Russia's War: Blood Upon the Snow (1997) s01e05 Episode Script
The Fight from Within
1 [Woman singing.]
[Ominous music.]
NARRATOR: September, 1939, and the Nazi-Soviet Pact partitions Poland.
For thousands of Poles, Jews, Communists, anyone with cause to fear Nazi rule, it is time to flee the plague of fascism.
But by the summer of 1941, German invasion has placed a vast sway of the western Soviet Union under Nazi occupation.
Now there can be no escape.
Poles, Ukrainians, fellow Russians, the Baltic peoples.
History's victims.
And about to be victims yet again.
[Car horn honks.]
And yet at first, the invaders disguise the true nature of their rule.
They present themselves to the local people as liberators.
Their first step, to expose the brutality of Stalin's regime.
They throw open the doors of Stalin's major prisons, and they dig up the NKVD mass graves, shallow pits crammed with the bodies of its victims, dreadful memorials to Stalin's war with his own people.
Pits like these are discovered all over the occupied lands.
Because with the Red Army tumbling back before the might of Hitler's Panzers, NKVD officers have systematically slaughtered anyone suspected of opposing Stalin's rule in peace time.
Filmed by German cameramen and screened in cinemas throughout the greater Reich, these scenes are a godsend to Nazi propaganda as it peddles the mirage of liberation.
Blinded by the vision, Ukrainian citizens tear down the effigies of one dictator, and cannot know that they are embracing another.
And German authorities encourage the local population to settle old scores with supporters of Stalin.
Impoverished citizens are offered special rewards for reporting Communists in hiding, and Jews, and ordinary people who lack proper enthusiasm for the new regime.
Just a year earlier, Soviet authorities had redistributed land and livestock among Polish peasants, heralding a new order.
Now the Germans parcel it out again, this time in the name of fascism.
[Crowd cheering.]
And as they had done for Stalin a year before, townspeople obediently take to the streets for Hitler the liberator.
A converted railcar filled with caged actors, once an agitprop vehicle glorifying the Soviet system, now provides a graphic tableau for German propaganda.
Inscribed on the carriage: Minsk, next stop Siberia.
The Bolsheviks operated as murderers.
Hitler is savior.
They know nothing of Nazi ideology.
They cannot know that they are being deceived.
And so many among them need to believe that this, at last, is their chance for freedom.
For the moment, Hitler grants them their fantasies.
He needs collaborators from their ranks, because the Red Army, though reeling, is not yet beaten.
And by exploiting their nationalist hopes, occupying authorities persuade local men and women to join the ranks of the S.
S.
This is the S.
S.
Galichina Division, a Ukrainian unit.
Belarusians, Latvians, and Estonians follow them into service.
Eventually more than a million collaborators will serve the Nazis, almost a third as military personnel.
Most, like this Latvian S.
S.
Unit, are sent straight to the front, rounding up Red Army stragglers and handing them to the Germans.
But as Hitler switches tactics from liberator to tormenter, some 70,000 of these collaborators are destined to assist the Nazis in a campaign of terror against the civilian population, a campaign designed to test the most terrifying political theory ever devised by man.
Even children will be recruited to this diabolical cause, wooed with braces and soap, lured into a world of merciless terror beyond their imagination, to become unwitting implements of genocide.
Nazi racial theory is a crude, almost medieval pseudo-science that judges a man by the shape of his skull and separates the world into superior Aryan and sub-human non-Aryan peoples.
It gives Aryans the duty to eliminate Jews, gypsies, and the incurably sick and accords them the right to clear any number of Slavs from their future living space.
Germany's new Eastern Empire is to provide that living space.
And S.
S.
Chief Himmler anticipates the death of 30 million non-Aryans in the occupied territories.
Now these absurd barroom concepts are in the hands of fanatics with the power and determination to put them into practice.
Four S.
S.
Special-action groups of some 3,000 men, Einsatzgruppen, are assigned to the occupied territories.
Their task, to systematically murder Jews wherever they are discovered in the occupied lands.
Commanded by S.
S.
General von dem Bach-Zelewski, they are otherwise unaccountable.
And according to S.
S.
Figures, they will cause more than 700,000 deaths in the western Soviet Union during less than four years of Nazi occupation.
The Einsatzgruppen come hard on the heals of the advancing Wehrmacht.
In Kiev, an Einsatzgruppe is in action within two days of the city's conquest in September, 1941.
The first group of Kiev's Jewish population are herded together in the city center and marched to the nearby ravine at Babi Yar.
A witness to the carnage at Babi Yar remembers.
INTERPRETER: They forced everyone to leave their belongings on the side of the road, things on one side, food on the other.
And they drove them into groups, stripped naked.
They made them run and shot them as they ran.
NARRATOR: Within days, 30,000 Jewish bodies lie in the pits at Babi Yar.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Here is her photograph.
Six years old and without a hope.
She was with my mother and my father.
My mother was 45, and my father was 48.
There was no one to take her to, to get her out of here.
My brother was at the front, and I was in a camp, and the child's father had been shot.
When the Red Army opens them up in 1944, it counts 125,000 dead.
Heinrich Himmler, moving spirit in the Great Aryan Experiment, visits Minsk in 1942, inspecting its mechanisms for murder.
He orders the Einsatzgruppe to shoot 100 prisoners in his presence.
The victims are selected.
Himmler notices one blond, blue-eyed man.
Are you a Jew? Yes.
Both parents? Yes.
Have you any non-Jewish ancestors? No.
Then I cannot help you.
And with the killings come the ghettos, nightmare waiting rooms for the doomed, playgrounds for genocidal enthusiasts, hell-on-earth for Jewish populations of every major western Soviet city under occupation.
Survivors of the ghetto in Minsk, Europe's largest, will never forget.
INTERPRETER: And when S.
S.
Men appeared in their cars with their dogs and machine guns, a lot of people had already managed to get into the ghetto by climbing through holes in the barbed wire.
There were no pogroms in the ghetto, only outside.
Mothers were left on one side, daughters on the other, fathers and sons.
Their final farewells were tragic.
Many people had been killed before they arrived.
The Polizei killed them.
And after all these people had been led away, we were told to pile all the corpses together, and then the Polizei told us, "Soviets, you are going to live.
So get on your knees.
" And we knelt in the frost for four hours.
Then they opened the ghetto gates, and we were allowed in.
I went to the ghetto like a lamb to the slaughter.
I might not even have gone.
I didn't even look Jewish.
I'll show a photo.
I might not even have gone.
The woman who took my room, she said, "You think you don't look like a Yid? "You don't go to the ghetto, I'll tear you apart myself.
" Anyone who attempts to climb through the fence will be shot! This is the territory of the ghetto, kilometer by kilometer.
The central gates through which the work brigades were marched in and out on their way to and from work.
The Germans performed their punitive actions through these gates, and their pogroms and their murders.
There were whole sections of Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Latvians.
Germans also came with them into the ghetto on their missions of extermination.
NARRATOR: It is not only Minsk.
Ghettos have already been established in Warsaw, Grodno, Lviv.
Few survive the starvation.
The grueling work programs.
The arbitrary murders.
None are meant to survive.
In Minsk, where brutal S.
S.
General Wilhelm Kübe reigns as Gauleiter, bodies are unceremoniously dumped into the yama, a natural hole in the ground that will eventually hold some 120,000 corpses.
And before the great slaughterhouse camps, Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor are fully operational further west, Jews arrive in Minsk from all over the Nazi Empire.
INTERPRETER: Jews were brought here from all over.
Not only from Germany, from Poland, Hungary.
We used to call them "Hamburg Jews," but they came from many countries.
For some reason, they were afraid of exterminating academics and members of the intelligentsia in Europe, and so they brought them here.
They put some of them in our ghetto.
Before, they'd had a pogrom killing people to clear a space for the people coming in, and sometimes they'd send whole train loads straight to the crematorium.
But even in these deserts of the human soul, love can and does blossom.
Oberleutnant Schultz works with inmates of the ghetto in Minsk.
Before their extermination, Jews brought from Europe are sent to work in the peat bogs.
This is where Schultz meets Elsa and falls in love.
He spends his savings on a truck and smuggles 25 women out of the ghetto.
Elsa, his new love, is one of them.
It is not easy to reach the limits of the ruined city.
But Schultz finally gets his party of condemned women to the forest, where they are rescued by the Belarusian Resistance.
But for the 48-year-old Schultz, and his 23-year-old lover, happiness will not last long.
Both are sent to Moscow to an NKVD sanatorium.
The NKVD then sends Elsa to Birobidzhan, Stalin's autonomous Jewish region in the Soviet Far East.
Schultz is taken first to the Lubyanka for interrogation, and then dispatched to a P.
O.
W.
Camp, where he dies after just two weeks.
This is not a war for lovers.
And for Elsa, 40 years on, only bittersweet memories.
INTERPRETER: In Belorussia, 300,000 died and only 300 survived.
Everybody who survived had an angel who saved him.
There were some exceptional people who rescued us.
But there were many victims who were betrayed and died, and they are buried here.
They cannot tell us who betrayed them and why they were killed.
I know a lot of people who got through under the barbed wire, but they were betrayed, and they can't tell us who betrayed them and how they perished.
And this is the tragedy.
All these victims.
We must remember all these victims forever.
NARRATOR: But it is not only Jews who feel the lash of German conquest.
The Einsatzgruppen's campaign of terror touches every man, woman, and child in the occupied territories.
Deportations of ethnically acceptable children begin almost at once.
Some 5,000 will undergo re-education in Germany as breeding stock.
Many more will be sent to the special children's camps springing up all over the northern and central occupied zones.
Inmates will be used for medical experiments, the older children as forced labor.
Thousands, too young to work, will simply be put to death.
Filmed in secret, this child is brutally snatched from his mother.
They will never see each other again.
In the closing months of the war, as the Nazis are beaten back, the Red Army will expose the nameless graves of these innocent victims to the world their corpses unrecognizable even to their mothers.
Adults are taken too, arbitrary additions to the Reich workforce, under a forced-labor program established in 1942.
Hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens will be exported to the Reich before the end of the war.
They are victims of Hitler, but many will later be imprisoned by Stalin as collaborators, tainted by fascism.
These are just the first steps in Hitler's grotesque design.
Once cleansed of non-Aryans, the conquered East will be colonized by Germans and other Aryan races.
Hitler plans to create four separate fiefdoms in the East, four Reich Commissariats.
Belorussia will become Ostland, under the jurisdiction of Wilhelm Kübe.
Ukraine will suffer the terror regime of S.
S.
General Adolf Prützmann.
General Erich Friderici will control the Caucasus.
And Moscovia, stretching from Moscow to the Urals, is to be governed by General von Roche.
Nazi ideology's ultimate testing grounds where its outrageous doctrines will be allowed their most ghastly expression.
In preparation for colonization, German authorities appropriate the land, copying Stalin's system of collectivization.
Livestock and crops are seized for German use, while in the cities, Ukrainians and Belarusians are starving.
For so many Soviet citizens, a stark choice serve the German cause or die.
Collaborators will be rewarded with local administrative posts, and German propaganda will force-feed the myth of what they call The Friendship Movement.
Young people in the Belarusian village of Medvezhino ostensibly greeting their occupiers in friendship.
But all is by no means as it seems.
In Medvezhino, they are not deceived.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: There was nothing like this in Medvezhino, which they show here, or in any of the villages around.
I was old enough to remember everything very clearly.
On the contrary, all the young people I was 16 or 17 at the time, and 20 when the war ended we all tried to look as bad as possible.
We hid wherever we could, and if we heard the Germans were coming to the village, we wouldn't even go out onto the street.
We all hid.
I am seeing all this for the first time.
Even the garlands on their head.
NARRATOR: Now the true nature of German liberation is becoming clear.
And for many, a new life in the forests offers the only escape from Nazi brutality.
Deep in the backwoods, they build the first resistance camps men, women, and children, all ready to fight a guerrilla war against the hated invader.
With them go their few possessions their livestock and the basic necessities of life.
Not much, but at least something the Germans cannot seize.
And what little they have, they use against the Germans moonshine to bribe sentries and ease raiding parties through the checkpoints that already surround the forest.
And afterwards, a joke shared at the drunken German's expense.
They are waging war to the death against a terrible invader.
They are fighting for their homes.
Their prayers are for Motherland and hearth, not for Stalin the atheist.
And Stalin views these nascent resistance groups with distrust.
Following his most basic instinct, he sees them as potential anti-Communist armies, as a threat.
Missing a chance to exploit their military potential, he at first refuses to supply them.
Only Beria's NKVD units receive official support and supplies to operate behind the German lines.
Small cells of organized party workers, NKVD personnel, and young Komsomol members are trained to form underground resistance, or partisan units, under central control.
But Beria's agents offer no comfort to local people.
Outsiders from the cities, they follow military priorities with no thought for local needs.
Priorities that often include the arbitrary execution of community leaders.
Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya is a Konsomol member.
Her task is to stampede horses and burn local stables.
Captured and tortured by the Germans, mutilated almost beyond recognition, her left breast amputated, she will be honored as a hero by Soviet authorities.
[Bells toll.]
But the year 1942 brings real changes.
Under pressure from renewed German offensives all along the Eastern Front, Stalin is forced to change his mind.
Now he recognizes the resistance movements, calling for the formation of "otryady", official partisan units in all occupied territories.
Arms and Red Army advisors are fed into the occupied zones.
Partisan units are enlarged, merged, re-equipped.
And the women, as Soviet women have always done, take their full share of combat and command duty.
But what Stalin supports, he must also control.
The otryady become part of the Red Army, given ranks and, thus, responsibility to authority.
And like every other regular soldier, partisans must swear an oath to the dictator.
It is an oath that cannot be broken, on pain of death.
Suddenly Russian propaganda newsreels find room for resistance heroes like the Ukrainian Yaremchuk.
"We'll put out the fires that the Germans have lit, throughout our land, with German blood.
" Stalin's speeches are transmitted throughout the forests.
And the larger partisan bands find themselves housing NKVD officers from Moscow.
The otryady are organized centrally from Moscow.
Stalin installs Belarusian partisan leader, Panamarenko, as their overall commander.
Field generals are appointed: Kolpak, Feodorov, Rudnev, to recruit and control partisans across vast occupied areas.
In Ukraine, General Feodorov heads one massive recruitment drive in person.
Many of those who fail to volunteer will be conscripted.
By the late summer of 1942, an estimated 150,000 partisans, in bands of anything between 10 and 1,000 fighters, are embroiled in a full-scale forest war all over the occupied zones.
Now the occupying power is under pressure.
Like the mirage of a quick victory over the Red Army, Hitler's plans to fully exploit his new empire's economic resources are evaporating.
The brunt of anti-partisan fighting falls on nine undermanned and mostly over-aged German security divisions.
Though constantly reinforced, they cannot hope to wrest control of these vast forests from a hidden enemy.
But they must try, surrounding huge tracts of land with barbed wire, in the vain hope of trapping and starving their foe.
Their grim failure is reflected in S.
S.
Figures for the last six months of 1942.
Jews killed: 363,000.
Suspected partisan sympathizers: 19,000.
Partisan combat deaths: 1,300.
737 partisans executed on the spot, another 7,827 after interrogation.
But survival is not easy.
Partisan wounded must travel the same tortuous pathways as their supplies, hauled under fire to the temporary refuge of a primitive field hospital.
As military efforts flounder, German propaganda tries in vain to stem the rising tide of resistance.
This film instructs partisans to give themselves up to the local Polizei.
Partisans surrendering voluntarily, who can prove that they acted under duress, are released with no further ado.
But real life is very different.
Red Army rank means nothing to the S.
S.
All partisans can expect to be treated as bandits.
And for every partisan action, savage German reprisals against civilians.
Hundreds of villages, authorities put the figure above 600 in Belorussia alone, are simply razed to the ground, their inhabitants driven out or slain.
Yelena Kniazeva was nine when the Germans came to her village.
INTERPRETER: It happened on the 17th of July, in the middle of haymaking, which meant all the men were busy.
All of them were called together and taken to the barn, where they were shot and shot.
Some of them were still alive after the shooting, but they set light to the barn and burnt everyone in it.
We had some hay in the loft.
They immediately set light to the hay.
It started to burn and fly around, getting into all the rooms.
My mother lifted herself up and said, "Well, children, what are we going to do? Burn to death?" And we said, "Yes, Mama, we'll burn, and we'll take off our clothes to burn better.
" But she didn't let us take off our clothes.
She said, "Wait for me, I'll get my leg from under these corpses, and we'll get out of here.
Otherwise we'll just burn to death.
" She managed to free her leg.
Then she checked to see if anyone else in the house was still alive.
And only then did she take us out.
NARRATOR: When the partisans return to their villages, they find their houses burnt, friends and relations who stayed behind chased away or murdered.
And many of the women have been raped.
In Minsk, Gauleiter Kübe, arch destroyer of villages, infamous for his raucous pleasure in reprisal shootings, is now the prime target of Belarusian partisans.
In the summer of 1942, Yelena Mazanik, 20-years-old and a member of the resistance, works as a maid in Kübe's Minsk household.
INTERPRETER: I leapt into the house.
I was, of course, shaking like a leaf.
Then where was I to put the bomb? So I went to the toilet, first of all, and I took the bomb out.
You know, I had an open-front dress.
So I put the bomb here, under my breasts, in my underwear.
So the duty officer was in this small corridor guarding the doors to the bedroom, the kitchen, upstairs, downstairs, everything.
I went up to the officer and said, "Bet you haven't managed to get a drop of coffee today, dear officer.
" And he said, "No, I haven't.
" Then I told him, "Go downstairs and Domina in the kitchen will give you a cup.
" I paid Domina five marks to give the officer a cup of coffee.
She'd asked me why, and I'd said, "You know, he's my boyfriend.
" I had to use every trick in the book.
He agreed to go downstairs and have a cup of coffee, and I flew into the bedroom like a bullet.
Sometime before, I'd asked the maid which bed was which, where the general slept and where his wife did, so as not to miss the target.
Then I ran into the bedroom and took the bomb out from here.
It was wrapped in the child's trousers.
There were two beds in the room.
I see the bed closest to the door.
I quickly squatted down by the bed and put the bomb between the mattress and the springs.
And you know, the springs were all interleaved with rope, and I thought the springs would be open.
So I leapt into the bedroom and sat down on the bed like this.
It wasn't made, thank God, and jumped on the bed to make sure that the bomb wouldn't fly out.
[Bomb explodes.]
Kübe's death provokes instant retaliation.
A thousand Minsk citizens are hanged.
But Yelena Mazanik, Kübe's assassin, has become a hero in a movement that is growing stronger all the time.
By the end of 1942, Soviet partisan forces have gained full control of large areas within the occupied regions.
They grow their own crops, administer whole towns and villages.
Some even style themselves partisan republics.
Their achievements are trumpeted as a miracle of Soviet organization.
But no one whispers of independent republics within earshot of Stalin.
And in the spring of 1943, as the Red Army consolidates its position on the Eastern Front, the flow of support for partisans has become a torrent.
People are realizing that just possibly the Nazis can be beaten.
Summer finds partisan resistance tying down almost 300,000 Axis troops in the occupied lands, and Moscow's ever-tightening control over partisan activities is at last reaping tangible, strategic rewards.
As the Red Army smashes its way back into the occupied zones, it can count on up to 100,000 partisans to mount simultaneous attacks on communications and rear installations all along the Eastern Front, a force capable of completely paralyzing German supply routes.
And according to Soviet sources, more than 1.
2 million fighters will eventually join partisan strength in the Nazi-occupied zones.
Yet for partisans, this war holds many complications.
At their backs, the machinations of Soviet central authority.
In their sights, the German invaders.
But partisans must also fight nationalist guerrillas waging their own war for their homelands, battling Hitler and Stalin.
Nationalism is strongest where national status has been tasted and snatched away in the former Baltic republics and in Ukraine, where almost 100,000 guerrillas under Stepan Bandera fight a relentless war against the Germans, against Soviet partisans, and against the local Polish population.
Their pitiless struggle permits no mercy to fellow countrymen in Stalin's service.
INTERPRETER: They took me, getting me out of bed.
One held me, and the other struck me with an ax, and my hand flew off.
He said, "That's for organizing a collective farm.
" He took my right hand and chopped it off.
NARRATOR: These are the heroes of Bandera's troop, fighting a civil war as brutal as the battle against the Nazi invaders.
INTERPRETER: I go to the house, and the commander says, "What are you doing here so soon?" I tell him that I shot a Stalinist.
"You mustn't shoot them.
We haven't got many bullets.
I'll show you what you have to do.
Take a couple of small sticks.
Tie a rope around his neck and twist it from behind, round and round until you've strangled him.
" But the Great Patriotic War will have no happy ending for these patriots.
Denied the resources of their Soviet counterparts, they are treated as enemies by all sides.
And though the invader retreats west, the killing does not stop.
Stalin's military troikas come in the wake of the resurgent Red Army.
They tour a land scorched by the departing Germans, convening kangaroo courts to purge partisan units of nationalists, anti-Communists.
There is no hiding place for Nazi collaborators.
The white card of betrayal hangs around their necks as they pay the price of treason to restrained applause from their neighbors and accusers.
There is no pity for the young boys who flocked in innocence to join the Hitler Youth.
And none for former S.
S.
Officers.
His desperate plea for clemency will be in vain.
INTERPRETER: When Hitler came to power I was a young boy of 13-years-old.
Dear judges, this trial gives me the opportunity to stand up and speak out about the atrocities committed by the Nazis and speak on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of young soldiers and officers of the Wehrmacht whose minds were poisoned by these criminals.
His execution is observed by the citizens he helped to terrorize.
Nor does the horror of Nazi rule disappear overnight.
German captives dig out the bodies at Babi Yar.
And yet another distraught mother recognizes her son.
Comrade Sovchenko, tell us, who was killed in your family? INTERPRETER: My son.
He was 28.
This is the reality of Nazi liberation.
But for the triumphant Soviet partisans, heroes of the forest wars, a happier prospect must surely beckon.
They have every right to enjoy their overdue release from fear and suffering, but not for long.
This is Stalin's Empire.
Yelena Mazanik, the woman who blew Kübe to pieces, arrives in Moscow expecting a hero's welcome.
INTERPRETER: Stalin told Panamarenko I went to see these people.
And so they started to get us ready for the meeting with Stalin.
Panamarenko had been told to prepare us, but how? We had to be all dressed up.
We'd come to Moscow like ragamuffins.
You can guess what we looked like.
I was in a German great coat, just without the epaulets.
And they began to get us ready, properly.
But Beria turned everything on its head.
Stalin did not receive us.
We were told to go to the Lubyanka by Kabulov, Beria's deputy.
Yes, afterwards I was told that they planned to kill me and put another woman in my place.
There was a door and a screen in the room, and I knew that someone was sitting behind the screen because I could see his boots.
When I came in, I took a look around this great, big office, and spotted the boots behind the screen.
I was immediately on my guard.
What was going to happen now? The officer who had brought me in saluted to Kuznetsov and hinted that he should leave.
At that moment, I threw my arms around Kuznetsov's neck, and started to cry, saying, "I won't go as long as I'm alive!" I would not let Kuznetsov leave the room.
"I don't want to stay here, and tell him to take his boots away.
" After this, the boots disappeared behind the screen.
"Sit down!" And the interrogation started.
Kabulov asked me the most disgusting question did I sleep with Kübe? Who gave me the order to do this? Kabulov said that I had to follow their orders and be under their authority, and that I had to say that they ordered me to do it.
He tormented me for about an hour.
Then they made up some sort of protocol, and I refused to sign anything.
I said to them, "I will not sign.
You can kill me, but I will not sign.
" And I left Moscow.
NARRATOR: As the war ends, resistance fighters like Yelena Mazanik and these boys they call Partisan Avengers can have only vague hopes for a better future.
But there will be no promised land, no new freedoms, only somber memorials like the bell towers at Hatin, tolling in memory of massacred villages.
So was their brave, pitiless war in vain? INTERPRETER: If I had the strength, I would have done it all again.
For my country.
For Russia, Belorussia, Ukraine.
For my country.
Nothing could have stopped me.
If an enemy came to our land and did what he did, burning people alive, herding people together and I was present at some of Kübe's banquets held in honor of the bandit leaders who carried out these actions.
Exterminations.
Destroyed villages.
When they got together and drank schnapps, Kübe used to say things like, "I have to admit that Hans has done very well.
No one got away.
He burnt everyone in the village to death.
But Fritz didn't do so well this time.
A few people slipped through the net.
Not everyone was eliminated.
A few people got away.
" So, tell me, what can you feel about people like that? You just want to kill them.
Kill them like mad dogs.
It was the only country we had, the land where we were born.
[Dramatic music.]
[Ominous music.]
NARRATOR: September, 1939, and the Nazi-Soviet Pact partitions Poland.
For thousands of Poles, Jews, Communists, anyone with cause to fear Nazi rule, it is time to flee the plague of fascism.
But by the summer of 1941, German invasion has placed a vast sway of the western Soviet Union under Nazi occupation.
Now there can be no escape.
Poles, Ukrainians, fellow Russians, the Baltic peoples.
History's victims.
And about to be victims yet again.
[Car horn honks.]
And yet at first, the invaders disguise the true nature of their rule.
They present themselves to the local people as liberators.
Their first step, to expose the brutality of Stalin's regime.
They throw open the doors of Stalin's major prisons, and they dig up the NKVD mass graves, shallow pits crammed with the bodies of its victims, dreadful memorials to Stalin's war with his own people.
Pits like these are discovered all over the occupied lands.
Because with the Red Army tumbling back before the might of Hitler's Panzers, NKVD officers have systematically slaughtered anyone suspected of opposing Stalin's rule in peace time.
Filmed by German cameramen and screened in cinemas throughout the greater Reich, these scenes are a godsend to Nazi propaganda as it peddles the mirage of liberation.
Blinded by the vision, Ukrainian citizens tear down the effigies of one dictator, and cannot know that they are embracing another.
And German authorities encourage the local population to settle old scores with supporters of Stalin.
Impoverished citizens are offered special rewards for reporting Communists in hiding, and Jews, and ordinary people who lack proper enthusiasm for the new regime.
Just a year earlier, Soviet authorities had redistributed land and livestock among Polish peasants, heralding a new order.
Now the Germans parcel it out again, this time in the name of fascism.
[Crowd cheering.]
And as they had done for Stalin a year before, townspeople obediently take to the streets for Hitler the liberator.
A converted railcar filled with caged actors, once an agitprop vehicle glorifying the Soviet system, now provides a graphic tableau for German propaganda.
Inscribed on the carriage: Minsk, next stop Siberia.
The Bolsheviks operated as murderers.
Hitler is savior.
They know nothing of Nazi ideology.
They cannot know that they are being deceived.
And so many among them need to believe that this, at last, is their chance for freedom.
For the moment, Hitler grants them their fantasies.
He needs collaborators from their ranks, because the Red Army, though reeling, is not yet beaten.
And by exploiting their nationalist hopes, occupying authorities persuade local men and women to join the ranks of the S.
S.
This is the S.
S.
Galichina Division, a Ukrainian unit.
Belarusians, Latvians, and Estonians follow them into service.
Eventually more than a million collaborators will serve the Nazis, almost a third as military personnel.
Most, like this Latvian S.
S.
Unit, are sent straight to the front, rounding up Red Army stragglers and handing them to the Germans.
But as Hitler switches tactics from liberator to tormenter, some 70,000 of these collaborators are destined to assist the Nazis in a campaign of terror against the civilian population, a campaign designed to test the most terrifying political theory ever devised by man.
Even children will be recruited to this diabolical cause, wooed with braces and soap, lured into a world of merciless terror beyond their imagination, to become unwitting implements of genocide.
Nazi racial theory is a crude, almost medieval pseudo-science that judges a man by the shape of his skull and separates the world into superior Aryan and sub-human non-Aryan peoples.
It gives Aryans the duty to eliminate Jews, gypsies, and the incurably sick and accords them the right to clear any number of Slavs from their future living space.
Germany's new Eastern Empire is to provide that living space.
And S.
S.
Chief Himmler anticipates the death of 30 million non-Aryans in the occupied territories.
Now these absurd barroom concepts are in the hands of fanatics with the power and determination to put them into practice.
Four S.
S.
Special-action groups of some 3,000 men, Einsatzgruppen, are assigned to the occupied territories.
Their task, to systematically murder Jews wherever they are discovered in the occupied lands.
Commanded by S.
S.
General von dem Bach-Zelewski, they are otherwise unaccountable.
And according to S.
S.
Figures, they will cause more than 700,000 deaths in the western Soviet Union during less than four years of Nazi occupation.
The Einsatzgruppen come hard on the heals of the advancing Wehrmacht.
In Kiev, an Einsatzgruppe is in action within two days of the city's conquest in September, 1941.
The first group of Kiev's Jewish population are herded together in the city center and marched to the nearby ravine at Babi Yar.
A witness to the carnage at Babi Yar remembers.
INTERPRETER: They forced everyone to leave their belongings on the side of the road, things on one side, food on the other.
And they drove them into groups, stripped naked.
They made them run and shot them as they ran.
NARRATOR: Within days, 30,000 Jewish bodies lie in the pits at Babi Yar.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Here is her photograph.
Six years old and without a hope.
She was with my mother and my father.
My mother was 45, and my father was 48.
There was no one to take her to, to get her out of here.
My brother was at the front, and I was in a camp, and the child's father had been shot.
When the Red Army opens them up in 1944, it counts 125,000 dead.
Heinrich Himmler, moving spirit in the Great Aryan Experiment, visits Minsk in 1942, inspecting its mechanisms for murder.
He orders the Einsatzgruppe to shoot 100 prisoners in his presence.
The victims are selected.
Himmler notices one blond, blue-eyed man.
Are you a Jew? Yes.
Both parents? Yes.
Have you any non-Jewish ancestors? No.
Then I cannot help you.
And with the killings come the ghettos, nightmare waiting rooms for the doomed, playgrounds for genocidal enthusiasts, hell-on-earth for Jewish populations of every major western Soviet city under occupation.
Survivors of the ghetto in Minsk, Europe's largest, will never forget.
INTERPRETER: And when S.
S.
Men appeared in their cars with their dogs and machine guns, a lot of people had already managed to get into the ghetto by climbing through holes in the barbed wire.
There were no pogroms in the ghetto, only outside.
Mothers were left on one side, daughters on the other, fathers and sons.
Their final farewells were tragic.
Many people had been killed before they arrived.
The Polizei killed them.
And after all these people had been led away, we were told to pile all the corpses together, and then the Polizei told us, "Soviets, you are going to live.
So get on your knees.
" And we knelt in the frost for four hours.
Then they opened the ghetto gates, and we were allowed in.
I went to the ghetto like a lamb to the slaughter.
I might not even have gone.
I didn't even look Jewish.
I'll show a photo.
I might not even have gone.
The woman who took my room, she said, "You think you don't look like a Yid? "You don't go to the ghetto, I'll tear you apart myself.
" Anyone who attempts to climb through the fence will be shot! This is the territory of the ghetto, kilometer by kilometer.
The central gates through which the work brigades were marched in and out on their way to and from work.
The Germans performed their punitive actions through these gates, and their pogroms and their murders.
There were whole sections of Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Latvians.
Germans also came with them into the ghetto on their missions of extermination.
NARRATOR: It is not only Minsk.
Ghettos have already been established in Warsaw, Grodno, Lviv.
Few survive the starvation.
The grueling work programs.
The arbitrary murders.
None are meant to survive.
In Minsk, where brutal S.
S.
General Wilhelm Kübe reigns as Gauleiter, bodies are unceremoniously dumped into the yama, a natural hole in the ground that will eventually hold some 120,000 corpses.
And before the great slaughterhouse camps, Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor are fully operational further west, Jews arrive in Minsk from all over the Nazi Empire.
INTERPRETER: Jews were brought here from all over.
Not only from Germany, from Poland, Hungary.
We used to call them "Hamburg Jews," but they came from many countries.
For some reason, they were afraid of exterminating academics and members of the intelligentsia in Europe, and so they brought them here.
They put some of them in our ghetto.
Before, they'd had a pogrom killing people to clear a space for the people coming in, and sometimes they'd send whole train loads straight to the crematorium.
But even in these deserts of the human soul, love can and does blossom.
Oberleutnant Schultz works with inmates of the ghetto in Minsk.
Before their extermination, Jews brought from Europe are sent to work in the peat bogs.
This is where Schultz meets Elsa and falls in love.
He spends his savings on a truck and smuggles 25 women out of the ghetto.
Elsa, his new love, is one of them.
It is not easy to reach the limits of the ruined city.
But Schultz finally gets his party of condemned women to the forest, where they are rescued by the Belarusian Resistance.
But for the 48-year-old Schultz, and his 23-year-old lover, happiness will not last long.
Both are sent to Moscow to an NKVD sanatorium.
The NKVD then sends Elsa to Birobidzhan, Stalin's autonomous Jewish region in the Soviet Far East.
Schultz is taken first to the Lubyanka for interrogation, and then dispatched to a P.
O.
W.
Camp, where he dies after just two weeks.
This is not a war for lovers.
And for Elsa, 40 years on, only bittersweet memories.
INTERPRETER: In Belorussia, 300,000 died and only 300 survived.
Everybody who survived had an angel who saved him.
There were some exceptional people who rescued us.
But there were many victims who were betrayed and died, and they are buried here.
They cannot tell us who betrayed them and why they were killed.
I know a lot of people who got through under the barbed wire, but they were betrayed, and they can't tell us who betrayed them and how they perished.
And this is the tragedy.
All these victims.
We must remember all these victims forever.
NARRATOR: But it is not only Jews who feel the lash of German conquest.
The Einsatzgruppen's campaign of terror touches every man, woman, and child in the occupied territories.
Deportations of ethnically acceptable children begin almost at once.
Some 5,000 will undergo re-education in Germany as breeding stock.
Many more will be sent to the special children's camps springing up all over the northern and central occupied zones.
Inmates will be used for medical experiments, the older children as forced labor.
Thousands, too young to work, will simply be put to death.
Filmed in secret, this child is brutally snatched from his mother.
They will never see each other again.
In the closing months of the war, as the Nazis are beaten back, the Red Army will expose the nameless graves of these innocent victims to the world their corpses unrecognizable even to their mothers.
Adults are taken too, arbitrary additions to the Reich workforce, under a forced-labor program established in 1942.
Hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens will be exported to the Reich before the end of the war.
They are victims of Hitler, but many will later be imprisoned by Stalin as collaborators, tainted by fascism.
These are just the first steps in Hitler's grotesque design.
Once cleansed of non-Aryans, the conquered East will be colonized by Germans and other Aryan races.
Hitler plans to create four separate fiefdoms in the East, four Reich Commissariats.
Belorussia will become Ostland, under the jurisdiction of Wilhelm Kübe.
Ukraine will suffer the terror regime of S.
S.
General Adolf Prützmann.
General Erich Friderici will control the Caucasus.
And Moscovia, stretching from Moscow to the Urals, is to be governed by General von Roche.
Nazi ideology's ultimate testing grounds where its outrageous doctrines will be allowed their most ghastly expression.
In preparation for colonization, German authorities appropriate the land, copying Stalin's system of collectivization.
Livestock and crops are seized for German use, while in the cities, Ukrainians and Belarusians are starving.
For so many Soviet citizens, a stark choice serve the German cause or die.
Collaborators will be rewarded with local administrative posts, and German propaganda will force-feed the myth of what they call The Friendship Movement.
Young people in the Belarusian village of Medvezhino ostensibly greeting their occupiers in friendship.
But all is by no means as it seems.
In Medvezhino, they are not deceived.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: There was nothing like this in Medvezhino, which they show here, or in any of the villages around.
I was old enough to remember everything very clearly.
On the contrary, all the young people I was 16 or 17 at the time, and 20 when the war ended we all tried to look as bad as possible.
We hid wherever we could, and if we heard the Germans were coming to the village, we wouldn't even go out onto the street.
We all hid.
I am seeing all this for the first time.
Even the garlands on their head.
NARRATOR: Now the true nature of German liberation is becoming clear.
And for many, a new life in the forests offers the only escape from Nazi brutality.
Deep in the backwoods, they build the first resistance camps men, women, and children, all ready to fight a guerrilla war against the hated invader.
With them go their few possessions their livestock and the basic necessities of life.
Not much, but at least something the Germans cannot seize.
And what little they have, they use against the Germans moonshine to bribe sentries and ease raiding parties through the checkpoints that already surround the forest.
And afterwards, a joke shared at the drunken German's expense.
They are waging war to the death against a terrible invader.
They are fighting for their homes.
Their prayers are for Motherland and hearth, not for Stalin the atheist.
And Stalin views these nascent resistance groups with distrust.
Following his most basic instinct, he sees them as potential anti-Communist armies, as a threat.
Missing a chance to exploit their military potential, he at first refuses to supply them.
Only Beria's NKVD units receive official support and supplies to operate behind the German lines.
Small cells of organized party workers, NKVD personnel, and young Komsomol members are trained to form underground resistance, or partisan units, under central control.
But Beria's agents offer no comfort to local people.
Outsiders from the cities, they follow military priorities with no thought for local needs.
Priorities that often include the arbitrary execution of community leaders.
Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya is a Konsomol member.
Her task is to stampede horses and burn local stables.
Captured and tortured by the Germans, mutilated almost beyond recognition, her left breast amputated, she will be honored as a hero by Soviet authorities.
[Bells toll.]
But the year 1942 brings real changes.
Under pressure from renewed German offensives all along the Eastern Front, Stalin is forced to change his mind.
Now he recognizes the resistance movements, calling for the formation of "otryady", official partisan units in all occupied territories.
Arms and Red Army advisors are fed into the occupied zones.
Partisan units are enlarged, merged, re-equipped.
And the women, as Soviet women have always done, take their full share of combat and command duty.
But what Stalin supports, he must also control.
The otryady become part of the Red Army, given ranks and, thus, responsibility to authority.
And like every other regular soldier, partisans must swear an oath to the dictator.
It is an oath that cannot be broken, on pain of death.
Suddenly Russian propaganda newsreels find room for resistance heroes like the Ukrainian Yaremchuk.
"We'll put out the fires that the Germans have lit, throughout our land, with German blood.
" Stalin's speeches are transmitted throughout the forests.
And the larger partisan bands find themselves housing NKVD officers from Moscow.
The otryady are organized centrally from Moscow.
Stalin installs Belarusian partisan leader, Panamarenko, as their overall commander.
Field generals are appointed: Kolpak, Feodorov, Rudnev, to recruit and control partisans across vast occupied areas.
In Ukraine, General Feodorov heads one massive recruitment drive in person.
Many of those who fail to volunteer will be conscripted.
By the late summer of 1942, an estimated 150,000 partisans, in bands of anything between 10 and 1,000 fighters, are embroiled in a full-scale forest war all over the occupied zones.
Now the occupying power is under pressure.
Like the mirage of a quick victory over the Red Army, Hitler's plans to fully exploit his new empire's economic resources are evaporating.
The brunt of anti-partisan fighting falls on nine undermanned and mostly over-aged German security divisions.
Though constantly reinforced, they cannot hope to wrest control of these vast forests from a hidden enemy.
But they must try, surrounding huge tracts of land with barbed wire, in the vain hope of trapping and starving their foe.
Their grim failure is reflected in S.
S.
Figures for the last six months of 1942.
Jews killed: 363,000.
Suspected partisan sympathizers: 19,000.
Partisan combat deaths: 1,300.
737 partisans executed on the spot, another 7,827 after interrogation.
But survival is not easy.
Partisan wounded must travel the same tortuous pathways as their supplies, hauled under fire to the temporary refuge of a primitive field hospital.
As military efforts flounder, German propaganda tries in vain to stem the rising tide of resistance.
This film instructs partisans to give themselves up to the local Polizei.
Partisans surrendering voluntarily, who can prove that they acted under duress, are released with no further ado.
But real life is very different.
Red Army rank means nothing to the S.
S.
All partisans can expect to be treated as bandits.
And for every partisan action, savage German reprisals against civilians.
Hundreds of villages, authorities put the figure above 600 in Belorussia alone, are simply razed to the ground, their inhabitants driven out or slain.
Yelena Kniazeva was nine when the Germans came to her village.
INTERPRETER: It happened on the 17th of July, in the middle of haymaking, which meant all the men were busy.
All of them were called together and taken to the barn, where they were shot and shot.
Some of them were still alive after the shooting, but they set light to the barn and burnt everyone in it.
We had some hay in the loft.
They immediately set light to the hay.
It started to burn and fly around, getting into all the rooms.
My mother lifted herself up and said, "Well, children, what are we going to do? Burn to death?" And we said, "Yes, Mama, we'll burn, and we'll take off our clothes to burn better.
" But she didn't let us take off our clothes.
She said, "Wait for me, I'll get my leg from under these corpses, and we'll get out of here.
Otherwise we'll just burn to death.
" She managed to free her leg.
Then she checked to see if anyone else in the house was still alive.
And only then did she take us out.
NARRATOR: When the partisans return to their villages, they find their houses burnt, friends and relations who stayed behind chased away or murdered.
And many of the women have been raped.
In Minsk, Gauleiter Kübe, arch destroyer of villages, infamous for his raucous pleasure in reprisal shootings, is now the prime target of Belarusian partisans.
In the summer of 1942, Yelena Mazanik, 20-years-old and a member of the resistance, works as a maid in Kübe's Minsk household.
INTERPRETER: I leapt into the house.
I was, of course, shaking like a leaf.
Then where was I to put the bomb? So I went to the toilet, first of all, and I took the bomb out.
You know, I had an open-front dress.
So I put the bomb here, under my breasts, in my underwear.
So the duty officer was in this small corridor guarding the doors to the bedroom, the kitchen, upstairs, downstairs, everything.
I went up to the officer and said, "Bet you haven't managed to get a drop of coffee today, dear officer.
" And he said, "No, I haven't.
" Then I told him, "Go downstairs and Domina in the kitchen will give you a cup.
" I paid Domina five marks to give the officer a cup of coffee.
She'd asked me why, and I'd said, "You know, he's my boyfriend.
" I had to use every trick in the book.
He agreed to go downstairs and have a cup of coffee, and I flew into the bedroom like a bullet.
Sometime before, I'd asked the maid which bed was which, where the general slept and where his wife did, so as not to miss the target.
Then I ran into the bedroom and took the bomb out from here.
It was wrapped in the child's trousers.
There were two beds in the room.
I see the bed closest to the door.
I quickly squatted down by the bed and put the bomb between the mattress and the springs.
And you know, the springs were all interleaved with rope, and I thought the springs would be open.
So I leapt into the bedroom and sat down on the bed like this.
It wasn't made, thank God, and jumped on the bed to make sure that the bomb wouldn't fly out.
[Bomb explodes.]
Kübe's death provokes instant retaliation.
A thousand Minsk citizens are hanged.
But Yelena Mazanik, Kübe's assassin, has become a hero in a movement that is growing stronger all the time.
By the end of 1942, Soviet partisan forces have gained full control of large areas within the occupied regions.
They grow their own crops, administer whole towns and villages.
Some even style themselves partisan republics.
Their achievements are trumpeted as a miracle of Soviet organization.
But no one whispers of independent republics within earshot of Stalin.
And in the spring of 1943, as the Red Army consolidates its position on the Eastern Front, the flow of support for partisans has become a torrent.
People are realizing that just possibly the Nazis can be beaten.
Summer finds partisan resistance tying down almost 300,000 Axis troops in the occupied lands, and Moscow's ever-tightening control over partisan activities is at last reaping tangible, strategic rewards.
As the Red Army smashes its way back into the occupied zones, it can count on up to 100,000 partisans to mount simultaneous attacks on communications and rear installations all along the Eastern Front, a force capable of completely paralyzing German supply routes.
And according to Soviet sources, more than 1.
2 million fighters will eventually join partisan strength in the Nazi-occupied zones.
Yet for partisans, this war holds many complications.
At their backs, the machinations of Soviet central authority.
In their sights, the German invaders.
But partisans must also fight nationalist guerrillas waging their own war for their homelands, battling Hitler and Stalin.
Nationalism is strongest where national status has been tasted and snatched away in the former Baltic republics and in Ukraine, where almost 100,000 guerrillas under Stepan Bandera fight a relentless war against the Germans, against Soviet partisans, and against the local Polish population.
Their pitiless struggle permits no mercy to fellow countrymen in Stalin's service.
INTERPRETER: They took me, getting me out of bed.
One held me, and the other struck me with an ax, and my hand flew off.
He said, "That's for organizing a collective farm.
" He took my right hand and chopped it off.
NARRATOR: These are the heroes of Bandera's troop, fighting a civil war as brutal as the battle against the Nazi invaders.
INTERPRETER: I go to the house, and the commander says, "What are you doing here so soon?" I tell him that I shot a Stalinist.
"You mustn't shoot them.
We haven't got many bullets.
I'll show you what you have to do.
Take a couple of small sticks.
Tie a rope around his neck and twist it from behind, round and round until you've strangled him.
" But the Great Patriotic War will have no happy ending for these patriots.
Denied the resources of their Soviet counterparts, they are treated as enemies by all sides.
And though the invader retreats west, the killing does not stop.
Stalin's military troikas come in the wake of the resurgent Red Army.
They tour a land scorched by the departing Germans, convening kangaroo courts to purge partisan units of nationalists, anti-Communists.
There is no hiding place for Nazi collaborators.
The white card of betrayal hangs around their necks as they pay the price of treason to restrained applause from their neighbors and accusers.
There is no pity for the young boys who flocked in innocence to join the Hitler Youth.
And none for former S.
S.
Officers.
His desperate plea for clemency will be in vain.
INTERPRETER: When Hitler came to power I was a young boy of 13-years-old.
Dear judges, this trial gives me the opportunity to stand up and speak out about the atrocities committed by the Nazis and speak on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of young soldiers and officers of the Wehrmacht whose minds were poisoned by these criminals.
His execution is observed by the citizens he helped to terrorize.
Nor does the horror of Nazi rule disappear overnight.
German captives dig out the bodies at Babi Yar.
And yet another distraught mother recognizes her son.
Comrade Sovchenko, tell us, who was killed in your family? INTERPRETER: My son.
He was 28.
This is the reality of Nazi liberation.
But for the triumphant Soviet partisans, heroes of the forest wars, a happier prospect must surely beckon.
They have every right to enjoy their overdue release from fear and suffering, but not for long.
This is Stalin's Empire.
Yelena Mazanik, the woman who blew Kübe to pieces, arrives in Moscow expecting a hero's welcome.
INTERPRETER: Stalin told Panamarenko I went to see these people.
And so they started to get us ready for the meeting with Stalin.
Panamarenko had been told to prepare us, but how? We had to be all dressed up.
We'd come to Moscow like ragamuffins.
You can guess what we looked like.
I was in a German great coat, just without the epaulets.
And they began to get us ready, properly.
But Beria turned everything on its head.
Stalin did not receive us.
We were told to go to the Lubyanka by Kabulov, Beria's deputy.
Yes, afterwards I was told that they planned to kill me and put another woman in my place.
There was a door and a screen in the room, and I knew that someone was sitting behind the screen because I could see his boots.
When I came in, I took a look around this great, big office, and spotted the boots behind the screen.
I was immediately on my guard.
What was going to happen now? The officer who had brought me in saluted to Kuznetsov and hinted that he should leave.
At that moment, I threw my arms around Kuznetsov's neck, and started to cry, saying, "I won't go as long as I'm alive!" I would not let Kuznetsov leave the room.
"I don't want to stay here, and tell him to take his boots away.
" After this, the boots disappeared behind the screen.
"Sit down!" And the interrogation started.
Kabulov asked me the most disgusting question did I sleep with Kübe? Who gave me the order to do this? Kabulov said that I had to follow their orders and be under their authority, and that I had to say that they ordered me to do it.
He tormented me for about an hour.
Then they made up some sort of protocol, and I refused to sign anything.
I said to them, "I will not sign.
You can kill me, but I will not sign.
" And I left Moscow.
NARRATOR: As the war ends, resistance fighters like Yelena Mazanik and these boys they call Partisan Avengers can have only vague hopes for a better future.
But there will be no promised land, no new freedoms, only somber memorials like the bell towers at Hatin, tolling in memory of massacred villages.
So was their brave, pitiless war in vain? INTERPRETER: If I had the strength, I would have done it all again.
For my country.
For Russia, Belorussia, Ukraine.
For my country.
Nothing could have stopped me.
If an enemy came to our land and did what he did, burning people alive, herding people together and I was present at some of Kübe's banquets held in honor of the bandit leaders who carried out these actions.
Exterminations.
Destroyed villages.
When they got together and drank schnapps, Kübe used to say things like, "I have to admit that Hans has done very well.
No one got away.
He burnt everyone in the village to death.
But Fritz didn't do so well this time.
A few people slipped through the net.
Not everyone was eliminated.
A few people got away.
" So, tell me, what can you feel about people like that? You just want to kill them.
Kill them like mad dogs.
It was the only country we had, the land where we were born.
[Dramatic music.]