Original subtitles

Hitler decides to make a private sightseeing trip to Paris

on 23rd June 1940,

when Paris is occupied and controlled by the German forces.

They tour the Arc de Triomphe,

they walk around the artists' quarter in Montmartre.

Hitler says he'd thought of razing Paris to the ground,

but now he realises that he can build a much bigger

and better city in Berlin.

And they go to Napoleon's tomb...

..where Hitler pays his respects to the previous conqueror of Europe.

Hitler stands for a long while in front of Napoleon's sarcophagus.

It's reported he tells his entourage,

"That was the greatest and finest moment of my life."

He's paying his respects to Napoleon, but also, I think,

declaring privately to himself that he's going

to surpass his achievements.

Napoleon Bonaparte had once tried to conquer the world,

but his armies got stuck in the harsh Russian winter.

This is the story of the Eastern Front of the Second World War,

which many see as its defining conflict.

It was a campaign that saw some of the most brutal and inhumane

warfare in all of history.

Our interest is the psychology of that war...

What is the enemy up to?

Can you deceive him?

..the minds of dictators and the morality of those around them.

For him, no building is high enough and no hall is long enough.

And this is exactly what Hitler wanted.

To tell this story, we've asked some of the world's most eminent

historians and experts with different kinds of insight

to each take us inside the mind of one of the key protagonists.

He wants to be the architect of Germany's reality,

in some ways, the only truth teller.

Nazi rule relies on quiet complicity.

Ultimately, it's a study of why dictatorships are flawed

and how those who rule through fear and terror can never trust even

the people closest to them.

He'll then lose everything and bring Germany down with him.

For years, Hitler's mind has been full of the poison

of anti-Semitism.

Falsely believing in German racial supremacy,

he wants to eliminate all Jews and other races

he considers inferior.

And he dreams of world domination.

So far, he's taken a number of huge gambles, and they've all paid off.

He marched into Austria unchallenged.

He thought he could annexe Czechoslovakia and get away with it.

And he was right.

Then he made a deal with Stalin to invade Poland,

and his tanks reached Warsaw within a week.

And then he invaded France.

LOUD, ECSTATIC CHEERING

Now, it's July 1940.

He rules most of Europe and the German people love him.

In the summer of 1940,

Hitler thinks, "I'm the supreme general, I'm the supreme leader,

"I'm invincible."

This is the high point of Hitler's national popularity.

People had doubts before,

there had been some opposition, some misgivings.

But all this was swept away in the summer of 1940.

And so he comes to believe ever more strongly

in his own invincibility.

Now, Hitler is about to make a decision that will determine

the outcome of the war.

What to do about the Soviet Union

and its dictator, Joseph Stalin?

Hitler in some ways admires Stalin.

He says he's a kind of a monster.

But of course, he admires him as a strong leader.

So it's a kind of love-hate relationship.

Meanwhile, in Moscow, Stalin is trying to work out

what he makes of Hitler.

Stalin, ruthless dictator, didn't hesitate to eliminate

opposition, didn't hesitate to send millions of people to die.

It's recorded that Stalin had very high opinion about

the Night of the Long Knives,

Hitler's ruthlessness.

And of course, in 1940, Stalin admires Hitler because he succeeded

in destroying France and

almost bringing England on her knees.

It's a very special love story.

This is not liking or not liking.

If Hitler's standing in the way of Stalin's dream

of global dominance, so he should find the most effective way

of eliminating Hitler.

And so you have two dictators, both dreaming of world domination.

So far, they have collaborated, working together to carve up Poland,

and it's at this point Hitler offers Stalin a deal

to split the world between them.

Stalin was very opportunistic,

not limited by any even ideological barriers.

Allying with Hitler? If it works - perfect.

But Stalin has to work out if Hitler can be trusted.

So he sends his Foreign Minister to Berlin to find out.

21 Hungarian Dances, WoO 1: No 5, Allegro by Johannes Brahms

Molotov is a party official.

He was loyal, and that meant that he behaved very brutally indeed.

For somebody who seemed to have such authority and such power,

he looked, you know, very sort of modest and low-key.

The German people that he met talked about him

as a mathematics professor.

That was probably quite complimentary, really.

Lenin, of course, had called him the best filing clerk in Russia.

He's thinking, "How do I get into the mind of somebody like Hitler?

"What will be the objectives for Hitler and the German side?"

He arrives at the Reich Chancellery.

The whole point about the Reich Chancellery is project the power

of Hitler, the power of the Reich.

Walking down the long, grand corridors

then coming up to the Fuhrer's study,

and then you walk in, you, the small man in the ordinary suit,

you walk in and then the Fuhrer's desk is right at the other end.

Molotov has a long history of regarding the fascists as the enemy.

Hitler makes these very grand general statements about friendship

and alliance and so on.

He's flattering, he's charming.

That works a lot of the time.

This is a game that Hitler has played before,

toying with other world leaders before deceiving them.

He even signed a peace deal with the British Prime Minister,

and now they're at war.

Hitler starts by outlining his deal, offering Molotov large swathes

of the British Empire, the Middle East and India.

He's polite, calm

and insists on answers to his questions.

How are Soviet security interests in Europe, which is what really

matters to them, how are they going to be protected?

A lot of what Hitler was thinking about was fantasy,

increasingly so.

His grand geopolitical visions of distributing bits of the world

here and there,

this is the kind of behaviour that you get with these dictators.

Molotov repeats the questions and persists with the questions.

"What does that actually mean for the Soviet Union?"

Hitler gets very irritated by Molotov.

The state of mind he was in the summer of 1940,

supreme, as he thinks, in Europe,

and then here's this little man in this dingy suit

arguing the toss with him. He doesn't like this at all.

Hitler becomes increasingly furious with Molotov

and abruptly ends the meeting.

That evening, a banquet has been arranged.

Still smarting, Hitler is nowhere to be seen.

So Molotov rubbed shoulders with the Nazi Foreign Minister,

Ribbentrop, until their dinner is interrupted by an air-raid siren.

Molotov and Ribbentrop continue their negotiations

in an air-raid shelter.

There is a discussion, and of course, the basic point is,

is the British Empire available now to be carved up?

There's big talk from Ribbentrop and he says,

"Well, Britain is defeated."

And of course, that famously brings forward the comment,

well, if Britain is defeated, why are we in this air-raid shelter

and why are these bombs going off?

DISTANT EXPLOSIONS

Molotov concludes after his time in Berlin that the Germans

have got their hands full dealing with the British

and do not pose an immediate threat.

Hitler comes to a very different conclusion.

That it's time to invade.

It was always Hitler's long-term aim to invade the Soviet Union.

The failure of the negotiations with Molotov did confirm him

in his belief that this is the right thing to do and to start making

preparations for it.

Hitler is planning to launch Operation Barbarossa,

sending three million soldiers into battle...

..one army to invade the north,

one to the south

and one tasked with going all the way to Moscow.

The invasion of the Soviet Union is really the first major move

that Hitler has made to fulfil the ambitions he laid down

in Mein Kampf and that he'd been harbouring since he

went into politics,

the creation of what he called a living space in Eastern Europe.

And from that point of view,

the invasion of Poland or Czechoslovakia,

these were just little kind of preparatory essays.

This is the really big one.

The man Hitler needs to launch this invasion is the head

of the German army, Field Marshal von Brauchitsch.

Walther von Brauchitsch,

the absolutely quintessential Prussian officer.

Von Brauchitsch, he's got very grave doubts about opening up a war

on two fronts, a great deal of consternation,

a great deal of doubt. What if this goes wrong?

Brauchitsch epitomises the great, vast tug-of-war

going on in the minds of all of those generals there

as to the wisdom of taking on the Soviets.

Hitler's spelling out the most ambitious, the biggest,

the most dramatic invasion plan in history.

It's on an enormous scale.

So he's offering them, in a way, to participate in leading positions

in what is inevitably going to be

an extremely famous invasion.

So he's appealing to their vanity, in a sense.

Brauchitsch is in this terrible dilemma, because although

he dislikes this, although he would want to push back, he doesn't dare.

This would be career suicide, if not worse.

Hitler had a number of ways of securing the loyalty

of the leading generals, and in particular,

he would dole out titles like Field Marshal, for example.

And also by, you might say, outright bribery and corruption.

Bribery going upwards through the system and corruption coming

down plays an ever bigger role, and that's true in any dictatorship.

When Brauchitsch wanted to leave his wife to marry a younger woman,

Hitler personally lent him 80,000 Reichsmarks to pay for the divorce.

In the Faustian bargain, it was Faust gave away his soul.

And Brauchitsch in a way makes that Faustian bargain with Hitler.

So although the man in charge of the biggest invasion force

in history has doubts, Hitler believes that the army

is at his heel and fast-tracks his plans for Barbarossa.

# Kann die Liebe Sunde sein?

# Auch wenn sie es war'

# So war's mir egal

# Lieber will ich sundigen mal... #

In Berlin, life continues as normal.

# Niemals werde ich bereuen... #

The only people that know about the planned invasion

are those inside the Nazi regime

like this man, Harro Schulze-Boysen,

who works inside the Air Ministry,

where he begins to see Hitler's attack plans.

Harro Schulze-Boysen is born into a very prominent German naval family.

He's very tall, very lean,

has these chiselled Nordic features,

which the Nazis considered kind of the ideal physical framework.

Harro's wife, Libertas, is also part of the Nazi machine

working for Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry.

But Harro and Libertas are not what they seem.

Harro and Libertas are both working for Nazi agencies,

but they both intentionally took these positions in order to gather

intelligence from the inside and share it with people

who could work against the Nazis.

While most Germans either endorse the regime or stay silent,

Harro and Libertas have joined

one of the few resistance networks in Germany.

As a student, Harro's Jewish friend was murdered at the hands

of Nazi stormtroopers.

What he says at that point is that he's not going to respond

at the moment.

He basically says revenge is a dish best eaten cold.

And that's the beginning of his plans to infiltrate

the Nazi military hierarchy.

Some of the things he sees are reports on air reconnaissance.

Some of the things he sees are planning documents.

He is able to find out what the order of battle is.

He is able to find out a lot about the forces

designated for the invasion.

So he makes contact with the Soviets.

Harro was aware

that Stalin was an abusive dictator.

It was never a matter of Harro serving Stalin

or promoting Stalin's interests in Germany, it was a matter of rescuing

Germany from Hitler.

Harro can see clearly in military terms how Hitler can be quickly

defeated, and potentially millions of lives can be saved.

Harro meets with a Soviet spy

and offers to become their man on the inside,

giving them the details of Hitler's attack plans.

He's assigned a code name, the Russian word for sergeant -

Starshina.

But Stalin has a vast espionage network.

He has eyes and ears everywhere at the heart of governments

across the world...

..from the Japanese cabinet

to the pillars of the British establishment,

and now inside the German Air Ministry.

So Harro's voice is just one of many.

Meanwhile, Hitler is preparing for Operation Barbarossa.

He needs to move a vast army of three million men

to the Soviet border.

And he has to do this right under the noses

of the watching Soviet generals.

Symphony No.7 in A major op.92 - Il Allegretto by Beethoven

Georgy Zhukov, he was one of the leading Soviet generals.

He would probably himself say,

"What do you mean, 'One of'? I am the leading Soviet general."

He was not without some vanity.

Zhukov clearly is

very concerned of German capability, of German deployments,

and there was this huge build-up of German military power

along the border.

Hitler has been busy working on a way to deceive Stalin.

Hitler had a very good eye for the weaknesses of his opponents.

Stalin was a very suspicious kind of man, he was prone to conspiracy

theories, and that, of course, means that you can supply Stalin

with many kinds of information and misinformation

that he will believe.

Hitler orders his spies to pump out conspiracy theories that other

nations are plotting against Russia, and spreads rumours that Germany

is going to attack Britain, and a smokescreen that troops

on the Soviet border are really just carrying out exercises,

preparing for the invasion of Britain.

The run-up to Barbarossa

is almost a kaleidoscope of information

which keeps changing.

Clever intelligence.

The Germans were quite good at deception.

Stalin relies on...

..what to me is a fairly transparent lie from Berlin

that these...assembly of forces is just retraining,

they're on exercise.

They're on exercise in preparation for the real thing.

Zhukov now does something that few others dare.

He tells Stalin something he doesn't want to hear.

I'm sure going through his head would have been,

"If I get this wrong, it's Siberia at best."

Zhukov is a patriot.

Yes, he was a Communist, but he was a patriot.

And therefore he would, I'm sure,

have been motivated by a patriotic stance

that we have to do everything we can to stop the Germans.

Zhukov is saying, "I have this intelligence,

"it's hard intelligence that the Germans are going to attack."

And Stalin says, "I have my own intelligence,"

discounting a warning which any,

any leader would have surely taken utterly seriously

because the stakes were unbelievably high.

Now, whether that was because he really, really thought

this would not happen or Stalin found the prospect

of a German invasion so awful,

he closed his mind down to it.

So Stalin makes no serious preparations for a German attack.

The whole story is very mysterious because it's this...

That's what I learned in my school in the Soviet Union.

That's what we learned from Soviet textbooks

and from the movies, that there was so much intelligence

and Stalin ignored it, Stalin ignored it,

and because he trusted Hitler.

No, Stalin didn't trust Hitler, Stalin didn't trust anybody.

There's only one rational explanation.

Stalin didn't care because he was also preparing to attack.

German invasion was inevitable.

They know there were four million soldiers or so

across the border.

You don't bring four million people at the border.

And do we believe Stalin could buy Hitler's story

that he had them there just to take a rest before invasion of England?

Come on, it's just... It doesn't fly.

So either Stalin doesn't believe Hitler is about to attack

or he is preparing an attack of his own.

Either way, virtually nothing is done.

What Hitler is planning is not a normal invasion.

This is something far darker even than normal warfare.

At a meeting with his generals,

he outlines his vision for Barbarossa.

Hitler tells them this is a war like no other,

this is not a conventional war.

This is a war between the races for racial supremacy.

It's a clash in which there must be no consideration

at all for the conventional rules of warfare.

The man on the other side is not your comrade.

He is someone who has got to be exterminated.

There must be no mercy. It must be absolutely ruthless.

He believes this is going to be a war of conquest above all

of Eastern Europe and of course, a war,

and this is the most important core belief of Hitler, against the Jews.

To be told you're going to be involved in a war of annihilation,

there's absolutely no pretence about the fact that this is going

to be a war about the mass murder of innocent civilians and human

beings who have absolutely nothing to do with this ideological fight

between Hitler and Stalin.

This becomes a tremendous burden for Brauchitsch.

All of a sudden it becomes clear

just what road they've started to go down.

Around the room, there is silence.

No-one utters any objections to Hitler's plans.

Brauchitsch's reaction is to, in a way, put his head in the sand,

the way a lot of them do.

He wants to think in terms of the military.

He wants to think in terms of, OK,

where are my divisions going to be going?

What about supplies and provisions?

What about weapons, ammunition, fuel?

These are the nice sort of rather, if you will, safe questions

that the military can busy themselves with.

It's a way of creating your own sort of moral bubble.

As if to ease his conscience, Brauchitsch makes insignificant

tweaks to Hitler's orders, but ultimately signs off

on commands giving carte blanche to kill anyone, including civilians.

He coordinates with Himmler's SS death squads,

who follow behind the German army,

murdering Jews in the name of security.

Brauchitsch is not the man pulling the trigger,

but the crimes that are going to be committed are so horrific

that just by being such an important cog in the wheel

of Hitler's machine makes him complicit.

Over three million troops are now stationed

along 1,100 miles of Soviet border.

In just under a week, they will attack.

With so many lives at stake, much is resting

on Harro Schulze-Boysen's covert intelligence.

I think about the story of Cassandra in Ancient Greece

and the way she saw disaster on the horizon,

and she desperately tried to tell everyone what was coming.

And if she could only warn them, maybe she could avoid the disaster.

That's Harro. Harro sees the disaster on the horizon.

He sees how it's going to unfold and the tragedy that

it's going to entail.

On June 17th, a report was sent quoting Starshina.

This lands on Stalin's desk.

He takes his pencil and he scrawls, "This is not information,

"this is disinformation, you can send your so-called source

"back to his whore of a mother."

A lot of authoritarian figures, they disregard intelligence,

they disregard expertise, they disregard the educated people

around them, and they go by their instincts and they go,

to some extent, by their cronies, who know how to tell them

what they want to hear.

You see this repeated in history time and time again.

And sooner or later, those qualities catch up with them

and they have this prediction that they make on instinct,

they're caught dead wrong, and

those are the seeds of their defeat.

The Seasons, Op. 37b - VI. Barcarolle by Tchaikovsky

On the eve of the attack, Hitler is in the Reich Chancellery

wracked with anxiety.

Hitler always gets nervous just before a big event.

He was nervous before the Night of the Long Knives,

he's nervous before the Anschluss.

He always gets kind of last-minute jitters.

And of course, in this case, there are spectres

hovering over Barbarossa.

There's the spectre of Napoleon and his defeat in Moscow,

the catastrophe of Napoleon's invasion of Russia.

He was a gambler, somebody who went for broke all the time

because he felt that the cards would fall in his favour.

Hitler believed that he was

a kind of favoured child of providence.

Fate had ordained that he would be victorious.

The invasion of the Soviet Union

is announced on all German radio stations

to the sound of Franz Liszt.

Les Preludes, symphonic poem No.3, S.97 by Franz Liszt

Across the entire Soviet border,

from the Baltic to the Black Sea,

the German army sweeps in,

killing indiscriminately.

In Moscow, the German ambassador arrives at the Kremlin

to tell Molotov that Germany have declared war.

He would be thinking, "I didn't judge this correctly.

"I've got to go and tell more to the boss,

"which is going to be difficult."

Er...he probably somewhere in his mind was thinking,

"Yeah, I'm going to be under stress now.

"This is the beginning of something really massive."

Stalin has been caught off guard

and the Red Army are in disarray.

It becomes clear in Moscow

that this is not just an incursion over the border,

but this is a strategic manoeuvre

to invade the Soviet Union.

Um...and you can imagine that

hearts would be in boots, um...in the Kremlin.

Stalin was stunned by

the reality of the German invasion.

Within days, German forces have advanced 200 miles

into Soviet territory.

By the time they reach the city of Minsk,

they've captured or killed over 300,000 Red Army troops.

With the Germans only 400 miles from the capital,

the gravity of the situation comes crashing down on Stalin.

The fall of Minsk happened on 28th June,

six days after the invasion.

Didn't take long.

And the scale of the defeat,

the destruction involved,

the killings involved of soldiers,

you know, it was a massive military failure.

I think Stalin was not knowing what to do.

I mean, he was...he was shocked,

panicked, frightened.

First time in many years,

maybe first time in his life, he didn't have a game plan.

Stalin retreats to his dacha like a cornered animal.

When his country needs him the most,

suddenly, Stalin is nowhere to be seen.

Hitler now bases himself at his front-line headquarters,

the Wolf's Lair,

a top-secret, high-security complex of camouflaged bunkers

hidden in a dense Prussian forest.

It's a strange world, penetrated by neither light nor reality.

Hitler is on course to control even more territory than Napoleon.

He feels that he's conquered the Soviet Union,

it's going to collapse any minute.

The atmosphere is one of continuing optimism and euphoria

as news rolls in of stunning military victories

over the Red Army.

The success of the invasion leads to a jubilant mood,

and this allows Brauchitsch to push any doubts he might have had to one side.

The relationship between officers and Hitler

is very much one like a magic show.

They had their doubts about the Soviet Union,

and now, once again, he seems to be like the great magician

pulling the vast rabbit out of a hat.

They're all going to be coming home by Christmas.

In the streets of Berlin,

confidence of a quick victory is sky-high.

But at the Ministry of Propaganda, Harro's wife, Libertas,

comes face-to-face with the reality of Hitler's war.

She's receiving these photographs and films

from soldiers coming back from the Eastern Front.

When you look at these photos, you see terrified women,

you see terrified children

looking into the eyes of their attackers.

At Babi Yar in the Ukraine, over two days,

34,000 men, women and children are massacred.

By the end of 1941,

half a million Jewish people are murdered.

It is known as the Holocaust by bullets.

Uncounted numbers of Russians,

many, but not all of them, Jewish,

are being massacred

by not just SS divisions,

but by Wehrmacht, German army divisions.

She feels a responsibility to archive this material

and to make it available in any way that she can.

And what she says is that

in the future, there will be accountability.

There will be a war crimes tribunal.

And she is assembling the evidence.

She is archiving it, it will be presented

in order to prosecute soldiers who have committed

these...these terrible atrocities

and the officers who have commanded them.

And she organises it. Er...

..this is her contribution to the resistance activities.

Meanwhile, her husband Harro and his resistance network

are desperately trying to get the next phase

of the German invasion plans to the Soviets.

But the Soviet high command is in disarray.

No-one has seen or heard from Stalin in days.

He refuses to sign documents or to speak to anyone.

The Soviet government is paralysed.

There's debate as to what extent he was actually breaking down,

or to what extent he was playing a game, in a true Stalin-type way,

to test the people around him

to see who was going to try and come forward and take his place.

Molotov knew that he had to deal with this situation.

He was clearly the number-two man.

It's an animal world. You know, the dictators, you know, they don't elect it.

They stay in power as long as they are trusted by their cronies.

It's like a mafia boss.

So, you...you...you lost? You're out.

And Stalin failed.

Stalin was desperate.

He was sitting alone, waiting for...for the worst,

because he was afraid that his own Politburo members

could actually arrest him for the failure,

because it was his fault, and everybody knew it was his fault.

The outcome of Stalin's gamble was disastrous.

This is like a mafia family.

So much, you know, reflects the mentality of the Soviet bosses.

And I know...I know this country, I grew up in this country.

And I-I could even... I could visualise this scene, you know.

They're entering the room and...

..it could go either way,

either just, you know, thrown in the dust,

or, um...he becomes the king again.

Molotov had to step in to try and control the situation,

but not in a way that made him out to be some kind of rival.

Molotov proposes the creation of a shiny new body,

the State Defence Commissariat...

..with Stalin, as supreme leader, at its helm,

a new superdictatorship.

At the end of the day, they proved to be weak.

And I think the fact that they proved to be weak

made Stalin stronger,

because that's...that's... Somehow it's a fluctuation of this energy

and spirit within the group.

So nothing...nothing could disappear.

Energy doesn't disappear.

So if they're getting weaker, Stalin's getting stronger.

And...and...and smelling their fear and weakness,

Stalin gained back his confidence.

So he's in charge again, so it's,

"Don't cry over spilled milk. It's behind me.

"Yes, we failed, now let's see what we can do."

This man, Molotov, who was a boring apparatchik,

best filing clerk in Russia, he kept his head.

And he was the one who knew Stalin best.

And then, to let him come forward

and show his strengths as a wartime leader.

Stalin reappears and tells the Soviet people

to resist the German invaders.

Stalin recognises it's time to change the tone.

He's no longer talking like a father of the nation.

His statement starts with, "Brothers and sisters..."

And that was the beginning of reorganising Soviet propaganda

towards Russian nationalists, towards the Great Patriotic War.

I can tell you something about Soviet propaganda.

Look at this picture.

Look at this picture.

And now look at this picture.

This picture, taken by anybody prior to the war,

suicidal. You disappear.

Because that's wrong. This is... That's...that's...that's...

That's the way, a triumphant, dear leader.

This picture, this is brothers and sisters.

This is a new image of Stalin who is suffering, who is thinking,

who is no longer all-powerful, he doesn't know everything,

but he's...he's with his people. Look at him.

Just, you know, ordinary man.

This is the image they wanted to present,

wounded by this betrayal of Hitler that he trusted.

But, you know, don't worry, we're all together.

As they get closer to Moscow,

the German attack is slowing.

And Brauchitsch becomes concerned

that this is going to take longer than expected.

He asks Hitler to focus the attack on Moscow.

And he'll need tank reinforcements,

and the troops may need winter clothes.

Hitler increasingly thought of himself as the military commander.

And when Brauchitsch tried to sway him

in favour of sending tanks to Moscow,

Hitler simply went berserk.

Hitler hates what he thinks of as defeatism.

For him, all you need is willpower,

the power of the will to overcome any practical problems,

whether it's getting bogged down in the mud in the autumn rains in Russia,

or getting frozen to death in the snows at minus 30 degrees.

All of this, he just brushes aside. These are not problems.

So he didn't really bother with getting the troops

adequate winter clothing.

It'll all be over by winter.

One push and the whole rotten edifice of the Soviet Union would collapse.

At this point, Hitler makes a controversial decision.

He decides that the attack on Moscow can wait...

..instead ordering his armies north, to Leningrad,

and south, to Kiev, to capture even more territory and resources.

Hitler was becoming increasingly detached from reality.

Hitler's limitless self-belief

made him think that he could do anything.

And those generals who pointed out the obstacles

in a sense of realism and military professionalism

were simply brushed aside.

By this point, the only reality that matters is Hitler's reality.

Brauchitsch made a Faustian pact with Hitler

when he decided that he would effectively bow to Hitler's wishes,

whatever his own personal views might be.

And in a way, this decision comes to bite him,

because Hitler was only always using him as a kind of mask

for what Hitler himself was trying to do.

Hitler sidelines Brauchitsch,

who is forced to watch what happens next.

Hitler wastes time capturing Kiev and laying siege to Leningrad.

It's October by the time he finally gives the order for Army Group Centre,

a force of two million men, to attack Moscow.

You had the German army advancing on Moscow

as a Russian winter was setting in.

Harro knew that the German military

were not prepared for the Russian winter.

And as Napoleon found out to his distress,

the Russian winter can be a greater enemy than the Russian armed forces.

Harro and Libertas meet with a Soviet spy,

handing over vital intelligence

showing that Germany is headed for military disaster.

They assure him that Hitler can be beaten.

Harro is supercharged with his adrenaline.

He's taking more and more risks.

When you're living with that addiction to adrenaline,

you're less attentive to danger.

And I watched various colleagues of mine who were journalists

who...who...who became totally addicted to the adrenaline

and just walked straight into situations that killed them.

And you realise that the adrenaline was driving them.

They forgot how to fear.

Harro forgot how to fear.

INDISTINCT RADIO COMMS

The agent radios vital intelligence back to Moscow.

The basic rule of thumb for these radio transmissions

is to keep them short.

But he's got so much information from Harro

that he stays transmitting for five hours.

And it also leaves him susceptible

to all kinds of detection from the German military and others

who are monitoring these transmissions.

INDISTINCT RADIO COMMS

The German army are converging on Moscow,

and the Luftwaffe are bombing the city.

There is panic in the capital.

With no air-raid shelters in the Kremlin,

Stalin has taken refuge in the subterranean halls of the Metro.

He is deciding whether to abandon the city.

Stalin was urged to leave Moscow

when the Wehrmacht were

supposedly in sight of the onion domes of the Kremlin,

when he must have known that if Moscow fell,

his life was likely to be short.

But Stalin has one last card left to play.

Having ignored the advice of the men around him,

he's finally ready to hear the truth.

He calls for General Zhukov.

An armoured train waits on the platform to take Stalin to safety.

The answer to one question will determine the outcome for Moscow.

He asks Zhukov whether he, Zhukov,

can keep Moscow out of German hands,

to which Zhukov says, "I can do that."

Stalin wanted to hear the truth.

But again, he's a dictator,

he wants Zhukov to say that.

So if anything goes wrong, Zhukov would be responsible.

The fate of the Soviet Union is in Zhukov's hands.

He's tough. Very strong-willed.

Something of a, um...street fighter.

He was so single-minded to achieve success

that once committed,

he was absolutely adamant that he would succeed.

Zhukov rallies thousands of civilians to defend Moscow...

..and sends battle-hardened Siberian troops to the front,

driving the Germans back 150 miles.

Moscow was saved by at least two generals,

General Zhukov and General Winter.

Zhukov telegraphed Stalin, saying, "Victory."

And then falls asleep, I think, for three days or more.

Over 100 years earlier,

Napoleon's army had taken Moscow, only to be driven back.

Hitler's army reaches the gates of Moscow, but no further.

So far, over three million Jews and Soviets have died

as part of Hitler's horrific racial genocide.

But this is only the beginning.

If you don't have people who find a way to stand up and say,

"No, this is not correct, this is not who we are,"

then you've lost the whole framework of civil society.

And Germany shows us better than anywhere else where that can lead.

One has to look at these Nazis

that particularly tried to hide behind

these elevated positions of power and of glory,

and they could separate themselves from the violence,

they could separate themselves from the crimes

and then carry on with their lives as if they really weren't involved.

At the Nuremberg trials, this was very much the position that Brauchitsch took

with his own career path and his own life.

"I didn't do anything wrong.

"I was separate from these terrible crimes.

"And anyway, I was dismissed in 1941,

"so I really had nothing to do with it."

But this is a cop-out.

Um...it shows again his lack of moral fibre,

the inability for him to look squarely in the face

of the Third Reich, of Hitler, of the Nazis,

and have his own role in that,

even if it was cut shorter than some of his other colleagues'.

For both Hitler and Stalin, this becomes a symbol of their conflict.

Stalingrad degenerated into the most bitter gutter fighting.

Speer doesn't feel guilt.

He talks Hitler into winning.

Die an honourable soldier's death,

like Roman generals falling on their swords.

If Stalingrad survives, if this battle is won,

that's him, Joseph Stalin.

That's where the German army could meet its match.