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.

On April 15th, 1943,

Bletchley Park decrypted a message in which Hitler said

of the coming offensive...

A victory at Kursk must be a beacon to the world.

The increasing output of Soviet industry

meant victory was far from assured.

With only a quarter of the steel that was available to Germany,

the Soviet Union produced more tanks,

more guns and more aircraft

than Hitler's Reich.

And Soviet soldiers were not

defending a regime, but their homes.

I think more than

90% of all factories and plants

were either evacuated or destroyed

by Soviet authorities.

State-run canteens, in relocated

Soviet factories, served food to

an estimated 25 million people every day,

and prioritising essential

war production had sometimes

life-threatening and sometimes

simply inconvenient side-effects.

The requisitioning of all available metal to make munitions

meant that there were no new pots and pans.

And Stalin did not flinch from the greatest hypocrisy

if he thought it would help the war.

When he invited three Russian

bishops to the Kremlin in 1943,

he understood what he was to do.

He gave them the most, er,

important monasteries,

which were closed by the Bolsheviks.

And he gave them an opportunity to go to people, yes?

To let these people come to churches.

The Soviet Union enjoyed

one further material advantage.

Lend-Lease.

Turning points are important,

but behind these turning points, we must look at efforts

on all levels of the Soviet society.

Economic ones, international ones,

and the help of the Allies,

Lend-Lease was a very important part

of the war, undeniably.

In December 1940,

President Franklin D Roosevelt

had made a pledge.

We must be the great arsenal of democracy. For us,

this is an emergency

as serious as war itself.

With Lend-Lease extended to

the Soviet Union, the Arsenal of Democracy

supplied the USSR with just 4% of Soviet weapons.

But it also sent more than 35,000 radio stations,

380,000 field telephones,

5,900 radio receivers,

and motor transport that was critical to

the Red Army's sustained momentum.

After Stalingrad, Soviet partisans - who would, by late 1943,

control almost 60% of the occupied territory -

became so effective,

particularly at disrupting the railway network,

that regular troops had to be

detached to deal with them.

Well, we have to say of all the crimes,

they also destroyed a lot of local people.

They killed them. But as far as

propaganda, it's just prohibited for us to talk about that,

but it's a very interesting topic.

In June, prior to Kursk,

partisan successes behind Army Group Centre included

the destruction of 298 locomotives

and 44 bridges.

For the largest anti-partisan operation, Gypsy Baron,

in May/June 1943,

a full Panzer Corps was deployed.

A document - produced at the Nuremberg War trials -

details results of the anti-partisan sweep in Belarus in June, 1943.

It lists 9,500 killed

and 492 rifles captured -

a disparity which can only suggest

that the vast majority of those killed had nothing

to do with armed resistance.

Erich Koch, Reichskommissar in Ukraine,

said he was in favour of...

Punishment and reprisals,

even when no direct provocation for such exists.

And on June 21st, his administration declared the whole of Ukraine

a gang-fighting area.

When the tide turned,

Reichskommissar Erich Koch ran away.

Recognised and brought to trial, he was, in 1959,

sentenced to death,

but not executed, because Polish law

forbade capital punishment

of the gravely ill.

Erich Koch died in prison in 1986.

Partisan action bought time for 300,000 Soviet civilians to prepare

9,000 km of trenches...

..extending for up to 300 km

in front of Kursk.

The German offensive - they named it Citadel -

was also compromised by the dispatch of Axis troops

from the Eastern Front to Italy,

an obvious invasion target,

following the surrender of German

and Italian troops in North Africa.

We cannot allow a second front

to develop on the Reich's frontiers.

On the day of Operation Citadel,

Hitler sent a message to his troops.

This day, you are to take part in

an offensive of such importance

that the whole future of the war

may depend on its outcome.

German plans, deciphered at

Bletchley Park, had been sent to Moscow.

So, two hours and 20 minutes before the time set for their attack,

the Germans came under intense Soviet bombardment.

At 3:30 am,

and without the element of surprise,

the Germans moved forward along a 320-kilometre front.

Axis forces of 780,000 faced

a Red Army strength of 1,900,000,

on a battlefield the size of Wales.

In the opening 45 minutes,

the Germans fired more shells than

they had discharged during

the Polish and French campaigns combined.

Facing them was 40% of

the Red Army's manpower

and 75% of its armour.

By July 7th, Model's forces in the north and Hoth's in the south

seemed close to choking the neck of the salient

and perhaps winning the battle,

but progress slowed.

Hoth was obliged to throw in his reserves on the 10th.

And on the 11th,

Zhukov and Vasilevsky began their counterattack.

When the Soviet armoured reserve was brought up,

the tank battle the Russians called Prokhorovskoe poboishche -

the slaughter at Prokhorovka - took place.

Recent research has cast doubt on

the accepted story of Prokhorovka.

The statement that over 500 German tanks,

including more than 100 Tigers, took part is now considered inflated.

Soviet myth-making swelling

the numbers and boosting the glory.

This supposedly great

tank battle at Prokhorovka, which is

actually an incredibly one-sided conflict,

where the Soviet armour

is largely obliterated for -

as the historiography would now suggest - something like

five German tanks lost. So, 400 versus five.

By the 14th, it was clear that the Germans could not achieve

their objectives, and Hitler told his commanders

that Citadel was to be called off.

That is the last time I will take

the advice of my General Staff.

By the numbers, Germany had the best of Kursk.

Russian armour lost to German

in the ratio of five to one.

Heinz Guderian called Kursk...

A decisive defeat.

Kursk is only one part of this summer offensive and,

typically, that's where a lot of the books end.

They just talk about Kursk. But actually, there are rolling

Soviet offensives that are now going to come up right through

the second part of the summer and the autumn, into the winter,

and liberate a far wider area of front.

I mean, hundreds of kilometres.

It sort of falls into this area of

a whole plethora of forgotten battles,

and these are very large-scale battles.

And we're talking millions of men clashing together

and huge amounts of casualties.

On July 16th, the Germans began to withdraw from Kursk.

Eight days later, the Allies having landed in Sicily,

Mussolini was deposed and arrested.

After suffering 96,000 casualties,

Hungarian head of state Admiral Horthy recalled

all but two of the ten Hungarian light-infantry divisions.

The Slovaks followed suit.

The 125,000 survivors

of the 220,000-strong Italian Eighth Army returned home.

By July, Finland and Romania were considering their best interests,

and the Axis was threatening to disintegrate.

On August 1st, following Kursk,

Joseph Stalin visited the front

in a train that was armed, specially equipped,

and rather preposterously camouflaged with birch branches.

Despite propaganda to the contrary,

including laughably heroic scenes

in sentimental Soviet movies,

it was his only such visit.

Hitler never visited the front.

Following the Belgorod-Kharkov Operation,

Stalin ordered the first artillery salute in Moscow.

In the name of our country,

our capital, Moscow, will today

salute our glorious troops

with 12 artillery salutes

from 124 guns.

Von Manstein, commanding the army,

predicted that after Kursk,

the Red Army would not be able to quickly transition to the offensive.

The following day, 100 Soviet divisions

fell on Army Group South,

in Operation Rumyantsev.

By mid-August, Hitler had given

permission for the construction of

a new defensive line,

the Panther line,

to be built by forced labour.

From Narva, on the Gulf of Finland,

to the Sea of Azov,

near Melitopol.

Why bother winning a war? There's not going to be a conquest.

It's one of the things I struggled with, actually. I,

for a long time, tried to understand this war in sort of rational terms,

but you only have to understand it as they understood it.

And if they are operating in a worldview that requires you to...

sort of suspend rational ideas, that's fine, so long as

you understand how they construct their world.

Four days after Hitler's Panther line decision,

German forces surrounded the Bialystok Ghetto.

At three, several hundred SS troops entered the ghetto.

By five, notices had been posted,

instructing the remaining Jews to assemble.

Young Jews from the ghetto's Combat Organisation yelled at

their fellow Jews to resist.

The Germans brought in tanks.

Some Jews managed to escape.

Most did not.

By August 20th, the ghetto at Bialystok,

and the Jewish community that had been in the town

since 1745, had ceased to exist.

There isn't a single aspect of day-to-day life that doesn't

have some sort of Jewish rule or practice associated with it.

"Why is all of this important to God?" is a very deep question,

which people have been asking for a very long time. It's not our place

to second-guess the mind of God.

On August 21st, in an uprising

chiefly by the forced labour Sonderkommandos,

about 300 prisoners broke out of Treblinka.

Less than three months later,

a Jewish Soviet prisoner of war,

Alexander Pechersky, and a Polish Jew, Leon Feldhendler,

led 600 inmates of the death camp at Sobibor against their captors.

Armed with knives and hatchets,

they killed 11, stormed the fence

and ran.

200 were gunned down as they ran.

300 were trapped and killed at the wire.

100 made it into the forests,

where many joined partisan units,

whose efforts were growing bolder.

The Chief of Transportation for Army Group Centre,

in reporting on the events of August 1943, explained the problem.

Partisan activity increased by 25% during August

and reached a record of 1,392 incidents.

The report notes that these were...

Sabotage acts, committed chiefly by native workers,

under partisan orders.

A particular issue was with what the Chief of Transportation

described as...

So-called volunteer units,

employed to protect the railway lines.

Manpower shortages forced the Germans to employ more than 100,000

Soviet railway workers,

many to provide protection.

They, to put it colloquially,

"legged it" with their German weapons.

An entire Russian security detachment of 600 men

went over to the partisans.

They attacked the Krulevshchizna railway station

using the machine guns,

mortars and anti-tank guns which they had taken with them.

The Russians caused considerable damage.

On the southern part of Belarus,

there are a lot of swamps.

These territories,

it was very useful for the partisans to create camps

and to take under the control these territories.

And if the column, German column,

need to pass through the swamps

and through the forests,

the partisans needed to shoot the first car and the last car.

Germans paralysed.

They cannot do anything.

They jump in the swamp, they die.

On August 22nd,

German forces withdrew from Kharkov,

the fourth time the city had changed hands in two years.

In four days, 200 villages and hamlets south of

Bryansk were liberated.

The Chernigov-Poltava operation

sent three of the Red Army's most

effective commanders towards Kyiv.

By the end of August, Ukraine,

which had been the USSR's greatest loss,

an area of more than

530,000 square kilometres,

rich in assets,

was being reoccupied.

On September 8th,

Hitler flew to the headquarters of Army Group South at Zaporozhye.

After a briefing, he flew back

to Rastenburg and took an afternoon nap,

from which he was roused with

the news that Italy had surrendered.

In a radio broadcast

three days later, Hitler tried to be reassuring.

The collapse of Italy has been

foreseen for a long time because of those elements

who, to crown systematic sabotage,

have now brought about capitulation.

The nation which passes this test set by Providence will be

rewarded by the Almighty with the laurels of victory.

This must, and will be, Germany.

Hitler sent troops into Italy

as the Wehrmacht in the East continued to pull back.

Himmler said that, in retreat,

the scorched-earth policy had to include Menschenvernichtung -

the destruction of people.

In May, Hitler approved Himmler's proposal

to liquidate the remaining Jewish population

in the occupied territories.

It is good that we had the toughness

to exterminate Jews in our domain.

Between five and nine times a day,

loads of 50 victims,

alive at departure, dead on arrival,

were delivered by gas van

to the charnel house of Babi Yar, in Kyiv.

One consignment was 100 naked young women from a brothel.

Young women, who would never tell their story.

And with a detail of hundreds

of prisoners, exhuming

and burning more than 100,000

corpses in that place,

the Germans did what they could to make sure that Babi Yar too

never told its story.

Meanwhile, negotiations with Admiral Horthy were under way

for the destruction of the 800,000 Hungarian Jews

until then protected by his regime.

It's clear that any resource that Germany can muster

to support the war is important.

At the same time, the Holocaust isn't the difference

between victory or defeat for the Germans, I'm sure of that.

The argument, had Germany

not pursued the Jews to the extent

they did, maybe they would have won the war,

it's a nonstarter. This WAS Nazi Germany

and it pursued the Jews in this way because they were Nazi Germany.

By summer 1943,

all four of the crematoria gas chamber complexes

at Auschwitz-Birkenau were operating.

Rail wagons brought the victims to Auschwitz

and departed loaded with loot.

Treasure that included six tonnes of dental gold.

At Auschwitz, they collected between

8kg and 9kg every day.

In Minsk, in September,

Yelena Grigorievna Mazanik

assassinated Wilhelm Kube,

Generalkommissar for Weissruthenien.

A partisan, she had managed to find

employment as one of his maids,

smuggled in a small magnetic mine

and attached it to his bed.

For what sort of man was such vengeance exacted?

In July 1941, Kube had sent Berlin

a rather whining complaint.

Army Group Centre has, without consulting me, liquidated

10,000 Jews, whose systematic extermination

WE had already planned.

During the 1942 Purim holiday -

the jolliest Jewish holiday,

when people dress up and eat pastries called Hamantaschen -

Wilhelm Kube stood immaculate in his uniform,

as German and Belarusian policemen threw Jewish children

from the Shpalerna Street orphanage into a deep sandpit.

Lacking Hamantaschen, Kube threw

handfuls of sweets to the children, who screamed,

as sand was shovelled on top of them.

It was perhaps to actions such as the Shpalerna Street outrage that

Heinrich Himmler was referring when,

addressing SS leaders in Poznan in October, he spoke of...

A page of glory in our history,

which has never been written

and shall never be written.

In the same vein, Hitler had told party leaders...

Everything that can be discussed

should never be put in writing. Never.

The fact that there's no paper trail leading back to Hitler,

this was intentional because he made that mistake

in 1939, with the letter of authorisation he gave for the murder

of the physically and mentally handicapped in Germany,

and Hitler was certainly not going to make the same mistake again.

Talking to the same SS audience a few weeks later,

and in the same place, Himmler addressed a page of glory

that could not be written, but had perhaps caused disquiet.

I did not feel justified in exterminating the men,

while allowing the avengers, in the form of their children,

to grow up in the middle of our sons and grandsons.

We collectively have done this for our people, have taken

the responsibility on ourselves.

The responsibility for a deed, not just an idea,

and we then carry the secret with us to our graves.

His audience is reported to have greeted

Himmler's speech with generous applause.

And then the killing started of

the 45,000 survivors of the Warsaw ghetto.

The place was Majdanek,

and the victims were shot.

As many as 18,000 on a single day,

at the start of Aktion Erntefest -

Operation Harvest Festival.

The killers were mainly volunteers

from German Reserve Police Battalion 101,

commanded by that

Hitler favourite, Odilo Globocnik.

Globocnik was transferred to anti-partisan duties

in northern Italy, where he

established a concentration camp in a disused rice factory.

Captured by the British, Globocnik used his cyanide pill.

Soviet troops had crossed the Dnieper between Kremenchuk

and Dnipropetrovsk in late-June,

and Goebbels wrote...

We are in danger of slowly bleeding to death in the East.

Vatutin, having assembled a force north of Kyiv,

burst from his bridgehead

on November 3rd.

The Germans set charges, destroying

significant Kyivan buildings.

Nikita Khrushchev, who had been head of the Communist Party

in Ukraine before the war, returned to Kyiv and recalled...

As we were walking along

Lenin Street, we suddenly heard

a hysterical scream and a young man

came running towards us.

He kept shouting,

"I'm the only Jew left! I'm the last Jew in Kyiv!"

Two days after the fall of Kyiv, Hitler delivered his annual

Bierkeller speech, and came close to admitting the truth.

The struggle in the east is the most difficult that the German volk

has ever had to fight.

What our men bear here cannot be compared with what

our enemies achieve.

Not only will it not be possible to reach the final objective,

namely, to bring about the collapse of the German Front,

but also, as always in world history, the final battle alone

will bring about the decision.

What I demand of the German soldier is therefore tremendous.

It is the task of the homeland to support and reinforce

the Front in its struggle against the, apparently, impossible.

The Soviet sequence of offensives, Stalin's' Ten Crushing Blows

that punctuate the New Year, owes its label to Stalin himself.

Speaking at the celebration of the 27th anniversary

of the October Revolution, he said...

The decisive successes of the Red Army this year and the expulsion

of the Germans from Soviet territory were predetermined by the

succession of shattering blows which our troops dealt the German forces.

The first blow, given that rank because Stalin named it first,

was the Leningrad-Novgorod Operation,

launched on January 14th, 1944.

In 1944, Stalin, he was not a great war chief.

It's a legend created by himself.

But, nevertheless, he understood how the army should be directed.

He tried to create a team of people that help him to wage this war.

A surge pushed Manstein back to within 30km of the Polish border

and liberated 300 towns and villages.

On January 6th, Red Army units crossed the old Polish border

and took Rokitno.

At the turn of 1943-44, Ribbentrop, according to his own memoirs,

was told by Hitler to stop attempting diplomatic feelers

through Sweden.

If I settled with Russia today,

I would only come to grips with her again tomorrow.

I just can't help it.

Army Group North was attacked on January 15th, 1944

by the Leningrad, Volkhov and 2nd Baltic Fronts

which broke through the ring around Leningrad,

linking with units coming from the east at the village of Ropsha.

On the 18th, the encirclement of Leningrad

was broken at the cost of 34,000 Soviet casualties.

On the 20th, before the guns were moved out of range,

the last German shells fell on the city.

A week later, the Moscow Leningrad railway line was cleared

ending the 876 day siege, the bloodiest in history,

in which civilians died at the rate of 1,100 each day.

More deaths than the combined British

and American death toll for the entire war.

In late January, 1944,

a significant battle raged on the Great Dnieper Bend,

where Zhukov and Konev trapped two German army corps in a salient from

which Manstein managed to extricate them

at the loss of 100,000 casualties.

Yet, the Battle of Korsun is barely known in the West.

The Soviet spring offensive began with a setback when,

on 28th February, one of the Red Army's most able commanders,

Nikolai Vatutin, was assassinated

by members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

The separatist group that had gained ascendancy among the partisans.

By April, the Red Army had advanced 265km.

The most productive land in the USSR was back in Soviet hands.

And Stalin and The Stavka were planning the campaign

that would finally eject the invader from Soviet soil -

Operation Bagration.

As Soviet forces moved west, it was not peace but more pain

that was in store for many of the liberated people.

From February 1944, Soviet deportations sent

Chechen, Ingush, Tatar, Balkar and more around the vast country

under the direction of Stalin's infamous secret police chief -

Lavrenity Beria.

1.5 million people were uprooted,

taken on trains and dumped.

As many as half a million died on their journeys

or soon after arrival.

A report by Beria dated March 11th 1944,

captures the callous nature of the deportations.

37,103 Balkars have been loaded onto special trains

and dispatched to the new areas of settlement in the Kazakh

and Kyrgyz republics.

There were no incidents requiring attention during the operation.

But then Beria always told Stalin that, and it was never true.

In May, the MKVD began deportation of 180,000 Crimean Tatars.

When almost half a million Chechens were deported, Beria claimed...

There were only isolated cases of attempted flight.

Of course, there was a death toll caused by his MKVD.

It tallied in the thousands.

In early March, Allied bombers made the first major daylight

bombing raid on Berlin.

But cities are easier to burn down than to blow up.

And Berlin, with extensive parks and wide boulevards,

proved difficult to burn down.

On the day of the raid, Soviet troops began the offensive

that would drive the Axis out of Belarus.

Rattled by the suspicion that Hungary was about to follow Italy

and seek peace, Hitler authorised Operation Margarethe,

the occupation of Hungary.

Two mechanised divisions followed by SS and police entered the country.

800,000 Jews, one quarter of them in Budapest, protected

from deportation by Admiral Horthy's regime, were still there.

But suddenly they were in great danger.

The troops entered Hungary on March 19th

and so did Adolf Eichmann, who moved into Budapest's Hotel Majestic,

soon changing to a villa stolen from its Jewish owner.

There, Eichmann worked closely with the Hungarian government

through two secretaries of state, Lazlo Endre and Laszlo Baky,

drawing up plans for the deportation of Hungary's Jews.

Hitler said...

Hungary, the entire country subverted and rotten.

Jews everywhere.

Here too I intervened, and this problem

is now going to be solved.

On May 10th, the New York Times told its readers,

"Hungarian Jews fear annihilation."

The deportation to Auschwitz, Birkenau of Hungarian Jews

began on May 15th.

The culmination of two months planning,

and triggering the camp's most intense killing period,

as between 70-90% of those on the transports

were sent directly to the gas chambers.

American bombers dropped leaflets on Budapest which said that the

United States government viewed with extreme gravity the persecution

of the Jews, and Admiral Horthy advised Germany

that it would have to stop.

It stopped on July 8th.

More than 170,000 Jews remained in Budapest.

But by then, 434,351 Hungarian Jews

had been deported aboard 147 trains.

It's not only the Jews that are living close

to the extermination camps, but it's worth having deportation

trains from Western Europe, from Hungary go to Auschwitz.

Throughout the Final Solution,

the Reich's main transport office paid the railways

for transporting the victims to the camps.

It paid half fare for children.

Stalin's third below, the Odessa Offensive,

launched on March 26th.

Ivan Konev, in 1956 he would command the Soviet troops that

suppress the Hungarian uprising,

drove his command 240km across Ukraine,

culminating on April 7th with his troops entering Botosani in Romania.

It was the first time Red Army boots had tramped on foreign soil

since the fighting began 34 months earlier.

On the 8th, Soviet forces advanced into the Crimea.

In only two days, Odessa fell.

On the 17th, Ternopil fell to Zhukov.

Hitler had declared Ternopil to be a fortress, a Fuhrer Festung,

and the 4,500 man garrison defended it accordingly.

55 Germans survived the assault.

On June 6th, D-Day, the Second Front opened.

One sixth of the German's 7th Army, facing the invasion

on the Normandy beaches, comprised troops

recruited during the invasion of the USSR.

There were Tatars, Cossacks, Georgians and the like.

Overlord is a source of joy to us all.

Tomorrow we begin first ground on the Leningrad front.

What's interesting is, the allies in the West

who are facing in total about 58 German divisions,

and actually in Normandy it's about 15 divisions that

they're directly engaged with, and they're tied up in Normandy,

and they haven't yet broken out.

On the Eastern Front, the Germans with Axis allies,

have about 228 divisions.

The Germans, engaged on two fronts, were still obliged to mount

major operations against partisans.

On June 19th, demolition charges placed by Soviet partisans,

so damaged the railway network west of Minsk

that it could not be repaired.

Other attacks disrupted Germany's ability

to resupply and reinforce.

On the night of the 19th, 20th of June,

partisan attacks put more than 1,000 transport modes out of action.

All of this merely a prologue to the main show

which would start on the 22nd.

Two senior staff officers, Sergei Shtemenko and Semyon Timoshenko,

had been tasked with considering the pros and cons

of offensive action in the northern, central or southern parts

of the line.

Their conclusion persuasively argued for the concentration

of forces in the centre.

So the fifth and most devastating blow fell there -

Operation Bagration.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media