Rise of the Nazis (2019) s02e01 Episode Script

1
Hitler decides to make
a private sightseeing trip to Paris
on 23rd June 1940,
when Paris is occupied and
controlled by the German forces.
They tour the Arc de Triomphe,
they walk around the artists'
quarter in Montmartre.
Hitler says he'd thought of
razing Paris to the ground,
but now he realises that he can
build a much bigger
and better city in Berlin.
And they go to Napoleon's tomb
where Hitler pays his respects
to the previous conqueror of Europe.
Hitler stands for a long while in
front of Napoleon's sarcophagus.
It's reported he tells
his entourage,
"That was the greatest and
finest moment of my life."
He's paying his respects
to Napoleon, but also, I think,
declaring privately to
himself that he's going
to surpass his achievements.
Napoleon Bonaparte had once
tried to conquer the world,
but his armies got stuck
in the harsh Russian winter.
This is the story of the Eastern
Front of the Second World War,
which many see as
its defining conflict.
It was a campaign that saw some
of the most brutal and inhumane
warfare in all of history.
Our interest is the
psychology of that war
What is the enemy up to?
Can you deceive him?
the minds of dictators and the
morality of those around them.
For him, no building is high enough
and no hall is long enough.
And this is exactly
what Hitler wanted.
To tell this story, we've asked
some of the world's most eminent
historians and experts with
different kinds of insight
to each take us inside the mind
of one of the key protagonists.
He wants to be the architect
of Germany's reality,
in some ways, the only truth teller.
Nazi rule relies
on quiet complicity.
Ultimately, it's a study of
why dictatorships are flawed
and how those who rule through fear
and terror can never trust even
the people closest to them.
He'll then lose everything and
bring Germany down with him.
For years, Hitler's mind
has been full of the poison
of anti-Semitism.
Falsely believing
in German racial supremacy,
he wants to eliminate all Jews
and other races
he considers inferior.
And he dreams of world domination.
So far, he's taken a number of huge
gambles, and they've all paid off.
He marched into
Austria unchallenged.
He thought he could annexe
Czechoslovakia and get away with it.
And he was right.
Then he made a deal with Stalin
to invade Poland,
and his tanks reached
Warsaw within a week.
And then he invaded France.
Now, it's July 1940.
He rules most of Europe
and the German people love him.
In the summer of 1940,
Hitler thinks, "I'm the supreme
general, I'm the supreme leader,
"I'm invincible."
This is the high point of
Hitler's national popularity.
People had doubts before,
there had been some opposition,
some misgivings.
But all this was swept away
in the summer of 1940.
And so he comes to believe
ever more strongly
in his own invincibility.
Now, Hitler is about to make
a decision that will determine
the outcome of the war.
What to do about the
Soviet Union
and its dictator, Joseph Stalin?
Hitler in some ways admires Stalin.
He says he's a kind of a monster.
But of course, he admires him
as a strong leader.
So it's a kind of love-hate
relationship.
Meanwhile, in Moscow,
Stalin is trying to work out
what he makes of Hitler.
Stalin, ruthless dictator,
didn't hesitate to eliminate
opposition, didn't hesitate to send
millions of people to die.
It's recorded that Stalin had very
high opinion about
the Night of the Long Knives,
Hitler's ruthlessness.
And of course, in 1940, Stalin
admires Hitler because he succeeded
in destroying France and
almost bringing England
on her knees.
It's a very special love story.
This is not
liking or not liking.
If Hitler's standing in the way
of Stalin's dream
of global dominance, so he should
find the most effective way
of eliminating Hitler.
And so you have two dictators,
both dreaming of world domination.
So far, they have collaborated,
working together to carve up Poland,
and it's at this point Hitler
offers Stalin a deal
to split the world between them.
Stalin was very opportunistic,
not limited by any
even ideological barriers.
Allying with Hitler?
If it works - perfect.
But Stalin has to work out
if Hitler can be trusted.
So he sends his Foreign Minister
to Berlin to find out.
No 5, Allegro by Johannes Brahms
Molotov is a party official.
He was loyal, and that meant that he
behaved very brutally indeed.
For somebody who seemed to have
such authority and such power,
he looked, you know, very sort of
modest and low-key.
The German people that he met
talked about him
as a mathematics professor.
That was probably quite
complimentary, really.
Lenin, of course, had called him
the best filing clerk in Russia.
He's thinking, "How do I get into
the mind of somebody like Hitler?
"What will be the objectives
for Hitler and the German side?"
He arrives at the Reich Chancellery.
The whole point about the Reich
Chancellery is project the power
of Hitler, the power of the Reich.
Walking down the long,
grand corridors
then coming up
to the Fuhrer's study,
and then you walk in, you,
the small man in the ordinary suit,
you walk in and then the Fuhrer's
desk is right at the other end.
Molotov has a long history of
regarding the fascists as the enemy.
Hitler makes these very grand
general statements about friendship
and alliance and so on.
He's flattering, he's charming.
That works a lot of the time.
This is a game that Hitler
has played before,
toying with other world leaders
before deceiving them.
He even signed a peace deal
with the British Prime Minister,
and now they're at war.
Hitler starts by outlining his deal,
offering Molotov large swathes
of the British Empire,
the Middle East and India.
He's polite, calm
and insists on answers
to his questions.
How are Soviet security interests
in Europe, which is what really
matters to them, how are
they going to be protected?
A lot of what Hitler was thinking
about was fantasy,
increasingly so.
His grand geopolitical visions of
distributing bits of the world
here and there,
this is the kind of behaviour
that you get with these dictators.
Molotov repeats the questions
and persists with the questions.
"What does that actually mean
for the Soviet Union?"
Hitler gets very irritated
by Molotov.
The state of mind he was in
the summer of 1940,
supreme, as he thinks, in Europe,
and then here's this little man
in this dingy suit
arguing the toss with him.
He doesn't like this at all.
Hitler becomes increasingly
furious with Molotov
and abruptly ends the meeting.
That evening, a banquet
has been arranged.
Still smarting,
Hitler is nowhere to be seen.
So Molotov rubbed shoulders
with the Nazi Foreign Minister,
Ribbentrop, until their dinner
is interrupted by an air-raid siren.
Molotov and Ribbentrop
continue their negotiations
in an air-raid shelter.
There is a discussion, and of
course, the basic point is,
is the British Empire
available now to be carved up?
There's big talk from Ribbentrop
and he says,
"Well, Britain is defeated."
And of course, that famously brings
forward the comment,
well, if Britain is defeated,
why are we in this air-raid shelter
and why are these bombs going off?
Molotov concludes after his time
in Berlin that the Germans
have got their hands full dealing
with the British
and do not pose an immediate threat.
Hitler comes to a
very different conclusion.
That it's time to invade.
It was always Hitler's long-term aim
to invade the Soviet Union.
The failure of the negotiations
with Molotov did confirm him
in his belief that this is the right
thing to do and to start making
preparations for it.
Hitler is planning to launch
Operation Barbarossa,
sending three million soldiers
into battle
one army to invade the north,
one to the south
and one tasked with going
all the way to Moscow.
The invasion of the Soviet Union
is really the first major move
that Hitler has made to
fulfill the ambitions he laid down
in Mein Kampf and that
he'd been harbouring since he
went into politics,
the creation of what he called a
living space in Eastern Europe.
And from that point of view,
the invasion of Poland
or Czechoslovakia,
these were just little kind of
preparatory essays.
This is the really big one.
The man Hitler needs to launch
this invasion is the head
of the German army,
Field Marshal von Brauchitsch.
Walther von Brauchitsch,
the absolutely quintessential
Prussian officer.
Von Brauchitsch, he's got very grave
doubts about opening up a war
on two fronts, a great deal
of consternation,
a great deal of doubt.
What if this goes wrong?
Brauchitsch epitomises
the great, vast tug-of-war
going on in the minds of all
of those generals there
as to the wisdom of
taking on the Soviets.
Hitler's spelling out the
most ambitious, the biggest,
the most dramatic invasion plan
in history.
It's on an enormous scale.
So he's offering them, in a way, to
participate in leading positions
in what is inevitably going to be
an extremely famous invasion.
So he's appealing to
their vanity, in a sense.
Brauchitsch is in this terrible
dilemma, because although
he dislikes this, although he would
want to push back, he doesn't dare.
This would be career suicide,
if not worse.
Hitler had a number of ways
of securing the loyalty
of the leading generals,
and in particular,
he would dole out titles like
Field Marshal, for example.
And also by, you might say,
outright bribery and corruption.
Bribery going upwards through
the system and corruption coming
down plays an ever bigger role,
and that's true in any dictatorship.
When Brauchitsch wanted to leave his
wife to marry a younger woman,
Hitler personally lent him 80,000
Reichsmarks to pay for the divorce.
In the Faustian bargain,
it was Faust gave away his soul.
And Brauchitsch in a way makes
that Faustian bargain with Hitler.
So although the man in charge
of the biggest invasion force
in history has doubts,
Hitler believes that the army
is at his heel and fast-tracks
his plans for Barbarossa.
Kann die Liebe Sunde sein?
Auch wenn sie es war'
So war's mir egal
Lieber will ich sundigen mal ♪
In Berlin, life continues as normal.
Niemals werde ich bereuen ♪
The only people that know about
the planned invasion
are those inside the Nazi regime
like this man, Harro Schulze-Boysen,
who works inside the Air Ministry,
where he begins to see
Hitler's attack plans.
Harro Schulze-Boysen is born into a
very prominent German naval family.
He's very tall, very lean,
has these chiselled Nordic features,
which the Nazis considered kind of
the ideal physical framework.
Harro's wife, Libertas, is also part
of the Nazi machine
working for Goebbels'
Propaganda Ministry.
But Harro and Libertas
are not what they seem.
Harro and Libertas are both
working for Nazi agencies,
but they both intentionally took
these positions in order to gather
intelligence from the inside
and share it with people
who could work against the Nazis.
While most Germans either endorse
the regime or stay silent,
Harro and Libertas have joined
one of the few resistance
networks in Germany.
As a student, Harro's Jewish friend
was murdered at the hands
of Nazi stormtroopers.
What he says at that point is
that he's not going to respond
at the moment.
He basically says revenge
is a dish best eaten cold.
And that's the beginning
of his plans to infiltrate
the Nazi military hierarchy.
Some of the things he sees
are reports on air reconnaissance.
Some of the things he sees
are planning documents.
He is able to find out
what the order of battle is.
He is able to find out
a lot about the forces
designated for the invasion.
So he makes contact
with the Soviets.
Harro was aware
that Stalin was an abusive dictator.
It was never a matter of Harro
serving Stalin
or promoting Stalin's interests in
Germany, it was a matter of rescuing
Germany from Hitler.
Harro can see clearly in military
terms how Hitler can be quickly
defeated, and potentially
millions of lives can be saved.
Harro meets with a Soviet spy
and offers to become
their man on the inside,
giving them the details
of Hitler's attack plans.
He's assigned a code name,
the Russian word for sergeant -
Starshina.
But Stalin has a vast
espionage network.
He has eyes and ears everywhere
at the heart of governments
across the world
from the Japanese cabinet
to the pillars of the
British establishment,
and now inside
the German Air Ministry.
So Harro's voice
is just one of many.
Meanwhile, Hitler is preparing
for Operation Barbarossa.
He needs to move a vast army
of three million men
to the Soviet border.
And he has to do this
right under the noses
of the watching Soviet generals.
Symphony No.7 in A major
op.92 - Il Allegretto by Beethoven
Georgy Zhukov, he was one
of the leading Soviet generals.
He would probably himself say,
"What do you mean, 'One of'?
I am the leading Soviet general."
He was not without some vanity.
Zhukov clearly is
very concerned of German capability,
of German deployments,
and there was this huge
build-up of German military power
along the border.
Hitler has been busy working
on a way to deceive Stalin.
Hitler had a very good eye
for the weaknesses of his opponents.
Stalin was a very suspicious kind
of man, he was prone to conspiracy
theories, and that, of course, means
that you can supply Stalin
with many kinds of information
and misinformation
that he will believe.
Hitler orders his spies to pump out
conspiracy theories that other
nations are plotting against Russia,
and spreads rumours that Germany
is going to attack Britain,
and a smokescreen that troops
on the Soviet border are really
just carrying out exercises,
preparing for the invasion
of Britain.
The run-up to Barbarossa
is almost a kaleidoscope
of information
which keeps changing.
Clever intelligence.
The Germans were quite good
at deception.
Stalin relies on
what to me is
a fairly transparent lie from Berlin
that these assembly of forces
is just retraining,
they're on exercise.
They're on exercise in preparation
for the real thing.
Zhukov now does something
that few others dare.
He tells Stalin something
he doesn't want to hear.
I'm sure going through his head
would have been,
"If I get this wrong,
it's Siberia at best."
Zhukov is a patriot.
Yes, he was a Communist,
but he was a patriot.
And therefore he would, I'm sure,
have been motivated
by a patriotic stance
that we have to do everything
we can to stop the Germans.
Zhukov is saying,
"I have this intelligence,
"it's hard intelligence that the
Germans are going to attack."
And Stalin says,
"I have my own intelligence,"
discounting a warning which any,
any leader would have surely taken
utterly seriously
because the stakes
were unbelievably high.
Now, whether that was because
he really, really thought
this would not happen
or Stalin found the prospect
of a German invasion so awful,
he closed his mind down to it.
So Stalin makes no serious
preparations for a German attack.
The whole story is very mysterious
because it's this
That's what I learned
in my school in the Soviet Union.
That's what we learned
from Soviet textbooks
and from the movies, that
there was so much intelligence
and Stalin ignored it,
Stalin ignored it,
and because he trusted Hitler.
No, Stalin didn't trust Hitler,
Stalin didn't trust anybody.
There's only one
rational explanation.
Stalin didn't care because
he was also preparing to attack.
German invasion was inevitable.
They know there were four
million soldiers or so
across the border.
You don't bring four million people
at the border.
And do we believe Stalin
could buy Hitler's story
that he had them there just to take
a rest before invasion of England?
Come on, it's just
It doesn't fly.
So either Stalin doesn't believe
Hitler is about to attack
or he is preparing
an attack of his own.
Either way,
virtually nothing is done.
What Hitler is planning
is not a normal invasion.
This is something far darker
even than normal warfare.
At a meeting with his generals,
he outlines his vision
for Barbarossa.
Hitler tells them this is
a war like no other,
this is not a conventional war.
This is a war between the races
for racial supremacy.
It's a clash in which there
must be no consideration
at all for the conventional
rules of warfare.
The man on the other side
is not your comrade.
He is someone who has
got to be exterminated.
There must be no mercy.
It must be absolutely ruthless.
He believes this is going
to be a war of conquest above all
of Eastern Europe and of course,
a war,
and this is the most important core
belief of Hitler, against the Jews.
To be told you're going to be
involved in a war of annihilation,
there's absolutely no pretence
about the fact that this is going
to be a war about the mass murder
of innocent civilians and human
beings who have absolutely nothing
to do with this ideological fight
between Hitler and Stalin.
This becomes a tremendous burden
for Brauchitsch.
All of a sudden it becomes clear
just what road they've
started to go down.
Around the room, there is silence.
No-one utters any objections
to Hitler's plans.
Brauchitsch's reaction is to,
in a way, put his head in the sand,
the way a lot of them do.
He wants to think in terms
of the military.
He wants to think in terms of, OK,
where are my divisions
going to be going?
What about supplies and provisions?
What about weapons,
ammunition, fuel?
These are the nice sort of rather,
if you will, safe questions
that the military can
busy themselves with.
It's a way of creating
your own sort of moral bubble.
As if to ease his conscience,
Brauchitsch makes insignificant
tweaks to Hitler's orders,
but ultimately signs off
on commands giving carte blanche to
kill anyone, including civilians.
He coordinates with Himmler's
SS death squads,
who follow behind the German army,
murdering Jews in the name
of security.
Brauchitsch is not the man
pulling the trigger,
but the crimes that are going to be
committed are so horrific
that just by being such an
important cog in the wheel
of Hitler's machine
makes him complicit.
Over three million troops
are now stationed
along 1,100 miles
of Soviet border.
In just under a week,
they will attack.
With so many lives at stake,
much is resting
on Harro Schulze-Boysen's
covert intelligence.
I think about the story of Cassandra
in Ancient Greece
and the way she saw
disaster on the horizon,
and she desperately tried to tell
everyone what was coming.
And if she could only warn them,
maybe she could avoid the disaster.
That's Harro. Harro sees
the disaster on the horizon.
He sees how it's going to unfold
and the tragedy that
it's going to entail.
On June 17th, a report was
sent quoting Starshina.
This lands on Stalin's desk.
He takes his pencil and he scrawls,
"This is not information,
"this is disinformation,
you can send your so-called source
"back to his whore of a mother."
A lot of authoritarian figures,
they disregard intelligence,
they disregard expertise,
they disregard the educated people
around them, and they go
by their instincts and they go,
to some extent, by their cronies,
who know how to tell them
what they want to hear.
You see this repeated in history
time and time again.
And sooner or later, those
qualities catch up with them
and they have this prediction
that they make on instinct,
they're caught dead wrong, and
those are the seeds of their defeat.
The Seasons, Op. 37b - VI.
Barcarolle by Tchaikovsky
On the eve of the attack,
Hitler is in the Reich Chancellery
wracked with anxiety.
Hitler always gets nervous
just before a big event.
He was nervous before the
Night of the Long Knives,
he's nervous before the Anschluss.
He always gets kind of
last-minute jitters.
And of course, in this case,
there are spectres
hovering over Barbarossa.
There's the spectre of Napoleon
and his defeat in Moscow,
the catastrophe of
Napoleon's invasion of Russia.
He was a gambler, somebody
who went for broke all the time
because he felt that the cards
would fall in his favour.
Hitler believed that he was
a kind of favoured child
of providence.
Fate had ordained
that he would be victorious.
The invasion of the Soviet Union
is announced on all
German radio stations
to the sound of Franz Liszt.
Les Preludes, symphonic poem
No.3, S.97 by Franz Liszt
Across the entire Soviet border,
from the Baltic to the Black Sea,
the German army sweeps in,
killing indiscriminately.
In Moscow, the German ambassador
arrives at the Kremlin
to tell Molotov that Germany
have declared war.
He would be thinking,
"I didn't judge this correctly.
"I've got to go and tell more
to the boss,
"which is going to be difficult."
Er he probably somewhere
in his mind was thinking,
"Yeah, I'm going to be under stress
now.
"This is the beginning of something
really massive."
Stalin has been caught off guard
and the Red Army are in disarray.
It becomes clear in Moscow
that this is not just an incursion
over the border,
but this is a strategic manoeuvre
to invade the Soviet Union.
Um and you can imagine that
hearts would be in boots, um in
the Kremlin.
Stalin was stunned by
the reality of the German invasion.
Within days, German forces
have advanced 200 miles
into Soviet territory.
By the time they reach
the city of Minsk,
they've captured or killed
over 300,000 Red Army troops.
With the Germans only 400 miles
from the capital,
the gravity of the situation
comes crashing down on Stalin.
The fall of Minsk happened on
28th June,
six days after the invasion.
Didn't take long.
And the scale of the defeat,
the destruction involved,
the killings involved of soldiers,
you know, it was a massive
military failure.
I think Stalin was not knowing
what to do.
I mean, he was he was shocked,
panicked, frightened.
First time in many years,
maybe first time in his life,
he didn't have a game plan.
Stalin retreats to his dacha
like a cornered animal.
When his country needs him the most,
suddenly, Stalin is nowhere
to be seen.
Hitler now bases himself
at his front-line headquarters,
the Wolf's Lair,
a top-secret, high-security
complex of camouflaged bunkers
hidden in a dense Prussian forest.
It's a strange world, penetrated
by neither light nor reality.
Hitler is on course to control
even more territory than Napoleon.
He feels that he's conquered
the Soviet Union,
it's going to collapse any minute.
The atmosphere is one of
continuing optimism and euphoria
as news rolls in of stunning
military victories
over the Red Army.
The success of the invasion
leads to a jubilant mood,
and this allows Brauchitsch
to push any doubts he might have had
to one side.
The relationship between officers
and Hitler
is very much one like a magic show.
They had their doubts about
the Soviet Union,
and now, once again, he seems to be
like the great magician
pulling the vast rabbit out
of a hat.
They're all going to be coming home
by Christmas.
In the streets of Berlin,
confidence of a quick victory
is sky-high.
But at the Ministry of Propaganda,
Harro's wife, Libertas,
comes face-to-face with the reality
of Hitler's war.
She's receiving these photographs
and films
from soldiers coming back from
the Eastern Front.
When you look at these photos,
you see terrified women,
you see terrified children
looking into the eyes of
their attackers.
At Babi Yar in the Ukraine,
over two days,
34,000 men, women and children
are massacred.
By the end of 1941,
half a million Jewish people
are murdered.
It is known as
the Holocaust by bullets.
Uncounted numbers of Russians,
many, but not all of them, Jewish,
are being massacred
by not just SS divisions,
but by Wehrmacht,
German army divisions.
She feels a responsibility
to archive this material
and to make it available
in any way that she can.
And what she says is that
in the future, there will be
accountability.
There will be a war crimes
tribunal.
And she is assembling the evidence.
She is archiving it,
it will be presented
in order to prosecute soldiers
who have committed
these these terrible atrocities
and the officers
who have commanded them.
And she organises it. Er
this is her contribution
to the resistance activities.
Meanwhile, her husband Harro
and his resistance network
are desperately trying to get
the next phase
of the German invasion plans
to the Soviets.
But the Soviet high command
is in disarray.
No-one has seen or heard from Stalin
in days.
He refuses to sign documents
or to speak to anyone.
The Soviet government is paralysed.
There's debate as to what extent
he was actually breaking down,
or to what extent he was playing
a game, in a true Stalin-type way,
to test the people around him
to see who was going to try and
come forward and take his place.
Molotov knew that he had to deal
with this situation.
He was clearly the number-two man.
It's an animal world.
You know, the dictators, you know,
they don't elect it.
They stay in power as long as they
are trusted by their cronies.
It's like a mafia boss.
So, you you you lost?
You're out.
And Stalin failed.
Stalin was desperate.
He was sitting alone,
waiting for for the worst,
because he was afraid
that his own Politburo members
could actually arrest him
for the failure,
because it was his fault,
and everybody knew it was his fault.
The outcome of Stalin's gamble
was disastrous.
This is like a mafia family.
So much, you know, reflects
the mentality of the Soviet bosses.
And I know I know this country,
I grew up in this country.
And I-I could even I could
visualise this scene, you know.
They're entering the room and
it could go either way,
either just, you know,
thrown in the dust,
or, um he becomes the king again.
Molotov had to step in
to try and control the situation,
but not in a way that made him out
to be some kind of rival.
Molotov proposes the creation
of a shiny new body,
the State Defence Commissariat
with Stalin, as supreme leader,
at its helm,
a new superdictatorship.
At the end of the day,
they proved to be weak.
And I think the fact that
they proved to be weak
made Stalin stronger,
because that's that's Somehow
it's a fluctuation of this energy
and spirit within the group.
So nothing nothing
could disappear.
Energy doesn't disappear.
So if they're getting weaker,
Stalin's getting stronger.
And and and smelling
their fear and weakness,
Stalin gained back his confidence.
So he's in charge again, so it's,
"Don't cry over spilled milk.
It's behind me.
"Yes, we failed,
now let's see what we can do."
This man, Molotov,
who was a boring apparatchik,
best filing clerk in Russia,
he kept his head.
And he was the one
who knew Stalin best.
And then, to let him come forward
and show his strengths
as a wartime leader.
Stalin reappears
and tells the Soviet people
to resist the German invaders.
Stalin recognises
it's time to change the tone.
He's no longer talking like a father
of the nation.
His statement starts with,
"Brothers and sisters"
And that was the beginning of
reorganising Soviet propaganda
towards Russian nationalists,
towards the Great Patriotic War.
I can tell you something
about Soviet propaganda.
Look at this picture.
Look at this picture.
And now look at this picture.
This picture, taken by anybody
prior to the war,
suicidal. You disappear.
Because that's wrong. This is
That's that's that's
That's the way, a triumphant,
dear leader.
This picture, this is brothers
and sisters.
This is a new image of Stalin
who is suffering, who is thinking,
who is no longer all-powerful,
he doesn't know everything,
but he's he's with his people.
Look at him.
Just, you know, ordinary man.
This is the image
they wanted to present,
wounded by this betrayal of Hitler
that he trusted.
But, you know, don't worry,
we're all together.
As they get closer to Moscow,
the German attack is slowing.
And Brauchitsch becomes concerned
that this is going to take
longer than expected.
He asks Hitler to focus the attack
on Moscow.
And he'll need tank reinforcements,
and the troops
may need winter clothes.
Hitler increasingly thought of
himself as the military commander.
And when Brauchitsch
tried to sway him
in favour of sending tanks
to Moscow,
Hitler simply went berserk.
Hitler hates what he thinks of
as defeatism.
For him, all you need is willpower,
the power of the will to overcome
any practical problems,
whether it's getting bogged down
in the mud in the autumn rains
in Russia,
or getting frozen to death
in the snows at minus 30 degrees.
All of this, he just brushes aside.
These are not problems.
So he didn't really bother
with getting the troops
adequate winter clothing.
It'll all be over by winter.
One push and the whole rotten
edifice of the Soviet Union
would collapse.
At this point, Hitler makes
a controversial decision.
He decides that the attack
on Moscow can wait
instead ordering his armies
north, to Leningrad,
and south, to Kiev, to capture
even more territory and resources.
Hitler was becoming increasingly
detached from reality.
Hitler's limitless self-belief
made him think that he could do
anything.
And those generals who pointed out
the obstacles
in a sense of realism
and military professionalism
were simply brushed aside.
By this point, the only reality
that matters is Hitler's reality.
Brauchitsch made a Faustian pact
with Hitler
when he decided that he would
effectively bow to Hitler's wishes,
whatever his own personal
views might be.
And in a way, this decision
comes to bite him,
because Hitler was only always using
him as a kind of mask
for what Hitler himself
was trying to do.
Hitler sidelines Brauchitsch,
who is forced to watch
what happens next.
Hitler wastes time capturing Kiev
and laying siege to Leningrad.
It's October by the time
he finally gives the order
for Army Group Centre,
a force of two million men,
to attack Moscow.
You had the German army
advancing on Moscow
as a Russian winter was setting in.
Harro knew that the German military
were not prepared for
the Russian winter.
And as Napoleon found out
to his distress,
the Russian winter can be a greater
enemy than the Russian armed forces.
Harro and Libertas meet with
a Soviet spy,
handing over vital intelligence
showing that Germany
is headed for military disaster.
They assure him that Hitler
can be beaten.
Harro is supercharged
with his adrenaline.
He's taking more and more risks.
When you're living
with that addiction to adrenaline,
you're less attentive to danger.
And I watched various colleagues
of mine who were journalists
who who who became totally
addicted to the adrenaline
and just walked straight into
situations that killed them.
And you realise that the adrenaline
was driving them.
They forgot how to fear.
Harro forgot how to fear.
The agent radios vital intelligence
back to Moscow.
The basic rule of thumb
for these radio transmissions
is to keep them short.
But he's got so much information
from Harro
that he stays transmitting
for five hours.
And it also leaves him susceptible
to all kinds of detection from
the German military and others
who are monitoring
these transmissions.
The German army
are converging on Moscow,
and the Luftwaffe
are bombing the city.
There is panic in the capital.
With no air-raid shelters
in the Kremlin,
Stalin has taken refuge in the
subterranean halls of the Metro.
He is deciding
whether to abandon the city.
Stalin was urged to leave Moscow
when the Wehrmacht were
supposedly in sight of
the onion domes of the Kremlin,
when he must have known that
if Moscow fell,
his life was likely to be short.
But Stalin has one last card
left to play.
Having ignored the advice of the men
around him,
he's finally ready
to hear the truth.
He calls for General Zhukov.
An armoured train waits on the
platform to take Stalin to safety.
The answer to one question will
determine the outcome for Moscow.
He asks Zhukov whether he, Zhukov,
can keep Moscow out of German hands,
to which Zhukov says,
"I can do that."
Stalin wanted to hear the truth.
But again, he's a dictator,
he wants Zhukov to say that.
So if anything goes wrong,
Zhukov would be responsible.
The fate of the Soviet Union
is in Zhukov's hands.
He's tough. Very strong-willed.
Something of a, um street
fighter.
He was so single-minded
to achieve success
that once committed,
he was absolutely adamant
that he would succeed.
Zhukov rallies thousands
of civilians to defend Moscow
and sends battle-hardened
Siberian troops to the front,
driving the Germans back 150 miles.
Moscow was saved by at least
two generals,
General Zhukov and General Winter.
Zhukov telegraphed Stalin,
saying, "Victory."
And then falls asleep, I think,
for three days or more.
Over 100 years earlier,
Napoleon's army had taken Moscow,
only to be driven back.
Hitler's army reaches
the gates of Moscow, but no further.
So far, over three million Jews
and Soviets have died
as part of Hitler's horrific
racial genocide.
But this is only the beginning.
If you don't have people
who find a way to stand up and say,
"No, this is not correct,
this is not who we are,"
then you've lost the whole framework
of civil society.
And Germany shows us better than
anywhere else where that can lead.
One has to look at these Nazis
that particularly tried
to hide behind
these elevated positions of power
and of glory,
and they could separate
themselves from the violence,
they could separate themselves
from the crimes
and then carry on with their lives
as if they really weren't involved.
At the Nuremberg trials,
this was very much the position
that Brauchitsch took
with his own career path
and his own life.
"I didn't do anything wrong.
"I was separate from
these terrible crimes.
"And anyway, I was dismissed
in 1941,
"so I really had nothing
to do with it."
But this is a cop-out.
Um it shows again
his lack of moral fibre,
the inability for him to look
squarely in the face
of the Third Reich, of Hitler,
of the Nazis,
and have his own role in that,
even if it was cut shorter than
some of his other colleagues'.
For both Hitler and Stalin, this
becomes a symbol of their conflict.
Stalingrad degenerated into
the most bitter gutter fighting.
Speer doesn't feel guilt.
He talks Hitler into winning.
Die an honourable soldier's death,
like Roman generals
falling on their swords.
If Stalingrad survives,
if this battle is won,
that's him, Joseph Stalin.
That's where the German army
could meet its match.