D‐Day.
156,000 British, American and Canadian soldiers
are transported across the English Channel
in the largest seaborn invasion ever attempted.
[Sir Mike] It's an almost unimaginable scale now
to put a huge army across the Channel
against a defended shore.
[narrator] After years of pressure
from Soviet leader Joseph Stalin,
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
has finally agreed
to open a second front in Europe,
and send Allied troops to liberate occupied France.
From there, they will fight their way
across to Germany,
and with the Red Army advancing from the east,
finally bring down Hitler's fascist empire.
The success of D‐Day will allow
a total of two million Allied troops
and nine million tonnes of armaments and supplies
to be landed on the beaches at Normandy.
[Sir Mike] It finally brought
Allied ground forces within reach of Germany itself.
[narrator] And yet, just three months later,
the Big Three's optimism will turn to despair,
as the Allies attempt to bulldoze their way
as quickly as possible across Europe,
comes to a grinding halt.
[Iwan] Operation Market Garden,
an attempt to end the war by Christmas,
turned into one of the great military disasters
of World War II,
with the so‐called "bridge too far."
[narrator] Operation Market Garden
will lead to 17,000 Allied casualties,
as well as thousands more dead and wounded Dutch civilians.
[in Dutch] When you look back at what happened
we know we did our very best,
and we are proud of what we've done.
[theme music]
[explosions]
[slides clicking]
[explosions]
[bombs hiss]
[explosions]
[narrator] During 1943, debate over the timing
of a western invasion of mainland Europe
had come close to breaking the Grand Alliance.
With his forces sustaining colossal losses in the east,
Stalin was impatient for a second front
to be opened in Western Europe without delay.
Churchill, however, preferred an attack
through the Mediterranean via Sicily and Italy,
Europe's soft underbelly.
Roosevelt was caught in the middle,
but ultimately backed Stalin,
in return for the Soviet leader's
declaration of war against Japan.
Churchill has this Imperial holdover
of really seeing
the Eastern Mediterranean as the key to Europe.
You could make the argument that he experienced
the failure of an amphibious landing
in the First World War,
and he didn't want to relive it again in France
in the Second World War.
So he has a sort of natural aversion,
in addition to believing actually
that you could form a pincer move
and divide the Germans on two fronts,
which is what he's trying to do by going up
through the Balkans and up through Italy.
[Peter] Stalin argued
for the opening of the second front
in northern France,
not only because he thought
this would support the Soviet war effort,
it was vital to victory over Hitler,
but he wanted equality
and prestige of his own within The Big Three.
He wanted to be treated as a partner within this trio,
and he thought he was not receiving
the credit that he was due.
It comes down to personal relationships,
again, in this sense.
[narrator] In February 1943,
Churchill had begun to yield to Stalin's pressure
and had promised a cross‐Channel operation
in August or September of that year.
When this was postponed for more than eight months,
Stalin was incandescent
and recalled his ambassadors
from London and Washington in protest.
Operation Overlord had an inauspicious beginning.
Stalin was insistent on Operation Overlord
because he knew how much pain
his people were coming under on the Eastern Front,
how many people were dying in the millions,
and that they couldn't sustain this forever.
[narrator] Then in January 1944, Churchill assured Stalin
that he was now going full blast for Overlord
and the opening of a second front.
But the invasion's commander would not be British.
In a distinct shift in the balance of power
of the Big Three,
D‐Day would be led by an American:
General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Stalin and Roosevelt both supported the idea
of a new world order,
and considered Churchill and his British imperialism
as a relic of a bygone age.
Despite people like Churchill
hoping, indeed, that the empire would carry on
and Britain could carry on as before,
the realities
and the ideologies were different,
which meant it could not be carried on.
[narrator] In early 1944,
Churchill was on a charm offensive,
hailing the tremendous victories of the Russian armies,
and described "the new confidence
which has grown in our hearts towards Stalin."
But with the Red Army now close to the Polish border,
tensions within the Big Three were growing.
Britain had guaranteed Polish independence in 1939,
and the country's government in exile
was based in London.
Churchill made intense efforts
to broker a Polish‐Soviet agreement,
but would his new confidence in Stalin prove to be misplaced?
By now, Soviet advances against the Nazis
were unstoppable.
On the 27th of January, 1944,
the Red Army finally liberated Leningrad,
ending a siege that had lasted almost two and a half years.
Stalin believed that even if Roosevelt and Churchill
broke their promise to invade France,
the Soviets would have enough power to finish off
Hitler's Germany alone.
Stalin was thriving, but his allies were not.
The Nazis had renewed their bombing of London,
and in February, Churchill cabled Roosevelt to say,
"We have just had a stick of bombs
around 10 Downing Street and there are no more windows."
Britain was war weary, and so was Churchill.
He looked old, tired and very depressed.
Roosevelt was equally exhausted, and now also gravely ill
with heart disease, cardiac failure,
and acute bronchitis,
and his standing in the polls was sinking.
If Overlord had been a catastrophe
then it would've been very bad
for both of them as leaders, I think.
Roosevelt, he wants to carry on being president.
He wants to run for a final term.
And he needs to show momentum. He needs to show success.
And those sorts of things matter in a democracy.
So for both of them, I think,
the repercussions could have been very serious
if it'd been a complete disaster.
Of course, it was very tough,
and it was not a foregone conclusion.
[narrator] As Roosevelt's popularity
continued to weaken,
Joseph Kennedy told Churchill's emissary,
Beaverbrook,
that he was certain Roosevelt faced defeat.
Overlord had to be a triumph, or the Alliance would crumble.
[theme music]
[explosions]
[narrator] To ensure Operation Overlord's success,
the Allies instigated an intricate campaign
of fake operations
and disinformation called Bodyguard,
approved on Christmas Day, 1943.
The aim was to mislead the Nazis about the location and timing
of key Allied military offensives.
The most significant was Operation Fortitude.
Fortitude North aimed to convince the Germans
that the Allied invasion in 1944
would come through Norway and Sweden.
Fortitude South sought to persuade them
that the Pas de Calais would be
the main invasion site in France,
and that any action directed
at Normandy was merely a diversion.
The campaign successfully persuaded the Nazis
to deploy forces and reserves to irrelevant locations
and limited Hitler's options.
This was not a matter
of fake intelligence being leaked.
The Allies placed an entire fictitious fighting force,
the First U. S. Army Group, in Kent,
directly opposite the French port of Calais.
Roads, bridges, airfields
and embarkation points were built,
and fake planes and landing craft
were put in place.
False radio messages were transmitted
to give an added sense of fevered activity.
This ingenious plan would culminate
on the evening before D‐Day,
when the Allies launched a mock invasion from Dover,
diverting Nazi forces away
from the real invasion in Normandy.
I don't think we should underestimate exactly
what was at risk here.
It wasn't just about the boots on the ground, so to speak,
but we needed deception plans,
we needed to use every single tool.
Of course, Churchill loved all of that unorthodox stuff.
He was interested in the Commandos
and supported SOE.
We dropped agents behind enemy lines.
He loved secret gadgets, exploding rats,
whatever it was, he was for it.
[narrator] To command this ghost army,
the Allies selected one of their most cunning and able generals,
George S. Patton.
Allied intelligence had already identified Patton
as the General most respected by the Nazis,
so his appointment was leaked
to the Germans to bolster the deception.
[Jonathan] They set Patton up in Kent
with a whole supposed army group.
They had him driving around inspecting troops,
pretending to be the First U. S. Army Group,
which was going to bounce across the Channel
and attack Calais and Boulogne.
They had inflatable tanks,
and all this sort of stuff parked in fields,
so that any German airplanes could spot them
and report back of this immense concentration.
They spent a lot of time convincing the Germans
that the main attack was going to be at the narrowest point
of the Channel across the Pas de Calais.
[narrator] For Patton himself, a man of action,
being the leader of a fake army was tortuous.
But Operation Fortitude would have a lasting effect
on German operations.
And that was so successful
that even after D‐Day,
the Germans still thought that the main attack hadn't come yet
and kept forces in the Pas de Calais.
They also had another completely fictitious
army group in Scotland
which was supposed to go over and invade Norway
to distract the Germans
and force them to keep forces in Norway.
They had all sorts of fun, and all kinds of schemes,
greatly helped by the fact that they could read
enough Enigma traffic by this stage
to know which of these deceptions
were working and which ones weren't.
n
was successful,
the full‐scale D‐Day rehearsals in April 1944 were anything but.
Operation Tiger on Slapton Sands in Devon
turned into a catastrophe
as Allied forces came under heavy attack
from German E‐boats
and were embroiled in friendly fire incidents.
In all, nearly a thousand men were killed or wounded.
Nothing, however,
would be allowed to stop this invasion,
and on the 6th of June 1944, an armada set off
from the south coast of England.
The flotilla was supported by more than 18,000 men
from the U. S. 82nd and 101st airborne,
as well as the British 6th Airborne Division.
They were dropped into enemy territory
in the early hours of the morning
to seize bridges and secure the beachheads
ahead of the landings.
3,000 landing craft, as well as 2,500 ships,
and 500 naval vessels were transporting
more than 156,000 American, British and Canadian soldiers
across the English Channel.
[suspenseful music]
They would disembark on five beaches
along the 50‐mile Normandy coastline.
The British and American divisions
had been training since 1942,
but nothing could prepare them
for the reality of what lay ahead.
[Sir Mike] We'll never know, without a doubt,
the preparation on the scale...
It's an almost unimaginable scale now,
to put a huge army across the Channel
against a defended shore.
Every day that went by
gave you another day's preparation,
so I think every day earlier
would have made that little less chance of success.
[narrator] When the seaborne units
began to land at 6:30 a. m.,
the British and Canadians on Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches
overcame light opposition from the Germans,
as did the Americans at Utah.
However, at Omaha Beach, the U. S. 1st Division
was met by the best of the German coastal defences,
the 352nd, and continuously fired on
by machine gunners as they came on shore.
Omaha threatened to fail, and only dedicated leadership
got the troops inland, but not without cost.
More than 2,000 American casualties
were sustained on this one beach.
Hitler, notoriously nocturnal,
did not wake up until midday on June 6th,
long after the landings had begun.
As soon as he heard the news,
he sent the 21st Panzer Division into the gap
between the British and Canadian beaches.
Had the Germans reached the sea,
the landings might not have succeeded.
But fierce resistance by British anti‐tank gunners
turned the tide.
It was also a victory for British intelligence
and their subsequent surveillance
of captured German commanders.
[Helen] We rarely think about all those top commanders
that were captured on the battlefields
of Normandy, in France,
and all the way down to the invasion of Germany.
What happened to them?
Well, they were brought back,
generals, couple of field marshals,
over 50 German generals ended up in British captivity.
We needed the intelligence from them,
and British intelligence bugged their conversations
and got intelligence which now is being recognised
as having turned the course of the war.
[narrator] The D‐day victory was reported extensively
in the newspapers and cinemas
in both the UK and the U. S.
But the victory was bittersweet.
[military music]
Some of the guys that had come back,
they're in the States,
they're in the hospital wanting to know,
they want to see what is going on
but they can't, because they don't have TVs.
A lot of people were wondering
what was happening to their loved one,
and that was a little bit harder,
unless it was in the newspaper probably about five days later,
six days later, they'd get the newspaper
to find out if one of their loved ones
was killed or not.
[narrator] Allied troops
who had not yet been shipped over
to join their colleagues
also watched the landings on the news.
[narrator] In five days, the beaches were fully secured
in the hands of the Americans and British,
and more than 326,000 men,
100,000 tons of equipment, and 50,000 vehicles had arrived.
Mulberry B, a temporary harbour, was built,
and over the next ten months
it was used to bring in 2.5 million troops,
500,000 vehicles,
and 4 million tonnes of supplies.
Major General Rudi Hemmes had made his way
from the Netherlands to England
to train as a soldier.
Now he was on his way back to fight.
bore the brunt of German resistance,
enabling American forces to break out
and make the initial running into France.
The small fields, thick hedges, and narrow, sunken lanes
favoured the defending Germans,
and infantry casualties were heavy.
But Hitler's intolerance of tactical withdrawals
meant that his forces were eventually trapped,
and 60,000 German soldiers were killed or captured.
Nearly all their guns, tanks, and vehicles were abandoned.
Stalin had got what he wanted, a second front had been opened,
and the Allied troops began to advance through France.
[Peter] The invasion of northern France
was a huge landing, a huge operation,
and it did make a huge contribution
to the defeat of Hitler.
The Soviet Union would not have been able
to maintain their momentum
without an assault from the other side,
from Western Europe.
It also created the nightmare scenario
for the Germans,
because for them, they've remembered back
to the First World War
where they had faced a war on two fronts,
and this was a central reason why they were defeated in 1918.
[Sir Mike] It finally brought Allied ground forces
within reach of Germany itself.
Up until now, Germany controlled vast swathes of Europe,
east and west, and south,
given Italy being a member of The Axis.
So it was never their fight on their land,
and this now, for the first time,
and from the east, and from the west,
Germany itself becomes threatened
by Allied attack.
[narrator] On 25th of August 1944,
Paris was liberated.
[triumphant music]
[crowd applauds]
[narrator] With the Germans now in full retreat,
the Allies advanced rapidly
on a broad front through north‐eastern France and Belgium
towards the borders of the Third Reich.
It would be here, however,
that the German Wehrmacht would make its final stand
against the Western Allies.
After the success of D‐Day,
the Allies believed victory was in sight
and could be achieved by Christmas, 1944.
Advancing a staggering 342 miles in six days,
British tanks swept through northern France and into Belgium
with little resistance.
The British Second Army, led by the Welsh Guards,
advanced to the south, entering Brussels
to an ecstatic welcome on the 3rd of September.
The next day, Antwerp fell to the 11th Armoured Division.
U. S. General Marshall told his commanders
that cessations of hostilities in the war against Germany
may occur at any time.
The Allies planned to drop paratroopers into Berlin,
in the event of a sudden German collapse,
to try to secure the city before the Red Army got there.
They did not consider
that the largely abandoned Siegfried Line
would still prove a major obstacle,
or that fuel for their tanks would soon be in short supply.
By mid‐September 1944,
Allied confidence was beginning to look severely misplaced.
When the Germans finally crumbled
at the end of the battle of Normandy,
the Falaise Pocket closed all of that.
Their withdrawal was then precipitate.
Paris fell within days, Brussels early September.
There was a real sense
that Allies had broken the Wehrmacht,
but I think they underestimated the extraordinary ability,
which they had demonstrated so clearly on the Russian Front,
to regroup, to reorganise,
and very rapidly turn it around.
[narrator] Operation Market Garden,
devised by Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery,
was to be the largest airborne operation
in the history of warfare.
Its aim was to secure the key bridges
over three Dutch rivers
in order to outflank the heavy Nazi defences
of the Siegfried Line and enter the German heartland.
It involved around 35,000 British, American
and Polish airborne and glider troops,
who'd meet up with the British Armoured Divisions
on the ground.
[Helen] The aim of Operation Market Garden
was to take strategically important bridges and routes
around Eindhoven and Nijmegen,
and ultimately, of course, we had to cross the Rhine.
So it's preparations ready for the invasion of Germany.
[Sir Mike] A strategic thrust, that was the great idea.
The strategic aim was to cross a number of water obstacles,
rivers, canals,
in order to give a breakout position
into not only Germany, but into the Ruhr,
into Germany's industrial heartland,
and then to Berlin.
allied paratroopers were dropped over the Netherlands.
These included the British 1st Airborne,
The Red Devils,
who were dropped into Arnhem and the surrounding area.
A handful of them managed to secure
the northern end of the Arnhem Bridge.
But German counterattacks cut them off
from the landing zones
and forced more than 2,000 men into a pocket
near the village of Oosterbeek several miles away.
The British airmen had few anti‐tank weapons,
limited food and supplies,
and their ammunition was running low.
By the night of the 25th of September,
the main body of troops had been forced to withdraw
from the Oosterbeek perimeter.
From this point, all British and American troops
began to withdraw,
leaving behind more than 15,000 Allied casualties
as well as thousands of dead Dutch civilians.
[Iwan] It was the scheme promoted
by the British General Bernard Montgomery,
who felt he should have been in command of Allied forces,
rather than Eisenhower.
The Americans accepted a plan drawn up largely by the British
which turned into one of the great military disasters
of World War II,
where the so‐called "bridge too far."
[narrator] Monty's bold bid for glory
proved a humiliation.
The whole operation had been hampered by dense fog,
thick clouds, and radio communication failure.
The British ground landing zones were too far from Arnhem,
a lack of aircraft meant the drop took three days,
vastly reducing any element of surprise,
and Allied commanders ignored British intelligence
that two SS Panzer divisions were in the area.
Of course, German troops were being mapped all the time,
in map rooms across Britain,
and we didn't know where 9 and 10 Panzer Division were.
They were hiding somewhere.
And their location was picked up just three days
before Operation Market Garden.
But the intelligence was not acted upon,
and it does raise questions as to why,
whether Market Garden could even that late have been stopped.
[narrator] Though Montgomery called the operation
90% successful,
in reality, it was a valiant failure.
The Allies had failed to establish
a bridgehead over the Rhine,
and they would now have to fight their way
into the Reich on a broad front.
[Jonathan] Yes, the Allies did underestimate
German strength.
If they had been able to launch it
two weeks previously,
then the Germans might have been weak enough for it to work.
But by the time it was eventually launched,
the Germans had a couple of weeks
to catch their breath,
start to reorganise themselves and rebuild the defences a bit.
But even if it had all worked,
even if it had all worked two weeks previously,
they would still have been holding a very exposed salient,
because although they might have captured the bridge at Arnhem,
there was always going to be another river.
[narrator] After the debacle of Operation Market Garden,
morale was low, and tensions again
became evident between the Allies.
The majority of the forces
in Northern Europe were American,
and they wanted the main say in how the war was run.
They considered Montgomery to be a whining, arrogant,
opinionated and self‐serving Brit,
desperate for the glory and credit for the final victories.
Montgomery, some would accuse him
of seeking personal glory here.
He would deny that,
absolutely vehemently,
and say "no, strategically, this is
the best way to finish the war.
It's the quickest way."
[narrator] Despite this, relations between Roosevelt
and Churchill seemed to be at their best.
Just before Operation Market Garden,
Churchill had heaped praise on Roosevelt
at the Quebec Conference,
and subsequent meetings saw them discuss ways to deindustrialize
and divide Germany after the war through the Morgenthau Plan.
The mood was equally cordial
at the Moscow Conference at the Kremlin
in October 1944 attended by Churchill,
the foreign ministers of all three countries
and hosted, of course, by Stalin.
British military leaders, however,
were growing increasingly anxious about the Soviets
as the Red Army began to encroach further
into Eastern and Southern Europe during the autumn of 1944.
In response, Churchill devised a plan
to maintain British influence in Greece and the Mediterranean,
protecting its imperial interests.
So, his bottom line is to persuade the Soviets,
to persuade the Greek communists,
to cooperate and not to attempt
to oppose the King of Greece,
who Churchill's very keen on putting back on his throne.
What happens is this broadens out into
a proposed arrangement of percentage of influence
over the countries of south‐eastern Europe,
so Greece, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Hungary.
And Churchill suggests that they divide it
in terms of percentages.
[narrator] The Americans opposed the idea.
whatever the British said, they feared it could turn
into a post‐war dispute over Allied occupied Europe
between Britain and the Soviet Union.
During a state dinner, Churchill slipped Stalin a list
dividing up the Balkans into spheres of influence
by percentages.
Stalin is said to have looked at the list,
and ticked it indicating his approval.
They also discussed the idea that the Soviet Union needed
a ring of independent, pro‐Soviet buffer states:
Poland, Czechoslovakia,
and Hungary to protect its border.
Now, for Stalin,
this was not a controversial thing,
because he did not really care about the status of countries.
He was interested in expanding Soviet power.
Where the Percentages Agreement is controversial
is for Churchill and Roosevelt, and why they agreed to this.
Democratic powers agreeing
to carve up Europe in this backroom deal
in a way that kind of fitted Stalin's methods
much more than it fitted theirs.
[narrator] The fates of many millions
were decided over dinner,
while the Allied forces were struggling
to bring a swift end to the war.
eptember, 1944,
U. S. forces were approaching
the Hurtgen Forest on the Siegfried Line,
the fortified wall of concrete and steel
extending along Germany's western borders
from the Netherlands to Switzerland.
This densely wooded area was said by U. S. intelligence
to be relatively undefended,
giving troops a clear route across the Siegfried Line,
the Rhine and on to Berlin.
‐They were wrong. ‐[machine gun fire]
Hurtgen was one
of the most heavily fortified areas
of the Siegfried Line.
200 square miles of dense woods and ravines,
packed with minefields
and gunners in concealed pillboxes.
From behind these formidable defences,
a very few Germans could pin down
a great many Allied soldiers.
Fierce fighting raged here
from September 1944 to February 1945.
It was a long, drawn‐out slogging match
for a wooded area
which didn't have that much, in my view,
tactical significance.
They got bogged down.
Perhaps it was a question of who blinked first,
and neither was prepared to.
[narrator] Soldiers called the forest
"The Death Factory,"
as it claimed 33,000 American casualties.
It was one of the greatest defeats
the U. S. Army has ever suffered.
For three months, the Nazis held at bay
the vastly better supplied and better equipped U. S. troops,
while just a few miles south,
three German field armies assembled in secrecy
for the Ardennes Offensive.
The so‐called Battle of the Bulge,
designed to push the Allies out of Northern Europe,
once and for all.
[machine gun fire]
[explosion]
[theme music]
[narrator] On the 16th of December, 1944,
more than 200,000 German troops
and nearly 1,000 tanks launched Operation Watch on the Rhine,
Hitler's last major offensive on the Western Front.
Seeking to drive to the coast and split the Allied armies,
the Germans struck in the Ardennes Forest,
a 75‐mile stretch held by four U. S. divisions.
The Nazis broke through,
surrounding U. S. Army infantry divisions,
seizing key crossroads, and advancing nearly 50 miles
towards the strategically vital Meuse River.
This created the bulge in the Western Front
that gave the battle its name.
The Battle of the Bulge was, of course,
Hitler's last roll of the dice,
where he commits a massive force of panzers
and his crack troops to try
to break through the Allied line.
Eisenhower, much to Montgomery's disgust,
had pursued a strategy of broad advancement.
And broad advancement meant that the line of advancement
was thinly defended.
Coming through the Ardennes,
the German forces virtually achieved a breakthrough,
but the Americans held them off.
It was largely the Americans' doing at very heavy costs.
The Americans lost more in the Battle of the Bulge
than in any other battle in Europe in the war,
and it was a triumph of America.
[narrator] It shattered Allied complacency.
Churchill asked Stalin to mount a new offensive.
Eisenhower sent an emissary to Moscow to share strategy
and request support.
But ultimately, American forces would be left
to fight what Churchill described afterwards
as the greatest American battle of the war.
[explosions]
In six bloody weeks,
19,000 Allied soldiers were confirmed dead.
Overall, 81,000 U. S. servicemen were killed, injured,
or assumed missing in action.
German casualties were even higher,
with around 100,000 men killed or injured,
a third of the attacking force.
In addition, more than 800 tanks and 1,000 planes were destroyed.
The Battle of the Bulge was a shock.
I don't know whether it was the biggest shock.
It was a significant setback
when things had seemed to be going so well.
[narrator] The Battle of the Bulge
delayed the Allies' final offensive,
and left the Americans' supplies
of fuel and ammunition almost exhausted.
Nevertheless, it broke the German backbone.
[Sir Mike] It didn't destroy it, it wore it down terribly,
because they put several armoured divisions
into the bulge, which they lost.
And you can't keep losing equipment,
because by this time, of course,
German industry was under severe bombing
from both the Royal Air Force
and the United States Army Airforce.
[narrator] The Siegfried Line was fatally compromised,
and the way was now clear
for the Allies to advance on Germany.
Meanwhile, the diversion of German troops
from the Eastern Front
to fight in the Battle of the Bulge
left the way clear for the Red Army
to move into Poland.
And on the 12th of January, 1945,
Stalin's troops launched the Vistula Offensive.
The Red Army took just over two weeks
to sweep across Poland,
take almost all of East Prussia, and drive deep into Silesia.
By the 2nd of February,
they were less than 50 miles from Berlin.
The launch of the Vistula‐Oder Offensive
was scheduled for the 20th of January,
however, Stalin brought it forward to the 12th.
Now, sometimes this is explained
because he listened to Churchill's appeals.
Churchill wanted this offensive started
because the Germans had launched
the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes,
and this would put more pressure on the German army.
However, the real reason for this,
or the more important reason as far as Stalin was concerned,
was that there was going to be
a thaw in the weather in late January,
and the tanks simply would not be able to traverse
the ground if it wasn't frozen.
And so, it really comes down to the weather,
that's why this operation was launched when it was.
It wasn't necessarily
about Stalin listening to Churchill's appeals,
however much he claimed that was the case
later at the Yalta Conference.
as the Soviets continued their march into Poland,
the Russian soldiers encountered
shocking scenes as they entered Auschwitz
and liberated around 7,000 remaining prisoners.
Most were Jews.
All were extremely sick and weak.
Many were near death.
These men, women and children had been left behind
after the SS forced the rest of the inmates on death marches.
At least 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz
between 1940 and 1945.
And of these, at least 1.1 million
were murdered.
Reports of the death camps and gas chambers,
some from escapees,
had reached the Big Three earlier in the war.
All of The Big Three knew about Auschwitz.
They knew about German concentration camps.
Stalin certainly knew about the camp
and what the Germans were doing
to the Jews of Europe and the Holocaust.
However, Stalin does not disseminate
that information. He doesn't tell his military.
So they came across camps like Auschwitz
and they hadn't known what they were.
We have to ask, why did Stalin do this?
Why did he not inform his generals
about they should be liberating these camps?
And sometimes, Stalin's antisemitism
is pointed to as an explanation.
But it seems to be that during the war years
he was just indifferent to the fate of the Jews.
For him this was not a strategic priority.
The liberation of Auschwitz
was not going to help him conquer Poland,
and so it came down to what his priorities were,
and the Jews did not fit into that picture.
[Iwan] Stalin had overseen
the murder of two million people,
at least, and the starvation
of probably six million others in the 1930s.
It didn't mean anything to him.
To Churchill, however,
I think Churchill felt great personal sorrow,
but asked himself the question of: What can we do?
[narrator] In July 1945, Churchill wrote:
"This is probably the greatest and most horrible crime
ever committed
in the whole history of the world,
and it has been done by scientific machinery,
by nominally civilized men in the name of a great state."
Roosevelt and Churchill did consider appeals
to bomb the camps, but they were told
that no military gain would be achieved.
Instead, all resources were devoted
to achieving ultimate victory over the Nazis.
[Iwan] The Americans had advanced knowledge
of what was going on.
The question was, what could be done about it?
There were several strategies.
Could you have bombed the railway lines
into the death camps?
Could you have bombed the death camps?
Could you have issued some warning
that anybody involved in the extermination of Jews
would be hanged as a war criminal after the war?
None of these things were done.
Why wasn't military action taken?
Because the military planners said,
"look, we're not committing military resources
on a speculated venture when we have to use them
to shorten the war
in realistic military engagements
that we know we can win,
rather than engagements whose outcome is uncertain."
[Helen] During the wartime itself,
we now know from declassified files,
these are intelligence files,
that information about the Holocaust,
about concentration camps, about serious mass murders,
were taking place, of course of Jews,
of Poles, and Russians,
and this was happening in 1941.
Bletchley Park was picking up messages
from the roving police units,
the bugged conversations of some secret sites in Britain,
Trent Park being one of them, near Cockfosters.
These sites were regularly picking up
very, very detailed accounts.
[narrator] Auschwitz would not be
the last concentration camp
discovered by the Allies as they progressed into Germany.
By the end of January 1945, victory was in sight.
But it would come tragically late
for many millions.
[dramatic music]
[theme music]
[narrator] Next time on Race to Victory.
The Allies march across the borders
into Nazi Germany,
but who will go on to claim
the biggest prize of all: Berlin?
This is the capital, the heartland of the darkness
that was Nazi Germany.
This said, "They have been defeated.
We are in Berlin."
[narrator] As the Allies prepare for their final battles,
a new competition develops,
one that threatens to split the Big Three apart.
A race to build nuclear weapons.
There was a theory that one of the reasons
the Americans dropped the bomb on Japan
was precisely to show the Soviets
that they had this thing.
[narrator] With victory so close,
can the Big Three maintain their relationship
and bring peace to the war‐torn world?
Or will this new race take over
and ultimately tear the Alliance apart?
[explosions]
[theme music]