Original subtitles

Hitler decides to make a private sightseeing trip to Paris on the 23rd of June

1940, when Paris is occupied and controlled by the German forces.

They tour the Arc de Triomphe,

they walk around the artist's quarter in Montmartre.

Hitler says he thought of raising 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.

Thank you.

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.

Thank you.

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 annex 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.

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.

popularity.

People that had doubts before have 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's 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 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 up England on her knees.

It's a very special love story.

This is not liking or not liking.

If Hitler is standing on 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.

Molotov is a party official.

He was loyal, and that meant that he was a party official.

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 Reichschanterie.

The whole point about the Reichschanteries is to project the power of Hitler,

the power of the Reich.

Walking down the long, grand corridors, then coming up to the Führer's study,

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

You walk in, and then the Führer'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 private sector by a 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 a 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 it's 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.

In Moscow, Molotov believes he has the upper hand, but he's misread the Führer.

Hitler has made up his mind that it's time to invade.

It was always Hitler's long -term aim to invade,

but it's not the end of the war.

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 man Hitler needs to launch this invasion is the head of the German army,

Field Marshal von Brauchitsch.

The German army is the head of the German army.

Walter von Brauchitsch, the absolutely quintessential Prussian officer.

Von Brauchitsch,

he's got very grave doubts about opening up a war on two forces.

a great deal of consternation, a great deal of doubt, what if this goes wrong?

Rauchitz epitomizes 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.

Hill is spelling out the most ambitious, the biggest,

the most dramatic invasion plan in history.

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

Rauchitz 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.

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

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

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

And Brauchitz 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.

In Berlin, life continues as normal.

The only people that know about the planned invasion are those inside the Nazi

regime, like this man, Haro Schultzer -Boisin,

who works inside the air ministry,

where he begins to see Hitler's attack plans.

Haro Schultzer -Boisin is born into a very prominent German navel family.

He's very tall, very lean, has these chiseled Nordic features,

which the Nazis considered kind of the ideal physical framework.

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

working in the German army, looking for Goebbels' propaganda ministry.

But Haro and Libertas are not what they seem.

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,

Haro and Libertas have joined one of the few resistance networks in Germany.

As a student,

Haro'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.

Harrow was aware that Stalin was an abusive dictator.

It was never a matter of Harrow serving Stalin or promoting Stalin's interests

in Germany.

It was a matter of rescuing Germany from Hitler.

Harrow 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.

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.

He was one of the leading Soviet generals.

He would probably himself say, would you mean one of?

I am the leading Soviet general.

He was not without some vanity.

Zhukov clearly is very convenient.

And so of German capability, of German deployments.

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 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.

Zukoff 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.

Zukoff 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 leader would have surely take him utterly seriously,

because the stakes were unbelievably high.

So Stalin makes no serious preparation for the war.

The whole story is very mysterious, because 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 not a bad thing.

They know there were four million soldiers or so across the border.

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

And do you believe Stalin could buy Hitler's story that he had them there just

to take it?

before invasion of England, come on, 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 the 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.

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 pretense 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 Brauschitz.

All of a sudden, it becomes clear just what road they've started to go down.

As if to ease his conscience,

Brauschitz 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.

Brauschitz 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 Harold Schultzer -Boisin'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 Harrow.

Harrow sees the disaster on the horizon.

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

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

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 disregard intelligence.

They disregard expertise.

They disregard the educated people around them.

And that is that those are the seeds of their defeat.

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's nervous before the night of long lives.

He's nervous before the Anschlusses.

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 France

list 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.

He probably somewhere in his mind was thinking,

I'm going to be under stress now.

This is the beginning of something really massive.

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.

A fall of Minsk happened on the 28th of June, six days after the invasion.

It didn't take long.

And the scale of the defeat, the destruction involved,

the killings involved of soldiers, you know, was a massive military failure.

I think Stalin was not knowing what to do.

I mean, 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 Dutchess like a cornered animal.

When his country needs him the most, suddenly Stalin is nowhere to be seen.

Hitler now bases himself at his frontline headquarters, the Wolf's Lair.

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 Brauchich 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, Haro'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.

Thank you.

At Babi Yar in the Ukraine, over two days 34 ,000 men,

women and children are massacred.

For more information, visit www .baba .gov By the end of 1941,

half a million Jewish people are murdered.

It is known as the Holocaust by bullets.

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

terrible atrocities and the officers who have commanded them.

And she organises it.

This is her contribution to the resistance activities.

Meanwhile,

her husband Haro 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 sort of 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.

The dictators, 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 lost, you're out.

And Stalin failed.

Stalin was desperate.

He was sitting alone waiting for the worst because he was afraid that his own

holiday members could actually arrest him for the failure because it was his

fault and everyone knew it was his fault.

Molotov had to step in...

try and control the situation but not in a way that made him out to be some

kind of rifle.

Molotov proposes the creation of a shiny new body,

the state defence commissariat, with Stalin a supreme leader at its helm,

a new super dictatorship.

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

And I think the fact is that they proved to be weak, made Stalin stronger,

because that's somehow a fluctuation of this energy and spirit within the group

So nothing disappears, energy doesn't disappear.

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

And smelling their fear and weakness, Stalin gained back his confidence.

So he's in charge again, so don't cry over spilled milk.

It's behind me.

Yes, we failed.

Now, let's see what we can do.

This man, Molotov, is some boring, hyper -actric,

the best -firing 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

nationalism, towards the Great Patriotic War.

As they get closer to Moscow, the German attack is slowing.

And Brauchich 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 Brauchich 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.

So he didn't really bother with getting the true power.

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 paid him things that he could do anything.

In 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.

Brauschitz 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 Brauchich, 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 Center,

a force of two million men, to attack Moscow.

You had the German army advancing on Moscow as the Russian winter was setting

in.

Harrow 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.

Harrow 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.

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 Harrow 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 monitored.

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 made 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, his dictator, he wants Zhukov to say that.

So anything going wrong, Zhukov would be responsible.

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

He's tough, very strong will, something of a street fighter.

He was so single -minded to achieve success that once committed,

he was absolutely adamant that it would succeed.

Zhukov rallies thousands of civilians to defend Moscow and sends battle

-hardened Siberian troops to the front,

driving the Germans back a hundred years later.

Oscar 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 a hundred 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.

If you don't have people who find a way to stand up and say, no,

this is not who we are.

One has to look at these Nazis that particularly try 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 is very much the position that Brauschitz 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.

It shows again his lack of moral fiber,

the inability for him to look squarely in the face of the Third World War.

of Hitler, of the Nazis, and of his own role in that,

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