Original subtitles

In June 1942, Hitler travelled to Finland

to have talks with the Finnish leader Mannerheim

in a railway carriage.

The talks were being recorded by the Finns for posterity.

The formal part of the discussion comes to an end,

but the sound engineers let the recording device

carry on recording.

We hear for the only time

Hitler speaking privately.

MAN SPEAKS GERMAN

What is fascinating is the tone and tenor of Hitler's voice.

This is not prepared.

This is almost stream of consciousness stuff.

He reveals how his meeting with the Soviet Foreign Minister

made up his mind to invade.

And then an SS man notices that the recording is still going

and he goes like that.

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.

Hitler always needed people around him saying,

"You are a genius, you are our leader, you are the Fuhrer."

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 truthteller.

Nazi rule relies on quiet complicity.

GUNSHOT

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'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.

Requiem Mass in D Minor by Mozart

It's January 1942.

Hitler has launched Operation Barbarossa...

..invading the Soviet Union

in the north, south and centre.

But he's just lost the Battle of Moscow,

and all three of the armies are now bogged down

in the Russian winter.

The German Army desperately needs fuel and resources.

Furious with this failure, Hitler has sacked or sidelined

his top generals and appointed himself head of the German Army.

Hitler feels that he has the willpower and the genius, frankly,

to turn the tide and defeat the Soviets.

Hitler wants war without end.

Continual warfare was the only way in which a race, as he thought

of the Germans, could survive.

Without war, they would be weak.

So there's no prospect of the war ending.

He believes it's all or nothing.

And 1942 is the year where it's going to be all.

Hitler decides on a bold new plan -

to focus all his attack in the south.

The aim - to take the Soviets' oilfields,

stealing the fuel from Stalin's army and supplying his own.

But before he can do that, the German forces need to be rearmed.

As formal head of the war economy,

this would usually fall to Hermann Goring.

But he's fallen out of favour.

The general view of Goring is that he was a bit of a maverick,

that he liked dressing up, he took drugs, that he indulged himself

a great deal and so on.

I think for Hitler, one of the main considerations in early '42

is that Goring's been given a lot of power and responsibility.

I mean, he has half a dozen offices.

I mean, there were so many things that Goring does,

so many pies he had his finger in.

You know, Hitler's come to understand I think,

that, you know, there's a limit to Goring.

And the habit in the Third Reich, of course, is for Hitler to give

power and to take it away, to raise people up and drop them away.

And there's a new man rising in Hitler's inner circle

who has been designing the monuments of the Third Reich.

Hitler's favourite architect, 36-year-old Albert Speer.

Hitler was notorious for appointing

apparently unqualified people to do important jobs.

You have Ribbentrop as Foreign Minister,

who was actually a wine merchant.

You have Goring who is a pilot running the economy,

and Speer fits the bill perfectly.

The vision of Hitler and Speer is

to build monumental buildings

like in ancient Rome, like in ancient Athens.

Berlin will be the world's biggest and most famous capital.

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

And this is exactly what Hitler wanted.

There's going to be a triumphal arch, bigger than the one in Paris,

a great hall with a dome, bigger than that of St Peter's,

and it was gargantuan.

Speer recalled in his memoirs later that his father,

who was also an architect, came and saw these plans.

He just tapped his head and said, "You've all gone mad."

Now, Speer has an opportunity.

If he can solve Hitler's problem and successfully resupply

the German Army, he will become even more powerful.

But there is one person in his way.

Hermann Goring.

He goes for a meeting to try and gain access

to Goring's ministries.

Well, Goring, I think, is horrified by the appointment of Speer

and really doesn't understand it.

You know, he's had years of experience running areas

of the economy. Here's Albert Speer, but he knows nothing

about armaments, nothing about the war economy.

Goring keeps Speer waiting for over an hour.

He knows he is close to Hitler.

He walks in and out of Hitler's flat and not Goring.

Speer understands that Goring is motivated by the prestige of power

but doesn't actually want to do the work.

So he offers to do Goring's job for him

whilst Goring remains the figurehead.

And so Germany has a new Armaments Minister,

architect Albert Speer.

He talks Hitler into winning.

"We can win the war. I'll more than double the war production."

Hitler loves Speer's confidence,

so begins preparations for his huge attack in the south.

At the Kremlin, the map looks very different for Stalin.

He's won the Battle of Moscow,

but millions of German troops are still all over the country,

from Leningrad in the north to Rostov in the south.

Oh, my goodness. Pravda.

"Glorious victory."

At Moscow.

HE READS IN RUSSIAN

And in prime position, Zhukov.

Saved Leningrad, saved Moscow,

the two leading cities of the Soviet Union.

Perhaps for Stalin, a slightly bigger worry

that this army officer is getting rather big for his boots

and I must watch him.

Stalin views Zhukov as his most capable general,

but a potential threat.

Because Zhukov could be a dictator, Stalin doesn't make

these kind of mistakes.

He could smell Zhukov's strengths - Zhukov's ruthless,

Zhukov's highly popular.

And Stalin knows that he needs Zhukov

but he has to distance Zhukov from himself.

Determined to prove that he's the one in charge,

Stalin unveils his own plan to drive the Germans out of the Soviet Union,

launching a huge offensive from Leningrad to the Black Sea.

But Zhukov can see Stalin's plan is doomed.

He warns Stalin that after the Battle of Moscow,

the Red Army are in no shape to attack so soon.

Stalin has shown time and time again,

if you get in my way, I will get in yours terminally.

But Zhukov had the courage when necessary -

I'm sure he chose his moments carefully -

but when necessary, to say to Stalin,

"Comrade Stalin, yes, but..."

While Zhukov is warning, correctly warning,

Stalin doesn't want to hear that.

Stalin's confident now, he's in the driving seat.

He is... He's a big boss.

It's not just about winning the war,

it's about making sure he was in charge.

So Zhukov's reward for the success of the Battle of Moscow

is that he is sidelined and sent to the Front.

If you think of an army as a body,

you've got the brain, you've got a nervous system

which carries signals and messages,

and you've got muscles which do the fighting.

What Stalin did was virtually to remove the brain.

So now both Hitler and Stalin have taken charge

of their own armies.

There's no-one left to hold them back.

Something that always happened to dictators,

by clearing their path to power,

they have no choice but to eliminate the most

capable and most skilful executives.

The moment Stalin or Hitler tried to take over the command,

it led to a disaster.

Hitler has already made a similar mistake,

replacing or firing his top generals.

And now the man in charge of the 6th Army, who will play a key

role in the attack on the south...

..is a man who has never commanded troops in the field before -

the recently appointed General Paulus.

TRAIN WHISTLE BLARES

Paulus's leadership qualities were frankly rather weak,

to put it mildly.

He probably felt a slight feeling of impostor syndrome,

at the same time feeling thrilled and happy

at this remarkable piece of luck.

Paulus is immediately thrust into difficulty

when his troops are attacked by the Red Army at the city of Kharkov.

Paulus was under tremendous strain.

He had this nervous tic,

revealed quite how much pressure he was under.

Paulus was nicknamed The Delayer.

This was partly because he did not like to take a decision.

He was always rather frightened of taking the wrong decision.

Paulus asked permission to hold off on attacking.

But Hitler is now in control of the battlefield.

He instructs Paulus to smash through Red Army lines.

Following Hitler's orders, Paulus and his army

annihilate Soviet troops.

Stalin loses nearly 300,000 soldiers.

Hitler personally thanks Paulus for the victory

and awards him the Knight's Cross.

Paulus had tremendous admiration from that particular moment,

thinking, well, Hitler must have had a better view from up there

than I had down on the ground during the course of the battle.

Hitler has put Paulus in his debt

and binds Paulus to him personally.

Paulus then follows every command of Hitler's,

believing totally in his military brilliance.

So Hitler feels ready to launch his massive assault on the south.

Just over a week before the operation begins,

a German plane is shot out of the sky by the Red Army.

When they approach the wreckage, they find in the dead officer's

satchel the German invasion plans.

The maps and documents are raced to the Kremlin.

The German airplane - shot down,

and the pilot accidently has a map.

In Stalin's eyes, forgery,

disinformation, so you cannot trust it.

I don't think Stalin had even second thoughts

because it's accidental - he doesn't believe in accidents,

so it's probably staged.

Having sidelined his top general, Zhukov,

Stalin has nobody to make him see sense.

Stalin thought that Hitler would eventually attack Moscow,

because taking over Moscow,

that's the way to make Soviet capitulate.

And while Germans were making their build-ups in the south,

Stalin couldn't think of anything else but Moscow,

because he was there.

And that's why the real information from the dead pilot,

that was all disregarded by Stalin because it did not fit his ideas

about the top targets in Hitler's mind.

So Stalin fails to defend the south and the German Army storm through.

Soon, a million German soldiers are advancing on the oilfields.

They show no mercy toward Soviet civilians.

Paulus is a Christian,

but that did not necessarily mean he was ever prepared

to outright rejection on Nazi killing-orders

of Jews, Slavs, commissars and so forth.

There's a form of moral anaesthetic.

Paulus probably feels that he's certainly not active in pushing

Hitler's genocidal endeavours.

He was uneasy, but he certainly wasn't going to speak out

in any way against it.

At this point, it is interesting to know what Hitler is thinking,

because on one hand, the war seems to be going well,

but it's all taking so much longer than he thought.

How does he justify to himself the failures of the campaign so far?

In June 1942, he travels to Finland

to meet the Finnish leader, Mannerheim.

And one can listen in to their conversation.

He's talking quite informally and quite openly about where things

have gone wrong, excusing the failure of the German Army

to defeat the Red Army, the Soviet Army, in short order.

He's making excuses for his failures.

While Hitler complains that nobody told him how strong the Russian Army

was, he doesn't realise that there are other things

that people still don't dare tell him.

In Berlin, the architect, Speer, is struggling.

He does everything in his power

to enforce war production

and to get more and more people to work.

He doesn't care where these labourers come from.

Desperate to give Hitler the armaments he has promised,

he conscripts slave labour into the war effort.

Speer is not only an able organiser, but he is ruthless.

He takes every worker he can get his hands on.

Speer sees people dying.

He sees desperate, ill people

deprived of everything, but he doesn't care.

These prisoners weren't human beings for him any more.

Tens of thousands die as he tries to supply the Nazi war machine.

But it's still not enough.

So he decides to cook the books,

faking the numbers to try and make it appear to Hitler

like he is delivering.

Hitler is so convinced that he will ultimately win the war,

he takes another huge gamble.

He's going to capture not only the Soviet oilfields,

but 300 miles of the Black Sea coast,

as well as the city of Stalingrad.

In military terms, this is madness.

I think if Hitler had understood the magnitude of any of the gambles

he made, he probably wouldn't have made them.

He was precisely a gambler,

somebody who went for broke all the time

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

His faith in the racial superiority of the Germans

was enough to quell any doubts he might have had.

Hitler is desperately impatient.

Paulus, I think, had a mixed idea or feeling about what was lying ahead.

He certainly was not going to openly reject the orders

coming from Hitler's headquarters.

By dividing the army group, Hitler is weakening each of the two parts.

So while Paulus is sent to Stalingrad,

the other half of the army sets off to capture the oilfields.

Gnossienne No 1 by Erik Satie

But what looks straightforward on Hitler's map

is different in reality.

They soon find themselves traversing the colossal Caucasus Mountains.

Within weeks, they are low on fuel and supplies,

and the army grinds to a halt.

UPBEAT GERMAN MUSIC PLAYS

A general of the Army High Command returns from the Caucasus

with the worst possible news.

The operation to capture Stalin's oilfields is failing.

But Hitler demands that the campaign continue at all costs.

It's very unusual for a general to stand up to Hitler,

but so serious is the situation that he does.

Unusually, he stands his ground and he shouts back at Hitler.

"You gave the orders, you can't blame us, the generals.

"It's all your fault."

Hitler simply won't accept this.

Hitler thinks, well, he's the leader,

he's the dictator, he's the supreme strategist,

he's the man who defeated France and now he's beginning to be confronted

with the realities of the situation, and he really can't take it.

Things get very heated.

Hitler's not used to being informed by generals that his own strategy

is not going to work.

What happens next seems to be a turning point

in Hitler's psychology.

With no-one left to blame, he has some kind of mental collapse.

He withdraws, pulls back,

won't talk to the generals again, eats on his own,

and there's a generally rather unpleasant, tense atmosphere

in the headquarters.

Convinced his generals must have misquoted his orders,

he brings in a team of stenographers from Berlin to type out everything

he says in meetings from now on.

None of this shakes Hitler's belief that he will win the war.

Hitler begins to pin his hopes on Stalingrad.

This is the part of the operation that's still going forward,

and he now decides that that is the big objective,

conquering the city named after Stalin.

Dictators, they pay overwhelming attention to symbols.

It's all about symbols.

Dictator must prove time and again that he is, he is worthy

of this power that he somehow has been given, often grabbed.

But to hold his power, he needs victories,

sometimes symbolic victories.

If the city was named whatever, Volgograd, Ekaterinoslav,

whatever the name, Tsaritsyn, as the original name,

I don't think Hitler would be so devoted to go against it.

But it was Stalingrad.

And I think the name on the map, on the map,

you know, paralysed Hitler, he wanted to take Stalingrad.

And the German armies, instead of using their momentum,

the advantage, the manoeuvres and looking for oil

in Baku and Caucasus, he decides to bring his best troops

into Stalingrad.

Stalin was quite pleased.

Deep in his soul, Stalin feels even happy.

He knows enough about war to recognise that Hitler

is making a mistake,

that war in the city is going to wear out German troops.

Also, I think in the back of his mind, he thinks

about the great effect.

If Stalingrad survives, if this battle's won,

that's him, Joseph Stalin, here in the city of Stalin -

which had nothing to do with Stalin -

but now it's the city that bears Stalin's name.

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

For both Hitler and Stalin, this becomes a symbol

of their conflict.

For Hitler it would be a kind of symbolic victory over Stalin.

Stalin realises this and throws everything he can into its defence.

Stalin orders that every Russian man, woman and child

must stay and defend the city.

Any Russian soldier seen retreating will be shot immediately.

So both the Red Army and the German forces descend on Stalingrad.

And Stalin knows just the man he needs for this situation.

Stalin knows that the professionals must carry the war.

Zhukov is Stalin's man now.

Not his pet, not his favourite,

but this is the man Stalin needs.

What's apparent to Zhukov is that the German Army

has a weak spot in Axis troops camped outside the city.

Romanian, Hungarian and Italian forces are vulnerable to attack

in the north and south.

Zhukov aims to launch a simultaneous attack

on both these flanks.

Zhukov came up with an ambitious plan

to encircle Paulus's 6th Army of the Wehrmacht.

It is the great objective of any ambitious general

because it gives you, if you get it right, an outstanding victory.

Paulus is aware of exactly the same weakness.

Fearing his army is vulnerable to Soviet entrapment,

he goes to ask Hitler for reinforcements.

At the same moment, in Moscow,

Zhukov asks for Stalin's approval to attack.

This is the moment where both dictators,

they change the course almost simultaneously.

While Stalin demonstrated Zhukov has his full confidence,

Hitler goes in the opposite direction.

Hitler refuses to listen to Paulus's concerns.

He's only interested in when Stalingrad will fall.

Hitler, once again consumed by impatience,

wants to have something to announce back in Germany

of a huge victory in the East.

And so he is pushing Paulus to say, when is the city going to fall?

Paulus had already given an assessment

of another two weeks at least.

But actually even Paulus didn't believe that figure at the time.

On September 30th, 1942,

Hitler is in Berlin to make a speech.

He declares to the nation that victory at Stalingrad is imminent.

Hitler's self-belief was absolute.

Success is what's going to happen.

You can't even contemplate any kind of failure.

Hitler in the speech is really doing two things.

He's rallying the public around the belief that Stalingrad

is finished, that the German troops are going to occupy it

in very short order.

But he's also saying to the German troops

that that's what they've got to do.

They've got to occupy Stalingrad, they mustn't be deterred.

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

Hitler has publicly tied his own fate to the conquest of Stalingrad.

But Stalin isn't going anywhere.

The Soviet people take up arms against the Germans,

fighting house by house and street by street to defend the city.

LOUD GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS

Stalingrad degenerated into the most

bitter gutter fighting

amongst the ruined factories.

Very vicious indeed.

With no space for tanks, savage urban combat breaks out

in ruined homes, basements and cellars across Stalingrad.

It's a fight to the death.

With the Germans dug in inside the city,

Stalingrad could fall.

Now, Zhukov launches his attack.

He sends over a million of his troops

in a surprise pincer movement,

attacking the weak German flanks

and trapping a quarter of a million enemy soldiers.

Well, it showed great imagination, thinking out of the box.

And on a grand scale.

The distances, the numbers involved in that encirclement operation

are on the ambitious side, without doubt.

Before Paulus can react, his army is almost entirely surrounded.

Paulus is in fairly constant correspondence

with Fuhrer Headquarters to decide on what should be done.

Paulus asks permission from Hitler to break out.

The German armies cannot withdraw, not least because he's said that

they've already won, so it will be a serious loss of face for him.

Stalingrad has to be captured.

Autocratic leaders seem incapable of accepting

that an army sometimes has to withdraw

to more favourable ground in order to better defend.

For the dictator, every inch is a failure.

And by not allowing redeployment,

they make the end worse than ever.

But for one man, this is the opportunity he's been waiting for.

Hermann Goring sees the situation in Stalingrad as a way to redeem

himself with Hitler and gain the upper hand over his rival,

Albert Speer.

He's very aware that Germany's up against it.

He wants Germany to win.

Victory means Goring's still number two,

Goring with even more resources,

Goring with his big hunting forest in Russia.

You know, victory means a lot to Goring.

Op 64, No.13 Dance of the Knights by Prokofiev

Goring has a plan that he claims will miraculously

turn the tide at Stalingrad.

He persuades Hitler that he can use the Luftwaffe to supply Paulus's

trapped army with enough food and equipment to beat Stalin.

This is an opportunity to demonstrate once again

that he's in command.

There's no serious group of people sitting around and evaluating

what's going on and saying,

this can be done, that can't be done and so on.

You've got Hitler and Goring, both of them inclined

to be impulsive strategically.

You know, Hitler desperately needing a solution to a strategic disaster

which he's created, Goring desperately wanting to

get in with Hitler again and show him that, you know,

he can deliver something that Hitler wants.

So the two of them really are colluding together to create

what actually turns out to be a strategic fantasy.

Just like Speer before him, Goring knows he can't deliver

on his far-fetched promise,

but sends his Luftwaffe in anyway,

carrying only a fraction of the supplies needed

to sustain Hitler's army.

The Russian winter prevents most planes from landing.

Those that do are attacked by the Soviets.

Goring loses the lives of 1,000 men,

leaving Paulus and his army stranded in Stalingrad.

Among those trapped is Albert Speer's brother, Ernst.

His family members beg Speer to use his influence

to get his brother out.

But Speer claims he can't do anything to save him.

Speer doesn't really feel guilt.

He is willing to sacrifice the lives of his family

for this higher cost.

It's Christmas Day, and for weeks Paulus and his men

have been trapped with virtually no supplies.

They're stuck in an area known as the Cauldron,

but instead of boiling alive, they are freezing to death.

The suffering of the German troops was appalling.

The temperatures were often down to minus 20,

even at one stage to minus 30.

It meant that the casualties from frostbite were simply terrifying.

The worst thing of all was the lice for many of them.

I mean, you could tell as soon as a body died, somebody had died,

because there was this grey mass of lice leaving the body

as the temperature had cooled down.

And this, of course, was spreading typhus.

From that point onwards, they are beginning to starve to death.

And they start eating the horses, they start eating animals,

and in the end, there's some evidence,

they started eating each other.

Caught between the extreme suffering of his men and his duty

to his Commander in Chief,

Paulus is now in a state of mental and physical collapse.

Paulus was suffering very badly from recurrent dysentery.

He was extremely thin and haggard.

His twitch was pretty manic.

And one could tell that he was only occasionally sort of in control

of his own state and his own emotions.

And this is where Schmidt, his Chief of Staff, starts to take over.

Paulus, he had no options, basically, that's his problem.

He had no option other than to disobey Hitler

and start to withdraw or to surrender.

What else could he have done?

At the start of 1943,

the Russians dropped thousands of leaflets over the Cauldron,

wishing the 6th Army a happy new year.

To the officers and soldiers of the Wehrmacht,

your hopes to get help, as of nothing.

You've had it.

So the best thing you can do is, basically,

come out with your hands up or you will die.

Paulus tries one last roll of the dice.

He chooses a most unlikely messenger to go and reason with Hitler.

A 23-year-old called Winrich Behr.

Hitler was not listening to any generals, and so that's why

they chose Winrich Behr, who was a young 23-year-old captain,

in his black Panzer uniform with the Knight's Cross at the throat,

who would speak to him almost soldier to soldier.

Under artillery fire, he is smuggled out and flown

to the Wolf's Lair, where he is given an audience with Hitler.

Behr basically was not allowed to speak.

Hitler basically was telling him what a wonderful situation it was,

they would have an opportunity of inflicting a vast defeat

on the Red Army and all the rest of it.

Now, Behr knew perfectly well that this was untrue

and he waited until Hitler had finished.

And then he said, you know, Mein Fuhrer, will I please now have

your permission to tell you exactly what I was ordered to tell you

by my commander in chief?

And in front of all of the others present, Hitler could not say no.

Behr tells Hitler that the situation before Stalingrad

is desperate, that the troops are starving.

That their morale and their physical strength is so low,

it's increasingly difficult for them to fight.

Then Hitler just thinks that Behr's talking nonsense.

So he takes him to the situation map

and shows him all these massive German forces, all these divisions.

And Behr realises these divisions are now reduced

to just a few hundred men each.

Stalin is now on the brink of victory in the city

that bears his name.

But so far he's lost the lives of almost half a million soldiers

and 40,000 civilians.

Stalin didn't care about who lives.

It was all about winning. It's all about surviving.

When we say brutality, we believe that there are certain values

like human life that, you know, could stand in the way

of us achieving our goals.

Stalin, Stalin was a classical dictator.

If you should get from A to B or A to Z even, you know,

it doesn't matter, you know, how many people will die in the middle.

Hitler now becomes fixated on the idea

that whatever happens in Stalingrad, his troops must not surrender.

Sensing Hitler's wishes, Goring gives a speech on the radio

that even the soldiers in Stalingrad will be able to hear.

What he's telling his audience is that the men in Stalingrad

are like the 300 in Thermopylae -

the Greeks, the Spartans who sacrificed themselves

to save Sparta.

And it's a bizarre message

because it means that all the people in Stalingrad are going to die.

Those few who actually heard the speech,

they knew that this was their funeral oration,

implying that they were there to die to create this great legend.

Paulus is holed up in the basement of a bombed-out department store

in Stalingrad when he finally gets word from Hitler himself.

He receives a telegram announcing that he's been promoted

to Field Marshal.

Paulus knew instantly what it indicated.

No German Field Marshal had ever surrendered.

He knew perfectly well that Hitler expected him to commit suicide.

Die an honourable soldier's death, like Roman generals falling

on their swords when they were defeated.

It shows the fanaticism of the Nazi party.

It shows Hitler's all-or-nothing mentality.

Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven

On January 31st, 1943,

Paulus surrenders what is left of his army to the Russians.

I think the most obvious lesson from Paulus's experiences

and his life as the pawn of a dictator

shows that if you do not have the courage to stand up to a dictator...

..you will be left to suffer.

The lack of moral courage which Paulus showed

was actually going to do for him in the end, and it did.

The Soviet victory at Stalingrad

marks a crucial turning point in the war.

Stalin knows that it's a big defeat for the German military machine,

but also it's a spiritual victory for him because it's Stalingrad.

His stock goes up.

Not just Soviet Union, Stalin.

He's potentially viewed as a liberator

and many of the past crimes could be simply wiped out from history.

And the fact that the Soviet Union paid such a high price

by fighting Nazi Germany cannot be used by Stalin, his successors,

to wipe out the crimes committed by Communism.

It's a result of misreading of history.

And that's one of the reasons why we should tell the truth

about World War II and about the immeasurable sufferings brought

to human race by Stalin and Hitler.

Memories fade.

I was born in 1944, a wartime baby.

My father was away fighting.

We forget just how...

..primeval a situation it was.

The weakness of dictatorship

is you get one man who thinks he is infallible,

who will not brook debate or dissension,

very dismissive of the value of human life.

And in the end, I'm glad to say, they don't really work.

Everyone in Europe is afraid of this man.

After years of talking about it, next to Hitler is a bomb

with a fuse ticking that's about to explode.

Are you willing to do what it takes to survive?

It's important to remember that fear,

because we would all feel it in those circumstances.

They have no alternative than to go forward in this war.

He decides that when he's not going to win,

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