Rise of the Nazis (2019) s02e02 Episode Script

1
In June 1942,
Hitler travelled to Finland
to have talks with the
Finnish leader Mannerheim
in a railway carriage.
The talks were being recorded
by the Finns for posterity.
The formal part of the discussion
comes to an end,
but the sound engineers
let the recording device
carry on recording.
We hear for the only time
Hitler speaking privately.
What is fascinating is the tone
and tenor of Hitler's voice.
This is not prepared.
This is almost stream
of consciousness stuff.
He reveals how his meeting with
the Soviet Foreign Minister
made up his mind to invade.
And then an SS man notices that
the recording is still going
and he goes like that.
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.
Hitler always needed people
around him saying,
"You are a genius, you are
our leader, you are the Fuhrer."
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 truthteller.
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'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.
Requiem Mass in D Minor
by Mozart
It's January 1942.
Hitler has launched
Operation Barbarossa
invading the Soviet Union
in the north, south and centre.
But he's just lost
the Battle of Moscow,
and all three of the armies
are now bogged down
in the Russian winter.
The German Army desperately
needs fuel and resources.
Furious with this failure,
Hitler has sacked or sidelined
his top generals and appointed
himself head of the German Army.
Hitler feels that he has the
willpower and the genius, frankly,
to turn the tide
and defeat the Soviets.
Hitler wants war without end.
Continual warfare was the only way
in which a race, as he thought
of the Germans, could survive.
Without war, they would be weak.
So there's no prospect
of the war ending.
He believes it's all or nothing.
And 1942 is the year
where it's going to be all.
Hitler decides on a bold new plan -
to focus all his attack
in the south.
The aim - to take the
Soviets' oilfields,
stealing the fuel from Stalin's
army and supplying his own.
But before he can do that, the
German forces need to be rearmed.
As formal head of the war economy,
this would usually fall
to Hermann Goring.
But he's fallen out of favour.
The general view of Goring
is that he was a bit of a maverick,
that he liked dressing up, he took
drugs, that he indulged himself
a great deal and so on.
I think for Hitler, one of the main
considerations in early '42
is that Goring's been given a lot
of power and responsibility.
I mean, he has half a dozen offices.
I mean, there were so many things
that Goring does,
so many pies he had his finger in.
You know, Hitler's come
to understand I think,
that, you know,
there's a limit to Goring.
And the habit in the Third Reich,
of course, is for Hitler to give
power and to take it away, to raise
people up and drop them away.
And there's a new man rising
in Hitler's inner circle
who has been designing the monuments
of the Third Reich.
Hitler's favourite architect,
36-year-old Albert Speer.
Hitler was notorious for appointing
apparently unqualified people
to do important jobs.
You have Ribbentrop
as Foreign Minister,
who was actually a wine merchant.
You have Goring who is a pilot
running the economy,
and Speer fits the bill perfectly.
The vision of Hitler and Speer is
to build monumental buildings
like in ancient Rome,
like in ancient Athens.
Berlin will be the world's biggest
and most famous capital.
For him, no building is high enough
and no hall is long enough.
And this is exactly
what Hitler wanted.
There's going to be a triumphal
arch, bigger than the one in Paris,
a great hall with a dome,
bigger than that of St Peter's,
and it was gargantuan.
Speer recalled in his memoirs later
that his father,
who was also an architect,
came and saw these plans.
He just tapped his head
and said, "You've all gone mad."
Now, Speer has an opportunity.
If he can solve Hitler's problem
and successfully resupply
the German Army, he will become
even more powerful.
But there is one person
in his way.
Hermann Goring.
He goes for a meeting
to try and gain access
to Goring's ministries.
Well, Goring, I think, is horrified
by the appointment of Speer
and really doesn't understand it.
You know, he's had years
of experience running areas
of the economy. Here's Albert Speer,
but he knows nothing
about armaments,
nothing about the war economy.
Goring keeps Speer waiting
for over an hour.
He knows he is close to Hitler.
He walks in and out of
Hitler's flat and not Goring.
Speer understands that Goring is
motivated by the prestige of power
but doesn't actually
want to do the work.
So he offers to do Goring's job
for him
whilst Goring remains
the figurehead.
And so Germany has a new
Armaments Minister,
architect Albert Speer.
He talks Hitler into winning.
"We can win the war. I'll more than
double the war production."
Hitler loves Speer's confidence,
so begins preparations for his
huge attack in the south.
At the Kremlin, the map looks
very different for Stalin.
He's won the Battle of Moscow,
but millions of German troops
are still all over the country,
from Leningrad in the north
to Rostov in the south.
Oh, my goodness. Pravda.
"Glorious victory."
At Moscow.
And in prime position, Zhukov.
Saved Leningrad, saved Moscow,
the two leading cities
of the Soviet Union.
Perhaps for Stalin, a
slightly bigger worry
that this army officer is getting
rather big for his boots
and I must watch him.
Stalin views Zhukov as his
most capable general,
but a potential threat.
Because Zhukov could be
a dictator, Stalin doesn't make
these kind of mistakes.
He could smell Zhukov's strengths -
Zhukov's ruthless,
Zhukov's highly popular.
And Stalin knows that he needs
Zhukov
but he has to distance Zhukov
from himself.
Determined to prove
that he's the one in charge,
Stalin unveils his own plan to drive
the Germans out of the Soviet Union,
launching a huge offensive
from Leningrad to the Black Sea.
But Zhukov can see
Stalin's plan is doomed.
He warns Stalin that after
the Battle of Moscow,
the Red Army are in no shape
to attack so soon.
Stalin has shown time and time
again,
if you get in my way,
I will get in yours terminally.
But Zhukov had the courage
when necessary -
I'm sure he chose his moments
carefully -
but when necessary,
to say to Stalin,
"Comrade Stalin, yes, but"
While Zhukov is warning,
correctly warning,
Stalin doesn't want to hear that.
Stalin's confident now,
he's in the driving seat.
He is He's a big boss.
It's not just about winning the war,
it's about making sure
he was in charge.
So Zhukov's reward for the success
of the Battle of Moscow
is that he is sidelined
and sent to the Front.
If you think of an army as a body,
you've got the brain,
you've got a nervous system
which carries signals and messages,
and you've got muscles
which do the fighting.
What Stalin did was virtually
to remove the brain.
So now both Hitler and Stalin
have taken charge
of their own armies.
There's no-one left
to hold them back.
Something that always happened
to dictators,
by clearing their path to power,
they have no choice but
to eliminate the most
capable and most skilful executives.
The moment Stalin or Hitler tried
to take over the command,
it led to a disaster.
Hitler has already made
a similar mistake,
replacing or firing
his top generals.
And now the man in charge of the
6th Army, who will play a key
role in the attack on the south
is a man who has never commanded
troops in the field before -
the recently appointed
General Paulus.
Paulus's leadership qualities
were frankly rather weak,
to put it mildly.
He probably felt a slight feeling
of impostor syndrome,
at the same time feeling thrilled
and happy
at this remarkable piece of luck.
Paulus is immediately thrust
into difficulty
when his troops are attacked by the
Red Army at the city of Kharkov.
Paulus was under tremendous strain.
He had this nervous tic,
revealed quite how much pressure
he was under.
Paulus was nicknamed The Delayer.
This was partly because he did not
like to take a decision.
He was always rather frightened
of taking the wrong decision.
Paulus asked permission
to hold off on attacking.
But Hitler is now in control
of the battlefield.
He instructs Paulus to smash
through Red Army lines.
Following Hitler's orders,
Paulus and his army
annihilate Soviet troops.
Stalin loses nearly
300,000 soldiers.
Hitler personally thanks
Paulus for the victory
and awards him the Knight's Cross.
Paulus had tremendous admiration
from that particular moment,
thinking, well, Hitler must
have had a better view from up there
than I had down on the ground
during the course of the battle.
Hitler has put Paulus in his debt
and binds Paulus to him personally.
Paulus then follows every command
of Hitler's,
believing totally
in his military brilliance.
So Hitler feels ready to launch
his massive assault on the south.
Just over a week before
the operation begins,
a German plane is shot out
of the sky by the Red Army.
When they approach the wreckage,
they find in the dead officer's
satchel the German invasion plans.
The maps and documents
are raced to the Kremlin.
The German airplane - shot down,
and the pilot accidently has a map.
In Stalin's eyes, forgery,
disinformation,
so you cannot trust it.
I don't think Stalin had
even second thoughts
because it's accidental -
he doesn't believe in accidents,
so it's probably staged.
Having sidelined his top general,
Zhukov,
Stalin has nobody
to make him see sense.
Stalin thought that Hitler would
eventually attack Moscow,
because taking over Moscow,
that's the way to make
Soviet capitulate.
And while Germans were making
their build-ups in the south,
Stalin couldn't think
of anything else but Moscow,
because he was there.
And that's why the real information
from the dead pilot,
that was all disregarded by Stalin
because it did not fit his ideas
about the top targets
in Hitler's mind.
So Stalin fails to defend the south
and the German Army storm through.
Soon, a million German soldiers
are advancing on the oilfields.
They show no mercy toward
Soviet civilians.
Paulus is a Christian,
but that did not necessarily mean
he was ever prepared
to outright rejection
on Nazi killing-orders
of Jews, Slavs,
commissars and so forth.
There's a form of moral anaesthetic.
Paulus probably feels that he's
certainly not active in pushing
Hitler's genocidal endeavours.
He was uneasy, but he certainly
wasn't going to speak out
in any way against it.
At this point, it is interesting
to know what Hitler is thinking,
because on one hand, the war
seems to be going well,
but it's all taking so much
longer than he thought.
How does he justify to himself
the failures of the campaign so far?
In June 1942, he travels to Finland
to meet the Finnish leader,
Mannerheim.
And one can listen in
to their conversation.
He's talking quite informally
and quite openly about where things
have gone wrong, excusing
the failure of the German Army
to defeat the Red Army,
the Soviet Army, in short order.
He's making excuses
for his failures.
While Hitler complains that nobody
told him how strong the Russian Army
was, he doesn't realise
that there are other things
that people still
don't dare tell him.
In Berlin, the architect, Speer,
is struggling.
He does everything in his power
to enforce war production
and to get more and more people
to work.
He doesn't care where
these labourers come from.
Desperate to give Hitler
the armaments he has promised,
he conscripts slave labour
into the war effort.
Speer is not only an able organiser,
but he is ruthless.
He takes every worker
he can get his hands on.
Speer sees people dying.
He sees desperate, ill people
deprived of everything,
but he doesn't care.
These prisoners weren't human beings
for him any more.
Tens of thousands die as he tries
to supply the Nazi war machine.
But it's still not enough.
So he decides to cook the books,
faking the numbers to try
and make it appear to Hitler
like he is delivering.
Hitler is so convinced that he will
ultimately win the war,
he takes another huge gamble.
He's going to capture not
only the Soviet oilfields,
but 300 miles of
the Black Sea coast,
as well as the city of Stalingrad.
In military terms, this is madness.
I think if Hitler had understood
the magnitude of any of the gambles
he made, he probably
wouldn't have made them.
He was precisely a gambler,
somebody who went for broke
all the time
because he felt that the cards
would fall in his favour.
His faith in the racial superiority
of the Germans
was enough to quell any doubts
he might have had.
Hitler is desperately impatient.
Paulus, I think, had a mixed idea or
feeling about what was lying ahead.
He certainly was not
going to openly reject the orders
coming from Hitler's headquarters.
By dividing the army group, Hitler
is weakening each of the two parts.
So while Paulus is sent
to Stalingrad,
the other half of the army
sets off to capture the oilfields.
Gnossienne No 1 by Erik Satie
But what looks straightforward
on Hitler's map
is different in reality.
They soon find themselves traversing
the colossal Caucasus Mountains.
Within weeks, they are low on fuel
and supplies,
and the army grinds to a halt.
A general of the Army High Command
returns from the Caucasus
with the worst possible news.
The operation to capture
Stalin's oilfields is failing.
But Hitler demands that the
campaign continue at all costs.
It's very unusual for a general
to stand up to Hitler,
but so serious is the situation
that he does.
Unusually, he stands his ground
and he shouts back at Hitler.
"You gave the orders,
you can't blame us, the generals.
"It's all your fault."
Hitler simply won't accept this.
Hitler thinks, well,
he's the leader,
he's the dictator,
he's the supreme strategist,
he's the man who defeated France and
now he's beginning to be confronted
with the realities of the situation,
and he really can't take it.
Things get very heated.
Hitler's not used to being informed
by generals that his own strategy
is not going to work.
What happens next
seems to be a turning point
in Hitler's psychology.
With no-one left to blame,
he has some kind of mental collapse.
He withdraws, pulls back,
won't talk to the generals again,
eats on his own,
and there's a generally
rather unpleasant, tense atmosphere
in the headquarters.
Convinced his generals must
have misquoted his orders,
he brings in a team of stenographers
from Berlin to type out everything
he says in meetings from now on.
None of this shakes Hitler's belief
that he will win the war.
Hitler begins to pin
his hopes on Stalingrad.
This is the part of the operation
that's still going forward,
and he now decides that
that is the big objective,
conquering the city
named after Stalin.
Dictators, they pay overwhelming
attention to symbols.
It's all about symbols.
Dictator must prove time and again
that he is, he is worthy
of this power that he somehow
has been given, often grabbed.
But to hold his power,
he needs victories,
sometimes symbolic victories.
If the city was named whatever,
Volgograd, Ekaterinoslav,
whatever the name, Tsaritsyn,
as the original name,
I don't think Hitler would be so
devoted to go against it.
But it was Stalingrad.
And I think the name
on the map, on the map,
you know, paralysed Hitler,
he wanted to take Stalingrad.
And the German armies, instead
of using their momentum,
the advantage, the manoeuvres
and looking for oil
in Baku and Caucasus, he decides to
bring his best troops
into Stalingrad.
Stalin was quite pleased.
Deep in his soul,
Stalin feels even happy.
He knows enough about war
to recognise that Hitler
is making a mistake,
that war in the city is going
to wear out German troops.
Also, I think in the back
of his mind, he thinks
about the great effect.
If Stalingrad survives,
if this battle's won,
that's him, Joseph Stalin,
here in the city of Stalin -
which had nothing
to do with Stalin -
but now it's the city
that bears Stalin's name.
That's where the German Army
could meet its match.
For both Hitler and Stalin,
this becomes a symbol
of their conflict.
For Hitler it would be a kind of
symbolic victory over Stalin.
Stalin realises this and throws
everything he can into its defence.
Stalin orders that every
Russian man, woman and child
must stay and defend the city.
Any Russian soldier seen retreating
will be shot immediately.
So both the Red Army and the German
forces descend on Stalingrad.
And Stalin knows just the man
he needs for this situation.
Stalin knows that the professionals
must carry the war.
Zhukov is Stalin's man now.
Not his pet, not his favourite,
but this is the man Stalin needs.
What's apparent to Zhukov
is that the German Army
has a weak spot in Axis troops
camped outside the city.
Romanian, Hungarian and Italian
forces are vulnerable to attack
in the north and south.
Zhukov aims to launch
a simultaneous attack
on both these flanks.
Zhukov came up with
an ambitious plan
to encircle Paulus's
6th Army of the Wehrmacht.
It is the great objective
of any ambitious general
because it gives you, if you get
it right, an outstanding victory.
Paulus is aware of exactly
the same weakness.
Fearing his army
is vulnerable to Soviet entrapment,
he goes to ask Hitler
for reinforcements.
At the same moment, in Moscow,
Zhukov asks for Stalin's
approval to attack.
This is the moment
where both dictators,
they change the course
almost simultaneously.
While Stalin demonstrated
Zhukov has his full confidence,
Hitler goes in the
opposite direction.
Hitler refuses to listen
to Paulus's concerns.
He's only interested in
when Stalingrad will fall.
Hitler, once again
consumed by impatience,
wants to have something to announce
back in Germany
of a huge victory in the East.
And so he is pushing Paulus to say,
when is the city going to fall?
Paulus had already given
an assessment
of another two weeks at least.
But actually even Paulus didn't
believe that figure at the time.
On September 30th, 1942,
Hitler is in Berlin
to make a speech.
He declares to the nation that
victory at Stalingrad is imminent.
Hitler's self-belief was absolute.
Success is what's going to happen.
You can't even contemplate
any kind of failure.
Hitler in the speech is
really doing two things.
He's rallying the public around the
belief that Stalingrad
is finished, that the German
troops are going to occupy it
in very short order.
But he's also saying
to the German troops
that that's what they've got to do.
They've got to occupy Stalingrad,
they mustn't be deterred.
Hitler has publicly tied his own
fate to the conquest of Stalingrad.
But Stalin isn't going anywhere.
The Soviet people take up arms
against the Germans,
fighting house by house and
street by street to defend the city.
Stalingrad degenerated into the most
bitter gutter fighting
amongst the ruined factories.
Very vicious indeed.
With no space for tanks, savage
urban combat breaks out
in ruined homes, basements
and cellars across Stalingrad.
It's a fight to the death.
With the Germans dug in
inside the city,
Stalingrad could fall.
Now, Zhukov launches his attack.
He sends over a
million of his troops
in a surprise pincer movement,
attacking the weak German flanks
and trapping a quarter
of a million enemy soldiers.
Well, it showed great imagination,
thinking out of the box.
And on a grand scale.
The distances, the numbers involved
in that encirclement operation
are on the ambitious side,
without doubt.
Before Paulus can react, his army
is almost entirely surrounded.
Paulus is in fairly
constant correspondence
with Fuhrer Headquarters
to decide on what should be done.
Paulus asks permission
from Hitler to break out.
The German armies cannot withdraw,
not least because he's said that
they've already won, so it will be
a serious loss of face for him.
Stalingrad has to be captured.
Autocratic leaders seem
incapable of accepting
that an army sometimes
has to withdraw
to more favourable ground
in order to better defend.
For the dictator,
every inch is a failure.
And by not allowing redeployment,
they make the end worse than ever.
But for one man, this is the
opportunity he's been waiting for.
Hermann Goring sees the situation
in Stalingrad as a way to redeem
himself with Hitler and gain
the upper hand over his rival,
Albert Speer.
He's very aware that
Germany's up against it.
He wants Germany to win.
Victory means Goring's
still number two,
Goring with even more resources,
Goring with his big hunting forest
in Russia.
You know, victory means
a lot to Goring.
Op 64, No.13
Dance of the Knights by Prokofiev
Goring has a plan that he claims
will miraculously
turn the tide at Stalingrad.
He persuades Hitler that he can use
the Luftwaffe to supply Paulus's
trapped army with enough food
and equipment to beat Stalin.
This is an opportunity
to demonstrate once again
that he's in command.
There's no serious group of people
sitting around and evaluating
what's going on and saying,
this can be done, that can't be done
and so on.
You've got Hitler and Goring,
both of them inclined
to be impulsive strategically.
You know, Hitler desperately needing
a solution to a strategic disaster
which he's created,
Goring desperately wanting to
get in with Hitler again
and show him that, you know,
he can deliver something
that Hitler wants.
So the two of them really are
colluding together to create
what actually turns out
to be a strategic fantasy.
Just like Speer before him,
Goring knows he can't deliver
on his far-fetched promise,
but sends his Luftwaffe in anyway,
carrying only a fraction
of the supplies needed
to sustain Hitler's army.
The Russian winter prevents
most planes from landing.
Those that do
are attacked by the Soviets.
Goring loses the lives of 1,000 men,
leaving Paulus and his army
stranded in Stalingrad.
Among those trapped is
Albert Speer's brother, Ernst.
His family members beg Speer
to use his influence
to get his brother out.
But Speer claims he can't do
anything to save him.
Speer doesn't really feel guilt.
He is willing to sacrifice
the lives of his family
for this higher cost.
It's Christmas Day, and for weeks
Paulus and his men
have been trapped with
virtually no supplies.
They're stuck in an area
known as the Cauldron,
but instead of boiling alive,
they are freezing to death.
The suffering of the German
troops was appalling.
The temperatures were often
down to minus 20,
even at one stage to minus 30.
It meant that the casualties from
frostbite were simply terrifying.
The worst thing of all was the lice
for many of them.
I mean, you could tell as soon as a
body died, somebody had died,
because there was this grey mass
of lice leaving the body
as the temperature had cooled down.
And this, of course,
was spreading typhus.
From that point onwards, they are
beginning to starve to death.
And they start eating the horses,
they start eating animals,
and in the end,
there's some evidence,
they started eating each other.
Caught between the extreme suffering
of his men and his duty
to his Commander in Chief,
Paulus is now in a state of mental
and physical collapse.
Paulus was suffering very badly
from recurrent dysentery.
He was extremely thin and haggard.
His twitch was pretty manic.
And one could tell that he was only
occasionally sort of in control
of his own state
and his own emotions.
And this is where Schmidt, his Chief
of Staff, starts to take over.
Paulus, he had no options,
basically, that's his problem.
He had no option other than
to disobey Hitler
and start to withdraw
or to surrender.
What else could he have done?
At the start of 1943,
the Russians dropped thousands
of leaflets over the Cauldron,
wishing the 6th Army
a happy new year.
To the officers
and soldiers of the Wehrmacht,
your hopes to get help,
as of nothing.
You've had it.
So the best thing you can do is,
basically,
come out with your hands up
or you will die.
Paulus tries one last
roll of the dice.
He chooses a most unlikely messenger
to go and reason with Hitler.
A 23-year-old called Winrich Behr.
Hitler was not listening
to any generals, and so that's why
they chose Winrich Behr,
who was a young 23-year-old captain,
in his black Panzer uniform with
the Knight's Cross at the throat,
who would speak to him
almost soldier to soldier.
Under artillery fire,
he is smuggled out and flown
to the Wolf's Lair, where
he is given an audience with Hitler.
Behr basically
was not allowed to speak.
Hitler basically was telling him
what a wonderful situation it was,
they would have an opportunity
of inflicting a vast defeat
on the Red Army and
all the rest of it.
Now, Behr knew perfectly well
that this was untrue
and he waited until
Hitler had finished.
And then he said, you know, Mein
Fuhrer, will I please now have
your permission to tell you exactly
what I was ordered to tell you
by my commander in chief?
And in front of all of the others
present, Hitler could not say no.
Behr tells Hitler that
the situation before Stalingrad
is desperate,
that the troops are starving.
That their morale and their
physical strength is so low,
it's increasingly difficult
for them to fight.
Then Hitler just thinks
that Behr's talking nonsense.
So he takes him to the situation map
and shows him all these massive
German forces, all these divisions.
And Behr realises these divisions
are now reduced
to just a few hundred men each.
Stalin is now on the brink
of victory in the city
that bears his name.
But so far he's lost the lives of
almost half a million soldiers
and 40,000 civilians.
Stalin didn't care about who lives.
It was all about winning.
It's all about surviving.
When we say brutality, we believe
that there are certain values
like human life that, you know,
could stand in the way
of us achieving our goals.
Stalin, Stalin
was a classical dictator.
If you should get from A to B
or A to Z even, you know,
it doesn't matter, you know, how
many people will die in the middle.
Hitler now becomes
fixated on the idea
that whatever happens in Stalingrad,
his troops must not surrender.
Sensing Hitler's wishes,
Goring gives a speech on the radio
that even the soldiers in Stalingrad
will be able to hear.
What he's telling his audience
is that the men in Stalingrad
are like the 300 in Thermopylae -
the Greeks, the Spartans who
sacrificed themselves
to save Sparta.
And it's a bizarre message
because it means that all the people
in Stalingrad are going to die.
Those few who actually
heard the speech,
they knew that this was their
funeral oration,
implying that they were there to
die to create this great legend.
Paulus is holed up in the basement
of a bombed-out department store
in Stalingrad when he finally
gets word from Hitler himself.
He receives a telegram announcing
that he's been promoted
to Field Marshal.
Paulus knew instantly
what it indicated.
No German Field Marshal
had ever surrendered.
He knew perfectly well that Hitler
expected him to commit suicide.
Die an honourable soldier's death,
like Roman generals falling
on their swords
when they were defeated.
It shows the fanaticism
of the Nazi party.
It shows Hitler's
all-or-nothing mentality.
Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven
On January 31st, 1943,
Paulus surrenders what is left
of his army to the Russians.
I think the most obvious lesson
from Paulus's experiences
and his life as the pawn
of a dictator
shows that if you do not have the
courage to stand up to a dictator
you will be left to suffer.
The lack of moral courage
which Paulus showed
was actually going to do for him
in the end, and it did.
The Soviet victory at Stalingrad
marks a crucial turning point
in the war.
Stalin knows that it's a big defeat
for the German military machine,
but also it's a spiritual victory
for him because it's Stalingrad.
His stock goes up.
Not just Soviet Union, Stalin.
He's potentially viewed
as a liberator
and many of the past crimes could be
simply wiped out from history.
And the fact that the Soviet Union
paid such a high price
by fighting Nazi Germany cannot
be used by Stalin, his successors,
to wipe out the crimes
committed by Communism.
It's a result of
misreading of history.
And that's one of the reasons
why we should tell the truth
about World War II and about
the immeasurable sufferings brought
to human race by Stalin and Hitler.
Memories fade.
I was born in 1944, a wartime baby.
My father was away fighting.
We forget just how
primeval a situation it was.
The weakness of dictatorship
is you get one man who thinks
he is infallible,
who will not brook debate
or dissension,
very dismissive of the value
of human life.
And in the end, I'm glad to say,
they don't really work.
Everyone in Europe
is afraid of this man.
After years of talking about it,
next to Hitler is a bomb
with a fuse ticking
that's about to explode.
Are you willing to do what it takes
to survive?
It's important to
remember that fear,
because we would all feel
it in those circumstances.
They have no alternative
than to go forward in this war.
He decides that when
he's not going to win,
he'll then lose everything
and bring Germany down with him.