Apocalypse - The Second World War (2009) s01e03 Episode Script
Le choc
Following Germany's defeat of France, Paris filled up with Nazi soldiers.
Every day, at exactly 1pm, the German Army paraded through Paris - to show who was in charge.
The Germans now occupied the most of the capital cities of Europe - Prague and Warsaw, Brussels, Luxembourg, The Hague, Copenhagen and Oslo.
But not Londonyet.
This series is the epic story of World War Two, as it raged across countries and continents, as millions of soldiers fought from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
It is the moving story of the millions of civilians whose homes were destroyed and lives disrupted as they were caught up in the cataclysm of war.
To tell this story, the best footage of the war has been painstakingly transformed, using digital techniques, into colour.
Along with original colour home movies, it gives a completely new perspective to one of the greatest events of the last century.
This is the powerful story of the Apocalypse and of the people who fought the Second World War.
During the winter of 1940 Britain's cities were devastated by German bombs.
But the country stood firm around Churchill.
And American aid was sent in by President Roosevelt.
Roosevelt was re-elected for a third term as President of the United States.
Though American opinion remained opposed to joining the war, he declared: We must become the great arsenal of democracy.
But only some of the supplies America sent to Britain got through.
Every British ship at sea was in great danger.
The Atlantic Ocean was crawling with German submarines, the U-boats.
Through their periscopes, the U-boat captains sought out British vessels.
Churchill was desperately worried.
He knew that if the supply convoys failed to get through Britain would be on its knees.
As an island nation, Britain was reliant upon supplies from overseas.
The German U-boats now had the French Atlantic harbours at their disposal.
Operating in deadly groups, using torpedoes and cannons, these wolf packs succeeded in sinking 4 million tons of British shipping in 1941 alone.
Here, German submariners toss loaves of bread to a shipwrecked crew who have almost no chance of surviving.
They would die of thirst, of hunger, of cold or by choking on oil.
Hitler was delighted with the success of hissubmarines, but America's huge rearmament programme worried him.
He told his secretary, Martin Bormann: "In one year, the United States will be ready to go to war.
"If we are to face them, we need more raw materials.
"Those materials are in the east.
We need to conquer that living space.
"Then Britain will lose all hope and make peace.
"And it will be too late for the Americans.
"Let us attack Russia as soon as possible.
" Hitler drew up a massive invasion plan to invade the Soviet Union called Operation Barbarossa, named after the triumphant German Emperor.
The Wehrmacht started to move its troops east.
Lieutenant von Kageneck was one of the many thousands of young officers who left for Poland.
He saw the debris from the battles of 1939 piled up alongside the railway.
Polish prisoners and Jews had been put to work on a massive construction project.
Hitler wanted to build a new autobahn, or motorway, right across Poland to move his army over to the new border with Russia.
This was where the 9th Panzer Division was installed, along with von Kageneck's regiment.
He wrote: "Next to us is an SS unit.
"The commander asks us, 'Do you want to see a Jew?' He makes a sign "and a soldier brings over a little man.
"'How many people have you stolen from today?' The man doesn't reply.
"'Beat him 10 times with a stick!' We were appalled.
"So this is our occupation of Poland? We had heard vague stories of "cruelty, but it was impossible to know what was really going on.
"This country had become the country of silence.
"We didn't know that this was the beginning of the genocide "to which we would lend ourhands and our courage.
The 9th Panzer Division was ready to attack, but the order didn't come.
So they went round in circles, waiting.
At the last minute, Hitler deferred his plans for an offensive in the East.
He had to help out his ally Mussolini who had tried to fight his own separate war and got into trouble.
The Duce's troops had been routed by the British in North Africa.
125,000 Italian prisoners had been taken by the British army.
To rescue Mussolini from disaster, Hitler dispatched one of his best generals to Libya, Erwin Rommel, along with an armoured division.
In February 1941, this small army of German soldiers known as the Afrika Korps arrived in North Africa.
They had no idea what lay in store for them.
In Germany, Rommel was already a big hero: he was the man whohad taken Cambrai, Rouen and Cherbourg in May and June of 1940.
And he was a true Nazi, a devoted supporter who had served Hitler with zeal and efficiency from the very beginning.
Rommel believed in tanks, in blitzkrieg, or lightning war.
On the first evening after their arrival, he ordered the Afrika Korps to pursue the British Army, with rapid success.
These Australian and South African prisoners had come to fight alongside the British.
Now they would spend the rest of the war in a German prisoner-of-war camp.
Rommel soon began to make a name for himself.
The British circulated his picture with the caption: "This man is dangerous.
" Hitler attacked Greece, a country that Mussolini had already tried to take.
After invading Yugoslavia, he dropped his paratroopers over Crete.
Hitler had at last secured his southern flank for the invasion of Russia, but he had lost precious time.
Operation Barbarossa had been delayed by several weeks.
First of May 1941.
A great military parade was traditionally held in Moscow's Red Square every year to celebrate International Labour Day.
But this year, the parade was special.
Stalin wanted to make a big impression on the Germans.
Although he had been receiving information from his spies warning that an attack was imminent, he found it impossible to believe that Hitler would dare to break the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact so soon.
And senior German officers were attending this parade.
Marshal Timoshenko, the People's Commissar and Stalin's Defence Minister, appeared to salute them with great respect.
The German army later argued that this display of military force was proof that Stalin planned to strike them first.
Churchill passed on intelligence reports to Stalin that Hitler was about to invade.
But Stalin ignored them.
Just as he ignored a message sent by a Soviet spy based in Tokyo.
The document, dated 30 May 1941, warned of an imminent German attack.
Stalin actually continued to send raw materials to the Reich.
Since the signing of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, he had exported thousands of tons of oil, chrome and nickel to Germany - all of which helped Hitler's armies conquer Western Europe.
A trainload was sent off on the night of the 21st of June 1941.
Carrying 1000 tons of wheat, this train crossed over the border at midnight.
On that same morning, at 3am, without officially declaring war, the first Wehrmacht sappers crept forward into Russian territory.
They were followed by 153 German divisions, as well as by Finnish, Romanian, Slovakian and Hungarian troops.
There was even a division of Spanish fascists.
4 million men, along with 600,000 trucks, launched Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa.
Along with 4,000 tanks, 7,000 artillery pieces .
.
and 3,000 airplanes.
In just a few minutes, 1,500 Soviet aircraft were destroyed on the ground.
In the first few hours, 400 more Russian planes were shot down by the Germans.
Taken by surprise and entirely overpowered, the Soviet air force was nearly wiped out on the first day.
The German offensive was unleashed across an 1800-mile front, and in three different directions.
In the North was the ideological target - Leningrad, Lenin's city, the cradle of the Russian Revolution - whose name has since been restored to St Petersburg.
In the centre was the political target - Moscow, Stalin's capital.
In the south was the economic target - Kiev and the Ukraine.
Pravda, the Communist Party's official newspaper, reported on the fascist aggression.
But Stalin had gone into hiding, dismayed by the catastrophic news that was coming in from the border.
Some said he had a breakdown.
The German advance was swift.
Lieutenant von Kageneck - It's an amazing sight! Our entire regiment of Panzers is moving out! Our tanks, tall and proud like boats, sail over a yellow sea of ripe wheat.
It seemed that nothing could stop the Germans.
Their mission had been hammered into them - you are going to save the West from the Asiatic hordes.
This is a modern crusade against the power of darkness, Judeo-Bolshevism.
(TRANSLATED SINGING) In the northern Baltic States, the Germans were given a triumphant welcome.
They were hailed as liberators.
After Stalin's reign of terror, anything was better than the ruthless Soviet secret police responsible for political repression.
Before they fled, they executed all the Baltic anti-communists in the prisons.
Local anti-Semites accused the Jews of being in collusion with the communists.
They rounded up the Jews and made them carry off the corpses.
Across the Baltic States, people started organising pogroms against Jews, which the Germans encouraged with instructions not to leave any traces.
Burning the bodies was one way of destroying the evidence.
On the central front, General Guderian, the tank strategist and architect of the Blitzkrieg, was held up by the Stalin Line, a series of fortifications that the German infantry was forced to assault.
Guderian broke through and continued his advance.
But something unexpected began to slow down his fast-moving motorised units, as described by von Kageneck.
We advance in our armoured cars and the dust envelops us.
We're in Russia! Where roads and asphalt don't exist! It's awful.
This sticky yellow or red dust gets into everything - into your eyes, your nose, your mouth.
Under these conditions, soldiers still marched 30 miles a day.
They had been marching since the 1st of September 1939.
They had marched all the way to Warsaw, to Oslo, to Paris.
But now they were beginning to realise just how vast Russia was.
Hundreds and hundreds of miles went by without a single village in sight.
It became harder and harder for the supply, fuel and ammunition trucks to keep up.
But there was something else the German soldiers had not expected.
Despite massive losses, the Russians were putting up a good defence.
A new type of Russian tank appeared on the scene, the T-34, a 30-ton monster that was equipped with a formidable cannon.
And wide tracks that meant it could go anywhere.
It was not as sophisticated as the German tanks.
To change gears, the Soviet tank driver had to hit the gear lever with a mallet.
But the T-34 rarely broke down.
The Germans were taken aback.
They couldn't understand how these sub-humans, as they thought of the Russians, had been able to manufacture such a brilliant tank.
The shells of their anti-tank guns ricocheted off the T-34's armour plating.
The only weapon powerful enough to neutralise it was the German 88mm.
Overall, the Germans were better armed, and their army was much stronger.
But these Ivans, as they called the Russians, fought tooth and nail until the very end.
Von Kageneck again - The smell of corpses baked by the sun, covered with flies.
A sickly sweet odour that clings to the nostrils and gets under your skin, just like the dust.
The Russians had suffered heavy losses, but German casualties were also rising.
Still, the Germans continued to make progress toward their three goals, Leningrad, Moscow and Kiev, by capturing entire Soviet armies.
Hitler's orders were to immediately execute all political commissars, members of the Communist Party whose job was to oversee the officers and keep an eye on the soldiers in each military unit.
Guderian refused to carry out such a criminal order.
However, other generals were more willing.
The commander of the Fourth Panzer Army group, General Hoepner declared menacingly - This war must be led with unprecedented brutality.
There is to be no mercy for the Bolsheviks.
Throughout the summer of 1941 the Russians were engaged in a desperate struggle with the German invaders, sometimes with only one rifle for every ten men.
They were forced to retreat along the entire 1,800 mile front.
For Stalin, things were looking very black.
He completely disappeared from public view for over a week.
Everyone wanted to know where he was and expected him to provide leadership at this critical time.
In July, Stalin finally addressed the Russian people again.
Stalin spoke words he had never used in public before.
He called the Russians, "My brothers and my sisters.
" He told them the truth.
!We're under attack by Hitler's Germany.
"The enemy is cruel and implacable.
A grave danger hangs over our country.
" In the darkest hour, he dared to ask "Is it true that German fascist troops are invincible? "Napoleon's army was considered invincible, but it was beaten.
" Stalin ordered the war factories, along with their machinery and their workers, to relocate to the east to the Ural Mountains.
And he gave farmers and peasants a clear order - leave.
Leave your isba, your house, destroy everything.
Leave behind nothing that can be of any use to the fascist Hitlerite aggressor.
This was the beginning of Stalin's scorched earth policy.
The German officers had not forgotten the story of Napoleon's invasion of Russia.
In 1812 the Russians had starved Napoleon's Grand Army by burning their towns and fields, and then massacred the French at the Battle of Berezina.
In early July 1941 the Germans also reached the Berezina River on the central front.
But this time they kept going.
But Soviet resistance was gradually growing stronger.
On the other side of the river there was an unpleasant surprise for the Germans.
The Russians had designed a new kind of artillery.
A rocket launcher called a Katyusha after a patriotic song.
It proved to be terrifying weapon.
But nothing could stop the German advance.
By mid-July the invaders had reached Smolensk, the last big city before Moscow.
The Battle for Smolensk lasted three weeks.
The Russians fought with immense determination, despite the calls for surrender coming over giant loudspeakers.
Very few were taken prisoner.
The survivors preferred to go into hiding in the deep forests and became partisans.
The soldiers trained the many peasants and farmers who joined them.
They hunted down traitors .
.
and disrupted the enemy communication lines.
Reprisals were brutal.
The Fuhrer ordered, "Immediately liquidate all people suspected "of harbouring even the smallest amount of hostility.
" Hitler decided to make a visit to the front.
With him went the Wehrmacht commander-in-chief, the servile Field Marshal Keitel.
Operation Barbarossa was slowing down.
The generals believed that Hitler's strategy of the three-pronged attack was to blame.
Field Marshal Von Bock, commander of Army Group Centre, argued that all of the forces should be focused on Moscow.
Hitler did not like generals who dared to contradict him.
General Guderian was there, too.
He added, "We're only 300 miles from Moscow now.
" "You understand nothing," said the Furher.
"You know nothing of wartime economics.
"First we need the wheat from the Ukraine so that they don't starve us "as they did in the previous war.
" He concluded, "Moscow is nothing but a symbol.
"We'll take care of it later.
" He ordered Guderian to swing south towards Kiev in order to mop up the Russian armies still operating in pockets to the rear of the advancing Wehrmacht.
It proved to be the biggest encirclement of all time.
The Germans captured 600,000 Russian soldiers in one fell swoop.
In September, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler visited this front.
No provisions had been made to feed these Russian prisoners.
With supreme indifference, Himmler dismissed the prisoners as Untermensch - as sub-humans.
He wasn't worried if they all starved to death.
Lt Von Kageneck wrote We lived quite well in the Ukraine.
We had everything we needed - eggs, butter, fruit, milk, wine, an excellent red wine from the area around the Black Sea.
The Ukrainians would come up to us, smiling, filled with joy.
The women would bring us bread and honey.
They saw us as their liberators.
The Ukrainians had lots of reasons to hate the Russians.
Many were hostile to Stalin who, in the early 30s, had organised agricultural reforms in which 3 million Ukrainians died of starvation.
Many Ukrainians who were anti-Semitic were encouraged by the Nazis to incriminate the Jews and carry out pogroms, such as here in Zolochiv, while German soldiers looked on.
In all, many Ukrainians thought they were better off with the Nazis.
But Germany did nothing to try to win further support.
Marshal Goering, the second highest-ranking figure in the Reich, said of the Ukraine We want nouseless mouths to feed.
Those who can work, will work for the Reich.
The rest will die.
Those who work will give everything they have until they themselves die.
Goering and Joshua Rosenberg, who was behind much of Nazi racist thinking, visited the region to work out how to enslave the Ukraine and to make plans for the systematic annihilation of the Jews.
Himmler and Heydrich set up execution commando squads called Einsatzgruppen.
They were composed of SS members, policemen and Wehrmacht soldiers.
Their task was to round up groups of Jews.
The SS took the Jews into the woods and gave them shovels so they could dig their own graves.
But the SS decided that this process was too slow.
So they ordered long common graves to be dug and made their victims line up on top of the last group of dead bodies.
But even this method of killing took too long.
The SS selected a ravine at a place called Babi Yar, near Kiev.
33,771 Jews were executed in just two days.
Men, women and children.
Amid this terrible carnage, and in hundreds of sites along the front, the executioners took pictures of their victims as souvenirs for their families back in Germany.
This premeditated, cold-blooded murder of a million Jews came to be known as the Holocaust by bullets.
But Himmler was not pleased.
He attended one of the Einsatzgruppen's executions and was spattered with blood.
It made him feel sick.
He told the SS to use more humane methods.
This lead to the use of gas vans with exhaust pipes hooked up to special compartments, and a year later to the gas chambers.
In the north of Russia, the Germans advanced hundreds of miles and arrived outside the city of Leningrad.
The long siege of the city began.
The Germans had a plan to deal with Leningrad.
Instead of fighting street by street, they let the artillery do its work.
Surrounded, they knew that the city's inhabitants would slowly starve to death.
The famous Leningrad Library was destroyed.
The zoo was devastated.
Food rations soon fell below the minimum necessary.
But the worst was still to come with the arrival of winter.
Guderian, who had been sent on the detour south, finally received the order from Hitler to rejoin the other armies further north and to proceed towards Moscow.
The Russians were fighting along an enormous front, from Leningrad to Odessa.
And this time the thrust towards Moscow seemed unstoppable.
The Germans took another 700,000 prisoners.
General Jodl, chief of staff of the Wehrmacht, announced, "We have won the war.
" In the south, Lieutenant von Kageneck wrote: We suddenly had to deal with a most frightful adversary - the autumn rain and mud which the Russians call Rasputiza.
Endless mud, so gluey and sticky, that it sucks and holds onto everything.
It won't let go of anything, whether it be a tank, a truck, a horse or a man.
It makes movement impossible.
We do four to five miles a day, instead of 30.
Putting one foot in front of the other requires superhuman effort.
The Panzers, the pride of the Wehrmacht, are brought to a standstill.
Hitler wrote to his troops, "Soldiers on the Eastern front! Comrades! "Today begins the last great decisive battle, "the battle for Moscow!" And in October, the German army started moving again towards Moscow because the frost had come and hardened the ground.
The world was holding its breath.
Would Hitler defeat Stalin? In November 1941, temperatures plummeted to minus40 degrees Celsius.
The Wehrmacht had been trained to conduct a Blitzkrieg, a lightning war.
It was supposed to bring Russia to its knees within four months.
It was not equipped for a harsh winter.
Guderian wrote in his memoirs: It was a sight to see those half-starved, insufficiently clothed men fight over a poor shelter.
They fought over even the tiniest village.
Losing a village, losing even a single isba, could mean death.
The men started to die of cold and dysentery.
Diarrhoea made their lives a misery.
Dr Haape, the Wehrmachtphysician, had to warn them: You have to choose.
If you pull down your trousers, you'll freeze to death.
You must take apart the seam in the back so you won't have to pull them down.
They envied their fellow soldiers in the Afrika Korps who, at that verymoment, in the North African desert, were able to fry eggs on their tanks.
Their theme became the popular song Lili Marleen.
Lili Marleen Wie Einst Lili Marleen.
But the war in the desert was also getting bogged down - in the sand.
Petrol and food supplies were drying up.
Rommel had to order a temporary halt.
But, ever resourceful, Rommel began to plan another offensive that would bring new sacrifices for his men in the Afrika Korps.
Back on the road to Moscow, the Germans were no longer able to wash or to change their clothes.
Like their enemies, they were driven crazy by lice and parasites that brought scabies and typhus.
Napoleon's Grand Army had lost a third of its men to typhus.
In spite of it all, the Wehrmacht pushed on.
They were now only 20 miles from Moscow.
The German vanguard reached the outskirts of Moscow and the end of the bus route that went straight to Red Square.
With German troops so near, Stalin still ordered the parades commemorating the anniversary of the Revolution to be held as usual.
To galvanise his troops, Stalin made a speech that invoked names that had been written out of Russian history by the Soviets, the great soldiers from the time of the Tsars.
"Be worthy of your glorious ancestors - Dmitry Donskoy, "who defeated the Tatars.
Alexander Nevsky, "who defeated the Teutons.
Suvorov, the Turks.
And Kutuzov, Napoleon!" Stalin had organized the defence of Moscow with one of his most brilliant generals, a tank specialist considered to be the Russian equivalent of Guderian, 45-year-old General Georgy Zhukov.
Luck was on Zhukov's side.
A Soviet spy had discovered that Japan, although Hitler's ally, had decided not to attack Russia because its main enemy was the United States.
This enabled Zhukov to withdraw troops from the Far East.
He brought over several divisions from Siberia.
The Siberian troops were well trained and well equipped to deal with harsh winter conditions.
They had all that was needed to fight in the snow.
They even brought their skis and their reindeer with them.
Now it was time to turn the tables on the German invaders.
Zhukov wanted to trap the Wehrmacht in a pincer movement.
On the 5th of December, he launched his counter attack.
50,000 Germans were killed or went missing.
57,000 were taken prisoner.
They were sent off to Siberia.
Their struggle with the cold was far from over.
Only one out of ten of them would ever return home.
Lieutenant von Kageneck was severely wounded and evacuated back to Germany.
He wrote: "Faith disappears, doubt becomes obsessive.
"Death becomes your best friend, man's only friend, "because it will deliver you from your suffering.
" The suffering of the Russians was not over either.
Their country had been ravaged.
But Moscow had been saved, although millions had been killed or taken prisoner,and the danger was still there.
The Wehrmacht were pushed back 120 miles.
Hitler ordered his army to defend this new line at all costs.
He dismissed 35 generals, including Guderian, and took personal charge of the Wehrmacht.
He would now personally take on the task of reviving his army, re-equipping his troops and plotting his revenge.
The Wehrmacht would remain firmly planted in Russia.
Hitler returned to his dogs back in his Bavarian retreat.
In his opinion, the defeat before Moscow was the fault of his generals and his diplomats.
After all they were the ones who had claimed that France and Britainwouldn't go to war over Poland.
And he blamed the Abwehr, the German intelligence service, that misinformed him about the state of the Russian army.
For the children of the Nazi elite, as for many Germans, life in Germany was still carefree.
The massive bombings of German cities had not yet begun and those struggling to survive in Moscow were far away.
Two days after Hitler's first major defeat, his ally Japan, launched a surprise attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor, the base of the US Pacific Fleet.
And with this Japanese assault, the war would become a world war.
Red Bee Media Ltd
Every day, at exactly 1pm, the German Army paraded through Paris - to show who was in charge.
The Germans now occupied the most of the capital cities of Europe - Prague and Warsaw, Brussels, Luxembourg, The Hague, Copenhagen and Oslo.
But not Londonyet.
This series is the epic story of World War Two, as it raged across countries and continents, as millions of soldiers fought from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
It is the moving story of the millions of civilians whose homes were destroyed and lives disrupted as they were caught up in the cataclysm of war.
To tell this story, the best footage of the war has been painstakingly transformed, using digital techniques, into colour.
Along with original colour home movies, it gives a completely new perspective to one of the greatest events of the last century.
This is the powerful story of the Apocalypse and of the people who fought the Second World War.
During the winter of 1940 Britain's cities were devastated by German bombs.
But the country stood firm around Churchill.
And American aid was sent in by President Roosevelt.
Roosevelt was re-elected for a third term as President of the United States.
Though American opinion remained opposed to joining the war, he declared: We must become the great arsenal of democracy.
But only some of the supplies America sent to Britain got through.
Every British ship at sea was in great danger.
The Atlantic Ocean was crawling with German submarines, the U-boats.
Through their periscopes, the U-boat captains sought out British vessels.
Churchill was desperately worried.
He knew that if the supply convoys failed to get through Britain would be on its knees.
As an island nation, Britain was reliant upon supplies from overseas.
The German U-boats now had the French Atlantic harbours at their disposal.
Operating in deadly groups, using torpedoes and cannons, these wolf packs succeeded in sinking 4 million tons of British shipping in 1941 alone.
Here, German submariners toss loaves of bread to a shipwrecked crew who have almost no chance of surviving.
They would die of thirst, of hunger, of cold or by choking on oil.
Hitler was delighted with the success of hissubmarines, but America's huge rearmament programme worried him.
He told his secretary, Martin Bormann: "In one year, the United States will be ready to go to war.
"If we are to face them, we need more raw materials.
"Those materials are in the east.
We need to conquer that living space.
"Then Britain will lose all hope and make peace.
"And it will be too late for the Americans.
"Let us attack Russia as soon as possible.
" Hitler drew up a massive invasion plan to invade the Soviet Union called Operation Barbarossa, named after the triumphant German Emperor.
The Wehrmacht started to move its troops east.
Lieutenant von Kageneck was one of the many thousands of young officers who left for Poland.
He saw the debris from the battles of 1939 piled up alongside the railway.
Polish prisoners and Jews had been put to work on a massive construction project.
Hitler wanted to build a new autobahn, or motorway, right across Poland to move his army over to the new border with Russia.
This was where the 9th Panzer Division was installed, along with von Kageneck's regiment.
He wrote: "Next to us is an SS unit.
"The commander asks us, 'Do you want to see a Jew?' He makes a sign "and a soldier brings over a little man.
"'How many people have you stolen from today?' The man doesn't reply.
"'Beat him 10 times with a stick!' We were appalled.
"So this is our occupation of Poland? We had heard vague stories of "cruelty, but it was impossible to know what was really going on.
"This country had become the country of silence.
"We didn't know that this was the beginning of the genocide "to which we would lend ourhands and our courage.
The 9th Panzer Division was ready to attack, but the order didn't come.
So they went round in circles, waiting.
At the last minute, Hitler deferred his plans for an offensive in the East.
He had to help out his ally Mussolini who had tried to fight his own separate war and got into trouble.
The Duce's troops had been routed by the British in North Africa.
125,000 Italian prisoners had been taken by the British army.
To rescue Mussolini from disaster, Hitler dispatched one of his best generals to Libya, Erwin Rommel, along with an armoured division.
In February 1941, this small army of German soldiers known as the Afrika Korps arrived in North Africa.
They had no idea what lay in store for them.
In Germany, Rommel was already a big hero: he was the man whohad taken Cambrai, Rouen and Cherbourg in May and June of 1940.
And he was a true Nazi, a devoted supporter who had served Hitler with zeal and efficiency from the very beginning.
Rommel believed in tanks, in blitzkrieg, or lightning war.
On the first evening after their arrival, he ordered the Afrika Korps to pursue the British Army, with rapid success.
These Australian and South African prisoners had come to fight alongside the British.
Now they would spend the rest of the war in a German prisoner-of-war camp.
Rommel soon began to make a name for himself.
The British circulated his picture with the caption: "This man is dangerous.
" Hitler attacked Greece, a country that Mussolini had already tried to take.
After invading Yugoslavia, he dropped his paratroopers over Crete.
Hitler had at last secured his southern flank for the invasion of Russia, but he had lost precious time.
Operation Barbarossa had been delayed by several weeks.
First of May 1941.
A great military parade was traditionally held in Moscow's Red Square every year to celebrate International Labour Day.
But this year, the parade was special.
Stalin wanted to make a big impression on the Germans.
Although he had been receiving information from his spies warning that an attack was imminent, he found it impossible to believe that Hitler would dare to break the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact so soon.
And senior German officers were attending this parade.
Marshal Timoshenko, the People's Commissar and Stalin's Defence Minister, appeared to salute them with great respect.
The German army later argued that this display of military force was proof that Stalin planned to strike them first.
Churchill passed on intelligence reports to Stalin that Hitler was about to invade.
But Stalin ignored them.
Just as he ignored a message sent by a Soviet spy based in Tokyo.
The document, dated 30 May 1941, warned of an imminent German attack.
Stalin actually continued to send raw materials to the Reich.
Since the signing of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, he had exported thousands of tons of oil, chrome and nickel to Germany - all of which helped Hitler's armies conquer Western Europe.
A trainload was sent off on the night of the 21st of June 1941.
Carrying 1000 tons of wheat, this train crossed over the border at midnight.
On that same morning, at 3am, without officially declaring war, the first Wehrmacht sappers crept forward into Russian territory.
They were followed by 153 German divisions, as well as by Finnish, Romanian, Slovakian and Hungarian troops.
There was even a division of Spanish fascists.
4 million men, along with 600,000 trucks, launched Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa.
Along with 4,000 tanks, 7,000 artillery pieces .
.
and 3,000 airplanes.
In just a few minutes, 1,500 Soviet aircraft were destroyed on the ground.
In the first few hours, 400 more Russian planes were shot down by the Germans.
Taken by surprise and entirely overpowered, the Soviet air force was nearly wiped out on the first day.
The German offensive was unleashed across an 1800-mile front, and in three different directions.
In the North was the ideological target - Leningrad, Lenin's city, the cradle of the Russian Revolution - whose name has since been restored to St Petersburg.
In the centre was the political target - Moscow, Stalin's capital.
In the south was the economic target - Kiev and the Ukraine.
Pravda, the Communist Party's official newspaper, reported on the fascist aggression.
But Stalin had gone into hiding, dismayed by the catastrophic news that was coming in from the border.
Some said he had a breakdown.
The German advance was swift.
Lieutenant von Kageneck - It's an amazing sight! Our entire regiment of Panzers is moving out! Our tanks, tall and proud like boats, sail over a yellow sea of ripe wheat.
It seemed that nothing could stop the Germans.
Their mission had been hammered into them - you are going to save the West from the Asiatic hordes.
This is a modern crusade against the power of darkness, Judeo-Bolshevism.
(TRANSLATED SINGING) In the northern Baltic States, the Germans were given a triumphant welcome.
They were hailed as liberators.
After Stalin's reign of terror, anything was better than the ruthless Soviet secret police responsible for political repression.
Before they fled, they executed all the Baltic anti-communists in the prisons.
Local anti-Semites accused the Jews of being in collusion with the communists.
They rounded up the Jews and made them carry off the corpses.
Across the Baltic States, people started organising pogroms against Jews, which the Germans encouraged with instructions not to leave any traces.
Burning the bodies was one way of destroying the evidence.
On the central front, General Guderian, the tank strategist and architect of the Blitzkrieg, was held up by the Stalin Line, a series of fortifications that the German infantry was forced to assault.
Guderian broke through and continued his advance.
But something unexpected began to slow down his fast-moving motorised units, as described by von Kageneck.
We advance in our armoured cars and the dust envelops us.
We're in Russia! Where roads and asphalt don't exist! It's awful.
This sticky yellow or red dust gets into everything - into your eyes, your nose, your mouth.
Under these conditions, soldiers still marched 30 miles a day.
They had been marching since the 1st of September 1939.
They had marched all the way to Warsaw, to Oslo, to Paris.
But now they were beginning to realise just how vast Russia was.
Hundreds and hundreds of miles went by without a single village in sight.
It became harder and harder for the supply, fuel and ammunition trucks to keep up.
But there was something else the German soldiers had not expected.
Despite massive losses, the Russians were putting up a good defence.
A new type of Russian tank appeared on the scene, the T-34, a 30-ton monster that was equipped with a formidable cannon.
And wide tracks that meant it could go anywhere.
It was not as sophisticated as the German tanks.
To change gears, the Soviet tank driver had to hit the gear lever with a mallet.
But the T-34 rarely broke down.
The Germans were taken aback.
They couldn't understand how these sub-humans, as they thought of the Russians, had been able to manufacture such a brilliant tank.
The shells of their anti-tank guns ricocheted off the T-34's armour plating.
The only weapon powerful enough to neutralise it was the German 88mm.
Overall, the Germans were better armed, and their army was much stronger.
But these Ivans, as they called the Russians, fought tooth and nail until the very end.
Von Kageneck again - The smell of corpses baked by the sun, covered with flies.
A sickly sweet odour that clings to the nostrils and gets under your skin, just like the dust.
The Russians had suffered heavy losses, but German casualties were also rising.
Still, the Germans continued to make progress toward their three goals, Leningrad, Moscow and Kiev, by capturing entire Soviet armies.
Hitler's orders were to immediately execute all political commissars, members of the Communist Party whose job was to oversee the officers and keep an eye on the soldiers in each military unit.
Guderian refused to carry out such a criminal order.
However, other generals were more willing.
The commander of the Fourth Panzer Army group, General Hoepner declared menacingly - This war must be led with unprecedented brutality.
There is to be no mercy for the Bolsheviks.
Throughout the summer of 1941 the Russians were engaged in a desperate struggle with the German invaders, sometimes with only one rifle for every ten men.
They were forced to retreat along the entire 1,800 mile front.
For Stalin, things were looking very black.
He completely disappeared from public view for over a week.
Everyone wanted to know where he was and expected him to provide leadership at this critical time.
In July, Stalin finally addressed the Russian people again.
Stalin spoke words he had never used in public before.
He called the Russians, "My brothers and my sisters.
" He told them the truth.
!We're under attack by Hitler's Germany.
"The enemy is cruel and implacable.
A grave danger hangs over our country.
" In the darkest hour, he dared to ask "Is it true that German fascist troops are invincible? "Napoleon's army was considered invincible, but it was beaten.
" Stalin ordered the war factories, along with their machinery and their workers, to relocate to the east to the Ural Mountains.
And he gave farmers and peasants a clear order - leave.
Leave your isba, your house, destroy everything.
Leave behind nothing that can be of any use to the fascist Hitlerite aggressor.
This was the beginning of Stalin's scorched earth policy.
The German officers had not forgotten the story of Napoleon's invasion of Russia.
In 1812 the Russians had starved Napoleon's Grand Army by burning their towns and fields, and then massacred the French at the Battle of Berezina.
In early July 1941 the Germans also reached the Berezina River on the central front.
But this time they kept going.
But Soviet resistance was gradually growing stronger.
On the other side of the river there was an unpleasant surprise for the Germans.
The Russians had designed a new kind of artillery.
A rocket launcher called a Katyusha after a patriotic song.
It proved to be terrifying weapon.
But nothing could stop the German advance.
By mid-July the invaders had reached Smolensk, the last big city before Moscow.
The Battle for Smolensk lasted three weeks.
The Russians fought with immense determination, despite the calls for surrender coming over giant loudspeakers.
Very few were taken prisoner.
The survivors preferred to go into hiding in the deep forests and became partisans.
The soldiers trained the many peasants and farmers who joined them.
They hunted down traitors .
.
and disrupted the enemy communication lines.
Reprisals were brutal.
The Fuhrer ordered, "Immediately liquidate all people suspected "of harbouring even the smallest amount of hostility.
" Hitler decided to make a visit to the front.
With him went the Wehrmacht commander-in-chief, the servile Field Marshal Keitel.
Operation Barbarossa was slowing down.
The generals believed that Hitler's strategy of the three-pronged attack was to blame.
Field Marshal Von Bock, commander of Army Group Centre, argued that all of the forces should be focused on Moscow.
Hitler did not like generals who dared to contradict him.
General Guderian was there, too.
He added, "We're only 300 miles from Moscow now.
" "You understand nothing," said the Furher.
"You know nothing of wartime economics.
"First we need the wheat from the Ukraine so that they don't starve us "as they did in the previous war.
" He concluded, "Moscow is nothing but a symbol.
"We'll take care of it later.
" He ordered Guderian to swing south towards Kiev in order to mop up the Russian armies still operating in pockets to the rear of the advancing Wehrmacht.
It proved to be the biggest encirclement of all time.
The Germans captured 600,000 Russian soldiers in one fell swoop.
In September, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler visited this front.
No provisions had been made to feed these Russian prisoners.
With supreme indifference, Himmler dismissed the prisoners as Untermensch - as sub-humans.
He wasn't worried if they all starved to death.
Lt Von Kageneck wrote We lived quite well in the Ukraine.
We had everything we needed - eggs, butter, fruit, milk, wine, an excellent red wine from the area around the Black Sea.
The Ukrainians would come up to us, smiling, filled with joy.
The women would bring us bread and honey.
They saw us as their liberators.
The Ukrainians had lots of reasons to hate the Russians.
Many were hostile to Stalin who, in the early 30s, had organised agricultural reforms in which 3 million Ukrainians died of starvation.
Many Ukrainians who were anti-Semitic were encouraged by the Nazis to incriminate the Jews and carry out pogroms, such as here in Zolochiv, while German soldiers looked on.
In all, many Ukrainians thought they were better off with the Nazis.
But Germany did nothing to try to win further support.
Marshal Goering, the second highest-ranking figure in the Reich, said of the Ukraine We want nouseless mouths to feed.
Those who can work, will work for the Reich.
The rest will die.
Those who work will give everything they have until they themselves die.
Goering and Joshua Rosenberg, who was behind much of Nazi racist thinking, visited the region to work out how to enslave the Ukraine and to make plans for the systematic annihilation of the Jews.
Himmler and Heydrich set up execution commando squads called Einsatzgruppen.
They were composed of SS members, policemen and Wehrmacht soldiers.
Their task was to round up groups of Jews.
The SS took the Jews into the woods and gave them shovels so they could dig their own graves.
But the SS decided that this process was too slow.
So they ordered long common graves to be dug and made their victims line up on top of the last group of dead bodies.
But even this method of killing took too long.
The SS selected a ravine at a place called Babi Yar, near Kiev.
33,771 Jews were executed in just two days.
Men, women and children.
Amid this terrible carnage, and in hundreds of sites along the front, the executioners took pictures of their victims as souvenirs for their families back in Germany.
This premeditated, cold-blooded murder of a million Jews came to be known as the Holocaust by bullets.
But Himmler was not pleased.
He attended one of the Einsatzgruppen's executions and was spattered with blood.
It made him feel sick.
He told the SS to use more humane methods.
This lead to the use of gas vans with exhaust pipes hooked up to special compartments, and a year later to the gas chambers.
In the north of Russia, the Germans advanced hundreds of miles and arrived outside the city of Leningrad.
The long siege of the city began.
The Germans had a plan to deal with Leningrad.
Instead of fighting street by street, they let the artillery do its work.
Surrounded, they knew that the city's inhabitants would slowly starve to death.
The famous Leningrad Library was destroyed.
The zoo was devastated.
Food rations soon fell below the minimum necessary.
But the worst was still to come with the arrival of winter.
Guderian, who had been sent on the detour south, finally received the order from Hitler to rejoin the other armies further north and to proceed towards Moscow.
The Russians were fighting along an enormous front, from Leningrad to Odessa.
And this time the thrust towards Moscow seemed unstoppable.
The Germans took another 700,000 prisoners.
General Jodl, chief of staff of the Wehrmacht, announced, "We have won the war.
" In the south, Lieutenant von Kageneck wrote: We suddenly had to deal with a most frightful adversary - the autumn rain and mud which the Russians call Rasputiza.
Endless mud, so gluey and sticky, that it sucks and holds onto everything.
It won't let go of anything, whether it be a tank, a truck, a horse or a man.
It makes movement impossible.
We do four to five miles a day, instead of 30.
Putting one foot in front of the other requires superhuman effort.
The Panzers, the pride of the Wehrmacht, are brought to a standstill.
Hitler wrote to his troops, "Soldiers on the Eastern front! Comrades! "Today begins the last great decisive battle, "the battle for Moscow!" And in October, the German army started moving again towards Moscow because the frost had come and hardened the ground.
The world was holding its breath.
Would Hitler defeat Stalin? In November 1941, temperatures plummeted to minus40 degrees Celsius.
The Wehrmacht had been trained to conduct a Blitzkrieg, a lightning war.
It was supposed to bring Russia to its knees within four months.
It was not equipped for a harsh winter.
Guderian wrote in his memoirs: It was a sight to see those half-starved, insufficiently clothed men fight over a poor shelter.
They fought over even the tiniest village.
Losing a village, losing even a single isba, could mean death.
The men started to die of cold and dysentery.
Diarrhoea made their lives a misery.
Dr Haape, the Wehrmachtphysician, had to warn them: You have to choose.
If you pull down your trousers, you'll freeze to death.
You must take apart the seam in the back so you won't have to pull them down.
They envied their fellow soldiers in the Afrika Korps who, at that verymoment, in the North African desert, were able to fry eggs on their tanks.
Their theme became the popular song Lili Marleen.
Lili Marleen Wie Einst Lili Marleen.
But the war in the desert was also getting bogged down - in the sand.
Petrol and food supplies were drying up.
Rommel had to order a temporary halt.
But, ever resourceful, Rommel began to plan another offensive that would bring new sacrifices for his men in the Afrika Korps.
Back on the road to Moscow, the Germans were no longer able to wash or to change their clothes.
Like their enemies, they were driven crazy by lice and parasites that brought scabies and typhus.
Napoleon's Grand Army had lost a third of its men to typhus.
In spite of it all, the Wehrmacht pushed on.
They were now only 20 miles from Moscow.
The German vanguard reached the outskirts of Moscow and the end of the bus route that went straight to Red Square.
With German troops so near, Stalin still ordered the parades commemorating the anniversary of the Revolution to be held as usual.
To galvanise his troops, Stalin made a speech that invoked names that had been written out of Russian history by the Soviets, the great soldiers from the time of the Tsars.
"Be worthy of your glorious ancestors - Dmitry Donskoy, "who defeated the Tatars.
Alexander Nevsky, "who defeated the Teutons.
Suvorov, the Turks.
And Kutuzov, Napoleon!" Stalin had organized the defence of Moscow with one of his most brilliant generals, a tank specialist considered to be the Russian equivalent of Guderian, 45-year-old General Georgy Zhukov.
Luck was on Zhukov's side.
A Soviet spy had discovered that Japan, although Hitler's ally, had decided not to attack Russia because its main enemy was the United States.
This enabled Zhukov to withdraw troops from the Far East.
He brought over several divisions from Siberia.
The Siberian troops were well trained and well equipped to deal with harsh winter conditions.
They had all that was needed to fight in the snow.
They even brought their skis and their reindeer with them.
Now it was time to turn the tables on the German invaders.
Zhukov wanted to trap the Wehrmacht in a pincer movement.
On the 5th of December, he launched his counter attack.
50,000 Germans were killed or went missing.
57,000 were taken prisoner.
They were sent off to Siberia.
Their struggle with the cold was far from over.
Only one out of ten of them would ever return home.
Lieutenant von Kageneck was severely wounded and evacuated back to Germany.
He wrote: "Faith disappears, doubt becomes obsessive.
"Death becomes your best friend, man's only friend, "because it will deliver you from your suffering.
" The suffering of the Russians was not over either.
Their country had been ravaged.
But Moscow had been saved, although millions had been killed or taken prisoner,and the danger was still there.
The Wehrmacht were pushed back 120 miles.
Hitler ordered his army to defend this new line at all costs.
He dismissed 35 generals, including Guderian, and took personal charge of the Wehrmacht.
He would now personally take on the task of reviving his army, re-equipping his troops and plotting his revenge.
The Wehrmacht would remain firmly planted in Russia.
Hitler returned to his dogs back in his Bavarian retreat.
In his opinion, the defeat before Moscow was the fault of his generals and his diplomats.
After all they were the ones who had claimed that France and Britainwouldn't go to war over Poland.
And he blamed the Abwehr, the German intelligence service, that misinformed him about the state of the Russian army.
For the children of the Nazi elite, as for many Germans, life in Germany was still carefree.
The massive bombings of German cities had not yet begun and those struggling to survive in Moscow were far away.
Two days after Hitler's first major defeat, his ally Japan, launched a surprise attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor, the base of the US Pacific Fleet.
And with this Japanese assault, the war would become a world war.
Red Bee Media Ltd