Original subtitles

(narrator) Russia: mid-June 1941 .

A bewildered, uncertain country.

Rumours abounded of invasion by Hitler's Germany.

Here in the Kremlin, Russia's leaders seemed oblivious of the Nazi threat,

or if not oblivious, then complacent,

as if, by ignoring it, it might disappear.

Yet already, millions of German troops were poised along Russia's border

to launch the bloodiest land battle in history -

the battle that was eventually to decide the Second World War.

(crowd) Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!

♪ Wenn die Soldaten durch die Stadt marschieren

♪ Öffnen die Mädchen

♪ Die Fenster und die Türen

♪ Ei warum? Ei darum

♪ Ei bloß wegen dem Schingderassa, Bumderassasa

♪ Ei bloß wegen dem Schingderassa, Bumderassasa...

(narrator) Hitler in July 1940, returning from France in triumph,

stood at the pinnacle of his power.

♪ ..Die Mädchen ach so gerne

♪ Ei warum? Ei darum

♪ Ei bloß wegen dem Schingderassa, Bumderassasa

(narrator) The sureness of his victories astonished even his generals.

Their doubts had been answered, their opposition could be discounted.

lt was now that Hitler confided to them it would be the Russians' turn next.

(crowd) Sieg Heil!

(narrator) In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler had written:

"When we speak of new territory, we must think of Russia."

"Destiny itself points the way there."

(♪ German national anthem)

(narrator) Russia would provide living space for the German Volk -

Lebensraum.

(crowd) Heil! Heil! Heil!

Heil! Heil! Heil!

(narrator) The ordinary German,

like the ordinary Russian or ordinary person anywhere,

had been surprised by Hitler's pact with Stalin in August 1939.

To him, as to them, it had seemed the least likely about-face

by the world's bitterest rivals.

The Nazi-Soviet Pact had serVed its purpose for Hitler.

He had not been hindered while he dealt with Poland and France.

Stalin, for his part, gained a breathing space

while he put his army in order affer the blood-letting purges of the '30s.

He had gambled, too, on a lengthy struggle between Germany and the Allies.

But the German victories in the west had been swiffer than he had expected.

(man) Hitler wanted to attack Russia already in the fall of 1940,

and let himself, for once, be persuaded

that it would be impossible to go to war at that late time

on account of the weather in Russia,

and for the reason that it would be

urgent and necessary

to enforce the German army,

as well as the German air force,

before entering into this new campaign.

ln August '39, when Hitler had signed the pact with Russia,

in the evening, there was a movie,

and this movie showed the parade of the Russian troops before the Kremlin.

He was very much impressed and was relieved that now, with the pact,

this army is neutralised.

But afferwards, when the German troops met the Russian ones

in occupying Poland,

officers reported to Hitler

that the equipment of those Russian units were very poor.

He first didn't believe it so much,

but then when the Russians attacked the Finns

and they didn't have any progress,

he was convinced that this was really the truth

and he was now considering the Russian army

no more as strong as before.

(narrator) Doubts about the Red Army's strength had been raised inside Russia.

The purges of the '30s had decimated its leadership.

90% of its generals, 80% of its colonels and well over half its corps commanders

had been put to death at Stalin's whim.

Every single commander of a military district was eliminated.

Every single commander of an army division has been eliminated.

Every single commander of a regiment, with some exceptions here,

also eliminated.

Now, you see, this is a little more than political weakness.

The army was beheaded, so to speak.

(narrator) Affer the Red Army's poor performance against the Finns,

steps were taken to reform it.

When news reached Moscow of the Wehrmacht's crushing of the French,

these reforms were accelerated.

They were still incomplete by the summer of 1940.

All the same, Stalin seized his chance

while Hitler was preoccupied with the battle for Britain

to grab first the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania,

and then, within the same month,

those parts of Romania known as Bessarabia and northern Bukovina -

a move that, to Hitler, brought Russian troops

uncomfortably close to the Romanian oil wells at Ploesti,

Germany's only oil supply,

vital for its tanks and planes and ships.

But with the bulk of his forces still in the west,

Hitler did not interVene.

lnstead, he stepped up diplomatic pressure

to woo the Balkans into the German fold.

First, King Boris of Bulgaria was invited

to visit Hitler that autumn at Berchtesgaden,

and he was followed by Prince Paul of Yugoslavia

and by young King Michael of Romania.

Michael was already under the sway

of his pro-German prime minister, Antonescu.

When news broke that Romania and Hungary had joined the Axis,

the Russians reacted sharply.

They accused Berlin of violating the spirit of the August 1939 pact.

The frail Soviet-German friendship was beginning to fall apart.

Hitler, that same month, further strengthened the Axis.

He signed a new military alliance with ltaly and with Japan -

the Tripartite Pact.

lt was aimed, allegedly, at only the United States and Britain.

The Russians thought otherwise. They protested angrily.

Hitler invited Stalin's closest adviser, Molotov,

to Berlin that November 1940,

to help, as he put it, "clarify the situation".

lt was a disastrous visit for Soviet-German relations.

(Speer) When Molotov visited Berlin,

he was obviously afraid of being poisoned by bacteria

and he asked that all the plates, all the glasses he used

are boiled before they came in use.

(man) He was blunt in his remarks

and he didn't spare Hitler at all.

Very uncompromising,

hardly smiling at all, reminding me of my mathematics teacher,

with the spectacles - hostile spectacles -

looking at his pupil, Hitler, and saying,

"ls our agreement -

last year's agreement - still valid?"

Hitler thought it was a mistranslation.

He said, "Of course. Why not?"

And Molotov said, "Yes,

l ask this question because of the Finns."

"You're on very friendly relations with the Finns."

"You invite people from Finland to Germany and send the missions there."

"The Finns are very dangerous people. They undermine our security."

"We'll have to do something about that,

and we are going to do something about that."

Whereupon Hitler exploded and said, "l understand you very well."

"You want to wage war against Finland,

and that is quite out of the question, do you hear me? lmpossible!"

"Because my supplies of iron and of nickel

and of other important raw materials would be cut."

lt was a very tough,

almost a heavyweight championship in political discussion.

(narrator) Even while Molotov was still in Berlin,

Hitler ordered his generals to plan an attack on Russia for May 15, 1941 .

They responded with a detailed scheme which he named "Operation Barbarossa"

affer the red-bearded Prussian emperor who, centuries earlier,

had crusaded against the Slavs.

Hitler's generals had taken some convincing.

To attack Russia with Britain resisting was to fight a war on two fronts,

something that even Mein Kampfmaintained

to be the gravest of military mistakes.

But Hitler argued, and with some truth that winter of 1940,

that Britain, although not beaten, was not a threat,

so an eastern campaign would be the only front, provided it was over quickly.

Years earlier, Hitler had written, "Armies do not exist for peace."

"They exist solely for triumphant exertion in war."

The Wehrmacht's morale was at its height.

Where was it to march next? lt couldn't move against Britain on land

and amphibious warfare was not to Hitler's liking.

Magnetism alone, it seemed,

must draw it against its sole remaining antagonist within Europe,

draw it in the same way as Napoleon's armies had been drawn

when they, too, had been leff champing at the bit along the Channel -

eastwards, ever eastwards,

to the boundless motherland of Russia.

The Red Army in 1941 was the largest in the world.

ln tanks, it outnumbered,

in airplanes, it equalled the rest of the world's armies put together.

Despite its shortcomings, the Red Army was better equipped

than previous Wehrmacht victims,

and its reorganisation since the fiasco of the Finnish war was well under way.

But what of its morale? Hitler felt sure he knew the answer:

"You have only to kick in the door

and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down."

Russia's leaders still thought they could buy time

while their army made ready for the struggle.

By March 1941 , Russian troops were already being faced by German troops

along the borders of Hungary and Romania, and even Bulgaria.

Yugoslavia, too, looked like becoming a German satellite until,

encouraged by British intelligence,

a popular uprising in Belgrade pushed out the Nazi puppets.

lncredibly, Moscow concluded a pact with the rebels.

The very next day, Hitler attacked Yugoslavia.

lncensed by the revolt, he named the operation "Retribution".

Operation Retribution meant postponing Operation Barbarossa

by five crucial weeks.

But now Russia stood by while the Wehrmacht overran her newest ally.

Hitler marched into Greece, again without Moscow so much as protesting.

This inaction made Hitler even more headstrong

as his armies swept on to further easy victories.

Stalin's spies had been sending back reports

of German troop concentrations along his borders,

reports which he chose to ignore.

When Western diplomats warned him too, he shrugged them off.

He argued to his cronies

that however inevitable a Nazi-Soviet conflict might be,

these present reports were simply a British ruse.

(man) The interesting thing was that both Roosevelt and Churchill

informed Stalin that Hitler was going to attack Russia.

Stalin thought that was a trick

on our part

to get him to mobilise and to divert,

to provoke Hitler into attack.

Stalin was very conscious that

in World War l,

it was the Tsar's mobilisation

that caused the German -

the Kaiser - to attack Russia,

and he wasn't going to have any part of it.

There is a traditional pathological mistrust.

When the British say something,

Stalin's philosophy used to tell us, "You must think the opposite".

lf the British warn us,

that must mean that they try to put us against the Germans.

For that reason - the main reason - he neglected all the warnings.

(narrator) May Day in Moscow, 1941 .

(♪ rousing, patriotic song)

A particularly impressive military parade,

as if to reassure the Russian people

in the face of all the rumours of impending invasion.

Russian diplomacy was aimed at appeasing Hitler,

hoping to delay any attack until the Red Army's reforms would be complete.

And so, while the generals lectured,

the diplomats rushed grain and much-needed raw materials to Germany,

turned a blind eye to the incursions of German reconnaissance planes

over Soviet territory

and even slowed down their building of frontier defences

so as not to offend Berlin.

Yet even as Stalin's defence commissar

shook hands with Hitler's military attaché in Moscow,

three million German troops were moving up to the border.

The biggest land battle in history was about to begin.

The shock was all the greater when it came.

l remember that night, l'd been out

and came home rather late and turned on the radio,

and l got onto, l think it was Kharkov

or Kiev or somewhere like that,

and there were accounts going on

of bombing and attacks and things,

which l thought was a sort of Orson Welles programme,

like when he bombed New York, remember?

Then we checked around and found it was real.

We were told that the Red Army will never fight on its own territory,

that the very first shot will be made on enemy's territory.

Then, suddenly, on the 22nd,

we were told that Sevastopol is being bombed, Kiev is being bombed,

Smolensk, bombed. The enemy smashed, wiped out our forces.

(man) Affer the success of the other campaigns,

we had confidence that Barbarossa would be successful too.

(man #2) The first period of the advance was very quick.

We made more than 100km per day.

(man #3) We hadn't lost a battle, so we were used to being victorious.

(narrator) Hitler's plan was for three armies

to seek out and destroy the Russian forces within four months.

(man #4) l never was in a war before.

We had no fear

because we thought we will win the war against Russia,

because the wars against Poland and France,

we had ended with victories for Germany.

(narrator) As well as surprise,

the Germans had overwhelming superiority in men and fire power

at those points chosen for their armoured thrusts.

Three Russian infantry divisions were annihilated that first day,

and another five cut to pieces.

(man #2) During the River Bug crossing,

we were attacked by several obsolete Russian aircraff

that were shot down immediately

and we were very impressed

by the superiority of our air force at the beginning.

(narrator) During the first two days,

2,000 Russian planes were destroyed, mostly on the ground.

The world's largest air force had been well-nigh eradicated.

Their air cover gone, the Russian frontier armies wilted and disappeared.

ln a week, the Wehrmacht was already halfway to Moscow.

ln a month, the Germans had won an area double the size of their own country.

(♪ "Wenn die Soldaten durch die Stadt marschieren")

♪ Wenn die Soldaten

♪ Durch die Stadt marschieren

♪ Öffnen die Mädchen

♪ Die Fenster und die Türen

♪ Ei warum? Ei darum

♪ Ei bloß wegen dem Schingderassa, Bumderassasa

♪ Zweifarben Tücher

♪ Schnauzbart und Sterne

♪ Herzen und küssen

♪ Die Mädchen ach so gerne

♪ Ei warum? Ei darum

♪ Ei bloß wegen dem Schingderassa, Bumderassasa

(narrator) Russian cities fell like ninepins to the panzers.

One was captured with its trams still running.

lts citizens, heading to work, cheered German tanks, thinking them their own.

(man #2) We were, in parts, very friendly received by the population.

We had the impression that we could win the population in Russia.

(narrator) Like the French the summer before,

the Russians used their tanks in penny packets

instead of the mass formations of the German panzers.

Easy meat for the German antitank gunners,

their blazing hulks littered the battlefield.

6,000 Russian tanks were lost

in just two engagements at Minsk and Smolensk in July.

(♪ lively German song)

(narrator) Half a million Russians were killed in the first fortnight,

and nearly a million taken prisoner.

As the weeks went by, the Russian losses mounted, bewildering the Germans,

who refused to believe such profligacy in human life could possibly continue.

As in France the year before,

Hitler was concerned more to destroy enemy forces in the field

than to capture cities or to conquer territory.

His generals didn't always see it that way.

Tempted, perhaps, by golden spires,

they vied with each other to be the captor of this or that great city,

especially Moscow.

To capture the Russian capital without delay, the generals argued,

would be decisive.

Hitler preferred to destroy the Russian forces in the south first,

hoping for a decisive battle there.

Moscow was not his first priority.

ln August, he ordered his panzers to swing south.

Kiev,

the capital of the Ukraine, was taken in mid-September.

ln one of the most spectacular encircling movements

in military history,

the German panzers took prisoner at Kiev

nearly three quarters of a million Russians.

German newsreel cameramen

made great play of these long columns of luckless Russians

for whom frontline fighting was now over.

But ahead lay another hell -

imprisonment at the hands of the Nazis.

Of every hundred Russian prisoners seen here,

only three would ever return alive.

By the end of September '41 ,

affer just three months of war,

the Russians had lost nearly three million men.

But Russian resilience before such fatal-seeming blows

was to astonish the world.

The German was told to regard his Russian foe as subhuman,

but it was not long before the German frontline soldier, at least,

came to think of him as more superhuman than subhuman.

The Russians seldom cried out when wounded

and there always seemed to be more of them on the horizon.

One Wehrmacht colonel wrote:

"ln fighting Russia,

the German army is like an elephant attacking a host of ants."

"The elephant will kill thousands, maybe millions,

but in the end, their numbers will overcome him

and he will be eaten to the bone."

(man) Orientation in Russia

is as difficult as it is in the desert,

only you don't see the horizon.

You are lost.

The immense space here was so immense

that we had many soldiers

who became melancholy.

The valley -

flat valleys, flat hills, flat valleys, flat hills -

endless. There was no limit.

We could not see an end

and it was so disconsolate.

We saw the big fields -

the cornfields -

from the horizon to the horizon.

We never saw it before.

lt's very large.

Unimaginable vastness of this country,

and we advanced from one river to the other,

from one position to the other, and there was no end to it.

(narrator) "Trade space for time" was the traditional Russian strategy.

Time was not on Hitler's side

if he was to achieve his decisive victory before winter.

(Russell) I remember flying back from Kuibyshev

and there was this great tank trap they were digging all round, outside Moscow,

and one saw what looked like ants moving around it,

and it was practically the entire population of Moscow -

man, woman and child - digging.

l think they did tap every emotional resource that was available to them.

l remember, for instance, a lot of churches being open

that had been shut for a long time.

(Tokaty) ln that very situation,

something else appeared among us -

the tradition of Borodino.

Borodino is the place where Napoleon was defeated.

And suddenly, religious feeling just appeared from nowhere

and that helped to unite people.

(narrator) With the Ukraine subdued and Leningrad surrounded,

Hitler now turned his attention to the biggest prize of all,

Moscow,

something his generals had been beseeching him to do

since the start of the campaign.

Moscow in October '41 was already a frontline city.

German troops had been only 200 miles away since August,

when Hitler had diverted his panzers southwards.

Rumours had been rife of early capitulation.

The city had long been placed under military rule.

Hardly a day went by without a visit from the Luffwaffe.

The battle for Moscow began in earnest in early October.

Straight away, things went wrong for its defenders.

(squealing)

ln two vast pincer movements,

the Germans captured another 700,000 Russian troops.

Goebbels summoned American war correspondents to Berlin

to announce Moscow's impending fall.

(man #3) We had had a very beautiful summer.

No problems - climatic problems - or anything of this sort.

As l remember it, it started snowing and becoming cold around October 10,

and then we knew immediately that we were totally unprepared and unequipped

for what was lying ahead of us.

(narrator) When one panzer commander asked

when he could expect winter clothing,

he was told not to make further unnecessary requests of this type.

On the day the first snows fell before Moscow,

its defenders received a new commander,

Zhukov, something German intelligence didn't consider worth telling Hitler,

although Zhukov had led Leningrad's defence

with enormous energy since mid-September.

But Moscow's defence was to be a bigger test of Zhukov's generalship.

The first snows soon melted,

turning roads into quagmires.

(man #5) Only a few roads in Russia were paved.

Therefore, in autumn, the terrible period of mud was beginning

and the roads became deeply soffened,

and therefore useless for motorcars,

except tanks.

(man #1) We had, as infantry, to march along the sides of the roads

to let pass cars and the tanks.

(man #6) The wheels of my guns were broken.

(man #2) And within a period of two or three days,

we had to improvise mobility

by requisitioning pannier horses and wagons.

We all were quite happy about the success of the German armies in Russia,

but the first inkling that something is wrong

was when Goebbels made a big action in all Germany

to collect furs and winter clothes for the German troops.

Then we knew something was ahead which was not foreseen.

(man #7) We had no warm mantles and nothing,

only the things we had also in summertime.

(man #3) And we were actually angry

that we didn't have better equipment.

(narrator) The weather worsened.

Many German commanders favoured halting for the winter.

Hitler would have none of it.

Convinced victory would be his before winter proper,

he ordered his generals on, on,

as soon as the ground had hardened enough to bear his panzers.

The welcome delay allowed Zhukov to organise Moscow's defences.

The Russians had less than 400 tanks leff to defend Moscow.

Space was running out fast for Zhukov,

but time was still on his side

as the cold winds of winter swept in from the north.

But, on October 14,

a panzer group broke through and took Kalinin,

less than 100 miles away to the north.

A few days later, another unit took Mozhaysk, 60 miles west,

while an infantry division reached Gorki, just 40 miles away.

Panic gripped Moscow's citizens.

Those who could, leff - two million, including most government departments.

Even Lenin's coffin was evacuated, along with other Kremlin treasures.

(Russell) lt was a bit of a shock when, in those two or three days -

l suppose they were just the advance spear tip probably -

a few chaps on motorbikes or something got to within

40 or 50 kilometres of Moscow.

Then there was, l must say, considerable shock in Moscow.

People were trying to get out.

They thought the German army was going to roll in.

(Tokaty) ln fact, l should imagine,

from October 16

to about October 20,

an average citizen of Moscow probably expected

that Moscow will fall within the next few days,

and that was what the panic was about, really.

People used just to stop top-ranking secret serVice officers

and shout insults at them without any fear.

ln normal times, you couldn't do anything like that.

These were the only times when, probably, a very weak force of Germans,

if they would manage to drop a unit of some kind of parachutists inside,

we would have real trouble.

(narrator) But while Hitler plotted his final attack on Moscow,

Zhukov, too, planned an attack.

But with what?

He had already withdrawn as many troops as he dared from other sectors

to defend Moscow.

But there was one reserVe the Russians had not yet touched,

nor ever thought they would be able to.

The 40 divisions of the Siberian front,

among the best troops in Russia, trained to fight in winter conditions.

Since June, they had been expecting a Japanese attack.

Midway through October, Stalin's master spy in Tokyo

reported Japan's eyes were elsewhere.

This time, Stalin believed his spies.

He moved the Siberian divisions to Moscow.

Even at this moment of crisis,

Moscow took time off to celebrate the anniversary of the revolution,

and Stalin showed himself to his people.

(Tokaty) We could say, in spite of all his shortcomings,

that Stalin rendered a very great serVice to the USSR by that presence

because it showed two things:

one, the supreme commander did not run away,

secondly, Stalin retained his nerVe.

That sense of nerVe spread at once into all the armed forces.

All the commanders began saying, "Stalin himself, he is here."

(people cheer)

(narrator) The ground had hardened. The panzers were able to roll again.

On November 26, they entered lstra,

just 30 miges west of Moscow,

and four days later had taken Krasnaya Polyana, just 25 miles north.

As yet, Zhukov had not used his Siberians

and German intelligence had not stumbled on the presence

of such numbers of fresh troops.

But the Germans were having troubles of their own.

(man #1) And one morning, it was finished.

All was frozen,

and the cars were sitting in the mud, frozen,

and the tanks could not roll

and, in this moment, my heart broke down.

And there was, in the distance, a large town,

and l think that was the first time and the last time l have seen Moscow.

(narrator) Temperatures were down to minus 40 degrees centigrade.

Oil solidified in the sumps of lorries and tanks.

The intense cold affected the soldiers, too.

There were more casualties from frostbite and stomach troubles

than from fighting.

(man #3) We had no winter shoes.

We had no equipment whatsoever to fight or stand the cold.

And l think this became a very, very big problem right away.

We lost a considerable part of our equipment -

guns, heavy and light equipment in general.

We, of course, due to the cold,

lost a lot of people who got frostbitten,

and we had not even the necessary amount of ointments

or the most simple and primitive things to fight it.

Of 900 men in my battalion,

200 fell out because of freezing

in the first 14 days.

(man #3) As it became colder,

towards the end of November and early December,

most of our artillery had become completely unusable.

(man #6) We had not the lubrication oil suitable for this winter war.

Nevertheless, the Russians had it

and suddenly our soldiers realised

that from one moment to the next,

the weapon didn't shoot any more.

(man #3) Well, the worst memory was if the vehicles got frozen in the ground

and the motor oil was thick so we couldn't move.

And we needed and we wanted to move. l think that was the worst.

(man #1) ln Russia, there were no signposts to mark the ways.

To find our roads,

we had set the frozen bodies of horses

along the snow walls

to find the way during the snowdriffs.

And the scenery was so disconsolate -

always snow and snow.

(man #4) We always were alone,

dreaming what time we will be back in Berlin.

(narrator) But the powers that be in Berlin refused to believe the worst.

The newsreels made it all seem great fun.

The reality was different.

(man #2) At that time, we had advanced almost 2,000 kilometres.

Hitler, at first, did not want to conceive

that this crisis was the end of all his strategical planning,

but the army knew better,

and the Russians did

the most important part

in convincing Hitler, too,

that the Russian campaign of this first year

had failed and had come to an end.

(narrator) December 6.

With the Wehrmacht's morale at its lowest,

although some German troops were just 15 miles from the Kremlin,

Zhukov unleashed his Siberians.

(man #4) lt was astonishing this time -

the first time - l saw the Russian tanks,

34,

running through the fields and through the snow.

Our own tanks couldn't drive, couldn't shoot,

because it was too cold.

(man #6) When l wanted to go back, l met Russians everywhere,

and so this was the first impression

that there was no victory any more.

(narrator) As the Russians regained territory,

they began to uncover the horror of the Nazi occupation.

"Comrade, kill your German" became the catch phrase.

ln the first month of the counteroffensive,

more than 300,000 Germans were killed or captured.

(man #4) The worst memory of this retreat

was the fear,

every day and every night,

to come in captivity.

(man #3) We had seen enough of the enemy to know that in cases like that,

prisoners were hardly taken.

(man #1) lt was the first time that our soldiers remarked

the dark shadows of the coming times.

(man #4) When we must retreat from Moscow,

the Russian population and the Russian soldiers must think:

"lt's possible to defeat the German army."

(narrator) Two days affer the Russian offensive began,

the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbour.

The war was taking a very different turn.