricades were up and French partisans struggled

to defend their headquarters here, the police prefecture.

Then, on August 24th, Paris went wild

as French and American troops roared into the city,

and the Germans threw down their arms.

Sam Dimas recalls what has been called

"the greatest party of the 20th century."

When we paraded down the Champs-Elysées,

you don't go through the opening of the Arc de Triomphe, you go around it.

So we had to double time to go around it.

The French girls were all over their liberators.

I think we had four or five guys that went AWOL.

Determined not to miss the party,

Lecoufle grabbed his 3D camera, jumped on his bike and raced to Paris.

There was general elation,

and the Americans arrived over by the police station,

and someone said there was a tank approaching.

So the Americans put on their helmets, but the people didn't want to leave.

They stayed there, and luckily, the tank turned around.

But amid the joy, Lecoufle also photographed

the deadly cost of liberation.

You have an American truck at the entrance

to the Luxembourg Gardens, and you can see on the wall

all the bullet holes which are white dots.

Marcel Lecoufle shot the last known

3D photographs taken during the war itself.

But they're not the final story of 3D in World War ll.

Nine months later, with Germany defeated

and Nazi photo chief Heinrich Hoffmann in prison,

a nearly bankrupt Otto Schdnstein found a new subject

for his 3D cameras, the ruins of his country.

Returning to historic sites he had shot before the war,

Schdnstein recorded the devastating results

of Germany's blind obedience to Adolph Hitler.

Today, Germans have rebuilt many of their cultural treasures,

like Munich's Residenz Theater,

its Renaissance Antiquarium,

and Nuremberg's Heiden Tower.

But the scars these pictures represent for Europe

and for civilization are not so easily healed.

I spend my life attempting to understand that conflict,

why it was necessary for humankind to go down the road

of being involved in a conflict that ultimately cost,

although people argue about it, I believe it's over 100 million lives.

Otto Schénstein died a broken man in 1958,

leaving behind an eerie, disturbing 3D record

of the darkest days of modern times.

Monsieur Lecoufle still photographs in 3D

and anticipates great days ahead for his hobby of 83 years.

Television would be perfect if it were in three dimensions.

The proof of that is when photography first arrived,

3D was already around, and now it's making a comeback.

That comeback now gives a new dimension

to the villainy of the Nazis, the heroism of their opponents,

and the crucial ways that 3D itself helped to build up

and then tear down the 1,000-year Reich.