♪ [theme song plays] ♪
[tank engines]
[narrator] Summer 1943, and on the eastern front
Hitler's armies were in retreat.
[cannons firing]
Huge Soviet artillery barrages and tank assaults
were shredding the German lines.
[cannons firing]
[bombs exploding]
[guns firing]
Hitler, by now, was fighting a war on two fronts.
In Western Europe and Anglo-American force
was moving up through Italy,
menacing his southern flank.
The Germans had been forced to pull
some of their elite troops back from the eastern front to help.
[missiles firing]
It left their forces in the east
dangerously over-stretched.
The exhausted German soldiers were up against
the enormous reserves of the huge Soviet military machine.
[guns firing]
The Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, now seized
this opportunity to wreak his revenge
and move onto the offensive.
[tank engines]
By early August 1943 the Red Army had driven the Germans
from the cities of Orel and Belgorod.
[people shouting]
- [bombs exploding] - [cannons firing]
To celebrate the victory, Stalin ordered 12,
124-gun salvoes and a barrage of fireworks
in Moscow's Red Square.
[fireworks booming]
[cannons firing]
He proclaimed, "Eternal glory to the heroes who fell
in the struggle for freedom. Death to the German invaders."
[fireworks booming]
In Germany, Hitler's response was to take greater
personal control of all important military decisions.
[tank engines]
The effects were felt almost immediately by Axis troops
occupying the strategically important city of Kharkov.
[machine guns firing]
The Soviet forces approached the city from three sides.
The German commander, Erich von Manstein,
ordered a tactical withdrawal.
Hitler immediately countermanded it.
[guns firing]
Kharkov should be held at all costs.
Hitler would not accept anything that would reduce
what he called, Lebensraum, the land he believed
Germany needed to ensure its greatness.
Just as importantly, he also believed Germany
would win the war, if not by numbers,
then by the sheer will to win.
[tank engine]
The Germans dug in.
[bombs exploding]
At first, it seemed to work.
[bombs exploding]
For several days, repeated Soviet assaults were repulsed.
[bombs exploding]
More than 300 Russian T-34 tanks were destroyed.
[cannons firing]
But by the end of August 1943,
the German positions had been overrun.
[guns firing]
Eventually, Manstein went against his Fuhrer.
He ordered his men to get out.
[fire crackling]
The Red Army drove into the ruins of Kharkov the next day.
It marked the beginning of a massive Soviet offensive
along a 1,500 mile front.
It stretched from Rostov in the south
to Smolensk in the north.
[tank engines roaring]
[distant voices of troops]
At the southern end of the front, near Rostov,
the Russian breakthrough threatened to trap
pockets of German soldiers in the Crimea.
[guns firing]
Once again, Manstein asked permission to withdraw.
All he got was a message from Hitler,
"Don't do anything. I am coming myself."
But he never did.
The German military was forced into another
last-minute, chaotic retreat.
The withdrawal was made worse by bands
of battle-hardened partisans.
Many were former Red Army soldiers
who had been cut off behind enemy lines.
[train sound]
[explosion]
They now ambushed the retreating Germans,
cutting their communication and supply lines.
The Germans responded with predictable ferocity.
There was savage reprisals against the civilian population.
The Germans also launched a scorched earth policy.
[fire crackling]
[explosions]
Factories, power plants, railways,
and bridges were all blown up.
[loud explosion]
A massive hydro-electric dam, which provided electricity
for the whole of the Ukraine, was wrecked.
[water rushing]
Meanwhile, in the centre of the front,
the Germans fell back across the River Dnieper.
As they fled, they blew up yet more bridges
turning the river into a formidable defensive line.
They then dug in along the west bank.
Stalin's response was to offer the Soviet Union's
highest award to the first Red Army soldier
to cross the river.
By the early autumn 1943 a number of small
Soviet bridgeheads had been established
on the German controlled west bank.
[cannons firing]
- [machine guns firing] - [cannons firing]
But they met determined German resistance.
Fighting raged along the Dnieper throughout October 1943.
[loud explosion]
Finally, at the beginning of November,
Soviet troops captured Kiev.
[water splashing]
All along the river, the Germans were pushed out
of their defensive positions
and forced to retreat still further west.
By the end of 1943, the Red Army had virtually cleared
the Germans out of Russia's historic home.
They were now moving west across the Ukraine.
The countries of Europe were in their sights.
[machine guns firing]
[tank engines roaring]
By Spring 1944, Hitler's armies were in full retreat.
[tank engines roaring]
The Soviet leadership now poured in
ever greater quantities of men and equipment.
The Germans had two excellent tanks:
The Tiger 1 and the Panzer Mark V Panther.
Both were well-suited to the sort of mobile
defensive warfare, which was the only remaining hope
for the German armies on the eastern front.
But the Red Army had at least twice as many tanks.
Mostly, the battle tried T-34 and armament factories
in Siberia were turning out more at a rate of 2,000 a month.
While Hitler was forced to divide his forces
between a war on two fronts,
Stalin's war machine was working flat out.
Six million Soviet troops faced less
than three million Germans.
[guns firing]
In early January 1944, the forces of the first
Ukrainian front moved in from the north
on the German held town of Korsun.
It was the last German toehold on what they'd hoped would be
their defensive line along the River Dnieper.
Twelve days later, the forces of the second
Ukrainian front drove forward on the southern side.
The attack followed a, by now,
well-established Soviet pattern.
First, there was a build-up
of an overwhelming number of troops.
The Germans were never quite sure
where the first assault would come from.
[cannons firing]
Then there was a devastating artillery bombardment.
[cannons firing]
Next, the mass tanks of the Red Army
would punch a hole through the German defences.
Finally, the infantry poured in.
[machine guns firing]
In Korsun, it quickly became obvious to the Germans
they were about to be overwhelmed.
[cannons firing]
The German commander, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein,
flew to Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia to beg,
yet again, for permission to pull out.
But Hitler, once more, refused.
[guns firing]
[tank engines roaring]
After a week of fierce fighting, about 60,000 men
were trapped in what became known as the Korsun pocket.
The Soviet's called it, "Little Stalingrad."
The German forces now attempted to break out.
[cannon firing]
But the Russians were ready for them.
T-34 tanks and Cossack horsemen harried the Germans
as they tried to escape.
[horses neighing]
[machine guns firing]
The fighting lasted two days.
[loud explosions]
By the time Korsun fell, the Germans had lost
some 30,000 men.
The Red Army forces were now moving forward at speed.
Their advance was made possible by fleets of trucks,
mostly provided by the United States,
that kept their forces supplied.
It was a much faster process than for the Germans,
who still relied heavily on horses.
The Russians were also dominating the skies.
[plane engines roaring]
The Luftwaffe had always been a key part
of the German war machine.
But Hitler had been forced to divert many of his aircraft
to defend the homeland from a US and British
bomber offensive.
As a result, Russian planes outnumbered
the Luftwaffe five to one.
The Red Air Force's Sturmovik fighter-bombers
took a heavy toll on German armour and supply columns.
Yet, Hitler refused to contemplate defeat
and now announced a new version of his "no retreat" policy.
He ordered the German troops to create what he called
"fortified areas" or "local strongholds."
These were to be defended to the bitter end.
Only with his personal approval,
could any of these fortresses be abandoned.
It was a desperate ploy
and would come to cost the Germans dearly.
One of the first tests of the new strategy
was near the Ukrainian town of Kamenets-Podolsky.
Here 20 divisions of Panzers were threatened
with being cut off.
But Hitler declared it a fortified area
and refused to allow a retreat.
[loud explosion]
[cannons firing]
In the face of bitter fighting,
there was a vitriolic argument between Hitler and Manstein,
who could see the writing on the wall.
[missiles firing]
Finally, Manstein got his way
and the Panzers were given permission to break out.
Ten days later, some 200,000 men of the 1st Panzer Army
safely reached the German lines over 100 miles to the west.
But they had lost most of their heavy equipment and weapons.
By now, Manstein's requests to retreat
had become too much for Hitler.
The Field Marshal was sacked.
[machine guns firing]
[cannons firing]
Further south the Germans attempted to hold back
the Soviet torrent on the Yuzhny Bug River.
[guns firing]
They failed and a large force of Germans was caught
behind Russian lines in the Black Sea port of Odessa.
They, too, faced being cut off.
In early April 1944, Hitler declared it a fortress.
But the German troops ignored him
and slipped out of the city.
Several days later on April 10th, Odessa was liberated.
[cannons firing]
Stalin was winning on all fronts.
He could now turn his attention to the northern Russian city
that had suffered under Nazi assault for years.
[bombs exploding]
[cannons firing]
By the beginning of 1944, the Russian city of Leningrad
had been under siege from German forces
for nearly two and a half years.
During the first winter, almost half a million people
had starved to death.
Volunteers struggled to put out fires
and construct defences.
But by 1944, life in the city had become almost unbearable.
Several attempts to relieve it had failed.
[fire crackling]
One effort in 1942 led to the capture
of more than 50,000 troops of the Soviet 2nd Shock Army.
[tank engines roaring]
Another in 1943, had enabled a trickle
of supplies to get into the city.
But even so, throughout 1943, up to 20,000 people continued
to die of cold, disease, and starvation every month.
By January 1944, however, with the Germans
in headlong retreat,
Stalin now turned his attention to the plight of the city.
That month, Soviet forces secretly infiltrated
the neighbouring peninsula around Oranienburg.
[cannons firing]
The attack on the German position started
with a savage, 65 minute bombardment.
[cannons firing]
Then Russian troops ripped into the startled German lines.
At the same time another Soviet force attacked
from the northeast around the city.
They, too, burst onto the German lines.
[cannons firing]
For three days the German commander,
Field Marshal Georg von Kuchler, held out.
Finally, he asked Hitler for permission to fall back.
[machine guns firing]
Hitler, as always, refused.
[cannons firing]
Kuchler argued back, telling the Fuhrer
only a swift withdrawal would save his army from a massacre.
Hitler sacked him.
[explosion]
He was replaced by General Walter Model.
He was known as Hitler's fireman
for his fierce loyalty and avid Nazi outlook.
[cannons firing]
But even to Model the danger was obvious.
He now disobeyed Hitler and pulled out.
After two and a half years, the siege of Leningrad
was finally lifted.
Nearly a million Russian civilians had died.
Relief in the city was overwhelming.
The first fallout was in neighbouring,
pro-German Finland,
which now feared a Soviet invasion.
So in March 1944, a secret Finnish delegation
arrived in Moscow to discuss peace.
Stalin's terms were harsh.
He demanded the Petsamo region in far north of Finland.
An area rich in nickel, an important ingredient
in the manufacture of metal alloys.
He also demanded reparations of $600 million.
The Finns refused and prepared for a Soviet invasion.
But Finland could wait.
The Soviet High Command, or Stavka, as it was known,
had more pressing business further south.
[tank engines roaring]
The Red Army offensives in the Ukraine in late 1943
had trapped 120,000 German troops in the Crimea.
Hitler, as ever, had refused to allow them to withdraw.
They now waited helplessly for the Soviet onslaught.
In early April, two months after the lifting
of the siege on Leningrad, it came.
The troops of the 4th Ukrainian Front
crashed into the Crimea from the north.
[cannons firing]
At the same time, a diversionary attack landed
on the eastern end of the peninsula.
In less than a day, the Axis troops in the west
had given way.
They fell back on the port of Sebastopol
and Hitler ordered Fortress Sebastopol
to hold out 'til the last man.
They didn't stand a chance.
[cannons firing]
Within two weeks of the siege,
German troops were being evacuated by sea.
Forty thousand men escaped.
But some 30,000 defenders were still trapped in the port.
They retreated to the beaches south of the city
hoping to be rescued by more German ships.
It didn't happen.
The evacuation was interrupted
by a Soviet artillery bombardment.
[cannons firing]
Three days later, the Germans surrendered.
Meanwhile, back in the northwest of the country,
the Germans still occupied much of what is Belarus today.
But the Red Army had grabbed a vast bulge of land
stretching into Poland and Romania.
It meant the Germans had to defend a 1,400 mile front.
They were hugely over-extended.
Military logic suggested it was time for the Germans
to withdraw to more manageable defensive positions.
But Hitler, still obsessed with territorial gain,
refused to allow any further retreat.
The German military would continue to pay a high price
for Hitler's constant meddling and unrealistic ambitions.
[missiles firing]
By the spring of 1944, Hitler's forces
were stretched to their limit.
All along the eastern front,
there as a desperate need for reinforcements.
The problem for the German high command was where to place
the few resources it had to maximum advantage.
German intelligence reports suggested the next
big Red Army offensive would be into Belarus.
But Hitler disagreed.
He was convinced Stalin would strike south
and seize the Romanian oil fields.
Both were wrong, at least, to begin with.
In the early summer, the Red Army Command
finally turned its attention to Finland.
[cannons firing]
Russian troops attacked across the Karelian Isthmus.
[cannons firing]
After two days fighting, the Finns were forced to retreat.
[bombs exploding]
Slowly, over the next month,
the Red Army advanced north into Finland.
By August 1944, it was all over
and the Finns sued for peace.
[audience applauding]
It was now that Stalin showed the first signs
of a pattern that would be repeated across Europe.
He seized land, in this case, areas of Finnish Karelia
and the nickel-rich Petsamo region.
Next, Stalin's attention turned to Central Europe.
In the summer of 1944, he launched what he called,
Operation Bagration, named after a Russian hero
of the Napoleonic Wars.
At 5 AM on June 22nd, three years to the day
after Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union,
the guns of the Red Army began a ferocious bombardment
of German forces, in what today is Belarus.
[cannons firing]
[bombs exploding]
[cannons firing]
It was exactly where months earlier,
German intelligence reports had suggested
a Soviet attack would come.
But because Hitler had ignored them,
the area was poorly defended.
[cannons firing]
It was another of his mistakes.
[bombs exploding]
The Germans were now being pounded along a 350 mile front.
In some places, the Russians used
over 400 guns for every mile.
[cannons firing]
The barrage was followed, as always,
by a torrent of Soviet tanks
and infantry crashing into the German defences.
[plane engines roaring]
To make matters worse for the Germans,
they had almost no air support.
Much of the Luftwaffe was still tied up
defending the German homeland.
It was now that Hitler's folly of fighting a war
on two fronts became all too apparent.
The Red Air Force could operate almost unopposed.
[bombs exploding]
Russian planes struck deep behind German lines,
cutting communications and harassing reinforcements.
[bombs exploding]
Within 36 hours the German Panzers had been swept aside.
About 50,000 men faced encirclement
in the German held town of Vitebsk.
[cannons firing]
Hitler, as had become routine,
initially refused to let it retreat.
[bombs exploding]
Then, when on the following day her relented,
it was too late for many of his troops.
Four days later, Vitebsk fell.
Twenty thousand Axis troops were killed
and 10,000 taken prisoner.
Further south, along the Belarus front,
the pattern was repeated.
Hitler, now furious, sacked his general,
Field Marshal Ernst Busch.
Once again, he brought in his favourite,
the now promoted Field Marshal, Walter Model.
But it made no difference.
Town after town fell.
[tank engines roaring]
The regional capital of Minsk was now within reach.
Two days later, the Red Army encircled it.
Over 100,000 German troops were trapped.
[cannons firing]
Soviet forces bombarded them.
[cannons firing]
Within a week, the German survivors surrendered.
The unstoppable Russian advance now pushed on
to the Baltic states.
First of all, was the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius.
Across the entire eastern front,
the Germans were in retreat.
But they left behind them towns and countryside laid waste.
[fire crackling]
They committed wide-spread atrocities
against local inhabitants.
[woman crying]
Nothing, however, could have prepared the Red Army
for what it was about to discover.
On July 23rd, 1944 Soviet forces reached
the small Polish village of Majdanek near Lublin.
Here they came across their first evidence
of Hitler's final solution.
The Majdanek extermination camp.
It was a camp designed for the murder of Jews
on an industrial scale.
But as the first Soviet reports of what they found leaked out,
the Western Allies simply dismissed them.
[woman crying]
Three days after seizing Majdanek,
the Russians were approaching Warsaw.
But here the Red Army paused.
Stalin now stood ready to do what Hitler had done before,
grab land, not in the name of Lebensraum, but of communism.
[bombs exploding]
By the summer of 1944, Operation Bagration had ripped
the heart out of the German army in the east.
More than 300,000 Axis soldiers had died.
One hundred fifty thousand had been taken prisoner.
The Red Army now paused and dug in
along the River Vistula, south of Warsaw.
Stalin was in no hurry to bring the war to an end.
With Europe in turmoil, conditions were ideal
for the spread of communism.
The first victims of Stalin's political calculations
were the Poles.
On August 1st, 1944 the Polish Home Army rose up in Warsaw
against its Nazi occupiers.
[cannons firing]
But it desperately needed help.
The Red Army, camped just to the south,
was perfectly placed to provide it.
But Stalin regarded the Polish Home Army
as close to the Polish government in exile in London
and hostile to communism.
[cannons firing]
So he turned a blind eye to the plight
of the Polish fighters.
They were crushed with terrible brutality.
The Germans wouldn't finally be pushed out of Poland
until the Russian army drove them out in January 1945.
It was the start of a Soviet master plan
that would eventually see communism governments
across most of Eastern Europe.
[cannons firing]
To the north, contingents of the Red Army continued
to clear the Germans out of the Baltic states.
These would be incorporated into the Soviet Union.
Near the Latvian capital of Riga, over 200,000 Germans
were trapped behind Russian lines.
[plane engine roaring]
But Hitler, still determined to hold on to his Lebensraum,
refused to countenance a retreat.
[cannons firing]
Even so, gradually the German forces
were pushed back to the Baltic coast.
By mid-October 1944, the Germans had been squeezed
onto the Courland Peninsula, west of Riga.
They would remain marooned there for the rest of the war
when they eventually surrendered to Soviet forces.
[audience applauding]
Stalin, meanwhile, was already sizing up
other territory in Eastern Europe.
He could have moved directly west towards Germany.
Instead, units of the Red Army moved south
in a vast thrust down through the Balkans.
[tank engines roaring]
Nearly 1,500 tanks and a million men pushed into Romania
in late August 1944.
The defending Axis forces had less than 400 tanks
and just 800,000 troops.
[cannons firing]
Pro-German Romanian troops gave way
almost immediately all along the front.
Three days later, large pockets of German troops
were surrounded near Kishinev.
Hitler issued his standard command, "No retreat."
[cannons firing]
For nine days there was bitter fighting.
[cannons firing]
[machine guns firing]
Over 180,000 German troops were killed or taken prisoner.
The remainder beat a belated retreat.
In late August, Romania's pro-German dictator,
Marshal Ion Antonescu, was arrested.
Romania surrendered.
By the end of the month, the Red Army was in Bucharest
and it occupied the strategically important
Romanian oil fields.
It meant Germany had lost its main supply of oil.
Three Soviet armies now moved south into Bulgaria.
Bulgaria had tried to stay neutral but it, too,
would soon be swallowed up by the Soviet Empire.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Russian forces now moved west
towards Yugoslavia.
German troops to the south, in Greece, faced being trapped.
They began a hasty retreat up through Albania
and southern Yugoslavia.
[cannons firing]
They were harried all the way by Albanian
and Yugoslav partisans.
[guns firing]
[missiles firing]
By mid-October 1944, the Red Army had reached
the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade.
Only now did it begin to swing north and west
towards Hungary and then Germany.
German reinforcements poured into Hungary
to support the pro-Nazi puppet government.
But the Red Army ground on.
[tanks firing]
Eight weeks later, it laid siege to Budapest.
[machine guns firing]
The siege lasted over six weeks
before the German puppet government collapsed.
By the end of 1944, most of Eastern Europe
lay in Stalin's grasp.
His troops controlled the Baltic states and Poland,
Romania, and Bulgaria.
Pro-Soviet forces ruled in Yugoslavia and Albania.
Hungary and Czechoslovakia were in his sights.
Stalin had successfully laid the foundations
for the future Soviet block.
He could now, at last, move on to Germany.
But in the west, Allied forces
were also approaching the German border.
The race was on to be the first to take Berlin.
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