Russia's War: Blood Upon the Snow (1997) s01e09 Episode Script
The Fall of the Swastika
1 [Woman singing.]
[Ominous music.]
NARRATOR: The Thousand Year Reich, Hitler's dark vision.
A rapacious empire built on pomp and pageant and on war.
Now the vision is evaporating, Germany is on its knees, and retribution is at hand.
As 1945 dawns, the sky is literally falling in on the people of Germany.
Massive fleets of British and American heavy bombers pound cities, factories, and oil refineries to rubble.
Sudden death has become a way of life in Germany.
The Nazi edifice is crumbling.
The Luftwaffe, once supreme, is all but powerless to interfere.
Outnumbered six to one, it is short of modern aircraft, pilots, ammunition.
Above all, it desperately lacks fuel.
Yet final defeat will not come from the skies, but over land.
Germany is surrounded.
From every frontier, enemies are marching on the heart of the Vaterland.
In the west, Allied armies cut deep into Germany during the first months of 1945.
They have twice as many men as the Wehrmacht, four times as many tanks.
And they are infinitely better-supplied.
But Hitler is sending his last reserves east in a desperate attempt to stave off an even more deadly foe The Red Army already sweeping through Eastern Europe.
By mid March, the Red Army has seized most of the Baltic coast.
And it has smashed its way through Nazi-occupied Poland.
Wehrmacht troops, loyal for so long, are surrendering in their thousands as Soviet forces press hard against the German frontier.
A sign marks the spot.
"This is a cursed Germany.
" The scene is set for one last great Soviet drive west to Berlin.
As the Red Army storms towards the capital, it liberates Soviet citizens captured by the Nazis for slave labor.
And it frees surviving victims of the concentration camps.
The experience leaves Stalin's troops hungry for revenge.
They've reconquered lands blighted by Hitler's wildest experiments in genocide.
They've been to Auschwitz, where millions of mutilated corpses cry silently for vengeance.
Hatred of the Reich needs little encouragement at the front.
Hitler knows he is surrounded.
[Speaking German.]
As giant pincers close around him, he orders the defense of Berlin to the last German.
Old men, women, and children prepare for a desperate fight against hopeless odds.
Yet at the same time, Hitler orders a scorched-earth policy the destruction of mines, power stations, water supplies, anything that might sustain life for survivors.
It is his final betrayal of the German people, a people who remain astonishingly loyal in the face of certain defeat.
In his madness, Hitler believes that they have failed his vision.
This is his revenge for what he calls their treachery though even now they are willing to die for him.
Boys of the Hitler Youth ready themselves for battle innocence devoured by evil.
Ordinary people still cheer Hitler's armies, but what else can they do? These troops are all that stand between Germany and Armageddon.
By late March, the western Allies are across the Rhine, and beyond that great natural barrier, Germany lies almost undefended.
As the German army's will to fight at last begins to slip away, soldiers and civilians flee west.
Better by far to seek mercy from the British and Americans than at the hands of Stalin's avengers.
Goebbels' propaganda has shown them what to expect from Stalin.
They know that the Red Army is seeking vengeance for Hitler's atrocities in the east.
But even in the west, British and Americans exact full retribution for SS crimes.
Ally troops escort a prisoner who has informed against camp guards.
His identity is concealed.
Fear of the Nazis will not die overnight.
Yet even now, the Führer is juggling improbable strategies for victory.
He refuses to believe that his country lies in mortal peril.
Insanely, he's convinced that massive counteroffensives in the east can still bring victory.
But the armies to carry them out exist only in his imagination.
And the Red Army is coming to shatter his illusions.
Its great assault on Berlin is about to begin.
Marshal Zhukov, never defeated in battle, will command Soviet forces.
He is the Soviet Union's greatest military hero.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: He was the only one who could talk to Stalin without constraints.
If Stalin was not right, say about some military issue or whatever, he was the only one who could discuss it with him or argue with him.
NARRATOR: At the beginning of April, Stalin and Zhukov meet in Moscow, preparing the final blow against Hitler.
INTERPRETER: I was there when they were walking in the Kremlin.
Stalin used to keep a step behind, and he put his arm around Zhukov, and he said to him, "You are my Suvorov," the great general who defeated Napoleon and never lost a battle.
NARRATOR: But Stalin's paranoia and his mistrust of generals means that Zhukov can enter the Kremlin a Marshal and leave moments later under arrest.
And Zhukov is a prime candidate for such treatment.
His uncompromising character and hints of independence have been known to prompt displeasure, even rage, in Stalin.
The dictator knows that in this, the Soviet Union's vital hour of decision, he must have his most brilliant commander at his side.
Nevertheless, as Zhukov prepares to take Berlin, NKVD agents are watching him.
INTERPRETER: Abakumov, Beria, Kabulov, and Merkulov started to collect evidence against Zhukov after Khalkhin-Gol.
They tried even harder after he became commander of Kiev Military Region and then head of general headquarters.
They started filling the dossier against him at exactly that time.
They followed everyone, and any little incident, however minor, was added to the file.
But Stalin's secret files are for later.
Zhukov is safe for now, at least until Germany is beaten.
The night of the 15th of April.
22,000 heavy guns announce the Red Army's offensive east of the German capital.
Stalin claims he has six million men against less than a million armed remnants of every unit the Reich can muster.
In the south, Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front breaks through at once to sweep around Berlin.
In the north, Rokossovsky's 2nd Belorussian Front overcomes difficult terrain to take Mecklenburg.
And in the center, Zhukov's great host grinds inexorably west towards a ruined Berlin still reeling under incessant air attack.
On the 19th of April, Soviet troops reach the Berlin suburbs.
Now it is street fighting, house by house, every one a natural redoubt for desperate defenders.
Casualties mount.
Resistance stiffens, but the Soviet armies cannot be halted now.
Hitler's Reich has been pierced to the heart.
The apartments of high-ranking Nazi officials now lying directly in the path of Stalin's vengeful armies are shaken by the battle.
Those who have prospered by Hitler's promises face the collapse of all they have believed in.
Yet Hitler still lives.
Prowling the bunker, he gloats over his photograph albums, celebrations of past glories.
While his people pay the price of defeat, he celebrates the death of Roosevelt as a portent of victory and imagines the imminent outbreak of war between the Allies.
On the 25th of April, southern units of Konev's front make contact with United States forces at the Elbe.
No hint of future tensions here.
With these happy scenes, Hitler's last fantasy evaporates.
Commanders with Konev's and Patton's armies hold a banquet to celebrate their momentous meeting.
Steak and a special victory cake are on the menu, washed down with champagne and followed by toasts.
Whiskey meets vodka.
Now, as Soviet forces converge on the center of Berlin, the fighting embraces everything and everyone in the battle zone.
But even now, Hitler has one guardian angel, fighter pilot Hanna Reitsch.
The only woman to receive an Iron Cross in the Second World War, she is utterly devoted to the Führer.
On the 29th of April, she pilots her light aircraft into the heart of Berlin.
Touching down on the Unter den Linden, she makes the perilous journey through the mayhem of battle to Hitler's bunker where he waits the end, comforted by a few treasured possessions pictures of himself, reminders of better days, and his family tree.
Hanna Reitsch is Hitler's last chance to escape, but he will not leave.
Preferring to cling to the past, he chooses to meet his destiny in Berlin.
Next day, the last day of April, the Führer marries Eva Braun.
She will share his chosen fate.
But for the defenders in the streets, there is only one choice left to make between surrender and death.
Many are giving up the fight, but pockets of fanatical resistance remain.
And in this final battle for Berlin, so close to the end, many on both sides will be struck down and tens of thousands will die.
General Oustugov commanded a Red Army battalion through the battle.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: We launched the outer-Berlin offensive on April the 16th and ruptured the enemy defense.
I cannot remember eating or sleeping, but I remember every detail of the combat operations.
Everybody does, because it was one of the final battles and because we paid dearly for it.
In the second battalion, only two soldiers survived, and no one from the third.
All the reinforcements were youngsters who had grown up in occupation, kids who'd been taken by force over here and had grown up in German territory.
Field-recruiting officers drafted them and sent them straight to us, untrained.
That's what I remember them lined up, our last formation.
The battalion had no more than 70 people, including liberated prisoners of war.
They were easy to spot.
They didn't have full uniforms.
They might have a cap and tunics with civilian trousers or the other way around.
They couldn't fight in their prison clothes.
And there were youngsters who were only 15 or 16 when they were sent.
In 1944, we started drafting at 17, and they rarely had uniforms.
They were trained there and then how to load automatic rifles, how to throw a grenade.
Can you imagine what price we had to pay for those final battles? NARRATOR: And the struggle for the last citadel of German government, for the Reichstag itself claims many more young lives.
SS units defend the Reichstag to the last man.
But on the 30th of April, Soviet troops charge up the steps and burst into the building.
At last, the red flag flies over Berlin, and the death of Nazi Germany is just a breath away.
Hitler is truly vanquished.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: What did the raising of the flag at the Reichstag mean? It was a symbol of victory, the end of the war, and the start of a new life.
NARRATOR: Only the last act remains.
Somewhere, cowering in the ruins of Germany, are Nazi leaders whose fanaticism has terrorized Europe and the world.
But defeat is more than they can bear.
The charred remains of Goebbels.
His wife Magda is also dead.
Before killing themselves, they ordered the family doctor to poison their six children.
Himmler, a British prisoner, chooses suicide.
For many other Nazis and for their families, the end of the Reich means the end of everything.
An epidemic of suicide sweeps Germany.
For those Nazi leaders still alive, incarceration.
GÃring hands himself over to the Americans.
Keitel, DÃnitz, Speer, and of course, Hess all prisoners.
But where is Adolf Hitler? Mikhail Posselsky receives news that Hitler's body has been found at the chancellery.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: We entered the hall on the ground floor.
It was a large conference room.
And in the center was a body covered by what looked like a gray soldier's blanket.
A general ordered the soldiers to lift the blanket, and there was a middle-aged man who looked a lot like Hitler.
He had a mustache, and the parting in his hair was on the right-hand side, which was not common, and a forelock covering his forehead.
He also had a corporal's award in his buttonhole.
At the bridge of his nose, just below his forehead, was an incoming bullet hole, so the nose had shifted and was swollen.
You can see it on the photograph.
And, of course, this distorted his features.
The chief pathologist of the 1st Belorussian Front was called in.
He was a colonel.
He asked for a profile shot of Hitler, which was easy to find in the Reich chancellery.
And he held it up to the dead man's face and started to compare the ears.
I didn't know this, but he explained that ears were like fingerprints.
No two people have an identical pair of ears.
And so he couldn't conclusively determine if this was Hitler or not.
His verdict the body was not Hitler.
After that, they completely removed the blanket, and we saw the whole body.
We noticed that his socks were darned in several places.
This helped prove that it was not him, as Hitler was unlikely to wear darned socks.
Hitler had a butler who looked a lot like him mustache, everything.
Even Hitler said to him, "Shave off your mustache, or people might confuse us one day.
" NARRATOR: But Hitler's remains are found by Soviet troops in Berlin.
He has poisoned Eva Braun and then shot himself, leaving orders for their bodies to be burned in the bunker garden.
Stalin is informed of the discovery by Zhukov but refuses to believe it.
He insists that Hanna Reitsch could have saved the Führer, and he sends Beria to Berlin to investigate events during the bunker's last hours.
The Red Army is still fighting in Czechoslovakia.
But for troops in Berlin, this is a time to honor 300,000 comrades lost in the battle.
Yet, it is also a time for celebration and for relaxation after the grim privations of their trek across Eastern Europe.
They have a chance to rest now, but they are a long way from home, and for most, there will be no swift return.
There will be armies of occupation in Berlin for many years to come.
Germans still alive in Berlin face an existence without hope.
The German tradition of law and order cracks.
They face starvation and homelessness forced to loot and fight for survival.
Drunkenness is a release from crushing defeat, a defeat which brings the horror of rape to thousands of German women.
Berlin stands at a crossroads.
Its citizens, old and new, can only guess which way the future lies.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: What am I? I'm just an ordinary country girl.
I did my 10 years at school, and then when the war started, I went to the front.
I made my way through Ukraine, Crimea, and then up to Berlin.
NARRATOR: Germany's fate lies in the hands of the world's new leaders.
The Reich representatives, now powerless, must bow to their conquerors and perform their final function unconditional surrender.
The ceremonial signing takes place in Berlin's eastern suburb.
Zhukov leads the Ally representatives, followed by Tedder, Eisenhower's British deputy.
Just after midnight on the 9th of May, German capitulation is formalized.
Keitel signs for Germany.
Grim-faced, resigned, he will later be hanged for his crimes.
Victory in Europe, sealed at last.
At a festive banquet, the generals salute their triumph, and Zhukov dances Russkaya though the cameras are sent outside.
For the Red Army and for the Soviet people, festival time.
Even in Stalin's prison communities, the Gulags, they celebrate.
These rare stills show prisoners, some of them former Red Army troops.
Every year, without fail, they will be forced to perform these official memorials to the war with Germany.
The Great Patriotic War is over, but Stalin's war with his own people continues.
In Berlin, as Zhukov inspects his conquests, Stalin turns against the man who brought him victory.
NKVD agents are unleashed to incriminate him.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Abakumov went to Germany on various orders to arrest anyone who could discredit Zhukov in any way.
And Zhukov found out.
He hadn't even introduced himself to Zhukov, even though he was Governor General.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Zhukov summoned him and asked, "On what grounds do you come here without permission to arrest people? If you do not leave tonight, I shall arrest you and send you back under guard.
" [Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: They now started a direct attack against Zhukov.
Air Marshal Novikov and then Zhukov's personal aide, Semochkin, were arrested.
They were beaten until they gave false evidence against him.
Novikov had to claim that Zhukov had organized a plot against Stalin.
And Semochkin had to say that he had been sent to Eisenhower to establish undercover contact.
NARRATOR: Zhukov's treatment of Abakumov will not be forgiven.
He will spend years in Odessa and the Urals with no real military authority.
The long list of less-celebrated generals suffer worse.
This order from the Supreme Soviet dismisses Air Marshal Novikov, strips him of medals and rank, and sends him to prison.
These secret documents recall the arrests of some 40 Soviet generals.
They will not be released until after Stalin's death.
And the file of General Telegin, hero of Berlin.
Beria is informed of his looting allegations against NKVD units.
Telegin's reward a 25-year prison term.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Some people used to take things for themselves.
General Sidnev, chief of NKVD in Berlin, was one.
He knew what to take.
His soldiers found Germany's gold deposits buried in a vault 100 meters below the ground level.
Not the whole deposit, obviously, but a large part of it, and masses of gold things furniture, dishes, jewelry, et cetera.
And that's what he took.
We only found out 50 years later.
He reported at the time to his superior, Serov, the colonel general of the NKVD, and they split it between themselves.
They kept four bags of Reichsmarks, which should have been handed over to the state.
Zhukov had ordered that all valuables taken in conquered territories be handed over to be recorded as trophies of war.
But General Sidnev didn't do that.
He simply ordered that the booty be distributed among our people in the provinces.
NARRATOR: And while NKVD troops plundered Germany's treasures, Berlin's ragged children are playing with guns and its people are starving.
As occupied Germany's Allied control zones come into force, Soviet authorities struggle to feed hungry Berliners.
The Soviet Union cannot spare the food, but Stalin's new regime must appear benevolent.
Livestock are brought into the center of town.
Potatoes are planted.
In future years, it is the Berlin Wall, not potatoes, that will spring up here.
But for now, Red Army soldiers share their meager rations with German children in what has become a city of lost children.
[Speaking German.]
Bereft families can only watch these special news reels and hope.
This family is lucky.
They have found each other.
And this little boy his father.
This boy his mother.
But many more are less fortunate and will be orphans forever.
Children deported from Nazi-occupied territories are returned to their homelands, though many will have no home to go to.
These are Soviet children, traveling home from the Nazi camps in Eastern Europe not only Jews, but Slav children from all parts of the occupied east.
Tattoos on their arms mark them for life, and they face a future of official mistrust.
Though they are victims of Nazism, Stalin views them as tainted by fascism.
And the same suspicion falls on returning Soviet citizens and prisoners of war.
This document shows Stalin's instructions to the State Defense Committee, placing returnees in 100 holding camps.
There, they will face NKVD interrogators, possibly imprisonment.
There is no escape from Stalin, even for exiles.
He invokes prior agreements with the Allies to ensure that émigrés in their hands are returned to his control.
General Krasnov, ataman of the Don Cossacks, has been fighting Bolsheviks since 1918.
His army of 70,000 Cossacks has fought for Germany.
At the end of the war, they surrender to the British, who promise them immunity from Stalin's revenge, but on Stalin's demand, British authorities break that promise.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Soldiers surrounded them and forced them into lorries.
There were about 40, 50 lorries.
They took them to one side of the bridge.
And our detachments were waiting for them on the other side.
They got out of the lorries and crossed the bridge on foot.
Then the wives and the soldiers arrived.
The officers were taken.
They didn't have to walk.
Two tried to throw themselves into the river, but they were stopped.
The English major who had handed them over watched as they were shot by the NKVD.
One of the women clutched her two children, who were only about 3 or 4, and threw herself into the river from the bridge, which was about 80 to 100 meters high.
That's how it was shouts, cries, noise.
Then everyone got into the train, and they were sent away.
NARRATOR: Traitors, their wives, their children, none escape Stalin's bloodlust.
General Vlasov's renegade army, German captives, Soviet prisoners of war, deported Soviet citizens, a torrent of people in one direction.
But as the railways haul Stalin's victims to their fates, the dictator's own train bearing his name is speeding to Germany to meet Allied leaders at Potsdam.
As usual, Beria prepares the ground for his master.
A massive security operation protects Stalin on his journey west.
17,000 troops and NKVD guards line the route.
And Beria personally supervises security at Potsdam.
Molotov is there, too.
But theirs are supporting roles.
Potsdam is Stalin's great stage.
Stalin is at the peak of his power, greeting the Allies with cordial self-confidence.
Negotiations begin with the demilitarization of Germany high on the agenda.
They confirm Germany's occupied zones, crowding them with some six million new Germans, exiles from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, where the communist Lublin government is recognized by the western Allies.
De facto Soviet control over the rest of Eastern Europe is never seriously disputed by Churchill and Truman.
One mystery remains the precise fate of the Führer.
And Stalin will not be drawn into discussing details.
The conference closes, and the leaders smile, but they are moving in opposite directions.
As their differences unfold and an Iron Curtain descends across Europe, politics will impose its own grim order on these happy scenes.
But in 1945, Allied soldiers swap stories and possessions.
Russian men and women date British and Americans.
They go dancing together in Berlin's nightclubs and bars or arrange swimming parties on the lakes outside the city.
Friendly games between East and West are organized on the sports fields.
And it appears to the world that Potsdam has laid the foundation for lasting peace.
On the surface, Germany seems to be a nation free to choose between West and East.
Between capitalism and communism.
As Nazi symbols crumble others emerge in their place.
But this honeymoon between east and west will be over soon.
In just a few years, Stalin's tanks will complete the division of Europe.
How can the people of Eastern Europe know that tyranny yet again seeks their subjection? They cannot see thousands of miles east to Stalin's prison camp on the Kolyma River, one among hundreds of islands of death and distress in the Gulag archipelago.
20 million people went through these camps under the Communist regime.
Four million were shot, at least as many more died from sickness or starvation.
Photographs and bones are all that remain, sad mementos of lives wasted.
But for now, the atrocities of Stalin's camps are concealed from the world.
Yet, those of Hitler's regime are laid bare for all to see.
Ten million people suffered in German death camps.
Perhaps eight million died.
Some three million were Soviet citizens.
Mummified human heads and tattooed human flesh are the reminders forced on German civilians visiting concentration camps after the war.
Those responsible for these appalling crimes are tried by an international tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946.
The celebrated Russian cartoonist Boris Yefimov was at the trials.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: So I made GÃring into a boa, a python coiled in rings.
And that was the way he used to sit.
He had an evil look in his eyes.
They did not take him away during the breaks.
And it was such a pleasure, a sadistic pleasure, to stand the other side of the barrier and stare at him.
He was sitting about the same distance away as you are now from me.
At first, he avoided us, and then he started to look at us.
It was very frightening.
I thought, "Go to hell!" And I could read in that look, "A year ago, I would have got you.
" Now, decades later, you wonder why we didn't have a version of the Nuremberg Trials.
Was Stalin better than Hitler? Were Yezhov and Beria better than Himmler and Kaltenbrunner? Did they kill less people? Did they torture less? NARRATOR: GÃring's suicide cheats the hangman, but seven leading Nazis are executed.
But only now, 50 years later, is it possible to accurately establish Hitler's fate.
Relics and documents buried for decades in Soviet archives and seen here for the first time have recently come to light.
They include Hitler's uniform, his Iron Cross, his Nazi membership badge.
This is his military cap.
This, his first-aid kit.
And the personal effects of those closest to Hitler GÃring's signet ring, Goebbels' orthopedic boot, Magda Goebbels' cigarette case, a gift from Hitler, Goebbels' gun and ampoule of poison, and Magda's.
These are her remains.
Hitler's personal library, including signed work by the infamous Nazi loyalist Robert Lay.
The bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun lie hidden in secret tombs at Magdeburg in Eastern Germany until 1970, when the KGB and orders from Brezhnev and Andropov crush the bones and scatter them over German marshlands.
Only fragments still exist Hitler's teeth and part of his skull, the bullet hole clearly showing.
With the fall of the swastika, this is all that remains of the Führer.
But from Stalin, omnipotent in victory, the world still has much to fear.
[Ominous music.]
NARRATOR: The Thousand Year Reich, Hitler's dark vision.
A rapacious empire built on pomp and pageant and on war.
Now the vision is evaporating, Germany is on its knees, and retribution is at hand.
As 1945 dawns, the sky is literally falling in on the people of Germany.
Massive fleets of British and American heavy bombers pound cities, factories, and oil refineries to rubble.
Sudden death has become a way of life in Germany.
The Nazi edifice is crumbling.
The Luftwaffe, once supreme, is all but powerless to interfere.
Outnumbered six to one, it is short of modern aircraft, pilots, ammunition.
Above all, it desperately lacks fuel.
Yet final defeat will not come from the skies, but over land.
Germany is surrounded.
From every frontier, enemies are marching on the heart of the Vaterland.
In the west, Allied armies cut deep into Germany during the first months of 1945.
They have twice as many men as the Wehrmacht, four times as many tanks.
And they are infinitely better-supplied.
But Hitler is sending his last reserves east in a desperate attempt to stave off an even more deadly foe The Red Army already sweeping through Eastern Europe.
By mid March, the Red Army has seized most of the Baltic coast.
And it has smashed its way through Nazi-occupied Poland.
Wehrmacht troops, loyal for so long, are surrendering in their thousands as Soviet forces press hard against the German frontier.
A sign marks the spot.
"This is a cursed Germany.
" The scene is set for one last great Soviet drive west to Berlin.
As the Red Army storms towards the capital, it liberates Soviet citizens captured by the Nazis for slave labor.
And it frees surviving victims of the concentration camps.
The experience leaves Stalin's troops hungry for revenge.
They've reconquered lands blighted by Hitler's wildest experiments in genocide.
They've been to Auschwitz, where millions of mutilated corpses cry silently for vengeance.
Hatred of the Reich needs little encouragement at the front.
Hitler knows he is surrounded.
[Speaking German.]
As giant pincers close around him, he orders the defense of Berlin to the last German.
Old men, women, and children prepare for a desperate fight against hopeless odds.
Yet at the same time, Hitler orders a scorched-earth policy the destruction of mines, power stations, water supplies, anything that might sustain life for survivors.
It is his final betrayal of the German people, a people who remain astonishingly loyal in the face of certain defeat.
In his madness, Hitler believes that they have failed his vision.
This is his revenge for what he calls their treachery though even now they are willing to die for him.
Boys of the Hitler Youth ready themselves for battle innocence devoured by evil.
Ordinary people still cheer Hitler's armies, but what else can they do? These troops are all that stand between Germany and Armageddon.
By late March, the western Allies are across the Rhine, and beyond that great natural barrier, Germany lies almost undefended.
As the German army's will to fight at last begins to slip away, soldiers and civilians flee west.
Better by far to seek mercy from the British and Americans than at the hands of Stalin's avengers.
Goebbels' propaganda has shown them what to expect from Stalin.
They know that the Red Army is seeking vengeance for Hitler's atrocities in the east.
But even in the west, British and Americans exact full retribution for SS crimes.
Ally troops escort a prisoner who has informed against camp guards.
His identity is concealed.
Fear of the Nazis will not die overnight.
Yet even now, the Führer is juggling improbable strategies for victory.
He refuses to believe that his country lies in mortal peril.
Insanely, he's convinced that massive counteroffensives in the east can still bring victory.
But the armies to carry them out exist only in his imagination.
And the Red Army is coming to shatter his illusions.
Its great assault on Berlin is about to begin.
Marshal Zhukov, never defeated in battle, will command Soviet forces.
He is the Soviet Union's greatest military hero.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: He was the only one who could talk to Stalin without constraints.
If Stalin was not right, say about some military issue or whatever, he was the only one who could discuss it with him or argue with him.
NARRATOR: At the beginning of April, Stalin and Zhukov meet in Moscow, preparing the final blow against Hitler.
INTERPRETER: I was there when they were walking in the Kremlin.
Stalin used to keep a step behind, and he put his arm around Zhukov, and he said to him, "You are my Suvorov," the great general who defeated Napoleon and never lost a battle.
NARRATOR: But Stalin's paranoia and his mistrust of generals means that Zhukov can enter the Kremlin a Marshal and leave moments later under arrest.
And Zhukov is a prime candidate for such treatment.
His uncompromising character and hints of independence have been known to prompt displeasure, even rage, in Stalin.
The dictator knows that in this, the Soviet Union's vital hour of decision, he must have his most brilliant commander at his side.
Nevertheless, as Zhukov prepares to take Berlin, NKVD agents are watching him.
INTERPRETER: Abakumov, Beria, Kabulov, and Merkulov started to collect evidence against Zhukov after Khalkhin-Gol.
They tried even harder after he became commander of Kiev Military Region and then head of general headquarters.
They started filling the dossier against him at exactly that time.
They followed everyone, and any little incident, however minor, was added to the file.
But Stalin's secret files are for later.
Zhukov is safe for now, at least until Germany is beaten.
The night of the 15th of April.
22,000 heavy guns announce the Red Army's offensive east of the German capital.
Stalin claims he has six million men against less than a million armed remnants of every unit the Reich can muster.
In the south, Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front breaks through at once to sweep around Berlin.
In the north, Rokossovsky's 2nd Belorussian Front overcomes difficult terrain to take Mecklenburg.
And in the center, Zhukov's great host grinds inexorably west towards a ruined Berlin still reeling under incessant air attack.
On the 19th of April, Soviet troops reach the Berlin suburbs.
Now it is street fighting, house by house, every one a natural redoubt for desperate defenders.
Casualties mount.
Resistance stiffens, but the Soviet armies cannot be halted now.
Hitler's Reich has been pierced to the heart.
The apartments of high-ranking Nazi officials now lying directly in the path of Stalin's vengeful armies are shaken by the battle.
Those who have prospered by Hitler's promises face the collapse of all they have believed in.
Yet Hitler still lives.
Prowling the bunker, he gloats over his photograph albums, celebrations of past glories.
While his people pay the price of defeat, he celebrates the death of Roosevelt as a portent of victory and imagines the imminent outbreak of war between the Allies.
On the 25th of April, southern units of Konev's front make contact with United States forces at the Elbe.
No hint of future tensions here.
With these happy scenes, Hitler's last fantasy evaporates.
Commanders with Konev's and Patton's armies hold a banquet to celebrate their momentous meeting.
Steak and a special victory cake are on the menu, washed down with champagne and followed by toasts.
Whiskey meets vodka.
Now, as Soviet forces converge on the center of Berlin, the fighting embraces everything and everyone in the battle zone.
But even now, Hitler has one guardian angel, fighter pilot Hanna Reitsch.
The only woman to receive an Iron Cross in the Second World War, she is utterly devoted to the Führer.
On the 29th of April, she pilots her light aircraft into the heart of Berlin.
Touching down on the Unter den Linden, she makes the perilous journey through the mayhem of battle to Hitler's bunker where he waits the end, comforted by a few treasured possessions pictures of himself, reminders of better days, and his family tree.
Hanna Reitsch is Hitler's last chance to escape, but he will not leave.
Preferring to cling to the past, he chooses to meet his destiny in Berlin.
Next day, the last day of April, the Führer marries Eva Braun.
She will share his chosen fate.
But for the defenders in the streets, there is only one choice left to make between surrender and death.
Many are giving up the fight, but pockets of fanatical resistance remain.
And in this final battle for Berlin, so close to the end, many on both sides will be struck down and tens of thousands will die.
General Oustugov commanded a Red Army battalion through the battle.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: We launched the outer-Berlin offensive on April the 16th and ruptured the enemy defense.
I cannot remember eating or sleeping, but I remember every detail of the combat operations.
Everybody does, because it was one of the final battles and because we paid dearly for it.
In the second battalion, only two soldiers survived, and no one from the third.
All the reinforcements were youngsters who had grown up in occupation, kids who'd been taken by force over here and had grown up in German territory.
Field-recruiting officers drafted them and sent them straight to us, untrained.
That's what I remember them lined up, our last formation.
The battalion had no more than 70 people, including liberated prisoners of war.
They were easy to spot.
They didn't have full uniforms.
They might have a cap and tunics with civilian trousers or the other way around.
They couldn't fight in their prison clothes.
And there were youngsters who were only 15 or 16 when they were sent.
In 1944, we started drafting at 17, and they rarely had uniforms.
They were trained there and then how to load automatic rifles, how to throw a grenade.
Can you imagine what price we had to pay for those final battles? NARRATOR: And the struggle for the last citadel of German government, for the Reichstag itself claims many more young lives.
SS units defend the Reichstag to the last man.
But on the 30th of April, Soviet troops charge up the steps and burst into the building.
At last, the red flag flies over Berlin, and the death of Nazi Germany is just a breath away.
Hitler is truly vanquished.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: What did the raising of the flag at the Reichstag mean? It was a symbol of victory, the end of the war, and the start of a new life.
NARRATOR: Only the last act remains.
Somewhere, cowering in the ruins of Germany, are Nazi leaders whose fanaticism has terrorized Europe and the world.
But defeat is more than they can bear.
The charred remains of Goebbels.
His wife Magda is also dead.
Before killing themselves, they ordered the family doctor to poison their six children.
Himmler, a British prisoner, chooses suicide.
For many other Nazis and for their families, the end of the Reich means the end of everything.
An epidemic of suicide sweeps Germany.
For those Nazi leaders still alive, incarceration.
GÃring hands himself over to the Americans.
Keitel, DÃnitz, Speer, and of course, Hess all prisoners.
But where is Adolf Hitler? Mikhail Posselsky receives news that Hitler's body has been found at the chancellery.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: We entered the hall on the ground floor.
It was a large conference room.
And in the center was a body covered by what looked like a gray soldier's blanket.
A general ordered the soldiers to lift the blanket, and there was a middle-aged man who looked a lot like Hitler.
He had a mustache, and the parting in his hair was on the right-hand side, which was not common, and a forelock covering his forehead.
He also had a corporal's award in his buttonhole.
At the bridge of his nose, just below his forehead, was an incoming bullet hole, so the nose had shifted and was swollen.
You can see it on the photograph.
And, of course, this distorted his features.
The chief pathologist of the 1st Belorussian Front was called in.
He was a colonel.
He asked for a profile shot of Hitler, which was easy to find in the Reich chancellery.
And he held it up to the dead man's face and started to compare the ears.
I didn't know this, but he explained that ears were like fingerprints.
No two people have an identical pair of ears.
And so he couldn't conclusively determine if this was Hitler or not.
His verdict the body was not Hitler.
After that, they completely removed the blanket, and we saw the whole body.
We noticed that his socks were darned in several places.
This helped prove that it was not him, as Hitler was unlikely to wear darned socks.
Hitler had a butler who looked a lot like him mustache, everything.
Even Hitler said to him, "Shave off your mustache, or people might confuse us one day.
" NARRATOR: But Hitler's remains are found by Soviet troops in Berlin.
He has poisoned Eva Braun and then shot himself, leaving orders for their bodies to be burned in the bunker garden.
Stalin is informed of the discovery by Zhukov but refuses to believe it.
He insists that Hanna Reitsch could have saved the Führer, and he sends Beria to Berlin to investigate events during the bunker's last hours.
The Red Army is still fighting in Czechoslovakia.
But for troops in Berlin, this is a time to honor 300,000 comrades lost in the battle.
Yet, it is also a time for celebration and for relaxation after the grim privations of their trek across Eastern Europe.
They have a chance to rest now, but they are a long way from home, and for most, there will be no swift return.
There will be armies of occupation in Berlin for many years to come.
Germans still alive in Berlin face an existence without hope.
The German tradition of law and order cracks.
They face starvation and homelessness forced to loot and fight for survival.
Drunkenness is a release from crushing defeat, a defeat which brings the horror of rape to thousands of German women.
Berlin stands at a crossroads.
Its citizens, old and new, can only guess which way the future lies.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: What am I? I'm just an ordinary country girl.
I did my 10 years at school, and then when the war started, I went to the front.
I made my way through Ukraine, Crimea, and then up to Berlin.
NARRATOR: Germany's fate lies in the hands of the world's new leaders.
The Reich representatives, now powerless, must bow to their conquerors and perform their final function unconditional surrender.
The ceremonial signing takes place in Berlin's eastern suburb.
Zhukov leads the Ally representatives, followed by Tedder, Eisenhower's British deputy.
Just after midnight on the 9th of May, German capitulation is formalized.
Keitel signs for Germany.
Grim-faced, resigned, he will later be hanged for his crimes.
Victory in Europe, sealed at last.
At a festive banquet, the generals salute their triumph, and Zhukov dances Russkaya though the cameras are sent outside.
For the Red Army and for the Soviet people, festival time.
Even in Stalin's prison communities, the Gulags, they celebrate.
These rare stills show prisoners, some of them former Red Army troops.
Every year, without fail, they will be forced to perform these official memorials to the war with Germany.
The Great Patriotic War is over, but Stalin's war with his own people continues.
In Berlin, as Zhukov inspects his conquests, Stalin turns against the man who brought him victory.
NKVD agents are unleashed to incriminate him.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Abakumov went to Germany on various orders to arrest anyone who could discredit Zhukov in any way.
And Zhukov found out.
He hadn't even introduced himself to Zhukov, even though he was Governor General.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Zhukov summoned him and asked, "On what grounds do you come here without permission to arrest people? If you do not leave tonight, I shall arrest you and send you back under guard.
" [Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: They now started a direct attack against Zhukov.
Air Marshal Novikov and then Zhukov's personal aide, Semochkin, were arrested.
They were beaten until they gave false evidence against him.
Novikov had to claim that Zhukov had organized a plot against Stalin.
And Semochkin had to say that he had been sent to Eisenhower to establish undercover contact.
NARRATOR: Zhukov's treatment of Abakumov will not be forgiven.
He will spend years in Odessa and the Urals with no real military authority.
The long list of less-celebrated generals suffer worse.
This order from the Supreme Soviet dismisses Air Marshal Novikov, strips him of medals and rank, and sends him to prison.
These secret documents recall the arrests of some 40 Soviet generals.
They will not be released until after Stalin's death.
And the file of General Telegin, hero of Berlin.
Beria is informed of his looting allegations against NKVD units.
Telegin's reward a 25-year prison term.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Some people used to take things for themselves.
General Sidnev, chief of NKVD in Berlin, was one.
He knew what to take.
His soldiers found Germany's gold deposits buried in a vault 100 meters below the ground level.
Not the whole deposit, obviously, but a large part of it, and masses of gold things furniture, dishes, jewelry, et cetera.
And that's what he took.
We only found out 50 years later.
He reported at the time to his superior, Serov, the colonel general of the NKVD, and they split it between themselves.
They kept four bags of Reichsmarks, which should have been handed over to the state.
Zhukov had ordered that all valuables taken in conquered territories be handed over to be recorded as trophies of war.
But General Sidnev didn't do that.
He simply ordered that the booty be distributed among our people in the provinces.
NARRATOR: And while NKVD troops plundered Germany's treasures, Berlin's ragged children are playing with guns and its people are starving.
As occupied Germany's Allied control zones come into force, Soviet authorities struggle to feed hungry Berliners.
The Soviet Union cannot spare the food, but Stalin's new regime must appear benevolent.
Livestock are brought into the center of town.
Potatoes are planted.
In future years, it is the Berlin Wall, not potatoes, that will spring up here.
But for now, Red Army soldiers share their meager rations with German children in what has become a city of lost children.
[Speaking German.]
Bereft families can only watch these special news reels and hope.
This family is lucky.
They have found each other.
And this little boy his father.
This boy his mother.
But many more are less fortunate and will be orphans forever.
Children deported from Nazi-occupied territories are returned to their homelands, though many will have no home to go to.
These are Soviet children, traveling home from the Nazi camps in Eastern Europe not only Jews, but Slav children from all parts of the occupied east.
Tattoos on their arms mark them for life, and they face a future of official mistrust.
Though they are victims of Nazism, Stalin views them as tainted by fascism.
And the same suspicion falls on returning Soviet citizens and prisoners of war.
This document shows Stalin's instructions to the State Defense Committee, placing returnees in 100 holding camps.
There, they will face NKVD interrogators, possibly imprisonment.
There is no escape from Stalin, even for exiles.
He invokes prior agreements with the Allies to ensure that émigrés in their hands are returned to his control.
General Krasnov, ataman of the Don Cossacks, has been fighting Bolsheviks since 1918.
His army of 70,000 Cossacks has fought for Germany.
At the end of the war, they surrender to the British, who promise them immunity from Stalin's revenge, but on Stalin's demand, British authorities break that promise.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: Soldiers surrounded them and forced them into lorries.
There were about 40, 50 lorries.
They took them to one side of the bridge.
And our detachments were waiting for them on the other side.
They got out of the lorries and crossed the bridge on foot.
Then the wives and the soldiers arrived.
The officers were taken.
They didn't have to walk.
Two tried to throw themselves into the river, but they were stopped.
The English major who had handed them over watched as they were shot by the NKVD.
One of the women clutched her two children, who were only about 3 or 4, and threw herself into the river from the bridge, which was about 80 to 100 meters high.
That's how it was shouts, cries, noise.
Then everyone got into the train, and they were sent away.
NARRATOR: Traitors, their wives, their children, none escape Stalin's bloodlust.
General Vlasov's renegade army, German captives, Soviet prisoners of war, deported Soviet citizens, a torrent of people in one direction.
But as the railways haul Stalin's victims to their fates, the dictator's own train bearing his name is speeding to Germany to meet Allied leaders at Potsdam.
As usual, Beria prepares the ground for his master.
A massive security operation protects Stalin on his journey west.
17,000 troops and NKVD guards line the route.
And Beria personally supervises security at Potsdam.
Molotov is there, too.
But theirs are supporting roles.
Potsdam is Stalin's great stage.
Stalin is at the peak of his power, greeting the Allies with cordial self-confidence.
Negotiations begin with the demilitarization of Germany high on the agenda.
They confirm Germany's occupied zones, crowding them with some six million new Germans, exiles from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, where the communist Lublin government is recognized by the western Allies.
De facto Soviet control over the rest of Eastern Europe is never seriously disputed by Churchill and Truman.
One mystery remains the precise fate of the Führer.
And Stalin will not be drawn into discussing details.
The conference closes, and the leaders smile, but they are moving in opposite directions.
As their differences unfold and an Iron Curtain descends across Europe, politics will impose its own grim order on these happy scenes.
But in 1945, Allied soldiers swap stories and possessions.
Russian men and women date British and Americans.
They go dancing together in Berlin's nightclubs and bars or arrange swimming parties on the lakes outside the city.
Friendly games between East and West are organized on the sports fields.
And it appears to the world that Potsdam has laid the foundation for lasting peace.
On the surface, Germany seems to be a nation free to choose between West and East.
Between capitalism and communism.
As Nazi symbols crumble others emerge in their place.
But this honeymoon between east and west will be over soon.
In just a few years, Stalin's tanks will complete the division of Europe.
How can the people of Eastern Europe know that tyranny yet again seeks their subjection? They cannot see thousands of miles east to Stalin's prison camp on the Kolyma River, one among hundreds of islands of death and distress in the Gulag archipelago.
20 million people went through these camps under the Communist regime.
Four million were shot, at least as many more died from sickness or starvation.
Photographs and bones are all that remain, sad mementos of lives wasted.
But for now, the atrocities of Stalin's camps are concealed from the world.
Yet, those of Hitler's regime are laid bare for all to see.
Ten million people suffered in German death camps.
Perhaps eight million died.
Some three million were Soviet citizens.
Mummified human heads and tattooed human flesh are the reminders forced on German civilians visiting concentration camps after the war.
Those responsible for these appalling crimes are tried by an international tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946.
The celebrated Russian cartoonist Boris Yefimov was at the trials.
[Speaking Russian.]
INTERPRETER: So I made GÃring into a boa, a python coiled in rings.
And that was the way he used to sit.
He had an evil look in his eyes.
They did not take him away during the breaks.
And it was such a pleasure, a sadistic pleasure, to stand the other side of the barrier and stare at him.
He was sitting about the same distance away as you are now from me.
At first, he avoided us, and then he started to look at us.
It was very frightening.
I thought, "Go to hell!" And I could read in that look, "A year ago, I would have got you.
" Now, decades later, you wonder why we didn't have a version of the Nuremberg Trials.
Was Stalin better than Hitler? Were Yezhov and Beria better than Himmler and Kaltenbrunner? Did they kill less people? Did they torture less? NARRATOR: GÃring's suicide cheats the hangman, but seven leading Nazis are executed.
But only now, 50 years later, is it possible to accurately establish Hitler's fate.
Relics and documents buried for decades in Soviet archives and seen here for the first time have recently come to light.
They include Hitler's uniform, his Iron Cross, his Nazi membership badge.
This is his military cap.
This, his first-aid kit.
And the personal effects of those closest to Hitler GÃring's signet ring, Goebbels' orthopedic boot, Magda Goebbels' cigarette case, a gift from Hitler, Goebbels' gun and ampoule of poison, and Magda's.
These are her remains.
Hitler's personal library, including signed work by the infamous Nazi loyalist Robert Lay.
The bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun lie hidden in secret tombs at Magdeburg in Eastern Germany until 1970, when the KGB and orders from Brezhnev and Andropov crush the bones and scatter them over German marshlands.
Only fragments still exist Hitler's teeth and part of his skull, the bullet hole clearly showing.
With the fall of the swastika, this is all that remains of the Führer.
But from Stalin, omnipotent in victory, the world still has much to fear.