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.

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.

We hear the voices and the voices of the German people.

They are the ones who have the power to answer the questions.

The question is, what is the main truth, the language of the German people?

The main truth is, what is the main truth, the language of the German people?

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 a 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.

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

It's behind me, yes we fail, now let's see what we can do.

Thanks for watching!

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 Russia.

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 will power and the genius, frankly,

to turn the tide and defeat the Soviets.

Hitler once, war without end,

continual warfare was the only way in which a race,

as he thought of the Germans, could survive.

Without war there would be weak, so there's no prospect of the war ending.

He believes it's all or nothing and 1942 is the year when it's going to be all.

Hitler decides on a bold new plan.

For more information on the German army, head to our website.

to focus all his attack in the south.

The aim?

To take the Soviets' oil fields,

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

But before he can do that, the German forces need to be re -armed.

As formal head of the war economy, this would usually fall to Hermann Göring.

But he's fallen out of favour.

Thank you.

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

that he liked dressing up, that 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 Goering's been given a lot

of power and responsibility.

I mean, it's half a dozen offices.

I mean, there are so many things that Goering does,

so many pies he had his finger in.

You know, Hitler has come to understand, I think, that, you know,

there's a limit to Goering.

And the habit in the Third Reich, of course,

is for Hitler to give power and to take it away.

It's 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's foreign minister, who is actually a wine merchant.

You have Goering, 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 an ancient

Rome, like an 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.

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 Göring.

He goes for a meeting to try and gain access to Göring's ministries.

Well, Göring, I think, is horrified by the point of the Speer,

and it 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 almonds,

there's nothing about the war economy.

Speer understands that Göring is motivated by the prestige of power,

but doesn't actually want to do the work.

So he offers to do Göring's job for him, whilst Göring 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 more than double the war production.

Hitler loves Speer's confidence,

so begins preparations for his huge attack in the south.

Thank you.

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.

Whoa, my goodness.

Oh, my goodness.

Glorious victory at Moscow, 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 strength.

Zhukov is ruthless.

Zhukov is 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 movements carefully, but when necessary,

to say to Stalin, comrades Stalin, yes, but...

While Zhukov is warning, correctly warning, Stalin doesn't want to hear that.

Stalin is confident now.

He isn't driving seat.

He is 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.

So now both Hitler and Stalin have taken charge of their own armies.

There's no one left to hold them back.

Something that's always happened to dictators, by cleaning 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.

Paulus' leadership qualities were frankly rather weak, to put it mildly.

He probably felt a slight feeling of imposter 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 tick reveal 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 Night'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's put Paulus in his debt and binds Paulus to him personally.

Paulus then follows every commander of Hitler's position.

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 shut down and the pilot accidentally has a map.

In Stalin's eyes.

forgery, disinformation.

So you cannot trust it.

I don't think Stalin had even a second thought, because it's accidental.

He doesn't move in accidents.

So he'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 capital late.

And while Germans were making the 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 storms through.

Soon, a million German soldiers are advancing on the oil fields.

They show no mercy towards Soviet civilians.

ambience Paulus is a Christian,

but that didn't 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 endeavors.

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 armies who 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 realize that there are other things that people still don't dare

tell him.

In Berlin, the architect Spär 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.

He conscripts slave labour into the war effort.

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 oil fields,

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 favor.

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 oil fields.

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.

A general of the Army High Command returns from the Caucasus with the worst

possible news, the operation to capture Stalin's oil fields.

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.

And Hitler simply won't accept this.

Hitler thinks, well, Hitler'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.

Thanks for watching!

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.

It's 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.

Thank you.

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 this power, he meets victories, sometimes symbolic victories.

If the city was named whatever, Volgograd, Yakaterinoslav,

whatever the name is, Tsaritsyn as the original name,

I don't think Hitler would be so devoted to go against this,

but it was Stalingrad.

And I think the name of the map, on the map, you know, paralyzed Hitler.

He wanted to take Stalingrad.

And the German armies, instead of using the momentum, the advantage,

the maneuvers, and looking for oil and bakut and caucuses,

he decides to bring his best troops into Stalingrad.

Stalin was quite pleased.

Deep in his soul, Stalin feels even happy.

And he knows enough about war to recognize 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 is won, that's him, Joseph Stalin,

here in the city of Stalin, actually nothing to do with Stalin,

but now it's a 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, being 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 soldiers 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.

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 Pilots' 6th Army of the

Wehrmacht,

it is a 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 demonstrates that 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's 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 the 30th of September 1942, Hitler is in Berlin to make a speech.

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

He says that he is going to fall, and that he is going to fall,

and that he is going to fall, and that he is going to fall,

and that he is going to fall.

He says that he is going to fall, and that he is going to fall,

and that he is going to fall, and that he is going to fall,

and that he is going to fall.

If you don't know what you're going to do, you're going to die.

You're going to die.

You're going to die.

Hitler's self -belief was absolute.

Success is what's going to happen.

You can't even contemplate any kind of failure.

Hitler, in his 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 a 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.

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.

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.

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

Paulus is in fairly constant correspondence with to decide on what should be

done.

Paulus asked permission from Hitler to break out.

The German armies cannot withdraw,

not least because he said that they've already won,

so there will be a serious loss of face for him.

Darlingrad has to be captured.

What a great leader.

Autocratic leaders seem incapable of accepting that an army sometimes has to

withdraw to a more favorable ground in order better to 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 Göring 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 him.

He wants Germany to win.

Victory means Göring, still number two, Göring with even more resources,

Göring with this big hunting forest in Russia.

You know, victory means a lot to Göring.

Göring has a plan that he claims will miraculously turn the tide at Stalingrad.

He persuades Hitler,

but he can use the Luftwaffe to supply Paulus' trapped army with enough food

and equipment to beat Stalingrad.

This is an opportunity to demonstrate, once again, that he's in command.

You know,

Hitler desperately needing a solution to a strategic disaster which he's

created.

Göring 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 are really colluding together to create what actually turns

out to be a strategic fantasy.

Just like Speer before him,

Göring 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.

Göring loses the lives of a thousand 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.

But he is willing to sacrifice the lives of his family for this higher cause.

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.

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,

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 really 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?

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 your lives.

It was all about winning.

It's all about surviving.

When we say brutality, we believe that there's certain values, like human life,

that could stand on the way of...

of us achieving our goals.

Stalin was a classical dictator.

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

it doesn't matter 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,

Göring gives a speech on the radio that even the soldiers in Stalingrad will be

able to hear.

Now 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 who started

going are going to die.

The work of Eimel Heisen has been done for the rest of the year.

The heart of the Spartans is 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...

...the 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.

It shows Hitler's all -or -nothing mentality when they were defeated when they

were defeated.

On the 31st of January 1943,

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

I think the most obvious lesson from Paulus' experiences and his life as the

pawn of a dictator shows that if you do not have the courage to turn 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 John 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 is potentially viewed as a liberator and many of the past crimes could be

simply wiped out from history.

Memories fade.

I was born in 1944, a wartime baby.

My father was away fighting.

We forget just how primeval a situation 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

didn't really work.