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."

The war to seize the land in the east

was a war of unfathomable cost.

It was Adolf Hitler's war.

Five days after invading the Soviet Union,

German tanks linked up east of Minsk

and a day later, with German forces ringing the city

and the Soviet third and tenth armies trapped,

Minsk surrendered.

Battle of Minsk, which is a big encirclement,

and you would think it's an encirclement on Minsk.

Really, that should be called the Battle of Belarus,

because it is an encirclement on an enormous scale.

When the Germans appeared,

people were robbed, raped and shot for no reason.

It was a part of Hitler's plan.

He didn't want to lose the precious lives of German soldiers

in order to take the city.

The idea was to destroy it by artillery fire and by hunger.

Hitler predicted that in four weeks...

"..Moscow will be razed to the ground."

He began to recite grand plans

that leapt beyond the Dnieper and the Volga

to distant rivers - the Nile and the Euphrates.

None of it happened.

A lot of paysans were moved by themselves on the roads

and German Nazi planes were just killing them

like targets on the road.

A lot of Soviet soldiers

were spreaded on the territory

where the German forces came.

And they do not know what to do.

The fall of Minsk shocked the Kremlin.

The Red Army commanders in Minsk were recalled

and on July 27th, an order was read out

concerning General Pavlov,

his Chief of Staff, General Klimovskikh

and all responsible for the failure.

They were to be shot.

In his first radio broadcast since the invasion,

Stalin did not mention the revolution

or the party.

He talked about Russia.

"Comrades, citizens,

"brothers and sisters,

"men of our army and navy.

"I am addressing you, my friends.

"The perfidious military attack on our Fatherland is continuing.

"A grave danger hangs over our country."

In this speech, he called his compatriots "brothers and sisters"

for the first time.

Stalin spoke about comrades, about citizens, but never about brothers and sisters.

There was a famous quotation Stalin told Churchill.

"They don't fight for Communism,

"they fight for their mother Russia."

In June, the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists

pledged itself to "cooperate closely with the great Nazi German Reich."

Which, it believed, would "help the Ukrainian nation

"liberate itself from Muscovite oppression."

On June 30th,

Germans arrived in Lviv.

In the Lonsky prison,

they found rooms stacked with corpses, some mutilated.

As they fled from the city,

the NKVD - The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs -

had killed 3,000 political prisoners.

All sorts of people were in partisan, as I knew this.

Not all of them were, you know, so-called ardent opponents of Nazism.

They enrolled local population for their own greed.

The invasion created a vast occupied territory...

..in which order was initially the responsibility of anxious reservists.

A report drawn up by German officers declared...

"No partisan-infested area can be cleared

"by a force composed of old men.

"If such security units fail to accomplish their mission,

"they are likely to become the laughing stock

"of an inherently antagonistic population."

Hitler's view on how to deal with the partisans was clear enough.

HITLER: "The swine have barricaded themselves in a house

"in which there are also women and children.

"Should the soldiers set fire to the house or not?

"There shouldn't be any doubt about this.

"He must burn it down."

In its first three weeks,

Barbarossa advanced 480 kilometres.

In its first three months,

twice as many Soviet prisoners of war were taken

as in the entire remainder of the war.

By the spring of 1942,

most of them were dead.

57.5% of Soviet prisoners of war

died in captivity.

The death toll for British and American prisoners of the Germans

was 3.5%.

They didn't care about the fate of the prisoners of war.

It was something like, you know, a by-product.

It was not necessary to feed them, to take care of their health

or whatever.

These people, prisoners of war,

are "rubbish".

The plan that the Germans had for the occupation,

The Generalplan Ost,

made no concession to prisoners

or anyone else.

According to the Germans' Plan Ost, so-called Plan Ost,

about Belarus territory,

only 25% of the population should remain here.

75% should be killed

or removed to other territories.

Himmler saw the plan on June 12th and wrote...

"It has very much pleased me."

In one of the documents of the Generalplan Ost,

it was written that "It's too expensive to kill all the Slavic people.

"We don't need to. We need to keep some of them

"but the others will die from starvation."

It was quite, you know, "practical".

We are going to be using these people

to serve the German empire

and they're gonna be in labourers' roles and all the rest of it.

We certainly don't want to enfranchise these people.

We certainly don't want to encourage nationalism.

On July 16th, according to Martin Bormann who was present,

Hitler said...

"We have now to face the task of cutting up the giant cake

"according to our needs.

"This vast area must be pacified as quickly as possible.

"This will best be done

"by shooting anyone who even looks sideways at us."

In the same speech,

Hitler also noted the advantage of the war against the partisans.

"It enables us to exterminate all those who oppose us."

In Bialystok,

2,000 Jews were shot in June

by the 309th Reserve Police Battalion.

When Himmler visited the city in July, he complained that...

"The police had rounded up too few Jews."

To govern areas captured in Operation Barbarossa,

the Reichskommissariat Ostland was created.

On July 18th, a Soviet prisoner of war

was questioned at Luftwaffe headquarters:

"Does the Red government consist mainly of Jews?"

"That's all rubbish.

"They have no influence at all.

"On the contrary, the Russian people has always hated the Jews."

After the war, the report of the interrogation was sent to Stalin.

The prisoner, who would be killed attempting to escape,

was his son, Yakov.

General Franz Halder, Chief of the General Staff, wrote:

"It is no exaggeration to say

"that the war against Russia has been won."

But on July 20th, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris,

Chief of Military Intelligence,

reported that the mood at Hitler's Rastenberg headquarters was...

"Very jittery."

The reason being, Canaris said, that it was...

"..increasingly evident that the Russian campaign

"is not going by the book."

On the 23rd, the Red Army launched its first major counter-offensive.

Von Bock confessed to finding the Soviet counter-offensives...

"Astonishing for an opponent who is so beaten.

"They must have unbelievable masses of material."

By the 28th, Joseph Goebbels acknowledged that he was...

"Gradually becoming aware that the eastern campaign

"is not a stroll to Moscow."

On the 31st, he admitted...

"It is clear that we have underestimated Bolshevism."

It was equally clear that the Germans had overestimated their own capacity.

Panzer groups are driving into the Soviet Union

on very poor infrastructure and on single roads.

The talk sometimes about driving in a cloud

and you can barely see the vehicle in front of you.

And this is in the middle of the day!

Because there's so much sand and that's going into air filters.

Those air filters aren't built to sustain this, not day after day.

Then the trucks and the tanks start to drop out.

That's where you start to see huge amounts of attrition.

By the beginning of August, the three army groups

had suffered 179,500 casualties.

Replacements numbered only 47,000

with, in the occupied territory,

some regular units being diverted to the wall behind the wall.

MAN: I think it would be fair to say that a majority of Wehrmacht soldiers

serving on the Eastern Front from 1941 onwards,

particularly during the first 12 months of the war,

were actually involved in war crimes.

In Jerusalem, on trial for his life,

Adolf Eichmann said that Heinrich Mueller, Head of the Gestapo,

had told him:

"In Minsk, they're shooting Jews.

"I want you to report on how it's going."

So Eichmann went to Minsk,

which had housed a Jewish community since the 15th century.

"They were shooting into the pit. It was a rather large one.

"I didn't think much about it

"because I only saw it

"and that was quite enough."

On August 1st, Mueller sent a message to commanders

of the operational groups, the Einsatzgruppen.

"The Fuhrer is to be sent regular reports

"about the work of the Einsatzgruppen in the East.

"For this purpose, particularly interesting material

"is required,

"like photographs, posters, pamphlets and other documents."

The same day,

Himmler sent the Second SS Cavalry regiment the first order

that explicitly included women in the extermination policy.

It instructed that after the men had been shot,

"that Jewish women be herded into the marshes."

But things did not go smoothly.

"The driving of women and children into the marshes

"did not have the expected success

because the marshes were not so deep that one could sink.

"After a depth of about a metre,

"there was in most cases solid ground

"preventing complete sinking."

Despite the "inconveniently shallow" marshes,

an estimated 25,000 Jews were killed in the Pinsk region

in a two-week period.

This is where the Holocaust starts.

The Holocaust does not start in Auschwitz or in the camp,

but it starts on the killing fields of the occupied Soviet Union.

Here, the Einsatzgruppen, they start shooting Jews

and they systematically round up all the Jews of the village

and then they murder them.

They do share a lot of the political convictions

that were prevalent at the time

and so prevalent that they were just accepted.

The soldiers didn't even need to talk about them.

In their mindsets, they were just part of the way they saw the world.

This was as a result of the indoctrination and the politicisation

and the propaganda of the previous decade.

Von dem Bach-Zelewski's message was amongst coded communications

deciphered at Bletchley Park.

But the British government could make only broad comments

for fear of alerting the Germans to the porous nature of their codes.

On August 25th,

Churchill told the British people of "methodical, merciless butchery."

In his book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe,

Raphael Lemkin gave it a name.

He called it genocide.

Daily, the Einsatzgruppen were shooting thousands.

The strain was too great.

There was, according to Helmuth von Moltke,

who would be executed for treason in 1945...

"A nerve clinic where SS men are cared for

"who have broken down while executing women and children."

Reichsfuhrer Himmler offered encouragement to his forces.

"I have to expect of you superhuman acts of inhumanity.

"But it is the Fuhrer's will."

The Minsk experience did prompt him to explore alternatives.

On September 1st,

100 Jews and 600 Red Army prisoners of war

were taken to Auschwitz and gassed with prussic acid.

"I must admit that the gassing set my mind at rest."

It's been said before that during the war,

if you want to know what Hitler was thinking,

look at what Himmler was doing.

And Himmler did not do anything without getting the green light from Hitler.

This might have just been a nod, a few words, or confirmation.

Nothing happened without Hitler's approval.

On August 8th, Stalin became Supreme Commander in Chief,

elevated to the rank of Generalissimus.

He complained that the uniform made him look like a hotel waiter.

On the 11th, offensives against Moscow and Leningrad were suspended,

Hitler having decided that his priority

was the industrial region of Kharkov,

the coalfields of the Donets Basin

and beyond, and most important of all,

the oilfields of the Caucasus.

The High Command was unconvinced.

Jodl, Chief of the Operations Staff,

and Halder, Chief of the Generals' Staff, compared notes.

They are both convinced Moscow is the best option.

That we should continue to drive on Moscow.

And Jodl says to Halder,

"We have to be careful about forcing Hitler to do something that he doesn't want to do

"because he's been right so many times in the past."

And here you have men whose professional expertise

is major operations, that's what they've spent their whole lives on,

they're convinced, many of their colleagues are convinced,

this is the best course to victory.

And yet they're second-guessing themselves,

based on a man who has no real military expertise,

not at a high level, he was never an officer.

On August 19th, Hitler told visitors to Rastenberg...

"For the good of the German people,

"we must wish for a war every 15 or 20 years."

The following day, the siege of Leningrad began.

A few days later,

the invasion was within sight of Dnipropetrovsk.

And the Germans did not recognise what they saw.

A population of 100,000 in the 1920s,

the vintage of German maps,

had jumped to 500,000

as a result of Stalin's forced industrialisation programme.

The jewels in the crown of Stalin's first five-year plan

were the dam on the Dnieper for hydroelectric power

and the steel city of Magnitogorsk.

On August 28th, the Russians destroyed the dam.

As Hitler and Benito Mussolini, battlefield tourists,

flew over the occupied Ukraine,

Jews were being machine-gunned outside the historic Ukrainian town

of Kamianets-Podilskyi.

Operational Situation Report number 80

gives the figure of 23,600 killed at Kamianets in three days.

By the end of August 1941,

the invading force had swept through the Soviet Republics

and captured material and men in vast numbers.

But not at sustainable cost.

You've encircled Belarus,

you've crushed Soviet armies near the Front.

They're driving into the rest of the Soviet Union

with small numbers relative to the overall invasion force.

They're unaware of just how large the Soviet reserve armies are

and the fact that they are already there.

On September 8th,

with Leningrad, Russia's second city and old Imperial capital

seeming on the brink of capture,

Stalin sent for Zhukov and asked him:

"Where will you be off to now? "To the Front." "Which Front?"

"The one you consider most necessary."

Zhukov was sent to Leningrad, where he acted decisively,

strengthening the defence.

Stalin said to him:

"My advice. No sentiment."

Stalin's style of administration, style of governing,

he was ruthless.

The assault on Leningrad having become too costly,

Hitler decided that Moscow and Kiev were the prizes.

Leningrad could be starved into submission.

He shifted the offensive to Operation Typhoon,

the assault on Moscow.

"I will raze that damned city

"and in its place construct an artificial lake

"with central lighting."

Both Moscow and Leningrad were to be destroyed

as the symbols of Russian statehood,

as their political, industrial and cultural centres.

It was a great plan of destruction of the Russian state,

of the Slavic state.

On September 12th, the first snow flurries drifted in the air.

Not settling, but threatening.

Field Marshal Keitel told commanders in a briefing at Rastenberg that their task...

"Demands ruthless and energetic measures,

"above all against the Jews,

"the main carriers of Bolshevism."

On September 14th,

two Panzer spearheads met behind Kiev,

which was transformed into a cauldron,

the term that gained favour to describe an encircled force.

In German, the "kessel".

Kiev, the Soviet Union's third largest city,

fell on September 19th.

The biggest encirclements in the history of wars,

they were here in 1941.

The biggest encirclement near Kiev in September 1941,

when 600,000 Soviet soldiers were taken prisoners.

It's not as much a Blitzkrieg as people think,

where these encirclements are taking place.

They're not what the maps represent

that there's these two big German claws closing in.

This is part of the reason why there is a partisan movement from 1941

because these are Red Army men.

Sometimes, they don't even know they've been encircled.

It took until October 4th to process the prisoners of war

and the vast quantity of captured equipment.

When the fighting ended,

43 Soviet divisions had simply ceased to exist.

And the road to Kharkov on the Donets Basin was open.

"We were all so happy to see them.

"They were going to save us from the communists who had starved us."

"In many cases, when the troops moved in,

"we found that, according to a Ukrainian practice,

"a table with a white cloth had been prepared with bread and salt.

"In one case, there was even a small band of musicians

"to welcome the troops."

German policy wasn't exactly the same as people expected,

especially the old populations

who remembered the First World War

and now this wasn't at all the Germans of the First World War.

When Erich Koch, Gauleiter of East Prussia,

was appointed Commissioner for Ukraine, he said:

"Our job is to suck from Ukraine all the goods we can get hold of.

"If I find a Ukrainian who is worthy of sitting at the same table as me,

"I must have him shot."

The occupied territories were a patchwork

of formerly independent, partially autonomous or simply aspiring nationalities.

Every aspiration was to be disappointed

by a German policy based on race.

And set out in the General Plan for the East.

In the Ukraine and the Baltic States particularly,

the dreams of statehood survived in the partisan groups

that fought against the occupier,

and, in turn, against the liberator

and each other.

For most people, the challenge was to stay alive.

OK, we will all buy your food,

we will all get acquainted with the women and so on and so forth.

But after the German infantry came Einsatzgruppen.

Ukraine's fate would be the destruction of 700 towns and cities,

28,000 villages...

..and seven million of its people

including virtually the entire Ukrainian Jewish population.

Posters went up throughout Kiev.

"All Yids living in the city of Kiev and its vicinity

"are to report by eight o'clock on the morning of Monday September 29th

"at the corner of Melnikovsky and Doctorov Streets.

"They are to take with them documents, money, valuables

"as well as warm clothes, underwear, et cetera."

September 29th was Yom Kippur,

the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

"A large column gathered,

"which included my family including six children

"and seven grandchildren.

"I stood at my father's side

"and held my three-year-old little brother, Potenka, in my arms."

A teacher, Elle Natova,

was a witness to the events on Korolenko Street.

She described what she saw in her diary.

"I went out to the balcony. I saw a crowd of Jews going along the street.

"They were of different ages, walking slowly

"and with such pitiful faces that it was difficult to look at them.

"Oh, how terrible it is to live here.

"How difficult it is to watch this scene."

Fedir Pehido was on Lviv Street

at approximately 11 o'clock that Monday.

"The children. My God, there were so many children.

"All this was moving, burdened with luggage and children."

Some of the women walking had strings of onions round their necks,

food for the journey.

Dina Pronicheva was one of those walking.

"I took my sick mother, and, following the order,

"she and I started out on the way to Babi Yar.

"Hundreds - no, thousands - of Jews

"were walking the same way."

MAN: "Both sides of Dokterivskaya Street were planted with young trees,

"and in-between them stood Hitlerites.

"Many had dogs."

"If someone fell, a dog was let loose

"which ripped things and the body."

"At Lvovskaya Street, they went deceived and distraught,

"bunching up.

"They caused horror to those whose gaze followed them."

"I heard shots from the direction of Babi Yar

"and realised what they meant.

"I wept over those who had gone towards their certain deaths."

"There were piles of clothes in a wide-open field.

"My job was to fetch them.

"From where I was, I saw other Ukrainians meeting the Jews

"and directing them to the place where, one after another,

"they were supposed to remove their belongings.

"Most people put up a fight when they had to undress,

"and there was a lot of screaming and shouting."

"Some of the policemen had brass knuckles.

"I saw a group of men and women,

"elderly people and children

"being forced to take off their clothes.

"All were taken to an open pit

"where sub-machine-gunners shot them.

"The policemen ordered me to strip and pushed me towards a precipice.

"But before the shots, I fell in."

In Riga, in 1946,

SS-und Polizeifuhrer Friedrich Jeckeln

was hanged with 4,000 people watching.

Mussolini's assessment of the Germans was...

"They have no political sense.

"In those occupied countries,

"they had an opportunity to create a good situation.

"And they let it slip.

"Now they are hated."

In the occupied territories,

people preferred to collaborate by fear.

"Just to stay and to do what the occupying power wants from me

"because I want to survive."

On September 30th,

Economy Inspectorate South

banned the supply of food to Kiev.

"The German military command closed the city

"and blocked not only cars but individuals from entering."

MAN: They just closed city markets for peasants.

They had no possibility to deliver food into the city.

There was starvation or otherwise

people were forced to leave the city centre

and went to the countryside.

Nina Micolevic told how patrols on bridges

confiscate everything.

By this time, the bread ration for Kiev

was smaller than for the besieged city of Leningrad.

"There is no bread.

"Many are already starting to swell up.

"Olya is starving.

"She will die soon.

"What will become of her child?

"He is also hungry."

"A German did not stand in line.

"Whatever his rank, he would commandeer the barber's chair

"even if ten people were waiting.

"He had a free ride on the trams and always had a right to a seat."

Germans in the bigger cities were living the good life.

They are really profiting from it.

They are looting cellars, they are drinking good wine.

They have good food

and they live off the land.

CROWD ROARS

Cronies, toadies and bully boys

from the old days

staked their claim as Gauleiters, administrators, commissars.

Inept, ignorant, they earned the term "ostriten", Eastern nobodies,

recruited, Hitler said,

"Not on the grounds of having judicial training,

"but because they successfully passed through the school of life."

On September 30th,

Heinz Guderian initiated Operation Typhoon,

the assault on Moscow.

The launch of Typhoon was announced by Hitler

in a radio broadcast on October 2nd.

"Today begins the last great decisive battle of the war.

"The final tremendous blow which, before the onset of winter,

"will lead to the destruction of the enemy."

Hoepner's 4th Panzer Group -

Hoepner would be hanged for his role in the July plot to assassinate Hitler -

smashed through the Soviet defensive line,

looking to take Vyazma from the south.

The following day,

Hitler announced...

"This enemy is already broken and will never rise again.

"This would have been a second storm of Genghis Khan.

"That this danger was averted, we owe in the first place

"to the bravery, endurance and sacrifice of the German soldiers."

Two days later, the Moscow Air Commander reported

that a long column of German tanks

was advancing along the Uknovo Highway,

100 kilometres from the walls of the Kremlin.

The diary entry of Corporal Richard Heidenreich

of the 354th Infantry Regiment noted...

"There were approximately 1,000 Jews in the village of Kraca

"and these all needed to be shot today.

"Only a few of them kept their composure.

"The children clung to their mothers,

"women to their men."

How is it possible that these people, Germans of moral character,

could carry out hideous crimes

without seeing - can't you just see that they're people?

Can't you see the tears in their eyes?

Undoubtedly there would have been a need

to continually construct and reconstruct the "them".

"These people are not us and they will never be like us.

"You need not feel sadness. In fact, you should feel fear."

On October 7th, Hoepner linked up with Hoff's 3rd Panzer group.

To their west was a huge pocket

containing four Soviet armies.

Further south, Guderian's 2nd Panzer group

had driven to take Bryansk from the rear,

as the infantry of the German 2nd Army marched on it from the west.

This double encirclement netted Germany more than 700,000 prisoners of war.

"In a military sense, Soviet Russia has been vanquished."

By the end of the operation, no major Red Army formation remained

on the approaches to Moscow.

And cadets, militia and police units

were being shuffled into the defensive Mozhaisk line,

120 kilometres from the capital.

Zhukov told Stalin...

"All routes to Moscow are open.

"The weak covering forces on the Mozhaisk line

"cannot be guaranteed against the sudden appearance of enemy tanks."

On October 15th, Stalin signed a decree,

ordering the evacuation of Moscow.

On the 18th,

Panzer spearheads broke through the Mozhaisk line.

They were two hours' drive from the Kremlin.

But by October 30th,

the Germans were stuck in mud,

between 80 and 100 kilometres short of the capital.

Of course German generals blamed Russian weather and frost.

But to be honest, it was not a state secret of Russia

that we've got frost in December and in January.

And the roads were never good in Russia.

It was not a secret!

One and a quarter million Red Army defenders

had met Operation Typhoon.

In the first ten days, one million of them

had been eliminated from the battle.

A third killed, two-thirds taken prisoner,

for German losses of 48,000.

The Soviet officers

have no idea how to survive these soldiers.

They just send them in the massacre.

Even now, we have a lot of unknown graves

on the territory of Belarus and on the territory of Russia.

Over the next couple of months,

the Soviet Union would send 1.5 million new troops

into the line with 8,000 guns

and more than 1,300 aircraft.

By November 27th,

Eduard Wagner, quartermaster-general of the army, the Ostia, was writing:

"We are at the end of our resources.

"We are about to be confronted with the dangers of a deep winter."

In 1944, implicated in the Operation Valkyrie plot

to assassinate the Fuhrer,

Wagner shot himself.

If you think what a General Staff Officer is,

they're not just blundering in with a machine gun.

They're making sense of this.

They're looking at numbers. They're quantifying operations.

And all of those numbers equal "This won't work",

and time and again on both sides,

they're trying to make it work.

Rundstedt's Army Group South broke the Dnieper River line,

moving further into Ukraine on a wide front.

Kharkov, an industrial city of 840,000,

fell on October 25th

and was soon gripped by starvation.

"Wonderful news from Russia",

wrote Erwin Rommel to his wife.

But he was in North Africa, where it was not snowing.

On October 15th, the battle diary of the SS Death's Head Division

recorded the first substantial snowfall.

25 centimetres.

By the 16th,

it was reported that 15 centimetres of snow

blanketed the entire countryside.

And the commander of the 10th Air Corps confessed...

"Our wildest dreams have been washed out by rain and snow."

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