Original subtitles

In the 1920s, Adolf Hitler promoted the idea of Lebensraum -

living space.

The German population was, he said, "Too great in every sense

"to be confined within its present borders."

And he knew that Germany could spread in only one direction.

"We National Socialists are ceasing the endless German movement

"to the south and west and levelling our gaze at the land in the east."

That war to seize the land in the east was a war of unfathomable cost.

It was Adolf Hitler's war.

A geopolitical faultline runs through the heart of Europe.

The Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire

and the German Empire once occupied the land

from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

When they crumbled, new countries, rashly fashioned from the rubble,

created the combat zone into which Adolf Hitler

sent his armies to claim living space,

destroy Bolshevism,

and cleanse Europe of Jews and other victims of his prejudice.

Berlin, November the 5th, 1937.

At a meeting with the heads of his armed forces,

Adolf Hitler explained the Nazi programme.

Colonel Friedrich Hossbach took the minutes.

Hitler dismissed the idea that Germany

could ever be self-sufficient behind its present borders.

"The only remedy lay in the acquisition

"of greater living space.

"The space necessary can only be sought in Europe.

"There had never been, in former times, spaces without a master,

"and there were none today."

"The attacker always comes up against the possessor."

"The aim of German policy is to make secure and to preserve

"the racial community.

"It is therefore a question of space."

"The question for Germany runs.

"Where can she achieve the greatest gain at the lowest cost?"

Hitler took the first step towards answering that question

in Fuhrerbefehle, or Hitler directive,

Number one issued on the last day of August, 1939.

"Since the situation in Germany's eastern frontier

"has become intolerable and all political possibilities

"of peaceful settlement have been exhausted,

"I have decided upon a solution by force."

The last Fuhrerbefehle, Number 74,

was issued on April 15th, 1945,

bookending the long, bloody war on which Hitler was determined.

"I am now 50.

"I would rather have the war now than when I am 55 or 60."

In a war where civilian casualties

greatly outnumbered those of the battlefield,

the cost of the fighting presents an extraordinary comparison.

For every two Americans killed,

Britain and her Empire lost three people.

The Japanese - 12.

The Germans - 22, of whom 19 were killed on the Eastern Front.

And the Soviet Union?

184.

All the time people are trying to mobilise us for things.

Why is it that some ideas take hold and others don't?

And this is an instance where

the experience and a leadership are in place

to mobilise people in a particular way.

The particular way in which, according to Hitler,

Germany could achieve the greatest gain at the lowest cost

was to go east.

Britain and France tried to check Hitler's ambition

through concession and compromise.

They failed.

"One does not obtain freedom through begging or cheating,

"nor through labour and industriousness either,

"but exclusively through fighting."

A few days after Hitler's foreign minister

signed the notorious non-aggression pact

with the right's least likely partner,

the Bolsheviks of the Soviet Union,

67 Wehrmacht divisions broke into Poland from three sides.

"I shall give you a propagandist reason for starting the war,

"no matter whether it is plausible or not.

"The victor will not be asked afterwards

"whether he told the truth."

"It is the intention of the Fuhrer and Goring

"to destroy and exterminate the Polish people."

Two weeks after the German invasion,

and as allowed under the secret provisions

of the non-aggression pact,

the Soviet Union invaded Poland through the fourth side.

Poland, in historian Michael Burleigh's memorable phrase,

was "crucified between two thieves."

The Nazi German was not only one aggressor in 1939,

but after two weeks, September 17th,

the Soviet Union, our second neighbour,

attacked Poland from the east.

The two invading armies came to a halt

roughly on the line of the River Bug.

There they divided Poland amongst themselves and faced each other.

It was really a very big surprise.

A lot of Polish soldiers, they have no idea what to do

in this situation, because they have no idea what Russians will do,

what Soviets will do, in this situation.

But the Red Army have one order -

they have to capture the oldest soldiers.

Warsaw capitulated on September 27th.

On the 28th, Radio Warsaw played Chopin's Funeral March.

Fighting in Poland had lasted for four weeks.

But very suddenly it becomes clear,

and even more clear after Warsaw falls,

there's a difference in which the Nazi occupiers treat Poles and Jews.

And people start feeling the differences between themselves.

Jews are immediately singled out.

There is both Poles and Jews persecuted,

but they are persecuted in a different way.

Jewish writers begin to write about what's happening to them,

because they know that this situation is different,

that this persecution is different.

They're initially right about the pogrom.

They say this is the longest pogrom in Jewish history.

At the end of November,

the people of the Soviet occupied territories of eastern Poland

became Soviet citizens by decree.

Instructions from Moscow defining anti-Soviet elements

included stamp collectors,

because it was assumed that they had foreign contacts.

291,513 Polish citizens were packed off to the gulag.

And in April 1940, 21,892 Poles,

mainly Army officers, were shot by Soviet killers

at sites including the Katyn Forest.

As the Soviet Union absorbed its conquest of eastern Poland,

Germany did likewise in the west.

Germany's plan was to absorb western Poland,

thought capable of Germanisation,

and exploit the central part called the general government

where Hans Frank, formerly Hitler's lawyer,

was installed as governor general.

Frank proclaimed that Poland...

"is a nation governed by the demands and desires of the Third Reich.

"The Poles have no rights whatsoever."

By late September 1939,

Reinhardt Heydrich, founder of the Sicherheitsdienst,

the security service, and according to Hitler,

"the man with the iron heart," could boast...

"Of the Polish upper classes, a maximum of 3% are still present."

Heinrich Himmler believed that with the murders,

the idea of a Polish nation would simply disappear.

It did not.

Poland was defeated, but it did not surrender.

Polish government began to operate in exile, first in France,

then in London, in Great Britain.

In September 1939, the Polish underground state,

which was fully subordinated to the government in exile, was created.

And it was, on the one hand, military part with a home army.

It was administration. It was education. There were media.

There were courts issuing verdicts against collaborators.

It was well-organised structure.

Polish created secret school organisation.

Even I know a few cases that people defended their PhD thesis

at secret universities.

Also, there was a secret parliament consisting of four main parties.

The pseudoscience of race is the only constant in Nazi ideology.

How are we to understand it?

Mein Kampf, "My Struggle,"

is Hitler's sprawling part-autobiography,

of which historian Alan Bullock said,

"The indelible impression left by its 700 pages

"is the vulgarity of Hitler's mind."

In the book, Hitler describes an incident in Vienna where he...

"suddenly came upon a being clad in a long caftan with black curls.

"'Is this also a Jew?' was my first thought.

"Is this also a German?"

It was a Hasidic Jew whose curls interpret a verse in Leviticus.

"You shall not round off the corner of your head,

"and you shall not destroy the edge of your beard."

The defining characteristics of the Hasidic movement would be more of a

focus on the emotional rather than the intellectual.

On mysticism and having a connection to God.

Centuries of expulsion had shifted Jewish life to Eastern Europe,

where the Hasidic movement that so startled Hitler had begun.

The result was that with the invasion of Poland,

the number of Jews under Nazi control

jumped from 300,000 to 3,000,000.

But to Adolf Hitler, they were not three million.

They were one enemy.

A race.

There's no way that they can integrate into us,

because I've closed the conceptual boundaries

by creating this fiction of race.

Hitler was not interested in the 2,000 years of anti-Judaism

that branded Jews as Christ killers.

It was a mistake, Hitler said, to think of Jews as...

"a religious community, when actually they are a race."

Before it was, more or less, traditional, religious anti-Judaism.

But in the end of 19th, beginning of 20th century,

there's a switch from religious to racial anti-Semitism.

From religious to racial, it was extremely dangerous physically

for Jews.

Between 1933 and 1943,

the Nazis enacted some 400 anti-Jewish laws and decrees.

Most restricted movement, activity, access to professions.

But some on the list Victor Klemperer compiled

in June 1942 are less comprehensible.

A ban on going to the barber. The surrender of all dogs and cats.

A ban on purchasing flowers.

If you see a Jew caring for an animal, caring for flowers,

showing human emotions, it begins to re-humanise them.

Rats probably don't care for pets.

Rats don't care for flowers, tend to them. Humans do.

And if you see Jews doing this, it re-humanises them.

Jews were, in the words of diarist Chaim Kaplan

who would die in Treblinka...

"Driven out of the society of the human race."

In the cities and towns, from the very beginning,

Nazis start to create a so-called ghetto for Jewish population.

"The time has come to drive this rabble into ghettos,

"and then epidemics will erupt and they'll all croak."

The first driving of Jews into a ghetto was at Piotrkow

in October 1939.

Lodz, the Germans renamed it Litzmannstadt,

was sealed off on May 1st, 1940.

Warsaw, which had the largest Jewish population of any European city,

enclosed half a million Jews by November.

So, we have this city, because it is a city.

There is up to 400,000 people who all locked up

in a relatively small part of Warsaw.

We could say waiting, because they don't really know what's happening.

"Black melancholy rained in our courtyard."

Under these living conditions, with five, ten people

sharing one room, there's a health crisis, obviously.

There are diseases.

"It is a joy to finally be able to physically attack the Jewish race."

"The more that die, the better."

In November, Colonel Hellmuth Stieff wrote to his wife.

"The extermination of entire races, including women and children,

"is only possible by a sub-humanity

"that no longer deserves the name German.

"I am ashamed to be a German."

Hellmuth Stieff, Hitler called him...

"a poisonous little dwarf..."

later conspired against the Fuhrer and was hanged on August 8th, 1944.

The first mass killing of Jews in Warsaw

took place before the end of November.

In a report that reached Hitler, General Walter Petzel,

commanding 1st Army Corps,

complained of public shootings where...

"selection is entirely arbitrary,

"and the conduct of the executions, in many cases, disgusting."

On December 7th, Hitler issued a decree which instructed that...

"persons endangering German security vanish without a trace

"into the night and fog."

Night and fog, "nacht und nebel,"

would soon blanket Eastern Europe.

"We cannot shoot 2,500,000 Jews.

"Neither can we poison them."

A van was set up as a mobile gas chamber.

The words Kaiser's Kaffee Geschaft,

Kaiser's Coffee Company, were painted on its side.

Judged a success, by 1942

eight gas vans were operating in Belarus alone.

In 1940, Walther Von Brauchitsch, head of the army,

described such actions as...

"ethno-political measures ordered by the Fuhrer

"for the security of the German living space in Poland."

Living space - Lebensraum -

was the reason Germany gave for violating Polish sovereignty.

The Soviet Union offered something equally self-serving.

"The annihilation of Poland would mean one fewer

"bourgeois fascist state to contend with."

With Poland's fate settled, Hitler turned his thoughts

to what his next move should be.

During the fighting in Poland, France and Britain

had 100 divisions facing 23 German divisions.

They had declared war, but they did not attack.

And nothing had disturbed the peace of Western Europe

since the invasion.

But the fact remained that Britain and France had declared war.

To the consternation of his generals,

Hitler decided to deal with this threat

before turning to the war he wanted.

It looked that, up to a point, Hitler didn't want war

against Great Britain.

He thought that Britain was a very good colonial state.

In one of history's most startling debacles,

16 days after the invasion of France, Belgium,

Luxembourg and the Netherlands,

the evacuation of Allied troops from Dunkirk began.

On June 10th, Italy declared war on Britain and France.

And on the day the Wehrmacht marched into Paris, an ultimatum for Molotov

was delivered to the Lithuanian government,

which was assured that, irrespective of its response,

Soviet troops would invade the following day.

And ten divisions did.

A day later, the Soviet Union occupied the other Baltic republics.

"Slavism is spreading. Our price for Russia's neutrality."

In mid-June, the Soviet Union deported 100,000 people

from the Baltic states.

More before, more after, for often risible reasons.

One woman was murdered because, according to the official report...

"she was caught singing Latvian folk songs."

A Lithuanian professor wrote in his diary...

"Most of the people are simply craving for the Germans to come.

"And then the real slaughtering of the Jews could start."

On July 13th, Germany's bombing offensive struck

against airfields and factories in England.

By the end of October,

the battle for control of the skies over Britain had been decided.

And Hitler abandoned plans for an invasion.

He turned east.

"With Russia smashed, Britain's last hope would then be shattered.

"Germany will then be master of Europe."

On October 1st, the German Army commenced Operation Otto -

constructing and upgrading road and rail communications

to the Soviet border, and Poles were reminded

that the produce of their farms was for the use of the Reich.

When we look at the countryside, we see peasants that are once more

being robbed. Their harvest is taken from them.

They are required to deliver a certain amount of corn, potatoes,

whatever, and once they can't deliver it,

the Germans don't care why they can't deliver it.

It's not, "Well, there was a lot of rain,

"so we couldn't bring in the harvest."

No, I mean, for the Germans, it's just,

"It's not there, so we'll punish you."

"The miller Niedzinski has acted against the regulations

"for ensuring food supplies, so his mill has been burned down."

In November, at a ceremony in Vienna, Hungary joined the Axis.

Romania, which would contribute more troops to the war

than any other Axis partner, signed the Tripartite Pact.

Slovakia followed. Bulgaria joined in March.

Tsar Boris III signing up

from the day the German troops entered his country.

The popular image of the eastern campaign is of Germany acting alone,

but these allies added hundreds of thousands of troops

to the Axis order of battle.

Not that Hitler was inclined to acknowledge their contribution.

On December 18th, Hitler Directive 21 began.

"The German armed forces must be prepared,

"even before the conclusion of war against England,

"to crush Soviet Russia in a rapid campaign."

Preparations for a rapid campaign, Operation Barbarossa,

were to be completed by May 15th,

and the final objective, the 11-page directive explained, was...

"to erect a barrier against Asiatic Russia."

The A-A line is approximately 2,700km long,

more or less the equivalent of New York to Los Angeles,

or Paris to Istanbul.

And Nizhny Novgorod, then known as Gorky,

sits in the middle of the line, more than 2,000km from Berlin.

KUDRYASHOV: Hitler and his generals tried to persuade themselves

that they would destroy the Red Army near the borders,

and that would take a month or so.

And then there will be two or three decisive battles.

And if you study Barbarossa plan,

you will be surprised how vague it is.

Hitler understood that Barbarossa would, as he said...

"make the world hold its breath."

All the advantages were on the German side.

The best armour, the best officers, the best military culture.

Between January and June 1941,

17,000 trains ferried German troops towards the Soviet border.

In March, Hitler addressed 250 of his senior commanders

at a planning conference.

It was a part of the great campaign, which started on the eve of the war,

to explain to a German soldier how should he fight Russians.

And he basically explains this will be a war of annihilation.

We have to understand this is going to be a different war

from the war in the West.

"The war against Russia cannot be fought in knightly fashion.

"The struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences

"and will have to be waged with unprecedented, unmerciful

"and unrelenting hardness.

"Any German soldier who breaks international law will be pardoned."

General Jodl, hanged for war crimes in 1946,

noted broad agreement that

"following conquest of the Soviet Union...

"the Jewish Bolshevik intelligentsia must be eliminated."

KAY: This endorsement from the highest levels,

this idea that we're not going to punish you if you commit these acts,

this created an atmosphere in which it became routine, almost,

to commit what were, in effect, horrific acts.

In October 1940, playing catch up with his fellow dictator,

Mussolini, with implications for the forthcoming campaign in the east,

had sent his troops to invade Greece.

Less than a month later, the Greeks defeated the Italian 9th Army.

When British forces arrived in Greece,

Hitler, partly from loyalty and partly from concern

for his southern flank, was obliged to aid his ally,

smashing through the resistance

that had so embarrassed the Italian invaders.

"Even now, our racial creed is penetrating nation after nation."

In March 1941, President Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act,

and the Wehrmacht began aligning forces against their start positions

for the invasion of the USSR,

the armour of Army Group South moving to Krakow.

Also in March, a document proposing a gesamtlosung der Judenfrage -

a comprehensive solution to the Jewish question.

It would be developed into the Endlosung - final solution -

was presented to Reichsmarschall Goring,

who had commissioned it.

In this way, the war behind the war was embossed on the coming fight,

which minutes of a German planning meeting noted...

"can only be waged if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia."

"Many tens of millions of people will become superfluous

"and will have to die or migrate to Siberia."

By May 10th, plans for Operation Barbarossa were complete.

They were based on the best information

provided by German intelligence,

which calculated that the USSR's deep reserve

comprised about 30 major military formations.

The true number was closer to 140.

Messages intercepted by British intelligence

confirmed that Axis formations would be in place by May 20th.

Earlier, the USSR's most reliable spy, Richard Sorge in Tokyo,

had told Moscow that Germany would launch its invasion

between June 20th and 22nd,

one of 80 warnings that Stalin received and rejected.

According to one of his biographers,

the intelligence Stalin believed useful

was the price of fleeces in Berlin.

He did not believe that Germany would attack the Soviet Union

without an adequate supply of sheepskin coats.

On the shortest night of the year,

some sources claim Hitler telephoned Mussolini.

Others that he wrote to him.

Perhaps he did both.

He said... "Months of anxious deliberation are ending

"in the hardest decision of my life."

At dinner, the Fuhrer played a gramophone record for his guests,

Albert Speer and Admiral Raeder.

It was Les Preludes by Franz Liszt, and Hitler said it was to be...

"our victory fanfare for the Russian campaign."

That night, a German commander reported...

"the Russians are manning their posts, which are fully illuminated.

"Apparently, they suspect nothing."

A communist worker from Berlin, Alfred Liskow,

swam across the River Pruth

to warn his Soviet comrades that his army unit

had been issued with its invasion orders.

Georgy Zhukov advised Moscow,

and Stalin ordered Liskow shot for disinformation.

But because the comrade's information was correct,

there wasn't enough time to shoot him.

Walther Von Brauchitsch, commander-in-chief, predicted...

"Fierce border battles anticipated,

"duration up to four weeks.

"Afterwards, only minor resistance is to be expected."

They foresee very heavy border battles,

where these large Soviet armies concentrated near the border

will be encircled, largely in the first round of encirclement,

and then the exploitation begins.

Barbarossatag, June 22nd, 1941,

is one of history's great punctuation points.

At 3:30 in the morning, a Soviet forward position radioed...

"We're being fired on. What are we to do?"

MAZUR: Since June, 1941, the situation changed,

because one of our aggressors, one of our enemies,

I mean the Soviet Union, became an ally of our Western allies.

For Polish leaders, it was a very big dilemma. What to do?

Relations between Poland and the Soviet Union were brought back.

Formally, they were not our allies. They were only allies of our allies.

German bombers struck 66 Soviet aerodromes,

destroying much of the Red air force on the ground.

Bombs also fell on Kovno, Minsk, Rovno, Odessa,

Sevastopol and Libava.

A lot of military planes, a lot of tanks,

were destroyed at the very first day of the German invasion

of the Soviet Union.

On June 22nd, Joseph Goebbels broadcast an announcement

that Hitler had written the previous day.

"The hour has come in which it is necessary to go into action

"against the conspiracy of Jewish Anglo-Saxon warmongers

"and Jewish powerholders of the Bolshevik centre in Moscow."

General Erhard Raus, commanding Sixth Panzer Division, said...

"The German soldier who crossed into Russian territory

"felt that he entered a different world."

VERSHININ: They were kind of crusaders.

They wanted to bring European civilisation here.

They turned into criminals which fought Soviet people,

which burned whole villages, which were to kill women, children.

Three giant thrusts launched 151 German divisions

supported by 40 from Axis partners on a north-south front

of about 2,000km, aiming initially for Leningrad, Kiev and Smolensk.

"In the east, a process will repeat itself

"as in the conquest of America.

"Our Mississippi must be the Volga.

"What India was for England,

"the territories of Russia will be for us."

The plan, insofar as the notoriously ad-lib Nazi regime had plans,

was to dismember Russia in Europe,

creating four political entities.

The first of these, Ostland,

the three Baltic states and part of Belarus,

were judged, like western Poland, capable of Germanisation.

The story in Moscow was pandemonium.

When Zhukov phoned the Kremlin, he was told that Stalin was asleep.

"Wake him immediately. The Germans are bombing our cities."

For days there was confusion.

Stalin and Beria, Malenkov and Molotov and Mikoyan

dashed about picking up and slamming down telephones

as seemingly every link in the chain of command,

from Moscow to the fighting front, snapped.

Stalin, according to Molotov...

"was in a very agitated state.

"He didn't curse, but he wasn't quite himself."

By nightfall on the first day,

Italy and Romania had declared war on the Soviet Union.

Finland joined in after four days, Hungary after five.

A disaster was unfolding which would not stop unfolding.

STAHEL: Panzer groups are driving deep into the Soviet Union,

but that doesn't mean that all the Soviet armies behind them

have surrendered or have broken.

There's a lot of rear-area fighting and soldiers have to react to this.

And this is where those lines, those classic lines

of how we understand a soldier's role, are being blurred.

They are very much targeting people who aren't classic enemies.

Soviet Order 246 stipulated that those encircled

must fight to the last.

"Those who prefer to surrender

"are to be destroyed by any means available

"while their families are to be deprived of all assistance."

Stalin took time to accept that he had been duped,

and a couple of days of disappearance

to test the mechanism of power

and learn that he had not lost authority.

His gang went to see him at his dacha in Kuntsevo,

and told him they proposed setting up a state defence committee.

Stalin asked... "With whom at its head?"

And Molotov and Malenkov and Beria said...

"You, Comrade Stalin."

VERSHININ: In this episode, Stalin's team played up his role.

Molotov was responsible for foreign policy.

Mikoyan was responsible for food provision,

for lend-lease, for trade.

Malenkov was responsible for heavy industry,

for aircraft construction. They played like a single team.

German confidence had been buoyed by many things.

France had collapsed.

Russians were subhuman...

"Little and weak peasant people."

The Red Army had fumbled badly in the Winter War against Finland

and lost leading officers to Stalin's purges.

General Jodl, chief of the Army's operational staff,

expressed a widely-shared belief.

"The Russian colossus will prove to be a pig's bladder.

"Prick it and it will burst."

It was problematic for the German military

that the prejudice of Nazi race theory

was riveted onto their planning.

As an illiterate rabble of Slav peasants,

the Red Army would collapse.

But because it was not, it did not.

That idea of easy victory in the east,

was shared by almost all his entourage.

By his generals, by his diplomats, by everyone.

And some were like, it is so easy to just throw it, just push it

and that's it.

But one thing is to believe in something.

The other one is actually to do it, to realise your plans.

Towards the end of July, you then get a radicalisation

of orders being issued further down the chain of command.

An increase in the manpower in the rear areas in the Soviet Union

to combat partisans and Red Army soldiers who have been cut off

from their units.

And the main increase in manpower is the SS battalions

who were sent to the east.

On June 23rd, Hitler left Berlin for his Rastenburg headquarters.

Two days later, Goebbels wrote in his diary...

"I'm refraining from publishing big maps of Russia.

"The huge areas may frighten the public."

In those initial weeks of Barbarossa,

you do record a sense of shock,

even for men who have fought in previous campaigns.

They are shocked by the violence. By the violence at the Front,

the fact that Soviet soldiers aren't giving up.

By the violence behind the rear.

What contributes to this saturation of violence

in the occupied Eastern territories is, on the one hand,

an ideology that was shared to varying extents

by a large proportion of the occupation troops.

So that doesn't mean they are all diehard Nazis,

but it does mean that they share some of the goals

and some of the political convictions of the regime.

In the war behind the war, Lithuanian militiamen,

encouraged by German officers,

murdered 1,500 Jews in Kovno.

In July, police in Riga, under German command,

slaughtered 400 Jews.

The turning point when it comes to

what we now refer to as the Holocaust, or the Shoah.

And there is actually a state of panic

among the military and political leaderships at this time,

and a sense of fear. A fear of failure.

Shoah is Hebrew for catastrophe.

In Latvia, Sheyna Gram wrote in her diary...

"All the Jews in Dvinskaya Street are chased out beyond the cemetery"

"and shot there. This is terrible."

"We did not expect things to end this way."

On August 9th, Sheyna Gram's family were murdered.

Sheyna was not killed until a week later

when the Einsatzgruppe commander had had enough of her.

She was 15 years old.

A few days after the invasion, Pravda was describing the conflict

as a "Fatherland war."

Significantly, the Russian people were not being told

that they were defending the Revolution,

but that they were defending Russia.

That day, ominously, Von Manstein's surging 56th motorised corps,

had to pause at the Western Dvina River

to allow the infantry to catch up.

So, how many overall of the 148 German divisions

in the Operation Barbarossa,

how many of those are motorised or Panzer divisions?

Only about 30. The rest were infantry divisions.

So the vast bulk, the real backbone of the German army,

is coming at a much slower speed.

Army Group Centre, advancing towards Minsk,

was commanded by General Fedor Von Bock,

who recognised an opportunity to bypass Minsk,

accelerating his advance on Moscow.

But because it seemed to the Fuhrer that blitzkrieg was being repeated,

he insisted Von Bock continue the attack on Minsk.

But all was not as it seemed.

Just six days into the campaign, Seventh Panzer Division,

spearheading Army Group Centre's push,

reported a 50% loss of Mach two and Mach three tanks,

and an unsustainable 75% loss of Mach four models.

STAHEL: You need to flush out these engines. You need spare parts.

Well, that all happens back in Germany.

That's what you've done in the past campaigns. Go back to the factories.

The planning is not there. This is predicated on big border battles,

and that hasn't won the war for us. Now what do we do?

Losses, mainly due to mechanical failure,

were reported plus or minus throughout the eastern army,

the ostia, and there was still a long way to go.

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