Shooting the War (2010) s01e01 Episode Script
Men
This is the Second World War, as it has rarely been seen, filmed by ordinary men for their home movies.
Despite Nazi control, amateur film was as widely used in Germany as it was in Britain.
Remarkably, a handful of British and German soldiers took their cine cameras with them to the front lines.
In the early days of the war, they filmed their comrades alongside the people that they had conquered.
TRANSLATION: Poland was the country where many of the so-called Eastern Jews lived.
So we filmed them, as if they were a tourist attraction.
But, from Europe to the Far East, as the conflict escalated, some of these amateur cameramen on both sides filmed the war in all its horror.
He filmed D-Day itself.
He was actually in the first wave.
This is the story of a few of these filmmakers, and how they filmed everyday life during wartime, capturing love and loss, life and death, victory and defeat.
PIANO MUSIC PLAYS These are some of the early films made by Derek Brown, who filmed his time as a soldier during the war.
In the 1930s, amateur filmmaking was an unusual hobby.
I suppose I started making films round about the age of 13, when I got my first cine camera.
I had the idea of making a film which involved a smash and grab raid.
We arranged for one of my friends to come up to the jeweller's shop and throw a brick through the window.
Except he didn't throw the brick through the window.
We were a little bit terrified in case the police saw us.
This is Paul Kellermann, a young German filmmaker living in Cologne, capturing a life as yet untroubled by war.
Inspired by his films, Paul's niece, Hiltrud, has become the family historian.
TRANSLATION: I first got to know him through watching his films.
He was filming in 1936, which was quite special, you know, quite unusual then.
The Christmas films are beautiful, but the films about the war are the most interesting and moving.
Paul Kellermann and Derek Brown are two of a few men on both sides who took their cine cameras with them to the front.
It's through their ingenuity that we are able to witness the experiences of war in this uniquely personal way.
What is the absolute sort of revelation, really, of these amateur collections we now have is they have an honesty about them that is purely to do with the vision of the filmmaker behind the camera.
It wasn't to do with propaganda.
They weren't always planned.
They were just spontaneous of the moment.
So when your community goes into revolution, which is, you know, what happened, when your world is completely changed, what better subject-matter for a filmmaker to take.
And I think how significant and important that contribution is to the history of the Second World War.
On September 1 1939, Germany invaded Poland.
Klaus Eismann was an airman in the Luftwaffe.
He was also an amateur filmmaker, for whom capturing day-to-day life was a passionate hobby.
He filmed the invasion, both on the ground and from the air.
TRANSLATION: He was trained as an aerial observer, so photography was an integral part of his job.
He made films of his campaigns during the war.
I think that he was interested in showing my mother images from Poland.
He had no personal experience of what Poland and Polish people were like.
He was influenced by propaganda, in terms of what to think about Poland.
Poland was a country where many so-called Eastern Jews lived, and of course they'd been depicted in a particular way in the Nazi press, so we filmed them, as if they were a tourist attraction.
RECORDING: Up to the very last, it would have been quite possible to have arranged a peaceful and honourable settlement between Germany and Poland.
But Hitler would not have it.
With the outbreak of war, many men in Britain enlisted in the military.
Amongst those to sign up was Leslie Fowler, a keen amateur filmmaker from Hertfordshire.
His son, Robin, seen here as a young boy, has researched his father's wartime experiences.
He went to join up with the Navy.
He did it because he had heard Chamberlain's broadcast, saying this country was now at war with Germany, and, um the alternative seemed to be that he was going to be dominated by somebody else, and he didn't want that.
So he said, "Well, it has to be fought, I'm going to do something about it.
" So off he went and did.
A lot of holding camps ensued, where they were trained to get fit and have some durability to them, mainly to be used in long hours spent on the bridge standing up, trying to keep awake.
Derek Brown had enlisted in the Territorial Army in April 1939.
He was on holiday with his family when he was called up.
We were finished with our training for the summer, and I joined my parents in Scotland.
While I was there, I met a girl, and was very friendly with her throughout that time.
But, at the end of ten days, I got a telegram calling me back to my unit, and from then on I was in the army.
Derek Brown might have been in the army, but the eight months following the outbreak of war were marked by an absence of British military operations.
The period became known in Britain as "the Phoney War".
Posted outside a small town in County Durham, he filmed the monotony of life in the searchlights.
For weeks on end, we were virtually confined to site.
The YMCA used to run a tea van.
This was the highlight of the week.
This used to call round the sites and provide luxuries like chocolate, cigarettes, stamps, letters, the sort of things that people need just to make life a little more bearable.
As both sides expanded their armed services through conscription, the war turned civilians into soldiers.
In Germany, amateur filmmaker Paul Kellermann, seen here in his own film, was conscripted into an artillery observation unit.
TRANSLATION: Paul rose to the rank of lieutenant.
In relation to how much time he spent in the army, this wasn't a great achievement.
I feel that it wasn't important for him, and that he was just more interested in filmmaking.
So it really suited him that he was posted in an observation unit and not right at the front.
The military in Germany at that time was a drafted army.
That means many men were made soldiers who actually did not like to become soldiers.
The perfect soldier and the perfect man would certainly be that one who was ready to sacrifice his life on behalf of his country.
But the military also needed to include those men who may not have been the perfect soldiers.
Just by being good socialisers were considered as true men as well.
Got their place.
From May 1940, the pace of war quickened, as Germany began its invasion of Holland, Belgium and France.
Paul Kellermann recorded his comrades' departure from loved ones, and their advance.
Always on the move, his films give a sense of the relentless pace of this offensive.
TRANSLATION: The films from France are really interesting because you can see the type of troops that the French sent into battle.
You can see the prisoners of war are, to a great extent, Moroccan.
Many of them appeared to be colonial troops conscripted from Africa.
I was very moved by the defeated troops marching through the streets.
The footage of the dead horses I found particularly terrible, because it shows such wanton destruction, a senseless waste of life.
These are animals that didn't have anything to do with it.
There is more German film of front-line activity shot by amateur cameramen than there is shot by British cameramen.
Filming was an integral part of German society.
Amateur filming was.
And in some instances, the commanders of units, more or less appointed soldiers within their unit as an official, semi-official, unit cameraman.
A second reason would be that at the start of the war the Germans were advancing.
There were fewer security concerns in the minds of the Germans than there were in their struggling British counterparts.
It never really occurred to me that there was anything very wrong in taking films of the domestic arrangements.
But I did take great care never to show any equipment.
The searchlight sight to sound locator or anything like that.
At that time, security was uppermost in almost everybody's mind.
There were all sorts of campaigns, advertising campaigns, to remind people that careless talk costs lives.
Because this was just about the time of Dunkirk, and we were expecting something of an invasion almost any day.
In this atmosphere of caution, amateur filmmakers like Derek Brown avoided recording military facilities.
Instead, they filmed the public activities of the Home Guard as it prepared for a possible invasion.
There were lots of amateur filmmakers at the time who took on those filmmaking skills that they had in order to promote war work.
For example, the Second World War Home Guard movies.
There were a number of those which show and promote the work of the Home Guards and the ARP.
Also training films, instructional films that had been made by amateurs, to say, you know, this is what our community's doing, let's carry on doing it.
It was motivational in that way.
It was sort of propaganda, but on a domestic, community scale.
The threat of invasion seemed to many to be very real.
By this time, Germany had the whole of France under its control.
Paul Kellermann drove into an occupied Paris in mid-June 1940, just over a month after the German offensive had begun.
TRANSLATION: When you watch these films, you can't believe that they're at war, because you can see just how relaxed they are.
There's Paul, shaving.
He really knew how to pose.
It's like they're camping - playing, reading the newspaper, writing letters.
What a group of men would do together anyway.
Such a comfortable atmosphere.
Pin up girls there.
Just what a chap needs.
TRANSLATION: I find what was filmed absolutely astonishing.
Soldiers were banned from filming front-line fighting, so instead they mostly filmed personal activities, particularly with the French campaign.
It comes across like a scout camp.
The images give the message that everything is still OK for us soldiers.
After the surrender of France in June 1940, Germany used French airfields as bases from which to stage bombing raids on Britain.
Theodor Plote worked as Luftwaffe ground crew, preparing planes for raids on cities such as Plymouth and Bristol.
TRANSLATION: We were based in an airfield in Normandy, between Lisieux and Caen, and from there we flew the Stukas into England.
Our job was to load the bombs onto the planes, sometimes as much as eight times a day.
The planes would be away for up to an hour and a half.
Then when they came back they'd be loaded again, and there would be more flight talks and so on.
I filmed life in the airfield.
I didn't have any problems doing this.
You did hear again and again that some people weren't allowed to film.
But I filmed everywhere that I wanted to film.
I was never criticised for doing this.
I could film aircraft, detonators, bombs.
No-one said anything.
You see life and work in the airfields, how the planes were serviced by the technicians.
We saw how the planes returned, badly shot up, but still managing to land safely, as well as planes that were shot down, some with the entire undercarriage blown away.
By the autumn of 1940, German air attacks on Britain were targeting major industrial and population centres.
Martin Davies was one of the millions on the receiving end of these raids.
Working as an ambulance man in London, he experienced the Blitz firsthand.
Speaking now, people say, "Weren't you dead frightened all the time?" Well, no, you weren't, you know, except at rare moments when something really big had happened.
But you get used to that life.
You're living in a war, damn it.
So you adapt to that.
But I can remember once the phone went, and it was it was my sister, who lived in Welwyn Garden City, 20 miles north of London.
And she said, "I'm terribly sorry, I've got bad news for you.
"Mum died in hospital this morning.
" And there I was, in the middle of an air raid, with bombs going on outside.
And of course the chaps in there, my friends, couldn't help overhearing this.
I got a lot of sympathy and feedback and so on, but it was a tricky time.
I couldn't even go out and go to see her or my sister for the moment, because I was stuck there.
Martin Davies worked in one of many rest centres, set up to help people whose homes had been destroyed.
Well, what they did was to come to us.
Or they were brought to us by wardens.
On the whole, they weren't much injured, because the injured ones had been taken off to hospital.
Or the cemetery.
But the ones who came to us were, on the whole, in one piece.
And generally they came with parents and a couple of kids, or usually the mother because the pa was probably off in the war somewhere.
Davies was one of those men who had not gone off to war.
He was a conscientious objector, working instead with the Friends Ambulance Unit.
If you decided you weren't going to blooming well join up, which of course everyone thought you would do, you had to register as a conscientious objector.
But registering wasn't enough.
You had then to go through a sort of trial, a tribunal, questionnaire.
Which I did.
We all did.
And there was a judge or somebody, sitting up there, firing at questions at me and saying, "What do you mean? This is ridiculous.
What do you mean you won't go to war? "Can't you see the Germans are facing us, and we've got to do something about it?" I could see that Hitler was up to no good, that he had in mind to attack this country.
And it's very difficult to argue logically against that.
But if you have this overriding feeling that to put a gun up and shoot another human being is wrong, that overrides all that.
Then in the end they went away and quietly discussed it, came back and said, "OK, as long as you continue with your idea of joining the Friends Ambulance Unit.
"We're not giving you complete exemption from military service, "only on condition that you go on with the Friends Ambulance.
" In Britain, individual men were able to opt out of combat on religious or moral grounds.
This was not the case in Germany.
In Germany, it was always the group that was glorified.
The group was the only thing that matters.
And what does that mean? It means that you had, as an individual, to switch off any kinds of thoughts of individual, personal visions of life, career whatsoever, family, it no longer mattered.
Your individual visions did no longer matter.
And your individual responsibility did no longer matter.
GERMAN SONG PLAYS By the end of 1940, with much of northern Europe under its control, the official mood in Germany was celebratory.
This amateur footage shows Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister for Propaganda, on the right, on a visit to Munster that year.
Goebbels was the architect of the state newsreels that announced Germany's triumphs to its people, and dramatically promoted the Third Reich as it wished to be seen.
He took a very, very close interest in the construction and editing of the German newsreels.
These are not only German newsreels designed for screening in Germany, but also throughout occupied and neutral Europe.
At one stage, German newsreels were being shown in 17 languages in 37 different territories.
In Britain, there was nothing of comparable scope being produced on film.
There was a natural British diffidence, I think, to the notion of publicity.
There was, of course, a different reason why publicity was not so welcome at that time, and that was, after the brief spell of the Phoney War, British forces were driven out of Europe.
The British retreat from Europe prompted calls to somehow boost morale at home.
In an attempt to improve the situation, the War Office recruited its first civilian publicity officer.
Ronald Tritton believed that the most effective way of improving morale lay in the use of cine film.
What happened was that we managed to capture some German newsreel stuff.
Tritton put this together in a screening and called together the top military people, and showed them the type of work the Germans were putting together, and the type of propaganda that they were feeding to their people and to the news worldwide.
And this was a deliberate attempt to change the minds of the military.
Tritton's film was a success.
It convinced military leaders of the need to produce high-quality film footage promoting British military efforts to rival that being produced by Germany.
The result was the creation of a new Army Film and Photographic Unit, or AFPU.
Unlike the previous Army Film Unit, that recruited from within the film industry, the AFPU recruited directly from the army, training soldiers with any previous experience of photography or film to capture front-line action on camera.
Cameramen in general were used to working in a closed environment with three or four assistants round them.
And that wasn't the type of cameraman that would do a good job whilst the enemy are shooting at him.
They preferred soldiers with cameras rather than cameramen as soldiers.
What happened was, on the noticeboards of every army unit throughout the United Kingdom, anyone with photographic or film experience was asked would they like to join a new thing called the Army Film Unit.
One person who applied was conscripted soldier Harry Oakes.
I was a parachutist before I was in the Army Film Unit.
A lot had knowledge of photography, and someone chap had his own photographic shop.
But nevertheless, no-one really knew much about filming.
It was rather rare, I think, in those days, for people to have a cine camera, even an eight mil one.
After initial film training, these new cameramen were attached to military units.
To begin with, they got a mixed reception.
It's just on one occasion I remember some dissent.
This brigadier, he saw me with this camera, he said, "We want people with rifles and bayonets, not bloody cameras.
" But generally speaking, it wasn't like that at all.
We got well received.
A defining moment for both the British military and its new Army Film Unit came in the autumn of 1942.
The 8th Army, under the command of Montgomery, defeated Rommel's Afrika Korps at El Alamein in the North African desert.
From coverage of this campaign, the AFPU produced Desert Victory, a feature-length documentary that charted the first major Allied victory of the war.
It was a significant film because it was a significant turning point in the war, and certainly in terms of putting together and the skill that was used to put it together, it was a tremendous piece of work.
And I would say that that was the take-off point for the AFPU.
In tropical climes there are certain times of day When all the citizens retire to take their clothes off and perspire The Allied campaign in North Africa relied heavily on support from colonial troops.
In 1942, Derek Brown had been reassigned from his searchlight unit in Britain and posted to North West India in order to train Indian army recruits for the North African offensive.
Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun Well, it was our first experience of life overseas and our first experience, really, of living in a hot country.
So we were all kitted up with pith helmets and shorts.
Derek Brown's passion for filmmaking went with him, but unfortunately he'd left his camera at home.
Our one day out there used to be a Saturday, and we would take a tonga down into the village, and there we would wander round the bazaar.
While I was there, I found myself an old 16 millimetre camera and I was able to get it for 200 rupees.
Victory in North Africa meant that Derek Brown was re-deployed yet again, this time to support a renewed Allied offensive against the Japanese in Burma.
He was sent to shore up the supply route over the India-Burma border, and used his camera to film the remnants of the previous Allied campaign.
When we got there, we found that there was a very poor road, and it was littered, absolutely littered, with broken-down vehicles and smashed vehicles, all of which had been used by those who'd escaped from Burma from the Japanese advance and come to grief in one way or another on the road.
These vehicles were the remains of the Allied retreat from Burma in May 1942.
One of the many people caught up in the chaos of the withdrawal was conscientious objector Martin Davies, seen here in amateur footage shot in China.
He had travelled to the Far East with the Friends Ambulance Unit to help wounded Chinese troops and civilians in the war with Japan.
We weren't part of the war, except that we were there to help the chaps who were fighting it, but we probably faced more danger than a lot of the chaps in the army! And that's what I wanted.
I didn't mind that.
Despite Allied support, China was fighting a losing battle against the Japanese.
The Allies were forced to retreat across the border into Burma, where the Friends Ambulance Unit helped re-establish a field hospital.
Our first stop, when we came down from the North, was Pyinmana.
That's where we met up with a civilian doctor, who was a missionary.
We went down to meet him and to help him, because he had the nurses, he had the medical knowledge, but he didn't have any transport, and that's just what we could do.
We had the transport.
The Japanese were advancing towards, so we were told we'd have to move, have to go back, find another base, another site to operate from.
So we did.
We loaded the nurses and gear and everything in the lorries, and set off up north to see where else we could set up hospital.
And we did this about four times.
North of Mandalay, they met with the command of General Joseph Stilwell, the American Commander-in-Chief for China and Burma.
With the Japanese barely 20 miles away, they began their retreat from Burma, driving through the jungle towards India until the road gave out.
Martin Davies photographed their escape.
There we were, 114 or whatever it was of us, waiting for orders.
At that point, Stilwell collected us all together in a group in the jungle, and gave us a little pep talk.
"This is where you are, we've got to get out.
"If you don't want to go, stay behind and look after yourself.
" That was the general message.
The actual walk took two weeks and something, sleeping in the rough, eating off the land.
But we knew we had to get our skates on and get to India.
The strange party of refugees spent two weeks on foot, struggling through dense rainforest, with the Japanese in hot pursuit.
I was walking along behind these two Americans, expecting to meet the Japanese around the corner.
I'm not sure that we were fearful exactly.
We weren't exactly quaking.
But you knew what was likely to what was possibly going to happen.
And I said in my conversation with Tom Owen, Tom said to me, "You know, Martin, if I had a Tommy gun with me now, "I might just ditch my pacifist principles and use it.
"What do you think?" And I said, "You may be right, Tom.
"I hope we're not put in that position, though.
" On 20th May 1942, the exhausted party crossed over the North India border at Imphal, reaching safety.
Martin Davies photographed his last view back into Burma.
The Germans had been fighting a long and arduous battle of their own.
In June 1941, Hitler had broken his pact with Stalin, and Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
As German forces advanced rapidly east, behind their front lines paramilitary death squads began the systematic killing of opponents.
One execution of Jewish prisoners was witnessed by a German sailor and amateur cameraman, Reinhardt Wiener.
It took place in August 1941, near Libau in Latvia.
Though hundreds of thousands died in this way, this is the only film record of these massacres.
As the German advance confronted the Red Army in the autumn and winter of 1941, Paul Kellermann filmed the increasingly harsh conditions.
His niece, Hiltrud, has the archive of his time in Russia.
TRANSLATION: The film from Russia is really upsetting.
He exchanged letters with his mother, 18 in total.
"Dear Mother, the advance has been going well.
"We are 150 kilometres further towards Moscow.
"The Panzers are ahead of us and the planes have been taking care of the rest.
"Around us, we can see so much destruction as we pass by.
"The food isn't great, but as long as we have potatoes, salt and fish, it's OK.
" "Dear Mother, "this is the worst that I've seen it since the war started.
"It really is a battlefield.
"We've buried 17 dead today.
"Thousands of refugees pass us by.
" "Dear Mother, The winter is passing slowly.
I can't wait for spring.
"The truck engines are dead and everything has been transferred to horse and sleigh.
"As an observer, I have to do everything on foot.
"When I'm using my equipment, my eyebrows freeze to the glass, "my cheeks burn, and the snow and wind sting my eyes.
"My fingertips become hard and lifeless, even though I'm wearing double gloves.
"And the end of my nose turns white, despite me rubbing it.
" "Ach.
It's constantly backwards and forwards.
"Advancing and retreating.
"Everyone has had enough of this.
"Lucky those who are wounded and at home, out of the war and safe on leave.
"At some point, this has to end.
"With this in mind, all my love, Paul.
" This was the last letter he ever wrote.
TRANSLATION: There were some Russian partisans, snipers, who ambushed him and shot him dead.
He died on February 2nd 1942.
By the middle of March, his mother had still not been informed, and she was still writing him letters.
She wished him a happy 27th birthday, which he didn't make.
In July 1942, five months after Paul Kellermann's death, the German army attacked the Russians at Stalingrad.
With combined casualties of more than 1.
5 million, it was to become one of the most brutal battles of the Second World War.
Klaus Eismann's father, an aerial observer with a bomber crew, was shot down during a raid over the city.
He'd flown nearly 100 similar raids.
TRANSLATION: We have quite a precise description from the signalman who was in the same plane as my father.
He wrote a letter to my mother, describing the last offensive that they flew together.
"Suddenly, four fighters came into view.
"I could tell that they were the enemy, and opened fire.
"The fighters hit one of our fuel tanks, which exploded and burned.
"Then the right wing broke off, which sent the plane into a tumble.
"At that point, the captain shouted to everyone on board to get out.
"I landed by parachute two kilometres west of Orlovka, a small village on the way to Stalingrad.
" "If he did die in the crash, then think of it as the most beautiful death and be comforted.
"It is not a bad thing.
"One only thinks of one's duty to one's home country, "the beautiful fatherland for which we will joyfully give our lives anytime.
" When I read this for the first time, it really filled me with angst.
These hollow phrases like "the most beautiful death".
They mean nothing to me.
That these people believed in these things, I just can't understand it.
Maybe only those who grew up in such circumstances could understand.
How can you try to give comfort in this way to a woman who has just lost her husband? It's incomprehensible to me.
The scale of the German defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943 marked a turning point in the German advance on the Eastern front.
Over the course of that year, the Nazis were forced into a retreat.
In the West, Allied bombing raids on German cities intensified.
In July of 1943, they launched a massive assault on Hamburg.
The bombing was so intense that it created a firestorm, incinerating some eight square miles of the city.
Hans Brunwswig, who worked for the fire service, captured it on film.
TRANSLATION: I was in Hamburg at the time of the big bombing raid in 1943.
I'd been in the fire brigade five years by then.
There was no talk of a raid on Hamburg.
And then, about half an hour after the air raid alarm, there came a dreadful bombardment on our neighbourhood.
We were in shock.
We heard nothing but the fire storm.
It was a great roar.
You could see the trees bend with the heat.
As soon as you went out of the doors, out of the fire station doors, you were almost blown over by the storm.
It was that powerful.
We found this petrol station.
It was situated in the middle of the flattened area.
The whole workforce who belonged to it lay dead, around the petrol station.
On the way to the petrol station, I saw thousands not hundreds, but thousands of dead bodies, which lay in great piles.
And I took some film of these bodies.
I must say that after about the tenth picture, I couldn't photograph any more.
You couldn't do it.
It was too much to take.
It's a picture you don't forget your whole life long.
The bombing of German cities continued throughout 1944.
And, as the Soviets forced a retreat in the East, the Western Allies launched the invasion of German-occupied France on June 6th.
Leslie Fowler was the captain of a landing craft.
Years later, he recounted the build-up to D-Day to his son, Robin.
D-Day itself was delayed for 24 hours.
They were all keyed up, ready to go, and, yes, if they could have a swim, why not? It was a way to let off steam, as it were, and relax a bit, before you have to key yourself up.
Fowler was transporting troops and equipment from ships on to the beaches.
Remarkably, he filmed the events of D-Day as they unfolded.
He was taking them in.
He was actually in the first wave.
He was down on Utah Beach first.
And, after that first wave landing, went up to join the British forces at Sword area, and did the ferrying of the infantry across from there.
There is a shot of him offloading what I believe is the 51st Highland Division on a very flat beach.
And they all had to wade ashore.
Apologised, of course, that he couldn't get them any closer.
But the commanding officer said, "Right, lads," and took his trousers off.
His boots, slung 'em over his shoulder, and waded off.
And the rest of his platoon followed him.
They did all sorts of, um work jobs, ferrying backwards and forwards.
And he did film one such offloading, when they had their own deck full of stretcher cases, and they're being winched up on to this venerable-looking hospital ship with its red crosses on it.
"Poor devils," he said.
They thought they were going home and that they were out of the war now, and safe.
But the ship struck a mine, and went down with all hands.
As the Western Allies advanced through France, the reality of war was filmed by an American serviceman.
Paris was liberated in August.
But there would be another year of fierce fighting across Europe before Germany would surrender.
On the 15th of April 1945, British troops came upon a camp at Bergen-Belsen in the north west of Germany.
During its liberation, the camp was extensively filmed by the Army Film and Photographic Unit.
This was something which had to be documented.
Camera men in the British Army were essentially fulfilling two purposes.
They were filming for a historic record, and also for publicity purposes.
This was absolutely essential that it be recorded for all time.
AFPU cameraman Harry Oakes, seen here in the middle of the group, was amongst the first Allied troops to come upon the camp.
I mean, it's awful really, to think you can get used to seeing corpses, but one did.
And the Germans used to have the job of putting the corpses in the pit.
What was evil was that two or three would have to get inside this big pit and make it level, because all the corpses were piling up on the side.
Can you remember filming the children that you found alive at Belsen? Yes.
Yes, yes, I do, yes.
They were extraordinarily brave, I felt.
Extraordinarily brave.
They'd got past the crying stage.
They simply looked quite They looked quite numb.
Victory in Europe was declared in May 1945.
Britain celebrated with street parties, caught on camera by newsreels and amateurs alike.
Yet the amateur films of men like Leslie Fowler, still serving on the front lines, paint a different picture, showing VE day as just another day endured in a foreign country reeling from the effects of war.
The footage that you'll see is the parading that went on at the end of the war in Holland.
My father said they were greeted as heroes.
But the poor people were absolutely starved.
They had suffered very badly, would sell themselves for a crust of bread.
One of the jobs my father had to do was ferry German prisoners out, and you'll see them on board there, because he was rather anxious at the time because he said there you'd got a shipload of 500 Nazi soldiers, and he, with ten crew and two officers, could have easily been rushed had they had a mind to do so.
But presumably they were just so glad to get out of the fighting.
They could see the way the war had gone.
They were finished, and they were just glad to be out of it.
Leslie Fowler was one of the lucky ones who made it home.
Without the ingenuity of amateur filmmakers like him who survived, but also those who did not, we would never have been able to see the war with such startling intimacy.
Their films show us life on the front lines in a way that newsreels of the era could never match.
One of those film makers, Derek Brown, remained stationed in the Far East, despite victory in Europe.
The war with Japan continued, and Brown had stayed in India.
Having become engaged in 1942, he hadn't seen his fiancee at all in the following three years.
For men like Derek, an end to the war seemed a distant prospect.
Most of us were under the impression that we would never get home.
As far as we could see, it looked as if we would be fighting our way through the Far East for the rest of our lives.
One morning, I saw a newspaper, and it was the description of what had happened at Hiroshima.
And my immediate reaction was, "Well, if they have got a bomb that does a thing like this, "we will eventually get home.
" I remember, as we were coming back from the ship on disembarkation .
.
there was one fellow whose fiancee had come to meet him, I think, at the ship.
And he said to me afterwards that he was wondering whether she was still the right girl for him.
Three or four years apart had made a big difference to him.
But not to me.
Not to either of us.
Is it a sin, is it a crime Loving you dear like I do? If it's a crime, then I'm guilty Guilty of loving you Maybe I'm wrong, dreaming of you Dreaming the lonely night through If it's a crime, then I'm guilty Guilty of dreaming of you.
Despite Nazi control, amateur film was as widely used in Germany as it was in Britain.
Remarkably, a handful of British and German soldiers took their cine cameras with them to the front lines.
In the early days of the war, they filmed their comrades alongside the people that they had conquered.
TRANSLATION: Poland was the country where many of the so-called Eastern Jews lived.
So we filmed them, as if they were a tourist attraction.
But, from Europe to the Far East, as the conflict escalated, some of these amateur cameramen on both sides filmed the war in all its horror.
He filmed D-Day itself.
He was actually in the first wave.
This is the story of a few of these filmmakers, and how they filmed everyday life during wartime, capturing love and loss, life and death, victory and defeat.
PIANO MUSIC PLAYS These are some of the early films made by Derek Brown, who filmed his time as a soldier during the war.
In the 1930s, amateur filmmaking was an unusual hobby.
I suppose I started making films round about the age of 13, when I got my first cine camera.
I had the idea of making a film which involved a smash and grab raid.
We arranged for one of my friends to come up to the jeweller's shop and throw a brick through the window.
Except he didn't throw the brick through the window.
We were a little bit terrified in case the police saw us.
This is Paul Kellermann, a young German filmmaker living in Cologne, capturing a life as yet untroubled by war.
Inspired by his films, Paul's niece, Hiltrud, has become the family historian.
TRANSLATION: I first got to know him through watching his films.
He was filming in 1936, which was quite special, you know, quite unusual then.
The Christmas films are beautiful, but the films about the war are the most interesting and moving.
Paul Kellermann and Derek Brown are two of a few men on both sides who took their cine cameras with them to the front.
It's through their ingenuity that we are able to witness the experiences of war in this uniquely personal way.
What is the absolute sort of revelation, really, of these amateur collections we now have is they have an honesty about them that is purely to do with the vision of the filmmaker behind the camera.
It wasn't to do with propaganda.
They weren't always planned.
They were just spontaneous of the moment.
So when your community goes into revolution, which is, you know, what happened, when your world is completely changed, what better subject-matter for a filmmaker to take.
And I think how significant and important that contribution is to the history of the Second World War.
On September 1 1939, Germany invaded Poland.
Klaus Eismann was an airman in the Luftwaffe.
He was also an amateur filmmaker, for whom capturing day-to-day life was a passionate hobby.
He filmed the invasion, both on the ground and from the air.
TRANSLATION: He was trained as an aerial observer, so photography was an integral part of his job.
He made films of his campaigns during the war.
I think that he was interested in showing my mother images from Poland.
He had no personal experience of what Poland and Polish people were like.
He was influenced by propaganda, in terms of what to think about Poland.
Poland was a country where many so-called Eastern Jews lived, and of course they'd been depicted in a particular way in the Nazi press, so we filmed them, as if they were a tourist attraction.
RECORDING: Up to the very last, it would have been quite possible to have arranged a peaceful and honourable settlement between Germany and Poland.
But Hitler would not have it.
With the outbreak of war, many men in Britain enlisted in the military.
Amongst those to sign up was Leslie Fowler, a keen amateur filmmaker from Hertfordshire.
His son, Robin, seen here as a young boy, has researched his father's wartime experiences.
He went to join up with the Navy.
He did it because he had heard Chamberlain's broadcast, saying this country was now at war with Germany, and, um the alternative seemed to be that he was going to be dominated by somebody else, and he didn't want that.
So he said, "Well, it has to be fought, I'm going to do something about it.
" So off he went and did.
A lot of holding camps ensued, where they were trained to get fit and have some durability to them, mainly to be used in long hours spent on the bridge standing up, trying to keep awake.
Derek Brown had enlisted in the Territorial Army in April 1939.
He was on holiday with his family when he was called up.
We were finished with our training for the summer, and I joined my parents in Scotland.
While I was there, I met a girl, and was very friendly with her throughout that time.
But, at the end of ten days, I got a telegram calling me back to my unit, and from then on I was in the army.
Derek Brown might have been in the army, but the eight months following the outbreak of war were marked by an absence of British military operations.
The period became known in Britain as "the Phoney War".
Posted outside a small town in County Durham, he filmed the monotony of life in the searchlights.
For weeks on end, we were virtually confined to site.
The YMCA used to run a tea van.
This was the highlight of the week.
This used to call round the sites and provide luxuries like chocolate, cigarettes, stamps, letters, the sort of things that people need just to make life a little more bearable.
As both sides expanded their armed services through conscription, the war turned civilians into soldiers.
In Germany, amateur filmmaker Paul Kellermann, seen here in his own film, was conscripted into an artillery observation unit.
TRANSLATION: Paul rose to the rank of lieutenant.
In relation to how much time he spent in the army, this wasn't a great achievement.
I feel that it wasn't important for him, and that he was just more interested in filmmaking.
So it really suited him that he was posted in an observation unit and not right at the front.
The military in Germany at that time was a drafted army.
That means many men were made soldiers who actually did not like to become soldiers.
The perfect soldier and the perfect man would certainly be that one who was ready to sacrifice his life on behalf of his country.
But the military also needed to include those men who may not have been the perfect soldiers.
Just by being good socialisers were considered as true men as well.
Got their place.
From May 1940, the pace of war quickened, as Germany began its invasion of Holland, Belgium and France.
Paul Kellermann recorded his comrades' departure from loved ones, and their advance.
Always on the move, his films give a sense of the relentless pace of this offensive.
TRANSLATION: The films from France are really interesting because you can see the type of troops that the French sent into battle.
You can see the prisoners of war are, to a great extent, Moroccan.
Many of them appeared to be colonial troops conscripted from Africa.
I was very moved by the defeated troops marching through the streets.
The footage of the dead horses I found particularly terrible, because it shows such wanton destruction, a senseless waste of life.
These are animals that didn't have anything to do with it.
There is more German film of front-line activity shot by amateur cameramen than there is shot by British cameramen.
Filming was an integral part of German society.
Amateur filming was.
And in some instances, the commanders of units, more or less appointed soldiers within their unit as an official, semi-official, unit cameraman.
A second reason would be that at the start of the war the Germans were advancing.
There were fewer security concerns in the minds of the Germans than there were in their struggling British counterparts.
It never really occurred to me that there was anything very wrong in taking films of the domestic arrangements.
But I did take great care never to show any equipment.
The searchlight sight to sound locator or anything like that.
At that time, security was uppermost in almost everybody's mind.
There were all sorts of campaigns, advertising campaigns, to remind people that careless talk costs lives.
Because this was just about the time of Dunkirk, and we were expecting something of an invasion almost any day.
In this atmosphere of caution, amateur filmmakers like Derek Brown avoided recording military facilities.
Instead, they filmed the public activities of the Home Guard as it prepared for a possible invasion.
There were lots of amateur filmmakers at the time who took on those filmmaking skills that they had in order to promote war work.
For example, the Second World War Home Guard movies.
There were a number of those which show and promote the work of the Home Guards and the ARP.
Also training films, instructional films that had been made by amateurs, to say, you know, this is what our community's doing, let's carry on doing it.
It was motivational in that way.
It was sort of propaganda, but on a domestic, community scale.
The threat of invasion seemed to many to be very real.
By this time, Germany had the whole of France under its control.
Paul Kellermann drove into an occupied Paris in mid-June 1940, just over a month after the German offensive had begun.
TRANSLATION: When you watch these films, you can't believe that they're at war, because you can see just how relaxed they are.
There's Paul, shaving.
He really knew how to pose.
It's like they're camping - playing, reading the newspaper, writing letters.
What a group of men would do together anyway.
Such a comfortable atmosphere.
Pin up girls there.
Just what a chap needs.
TRANSLATION: I find what was filmed absolutely astonishing.
Soldiers were banned from filming front-line fighting, so instead they mostly filmed personal activities, particularly with the French campaign.
It comes across like a scout camp.
The images give the message that everything is still OK for us soldiers.
After the surrender of France in June 1940, Germany used French airfields as bases from which to stage bombing raids on Britain.
Theodor Plote worked as Luftwaffe ground crew, preparing planes for raids on cities such as Plymouth and Bristol.
TRANSLATION: We were based in an airfield in Normandy, between Lisieux and Caen, and from there we flew the Stukas into England.
Our job was to load the bombs onto the planes, sometimes as much as eight times a day.
The planes would be away for up to an hour and a half.
Then when they came back they'd be loaded again, and there would be more flight talks and so on.
I filmed life in the airfield.
I didn't have any problems doing this.
You did hear again and again that some people weren't allowed to film.
But I filmed everywhere that I wanted to film.
I was never criticised for doing this.
I could film aircraft, detonators, bombs.
No-one said anything.
You see life and work in the airfields, how the planes were serviced by the technicians.
We saw how the planes returned, badly shot up, but still managing to land safely, as well as planes that were shot down, some with the entire undercarriage blown away.
By the autumn of 1940, German air attacks on Britain were targeting major industrial and population centres.
Martin Davies was one of the millions on the receiving end of these raids.
Working as an ambulance man in London, he experienced the Blitz firsthand.
Speaking now, people say, "Weren't you dead frightened all the time?" Well, no, you weren't, you know, except at rare moments when something really big had happened.
But you get used to that life.
You're living in a war, damn it.
So you adapt to that.
But I can remember once the phone went, and it was it was my sister, who lived in Welwyn Garden City, 20 miles north of London.
And she said, "I'm terribly sorry, I've got bad news for you.
"Mum died in hospital this morning.
" And there I was, in the middle of an air raid, with bombs going on outside.
And of course the chaps in there, my friends, couldn't help overhearing this.
I got a lot of sympathy and feedback and so on, but it was a tricky time.
I couldn't even go out and go to see her or my sister for the moment, because I was stuck there.
Martin Davies worked in one of many rest centres, set up to help people whose homes had been destroyed.
Well, what they did was to come to us.
Or they were brought to us by wardens.
On the whole, they weren't much injured, because the injured ones had been taken off to hospital.
Or the cemetery.
But the ones who came to us were, on the whole, in one piece.
And generally they came with parents and a couple of kids, or usually the mother because the pa was probably off in the war somewhere.
Davies was one of those men who had not gone off to war.
He was a conscientious objector, working instead with the Friends Ambulance Unit.
If you decided you weren't going to blooming well join up, which of course everyone thought you would do, you had to register as a conscientious objector.
But registering wasn't enough.
You had then to go through a sort of trial, a tribunal, questionnaire.
Which I did.
We all did.
And there was a judge or somebody, sitting up there, firing at questions at me and saying, "What do you mean? This is ridiculous.
What do you mean you won't go to war? "Can't you see the Germans are facing us, and we've got to do something about it?" I could see that Hitler was up to no good, that he had in mind to attack this country.
And it's very difficult to argue logically against that.
But if you have this overriding feeling that to put a gun up and shoot another human being is wrong, that overrides all that.
Then in the end they went away and quietly discussed it, came back and said, "OK, as long as you continue with your idea of joining the Friends Ambulance Unit.
"We're not giving you complete exemption from military service, "only on condition that you go on with the Friends Ambulance.
" In Britain, individual men were able to opt out of combat on religious or moral grounds.
This was not the case in Germany.
In Germany, it was always the group that was glorified.
The group was the only thing that matters.
And what does that mean? It means that you had, as an individual, to switch off any kinds of thoughts of individual, personal visions of life, career whatsoever, family, it no longer mattered.
Your individual visions did no longer matter.
And your individual responsibility did no longer matter.
GERMAN SONG PLAYS By the end of 1940, with much of northern Europe under its control, the official mood in Germany was celebratory.
This amateur footage shows Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister for Propaganda, on the right, on a visit to Munster that year.
Goebbels was the architect of the state newsreels that announced Germany's triumphs to its people, and dramatically promoted the Third Reich as it wished to be seen.
He took a very, very close interest in the construction and editing of the German newsreels.
These are not only German newsreels designed for screening in Germany, but also throughout occupied and neutral Europe.
At one stage, German newsreels were being shown in 17 languages in 37 different territories.
In Britain, there was nothing of comparable scope being produced on film.
There was a natural British diffidence, I think, to the notion of publicity.
There was, of course, a different reason why publicity was not so welcome at that time, and that was, after the brief spell of the Phoney War, British forces were driven out of Europe.
The British retreat from Europe prompted calls to somehow boost morale at home.
In an attempt to improve the situation, the War Office recruited its first civilian publicity officer.
Ronald Tritton believed that the most effective way of improving morale lay in the use of cine film.
What happened was that we managed to capture some German newsreel stuff.
Tritton put this together in a screening and called together the top military people, and showed them the type of work the Germans were putting together, and the type of propaganda that they were feeding to their people and to the news worldwide.
And this was a deliberate attempt to change the minds of the military.
Tritton's film was a success.
It convinced military leaders of the need to produce high-quality film footage promoting British military efforts to rival that being produced by Germany.
The result was the creation of a new Army Film and Photographic Unit, or AFPU.
Unlike the previous Army Film Unit, that recruited from within the film industry, the AFPU recruited directly from the army, training soldiers with any previous experience of photography or film to capture front-line action on camera.
Cameramen in general were used to working in a closed environment with three or four assistants round them.
And that wasn't the type of cameraman that would do a good job whilst the enemy are shooting at him.
They preferred soldiers with cameras rather than cameramen as soldiers.
What happened was, on the noticeboards of every army unit throughout the United Kingdom, anyone with photographic or film experience was asked would they like to join a new thing called the Army Film Unit.
One person who applied was conscripted soldier Harry Oakes.
I was a parachutist before I was in the Army Film Unit.
A lot had knowledge of photography, and someone chap had his own photographic shop.
But nevertheless, no-one really knew much about filming.
It was rather rare, I think, in those days, for people to have a cine camera, even an eight mil one.
After initial film training, these new cameramen were attached to military units.
To begin with, they got a mixed reception.
It's just on one occasion I remember some dissent.
This brigadier, he saw me with this camera, he said, "We want people with rifles and bayonets, not bloody cameras.
" But generally speaking, it wasn't like that at all.
We got well received.
A defining moment for both the British military and its new Army Film Unit came in the autumn of 1942.
The 8th Army, under the command of Montgomery, defeated Rommel's Afrika Korps at El Alamein in the North African desert.
From coverage of this campaign, the AFPU produced Desert Victory, a feature-length documentary that charted the first major Allied victory of the war.
It was a significant film because it was a significant turning point in the war, and certainly in terms of putting together and the skill that was used to put it together, it was a tremendous piece of work.
And I would say that that was the take-off point for the AFPU.
In tropical climes there are certain times of day When all the citizens retire to take their clothes off and perspire The Allied campaign in North Africa relied heavily on support from colonial troops.
In 1942, Derek Brown had been reassigned from his searchlight unit in Britain and posted to North West India in order to train Indian army recruits for the North African offensive.
Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun Well, it was our first experience of life overseas and our first experience, really, of living in a hot country.
So we were all kitted up with pith helmets and shorts.
Derek Brown's passion for filmmaking went with him, but unfortunately he'd left his camera at home.
Our one day out there used to be a Saturday, and we would take a tonga down into the village, and there we would wander round the bazaar.
While I was there, I found myself an old 16 millimetre camera and I was able to get it for 200 rupees.
Victory in North Africa meant that Derek Brown was re-deployed yet again, this time to support a renewed Allied offensive against the Japanese in Burma.
He was sent to shore up the supply route over the India-Burma border, and used his camera to film the remnants of the previous Allied campaign.
When we got there, we found that there was a very poor road, and it was littered, absolutely littered, with broken-down vehicles and smashed vehicles, all of which had been used by those who'd escaped from Burma from the Japanese advance and come to grief in one way or another on the road.
These vehicles were the remains of the Allied retreat from Burma in May 1942.
One of the many people caught up in the chaos of the withdrawal was conscientious objector Martin Davies, seen here in amateur footage shot in China.
He had travelled to the Far East with the Friends Ambulance Unit to help wounded Chinese troops and civilians in the war with Japan.
We weren't part of the war, except that we were there to help the chaps who were fighting it, but we probably faced more danger than a lot of the chaps in the army! And that's what I wanted.
I didn't mind that.
Despite Allied support, China was fighting a losing battle against the Japanese.
The Allies were forced to retreat across the border into Burma, where the Friends Ambulance Unit helped re-establish a field hospital.
Our first stop, when we came down from the North, was Pyinmana.
That's where we met up with a civilian doctor, who was a missionary.
We went down to meet him and to help him, because he had the nurses, he had the medical knowledge, but he didn't have any transport, and that's just what we could do.
We had the transport.
The Japanese were advancing towards, so we were told we'd have to move, have to go back, find another base, another site to operate from.
So we did.
We loaded the nurses and gear and everything in the lorries, and set off up north to see where else we could set up hospital.
And we did this about four times.
North of Mandalay, they met with the command of General Joseph Stilwell, the American Commander-in-Chief for China and Burma.
With the Japanese barely 20 miles away, they began their retreat from Burma, driving through the jungle towards India until the road gave out.
Martin Davies photographed their escape.
There we were, 114 or whatever it was of us, waiting for orders.
At that point, Stilwell collected us all together in a group in the jungle, and gave us a little pep talk.
"This is where you are, we've got to get out.
"If you don't want to go, stay behind and look after yourself.
" That was the general message.
The actual walk took two weeks and something, sleeping in the rough, eating off the land.
But we knew we had to get our skates on and get to India.
The strange party of refugees spent two weeks on foot, struggling through dense rainforest, with the Japanese in hot pursuit.
I was walking along behind these two Americans, expecting to meet the Japanese around the corner.
I'm not sure that we were fearful exactly.
We weren't exactly quaking.
But you knew what was likely to what was possibly going to happen.
And I said in my conversation with Tom Owen, Tom said to me, "You know, Martin, if I had a Tommy gun with me now, "I might just ditch my pacifist principles and use it.
"What do you think?" And I said, "You may be right, Tom.
"I hope we're not put in that position, though.
" On 20th May 1942, the exhausted party crossed over the North India border at Imphal, reaching safety.
Martin Davies photographed his last view back into Burma.
The Germans had been fighting a long and arduous battle of their own.
In June 1941, Hitler had broken his pact with Stalin, and Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
As German forces advanced rapidly east, behind their front lines paramilitary death squads began the systematic killing of opponents.
One execution of Jewish prisoners was witnessed by a German sailor and amateur cameraman, Reinhardt Wiener.
It took place in August 1941, near Libau in Latvia.
Though hundreds of thousands died in this way, this is the only film record of these massacres.
As the German advance confronted the Red Army in the autumn and winter of 1941, Paul Kellermann filmed the increasingly harsh conditions.
His niece, Hiltrud, has the archive of his time in Russia.
TRANSLATION: The film from Russia is really upsetting.
He exchanged letters with his mother, 18 in total.
"Dear Mother, the advance has been going well.
"We are 150 kilometres further towards Moscow.
"The Panzers are ahead of us and the planes have been taking care of the rest.
"Around us, we can see so much destruction as we pass by.
"The food isn't great, but as long as we have potatoes, salt and fish, it's OK.
" "Dear Mother, "this is the worst that I've seen it since the war started.
"It really is a battlefield.
"We've buried 17 dead today.
"Thousands of refugees pass us by.
" "Dear Mother, The winter is passing slowly.
I can't wait for spring.
"The truck engines are dead and everything has been transferred to horse and sleigh.
"As an observer, I have to do everything on foot.
"When I'm using my equipment, my eyebrows freeze to the glass, "my cheeks burn, and the snow and wind sting my eyes.
"My fingertips become hard and lifeless, even though I'm wearing double gloves.
"And the end of my nose turns white, despite me rubbing it.
" "Ach.
It's constantly backwards and forwards.
"Advancing and retreating.
"Everyone has had enough of this.
"Lucky those who are wounded and at home, out of the war and safe on leave.
"At some point, this has to end.
"With this in mind, all my love, Paul.
" This was the last letter he ever wrote.
TRANSLATION: There were some Russian partisans, snipers, who ambushed him and shot him dead.
He died on February 2nd 1942.
By the middle of March, his mother had still not been informed, and she was still writing him letters.
She wished him a happy 27th birthday, which he didn't make.
In July 1942, five months after Paul Kellermann's death, the German army attacked the Russians at Stalingrad.
With combined casualties of more than 1.
5 million, it was to become one of the most brutal battles of the Second World War.
Klaus Eismann's father, an aerial observer with a bomber crew, was shot down during a raid over the city.
He'd flown nearly 100 similar raids.
TRANSLATION: We have quite a precise description from the signalman who was in the same plane as my father.
He wrote a letter to my mother, describing the last offensive that they flew together.
"Suddenly, four fighters came into view.
"I could tell that they were the enemy, and opened fire.
"The fighters hit one of our fuel tanks, which exploded and burned.
"Then the right wing broke off, which sent the plane into a tumble.
"At that point, the captain shouted to everyone on board to get out.
"I landed by parachute two kilometres west of Orlovka, a small village on the way to Stalingrad.
" "If he did die in the crash, then think of it as the most beautiful death and be comforted.
"It is not a bad thing.
"One only thinks of one's duty to one's home country, "the beautiful fatherland for which we will joyfully give our lives anytime.
" When I read this for the first time, it really filled me with angst.
These hollow phrases like "the most beautiful death".
They mean nothing to me.
That these people believed in these things, I just can't understand it.
Maybe only those who grew up in such circumstances could understand.
How can you try to give comfort in this way to a woman who has just lost her husband? It's incomprehensible to me.
The scale of the German defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943 marked a turning point in the German advance on the Eastern front.
Over the course of that year, the Nazis were forced into a retreat.
In the West, Allied bombing raids on German cities intensified.
In July of 1943, they launched a massive assault on Hamburg.
The bombing was so intense that it created a firestorm, incinerating some eight square miles of the city.
Hans Brunwswig, who worked for the fire service, captured it on film.
TRANSLATION: I was in Hamburg at the time of the big bombing raid in 1943.
I'd been in the fire brigade five years by then.
There was no talk of a raid on Hamburg.
And then, about half an hour after the air raid alarm, there came a dreadful bombardment on our neighbourhood.
We were in shock.
We heard nothing but the fire storm.
It was a great roar.
You could see the trees bend with the heat.
As soon as you went out of the doors, out of the fire station doors, you were almost blown over by the storm.
It was that powerful.
We found this petrol station.
It was situated in the middle of the flattened area.
The whole workforce who belonged to it lay dead, around the petrol station.
On the way to the petrol station, I saw thousands not hundreds, but thousands of dead bodies, which lay in great piles.
And I took some film of these bodies.
I must say that after about the tenth picture, I couldn't photograph any more.
You couldn't do it.
It was too much to take.
It's a picture you don't forget your whole life long.
The bombing of German cities continued throughout 1944.
And, as the Soviets forced a retreat in the East, the Western Allies launched the invasion of German-occupied France on June 6th.
Leslie Fowler was the captain of a landing craft.
Years later, he recounted the build-up to D-Day to his son, Robin.
D-Day itself was delayed for 24 hours.
They were all keyed up, ready to go, and, yes, if they could have a swim, why not? It was a way to let off steam, as it were, and relax a bit, before you have to key yourself up.
Fowler was transporting troops and equipment from ships on to the beaches.
Remarkably, he filmed the events of D-Day as they unfolded.
He was taking them in.
He was actually in the first wave.
He was down on Utah Beach first.
And, after that first wave landing, went up to join the British forces at Sword area, and did the ferrying of the infantry across from there.
There is a shot of him offloading what I believe is the 51st Highland Division on a very flat beach.
And they all had to wade ashore.
Apologised, of course, that he couldn't get them any closer.
But the commanding officer said, "Right, lads," and took his trousers off.
His boots, slung 'em over his shoulder, and waded off.
And the rest of his platoon followed him.
They did all sorts of, um work jobs, ferrying backwards and forwards.
And he did film one such offloading, when they had their own deck full of stretcher cases, and they're being winched up on to this venerable-looking hospital ship with its red crosses on it.
"Poor devils," he said.
They thought they were going home and that they were out of the war now, and safe.
But the ship struck a mine, and went down with all hands.
As the Western Allies advanced through France, the reality of war was filmed by an American serviceman.
Paris was liberated in August.
But there would be another year of fierce fighting across Europe before Germany would surrender.
On the 15th of April 1945, British troops came upon a camp at Bergen-Belsen in the north west of Germany.
During its liberation, the camp was extensively filmed by the Army Film and Photographic Unit.
This was something which had to be documented.
Camera men in the British Army were essentially fulfilling two purposes.
They were filming for a historic record, and also for publicity purposes.
This was absolutely essential that it be recorded for all time.
AFPU cameraman Harry Oakes, seen here in the middle of the group, was amongst the first Allied troops to come upon the camp.
I mean, it's awful really, to think you can get used to seeing corpses, but one did.
And the Germans used to have the job of putting the corpses in the pit.
What was evil was that two or three would have to get inside this big pit and make it level, because all the corpses were piling up on the side.
Can you remember filming the children that you found alive at Belsen? Yes.
Yes, yes, I do, yes.
They were extraordinarily brave, I felt.
Extraordinarily brave.
They'd got past the crying stage.
They simply looked quite They looked quite numb.
Victory in Europe was declared in May 1945.
Britain celebrated with street parties, caught on camera by newsreels and amateurs alike.
Yet the amateur films of men like Leslie Fowler, still serving on the front lines, paint a different picture, showing VE day as just another day endured in a foreign country reeling from the effects of war.
The footage that you'll see is the parading that went on at the end of the war in Holland.
My father said they were greeted as heroes.
But the poor people were absolutely starved.
They had suffered very badly, would sell themselves for a crust of bread.
One of the jobs my father had to do was ferry German prisoners out, and you'll see them on board there, because he was rather anxious at the time because he said there you'd got a shipload of 500 Nazi soldiers, and he, with ten crew and two officers, could have easily been rushed had they had a mind to do so.
But presumably they were just so glad to get out of the fighting.
They could see the way the war had gone.
They were finished, and they were just glad to be out of it.
Leslie Fowler was one of the lucky ones who made it home.
Without the ingenuity of amateur filmmakers like him who survived, but also those who did not, we would never have been able to see the war with such startling intimacy.
Their films show us life on the front lines in a way that newsreels of the era could never match.
One of those film makers, Derek Brown, remained stationed in the Far East, despite victory in Europe.
The war with Japan continued, and Brown had stayed in India.
Having become engaged in 1942, he hadn't seen his fiancee at all in the following three years.
For men like Derek, an end to the war seemed a distant prospect.
Most of us were under the impression that we would never get home.
As far as we could see, it looked as if we would be fighting our way through the Far East for the rest of our lives.
One morning, I saw a newspaper, and it was the description of what had happened at Hiroshima.
And my immediate reaction was, "Well, if they have got a bomb that does a thing like this, "we will eventually get home.
" I remember, as we were coming back from the ship on disembarkation .
.
there was one fellow whose fiancee had come to meet him, I think, at the ship.
And he said to me afterwards that he was wondering whether she was still the right girl for him.
Three or four years apart had made a big difference to him.
But not to me.
Not to either of us.
Is it a sin, is it a crime Loving you dear like I do? If it's a crime, then I'm guilty Guilty of loving you Maybe I'm wrong, dreaming of you Dreaming the lonely night through If it's a crime, then I'm guilty Guilty of dreaming of you.