♪ [theme song plays] ♪
[cannon fire]
[narrator] By early 1945, Hitler's Third Reich
was entering its death throes.
In the west, allied forces had pushed to within
striking distance of the Rhine.
In the east, the Red Army was crossing
the Polish border into Germany.
As the Allies battled their way towards Berlin
from east and west, the Germans fought them all the way.
But it was a hopeless task.
By May, 1945, Hitler would be dead
and Germany finally defeated.
February, 1945, and the allied forces in the west had
assembled near the Rhine for the final push into Germany.
In the north, were the amassed ranks of
Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's 21st Army Group.
To its south, was General Omar Bradley's 12th Army Group.
It included the U.S. Third Army
commanded by General George Patton.
On February the 8th, Montgomery's Army Group launched
a two-pronged assault on German forces defending the Rhine.
The northern prong had to fight its way
through the wooded countryside.
The southern prong was delayed when the Germans
released water from a series of dams,
flooding the surrounding area.
It would be over two weeks before the two prongs met up
on the west bank of the Rhine.
By early March, 1945,
Montgomery's forces were in control
of some 60 miles of the west bank of the river.
The next task was to cross it.
South of Montgomery, Bradley's armies were also
moving eastward, looking for a route across the river.
On March the 7th, 1945, they reached the Rhine at Cologne.
But Hitler had ordered all the bridges to be destroyed.
Then as the U.S. forces explored further south,
they found one bridge still intact
near the small town of Remagen.
They made a dash for it,
brushing aside German resistance.
Then, just as they were about to cross it,
there was an explosion.
But against the odds, the bridge remained standing.
A small group of Americans raced across it,
desperately cutting any wires that looked like
demolition cables.
U.S. commanders began to push men across
as fast as possible.
The Allies had at last penetrated the German heartland.
In Berlin, news of the capture of the bridge
at Remagen infuriated Hitler.
Five junior officers were court martialled.
Four were shot.
In addition, the long-suffering German commander in the west,
Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, was sacked.
It was the second time it had happened to him
in less than a year.
He was replaced by veteran commander,
Field Marshal Albert Kesselring,
who'd been in overall charge in North Africa and Italy.
Over the next week, the Germans launched desperate
air attacks to try and destroy the bridge at Remagan.
None of them succeeded.
Then suddenly, on March the 17th, while combat engineers
were repairing it, the bridge unexpectedly collapsed.
Twenty-eight men plunged to their deaths.
The first Allied thrust into Germany had been blocked.
Meanwhile further north, Montgomery was preparing
the first full scale Allied crossing of the Rhine.
On March the 23rd, 1945, he launched an aerial bombardment
on German forces defending the east bank of the river.
Some 200 RAF Lancaster bombers
virtually flattened the town of Wesel.
Then British commanders in Buffalo
amphibious vehicles crossed.
They met little opposition from the dazed German defenders.
Other divisions followed.
The crossing lasted all night.
The following day, in the largest airborne operation
of the war, 17,000 men of British 6th and U.S. 17th
airborne divisions were dropped to seize
key positions east of the river.
They were met by heavy German anti-aircraft fire.
A newsreel report told the story.
[reporter] In a short time, hundred of gliders
make their hazardous landings,
their men beginning the fight as soon as they land.
One glider has its wing shot away when only
50 feet from the ground.
[explosion]
[narrator] More than half the gliders
were destroyed or damaged before landing.
But within hours, the paratroopers linked up
with Montgomery's land forces,
and the Allied bridgehead was secured.
It should have been, for the ferociously
competitive Montgomery, a moment of glory.
But he'd been upstaged.
The night before his great rival, General Patton,
had unexpectedly crossed the Rhine near Oppenheim
and had already entered Germany.
It was a sign of the intense rivalry between
Montgomery and American commanders as they competed
to be the first into Germany.
Over the next few days there were more Allied crossings.
German defences along the Rhine collapsed.
In the north, Montgomery now pushed deeper into Germany,
towards Munster.
In the south, Bradley's forces,
including Patton's Third Army, pushed east
towards Marburg and Lauterbach.
The major German city of Frankfurt am Main
were circled and bypassed.
Die hard German troops fought back ferociously.
But by now there was no question
that the Germans were finished.
The only issue was when they would realise it.
As the western allies battled their way across west Germany,
Stalin's Red Army in Poland prepared to launch
a major offensive on Germany's eastern border.
Hitler's forces in the region were poorly equipped
and ill prepared to repel an attack.
Supplies of weapons had run so low,
they were reduced to using first World War rifles.
German intelligence estimated the Red Army's infantry
outnumbered them eleven to one.
The Russians also had vastly more tanks and artillery.
But the Germans had nothing left.
Hitler's strategic reserve had already been used up
on the western front.
On January the 12th, 1945, the Russian offensive began
with the usual artillery barrage.
It stretched along a 300-mile front.
A week later, the Red Army drove into
the devastated remains of Warsaw.
They then pushed westwards towards the German border,
300 miles away.
To the south a second Soviet force
took the Polish town of Krakow on January the 18th.
As the Soviet forces now raced westwards
on a broad front across Poland, they left behind pockets of
German resistance in cities like Poznan and Breslaw.
These would later be mocked up.
By the end of January, 1945, Soviet troops
had crossed the German border and reached the River Oder.
The Russians were now just an hour's drive east of Berlin.
For the veteran Russian Commander Georgy Zhukov,
it had been a triumph.
He had travelled 300 miles in just 14 days.
It was one of the fastest and longest
blitzkrieg advances in military history.
Zhukov's troops now paused to catch their breath
and bring up supplies.
They were soon joined by a second group of Soviet armies
that dug in to their south on the River Neisse.
Meanwhile, a third Russian force pinned the remnants
of the German armies in East Prussia
into the Baltic port of Konigsberg, Kaliningrad today.
Hitler had appointed the SS Chief Heinrich Himmler
to command his forces in the neighbouring region.
It was a sign of how deeply he had come to distrust
his army generals.
But Himmler had no military knowledge or experience.
During February, 1945, troops under Himmler's command
were torn apart by Russian forces moving west.
This time Hitler could have sent reserves.
A large force of German troops still occupied
the Courland Peninsula in neighbouring Latvia.
But in another bizarre decision, Hitler refused to
allow it to break out and provide assistance.
He was still committed to holding on to land,
his lebensraum, however irrelevant or wasteful
it might now be.
It meant some 200,000 German troops
spent the final months of the war doing nothing.
The Red Army now prepared for its final assault on Berlin.
It lay less than 50 miles away.
In Germany the imminent Soviet invasion caused
mass panic among the civilian population.
The Russians had seen first hand the horrors
perpetrated by the Germans in the Soviet Union.
They'd witnessed whole towns and villages destroyed,
their inhabitants massacred.
They were now very clearly looking for revenge.
There were horrific tales of Russian
rape, murder and pillage.
In snow and bitter sub zero temperatures,
more than five million German civilians on the eastern front
fled their homes and flooded west to seek refuge.
Two million people were evacuated by sea
from German-held ports along the Baltic coast.
They were easy pickings for Soviet submarines.
Twenty-four German passenger ships were torpedoed.
They included the cruise liner Wilhelm Gustloff,
which had over 10,000 people on board.
Barely a thousand survived, the worst loss of life ever
in a single incident at sea.
Hitler's acting Chief of Staff, General Heinz Guderian,
now urged the Fuhrer to bring back any units
that could be spared from the western front
to defend Berlin.
Hitler agreed and brought back the elite
6th SS Panzer Army.
But he didn't send it to Berlin, he sent it to Hungary.
He had become obsessed with defending Germany's
last remaining source of oil,
the Hungarian oil field west of Lake Balaton.
It was an ill-considered decision.
In Hungary the Panzers were hopelessly
outnumbered by the Russians.
To make matters worse, the weather conspired against them.
A sudden thaw turned the ground into a sea of mud.
For several days the Panzers struggled
to hold back the advancing Russians.
But they were steadily forced back into Austria.
Soon they were drawn into the defence of Vienna
as the Red Army advanced towards the Austrian capital.
But 6th SS Panzer Army was a spent force.
Its commander, SS General Sef Dietrich, had no illusions.
We call ourselves, he said, the 6th Panzer Army
because we have only six Panzers left.
On April the 10th, the Red Army swept them aside
and took Vienna.
As they did so, the question now became
who would be the first to reach Berlin.
Would it be the Red Army or the Western Allies?
The race for Berlin had become not just a military,
but a political issue.
By March 1945, the Red Army was lined up
along the River Oder awaiting a final assault on Berlin.
It presented the Allied military command
in the west with a dilemma.
Berlin was less than 300 miles
from their advanced positions.
Most Allied commanders wanted to race to the city
to beat the Russians.
But at a conference a month earlier
in the Black Sea port of Yalta, the Allied leaders
had divided up Germany into zones of influence.
Berlin was firmly inside the Russian zone.
So Eisenhower was instructed to tell his commanders
to ignore Berlin and spread out
to take the rest of the country.
On April the 1st, U.S. troops surrounded
the German industrial cities in the Ruhr.
German soldiers occupying the area
put up a stiff resistance.
When two weeks later the area fell,
more than 325,000 troops were taken prisoner.
It was one of the largest number of German prisoners
taken in the war so far.
The German Commander, the diehard Nazi
Field Marshal Walter Model committed suicide.
Elsewhere in the country resistance was more patchy,
and General Bradley's armies stormed across Germany.
By April the 18th, 1945, the U.S. forces
had punched a corridor through to the Czech border,
splitting Germany in two.
Meanwhile north of the Ruhr,
Montgomery's Canadian First Army began
the liberation of Holland.
The Dutch had suffered horrendously
during the bitter winter of 1944 1945.
The German occupying force had deliberately taken supplies
of food and fuel from the country to use elsewhere.
There had been widespread deaths from starvation and cold.
The Dutch town of Arnhem was seized on April the 15th, 1945.
Progress was rapid, and on the following day the Canadians
had liberated Groningen, close to the Dutch north coast.
[cheering]
That left a German army virtually intact,
but surrounded, near Amsterdam.
Soon afterwards a cease fire was negotiated.
Allied aircraft now roared over the Dutch countryside
dropping food and medical supplies.
At the same time the British Second Army,
also under Montgomery's command,
pushed fast across the north German plain.
Osnabruck fell on April the 4th.
The British were soon at the German port of Bremen.
Here there was fierce German resistance.
It took nine days of house-to-house fighting
before the port was secured.
Two days later Montgomery's British forces
reached the Elbe at Lauenburg.
As the Allies advanced across Germany,
they now came across horrific new evidence
of the Nazi's final solution.
In early April, 1945, U.S. troops overran
a concentration camp at Ohrdruf near Weimar
in central Germany.
A visibly shocked General Eisenhower paid a visit.
The SS had evacuated most of the prisoners,
but they had left behind piles of bodies.
Eight days later British troops overran another
concentration camp at Belsen, north of Hanover.
Here they discovered over 70,000 prisoners.
Thousands were already dead.
The remainder were starving and disease-ridden.
A radio broadcast by the BBC correspondent Richard Dimbleby
gave the horrific details.
[Richard] I passed through the barrier
and found myself in the world of a nightmare.
The living lay with their heads against the corpses,
and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession
of emaciated, aimless people with nothing to do
and no hope of life.
Unable to move out of your way, unable to look
at the terrible sights around them.
It was as though they were waiting their turn.
This is what the Germans did.
Let there be no mistake about it,
did deliberately and slowly.
[narrator] Meanwhile far to the south in Italy,
the German front was also starting to collapse.
The German forces were dug in across the Apennine Mountains.
Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander, the Allied commander
in the Mediterranean, now launched a spring offensive.
On April the 9th, 1945, British troops attacked,
pulling German forces in from along the front.
Five days later, U.S. troops also moved forward
and swiftly reached the south bank of the River Po.
The Germans retreated to the north bank.
But Hitler's commander in Italy,
General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, had no illusions
that he could hold back the Allied advance for long.
So he now made approaches to the Allies,
and on April the 29th surrendered unconditionally.
It would take effect from May the 2nd, 1945.
This was the first formal surrender of German forces
anywhere in Europe.
The war was moving swiftly towards a conclusion.
Back in Germany, American and Russian forces had by now
met up on the Elbe near Leipzig.
[reporter] The moment the world has been
awaiting so long, when ally from west meets ally from east.
The meeting was achieved on April 26th,
when a detachment of the American 69th Infantry Division
under Major General Reinhardt was rowed across the Elbe
to the Russians assembled on the far bank.
[narrator] The stage was set for the final
assault on Berlin.
Hitler was desperate.
He now turned to the old and very young
for help in defending the city.
His Thousand-Year Reich was preparing for its final
apocalyptic struggle to survive.
[applause]
On April the 1st, 1945, Joseph Stalin
summoned his top commanders to Moscow
to receive their orders for the capture of Berlin.
Marshal Georgy Zhukov, Russia's most successful commander,
would make the main assault from his bridgehead
on the Oder River.
A second group of Soviet armies under Marshal Ivan Konev
would cross the River Neisse further south and push
deep into Germany, bypassing the German capital.
Between them they represented a massive Soviet force
of over two and a half million men.
They were equipped with 6,000 tanks
and self propelled guns,
and 40,000 guns, mortars and rocket launchers.
But the Germans were never going to make it easy.
The city was defended by about a million troops.
Many were dug into strong defensive positions,
particularly along the Seelow heights,
a steep escarpment arising out of the Oder Valley
and slap in front of Zhukov's point of assault.
The defenders were a mixed bunch of combat veterans,
SS fanatics and inexperienced conscripts,
some as young as 14, as well as elderly members
of the Volkssturm, or People's Army.
By now Hitler had retired to a bunker
under the Reich's Chancellery in Berlin.
He was a heavily medicated and shambling figure
who spent much of his time issuing increasingly
unrealistic orders to largely imaginary armies.
His public appearances were becoming ever more rare.
But in early March he was persuaded to visit
some of the troops preparing to defend the Oder line.
Later in the same month, he emerged to inspect
a small group of Hitler Youth soldiers.
It was his last ever appearance before the cameras.
Then on April the 13th, 1945, the U.S. President,
Franklin Roosevelt, died of a heart attack.
He had been one of the architects of the war,
responsible for throwing America's might
behind the Allied offensive.
The Nazi Propaganda Minister, Josef Goebbels,
seized on the event to encourage his
increasingly befuddled Fuhrer to believe
the Allied alliance would collapse.
A German victory could still be snatched
from the jaws of defeat.
But any illusions were rapidly dispelled.
Three days after Roosevelt's death,
Zhukov began his assault on Berlin.
He had one gun for every 13 feet of the front.
But the German defence had anticipated
and pulled back to avoid the bombardment.
As a result, when Zhukov's infantry advanced
they met unexpectedly heavy resistance.
Desperate to retrieve the situation,
Zhukov threw in his tanks.
But they, too, were soon bogged down.
Meanwhile to the south, the assault by Konev's
second group of armies had gone better.
His troops had crossed the Neisse River and were
well on their way to their next obstacle, the River Spree.
Stalin stoked the rivalry between his two commanders
by authorizing Konev to swing his tanks north
towards Berlin.
He was only too happy to see a race to take the city.
After three days of savage fighting, Zhukov's troops
managed to enter the eastern suburbs of Berlin.
At the same time Konev was approaching
the city from the south.
There was desperate German resistance.
But on April the 25th, the Soviet armies met up,
and the final assault on Berlin began.
As the fighting moved on from district to district,
civilians began to emerge from the cellars.
But the Russians took little notice
of the flags of surrender.
The rape of German women and girls was widespread.
After three more days of fighting, the city's
remaining defenders were pinned down in a narrow strip
of central Berlin less than two miles wide.
Every street and house was contested.
Then on the morning of April the 30th,
Soviet troops began an assault on the Reichstag,
the German Parliament building.
Stalin regarded it as the symbol of Nazi power.
They were stopped by heavy fire,
so they blasted the building at point blank range
with heavy artillery.
That evening the Russians stormed it.
Fighting raged from room to room,
and up and down corridors and staircases.
It would take four hours before the red flag
could be hoisted on one of the towers.
The next morning, on May the 1st, 1945,
the event was restaged for the cameras.
But by then Hitler was already dead.
On April the 30th, as fighting raged overhead,
the man whose insane ambitions had embroiled
the world in war, laid waste a continent and led to
the extermination of millions of Jews
took his own life.
[German shouts]
His long time mistress, Eva Brown,
who he'd married the day before, died with him.
Their partially burned bodies were buried
in the garden of the Reich's chancellery.
But the fighting continued.
Hitler had appointed Grand Admiral
Karl Doenitz his successor, and for the next few days
the new leadership attempted to salvage something
from its nation's cataclysmic defeat.
On May the 1st, 1945, the day after his death,
German people were told that their Fuhrer
had fallen in battle.
But they were told to continue the fight
against the Bolshevik menace.
But the German leadership was falling apart.
In Berlin Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann
tried to negotiate a city wide cease fire with the Russians.
But the Russian Commander, Marshal Zhukov, demanded
unconditional surrender of all German forces everywhere.
It was more than Goebbels and Bormann could deliver.
Fighting in Berlin continued.
Later that evening, Goebbels and his wife killed
their six children and then committed suicide themselves.
That same night Bormann disappeared.
Eventually in the 1990's, DNA testing confirmed
that a body found in Berlin was his.
The next morning Berlin surrendered.
By mid afternoon all fighting in the city had stopped.
Across the country the pace of the German surrender
now gathered momentum.
The following day Doenitz sent a delegation
to the British commanding officer,
Field Marshal Montgomery.
He offered to surrender all German forces
in northern Germany.
Montgomery sent a reply saying he didn't have the authority
to accept a surrender on behalf of the Americans
or the Russians.
He could only accept the surrender
of those troops fighting him.
Doenitz had no choice but to agree to Montgomery's terms.
But that left Germany still fighting
in the rest of the country.
Doenitz now sent another delegation
to General Eisenhower,
the supreme Allied commander,
to discuss a peace deal with the west.
But it carefully avoided any reference
to a surrender to the Russians.
Eisenhower rebuffed him and insisted that only the
unconditional surrender of all German forces was acceptable.
Once again Doenitz was forced to back down.
At 2:41 in the morning of May the 7th, 1945,
at Eisenhower's headquarters in France,
General Alfred Jodl, Hitler's Chief of Operations
throughout the six years of war
signed a document of unconditional surrender.
Eisenhower's Chief of Staff, Walter Bedell Smith,
signed for the western allies.
General Ivan Susloparov signed for the Soviet Union.
The only member of the Allies side
not happy with the arrangement was Stalin.
The Soviet Union had suffered too much to miss out
on its own humiliation of the Germans.
So Stalin countermanded Susloparov and declared
Russia would only accept a surrender in Berlin.
It meant that the following day Hitler's
former Chief of Staff, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel,
signed a second surrender document to satisfy Stalin.
Marshal Zhukov signed for the Soviet Union,
with Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder
signing on behalf of the western allies.
[clapping]
In January, 1943, the late President Roosevelt
and Premier Churchill met in Casablanca.
There they pronounced the formula of unconditional
surrender for the Axis powers.
In Europe that formula has now been fulfilled.
[music and cheering]
[narrator] Across Europe and the United States
crowds began to celebrate the end of the war in Europe.
From now on, the day after the German surrender,
May the 8th, would be known as VE Day,
Victory in Europe.
But as the celebrations continued,
many were aware of two very sobering issues.
In the east, Japan was still fighting.
And in Europe the continent lay in ruins,
and huge problems needed to be solved.
Millions of Germany's concentration camp victims
and slave labourers would need help to rebuild their lives.
Millions of captured German fighting men had to be
screened before being allowed to go home
to identify and arrest major war criminals.
The SS was a particular target.
It had been responsible for some of the
worst atrocities of the war.
Leading Nazis like Hermann Goering,
head of Hitler's Air Force, were rounded up
and paraded in front of the cameras.
Other top Nazis arrested included civilian leaders like
Albert Speer, and military leaders like Yodl and Doenitz.
They would be put on trial in the German city of Nuremberg
for crimes against humanity.
[judge] You must plead guilty or not guilty.
[German dialogue]
[judge] Rudolph Hess, you must plead
guilty or not guilty.
Nein.
[judge] That will be entered as a plea
of not guilty.
[narrator] The Nazi leadership received sentences
ranging from the death penalty to ten years in prison.
Goering committed suicide before he could be hung.
Two months after the German surrender, the Allies met
in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam.
Germany was divided into four zones of occupation,
Soviet, British, American and French.
Berlin, although deep in the Soviet zone,
was parcelled up between the Allies in the same way.
The peoples of Europe would also find themselves divided.
Some would now live under the control the western allies,
some under Communist Russia.
But before any of this could be faced,
there was still the war in the Pacific to be won.
[heavy gunfire]
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