Hitler decides to make a private sightseeing trip to Paris
on 23rd June 1940,
when Paris is occupied and controlled by the German forces.
They tour the Arc de Triomphe,
they walk around the artists' quarter in Montmartre.
Hitler says he'd thought of razing Paris to the ground,
but now he realises that he can build a much bigger
and better city in Berlin.
And they go to Napoleon's tomb...
..where Hitler pays his respects to the previous conqueror of Europe.
Hitler stands for a long while in front of Napoleon's sarcophagus.
It's reported he tells his entourage,
"That was the greatest and finest moment of my life."
He's paying his respects to Napoleon, but also, I think,
declaring privately to himself that he's going
to surpass his achievements.
Napoleon Bonaparte had once tried to conquer the world,
but his armies got stuck in the harsh Russian winter.
This is the story of the Eastern Front of the Second World War,
which many see as its defining conflict.
It was a campaign that saw some of the most brutal and inhumane
warfare in all of history.
Our interest is the psychology of that war...
What is the enemy up to?
Can you deceive him?
..the minds of dictators and the morality of those around them.
For him, no building is high enough and no hall is long enough.
And this is exactly what Hitler wanted.
To tell this story, we've asked some of the world's most eminent
historians and experts with different kinds of insight
to each take us inside the mind of one of the key protagonists.
He wants to be the architect of Germany's reality,
in some ways, the only truth teller.
Nazi rule relies on quiet complicity.
Ultimately, it's a study of why dictatorships are flawed
and how those who rule through fear and terror can never trust even
the people closest to them.
He'll then lose everything and bring Germany down with him.
For years, Hitler's mind has been full of the poison
of anti-Semitism.
Falsely believing in German racial supremacy,
he wants to eliminate all Jews and other races
he considers inferior.
And he dreams of world domination.
So far, he's taken a number of huge gambles, and they've all paid off.
He marched into Austria unchallenged.
He thought he could annexe Czechoslovakia and get away with it.
And he was right.
Then he made a deal with Stalin to invade Poland,
and his tanks reached Warsaw within a week.
And then he invaded France.
LOUD, ECSTATIC CHEERING
Now, it's July 1940.
He rules most of Europe and the German people love him.
In the summer of 1940,
Hitler thinks, "I'm the supreme general, I'm the supreme leader,
"I'm invincible."
This is the high point of Hitler's national popularity.
People had doubts before,
there had been some opposition, some misgivings.
But all this was swept away in the summer of 1940.
And so he comes to believe ever more strongly
in his own invincibility.
Now, Hitler is about to make a decision that will determine
the outcome of the war.
What to do about the Soviet Union
and its dictator, Joseph Stalin?
Hitler in some ways admires Stalin.
He says he's a kind of a monster.
But of course, he admires him as a strong leader.
So it's a kind of love-hate relationship.
Meanwhile, in Moscow, Stalin is trying to work out
what he makes of Hitler.
Stalin, ruthless dictator, didn't hesitate to eliminate
opposition, didn't hesitate to send millions of people to die.
It's recorded that Stalin had very high opinion about
the Night of the Long Knives,
Hitler's ruthlessness.
And of course, in 1940, Stalin admires Hitler because he succeeded
in destroying France and
almost bringing England on her knees.
It's a very special love story.
This is not liking or not liking.
If Hitler's standing in the way of Stalin's dream
of global dominance, so he should find the most effective way
of eliminating Hitler.
And so you have two dictators, both dreaming of world domination.
So far, they have collaborated, working together to carve up Poland,
and it's at this point Hitler offers Stalin a deal
to split the world between them.
Stalin was very opportunistic,
not limited by any even ideological barriers.
Allying with Hitler? If it works - perfect.
But Stalin has to work out if Hitler can be trusted.
So he sends his Foreign Minister to Berlin to find out.
MUSIC: 21 Hungarian Dances, WoO 1: No 5, Allegro by Johannes Brahms
Molotov is a party official.
He was loyal, and that meant that he behaved very brutally indeed.
For somebody who seemed to have such authority and such power,
he looked, you know, very sort of modest and low-key.
The German people that he met talked about him
as a mathematics professor.
That was probably quite complimentary, really.
Lenin, of course, had called him the best filing clerk in Russia.
"What will be the objectives for Hitler and the German side?"
He arrives at the Reich Chancellery.
The whole point about the Reich Chancellery is project the power
of Hitler, the power of the Reich.
Walking down the long, grand corridors
then coming up to the Fuhrer's study,
and then you walk in, you, the small man in the ordinary suit,
you walk in and then the Fuhrer's desk is right at the other end.
Molotov has a long history of regarding the fascists as the enemy.
Hitler makes these very grand general statements about friendship
and alliance and so on.
He's flattering, he's charming.
That works a lot of the time.
This is a game that Hitler has played before,
toying with other world leaders before deceiving them.
He even signed a peace deal with the British Prime Minister,
and now they're at war.
Hitler starts by outlining his deal, offering Molotov large swathes
of the British Empire, the Middle East and India.
He's polite, calm
and insists on answers to his questions.
How are Soviet security interests in Europe, which is what really
matters to them, how are they going to be protected?
A lot of what Hitler was thinking about was fantasy,
increasingly so.
His grand geopolitical visions of distributing bits of the world
here and there,
this is the kind of behaviour that you get with these dictators.
Molotov repeats the questions and persists with the questions.
"What does that actually mean for the Soviet Union?"
Hitler gets very irritated by Molotov.
The state of mind he was in the summer of 1940,
supreme, as he thinks, in Europe,
and then here's this little man in this dingy suit
arguing the toss with him. He doesn't like this at all.
Hitler becomes increasingly furious with Molotov
and abruptly ends the meeting.
That evening, a banquet has been arranged.
Still smarting, Hitler is nowhere to be seen.
So Molotov rubbed shoulders with the Nazi Foreign Minister,
Ribbentrop, until their dinner is interrupted by an air-raid siren.
Molotov and Ribbentrop continue their negotiations
in an air-raid shelter.
There is a discussion, and of course, the basic point is,
is the British Empire available now to be carved up?
There's big talk from Ribbentrop and he says,
"Well, Britain is defeated."
And of course, that famously brings forward the comment,
well, if Britain is defeated, why are we in this air-raid shelter
and why are these bombs going off?
DISTANT EXPLOSIONS
Molotov concludes after his time in Berlin that the Germans
have got their hands full dealing with the British
and do not pose an immediate threat.
Hitler comes to a very different conclusion.
That it's time to invade.
It was always Hitler's long-term aim to invade the Soviet Union.
The failure of the negotiations with Molotov did confirm him
in his belief that this is the right thing to do and to start making
preparations for it.
Hitler is planning to launch Operation Barbarossa,
sending three million soldiers into battle...
..one army to invade the north,
one to the south
and one tasked with going all the way to Moscow.
The invasion of the Soviet Union is really the first major move
that Hitler has made to fulfil the ambitions he laid down
in Mein Kampf and that he'd been harbouring since he
went into politics,
the creation of what he called a living space in Eastern Europe.
And from that point of view,
the invasion of Poland or Czechoslovakia,
these were just little kind of preparatory essays.
This is the really big one.
The man Hitler needs to launch this invasion is the head
of the German army, Field Marshal von Brauchitsch.
Walther von Brauchitsch,
the absolutely quintessential Prussian officer.
Von Brauchitsch, he's got very grave doubts about opening up a war
on two fronts, a great deal of consternation,
a great deal of doubt. What if this goes wrong?
Brauchitsch epitomises the great, vast tug-of-war
going on in the minds of all of those generals there
as to the wisdom of taking on the Soviets.
Hitler's spelling out the most ambitious, the biggest,
the most dramatic invasion plan in history.
It's on an enormous scale.
So he's offering them, in a way, to participate in leading positions
in what is inevitably going to be
an extremely famous invasion.
So he's appealing to their vanity, in a sense.
Brauchitsch is in this terrible dilemma, because although
he dislikes this, although he would want to push back, he doesn't dare.
This would be career suicide, if not worse.
Hitler had a number of ways of securing the loyalty
of the leading generals, and in particular,
he would dole out titles like Field Marshal, for example.
And also by, you might say, outright bribery and corruption.
Bribery going upwards through the system and corruption coming
down plays an ever bigger role, and that's true in any dictatorship.
When Brauchitsch wanted to leave his wife to marry a younger woman,
Hitler personally lent him 80,000 Reichsmarks to pay for the divorce.
In the Faustian bargain, it was Faust gave away his soul.
And Brauchitsch in a way makes that Faustian bargain with Hitler.
So although the man in charge of the biggest invasion force
in history has doubts, Hitler believes that the army
is at his heel and fast-tracks his plans for Barbarossa.
# Kann die Liebe Sunde sein?
# Auch wenn sie es war'
# So war's mir egal
# Lieber will ich sundigen mal... #
In Berlin, life continues as normal.
# Niemals werde ich bereuen... #
The only people that know about the planned invasion
are those inside the Nazi regime
like this man, Harro Schulze-Boysen,
who works inside the Air Ministry,
where he begins to see Hitler's attack plans.
Harro Schulze-Boysen is born into a very prominent German naval family.
He's very tall, very lean,
has these chiselled Nordic features,
which the Nazis considered kind of the ideal physical framework.
Harro's wife, Libertas, is also part of the Nazi machine
working for Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry.
But Harro and Libertas are not what they seem.
Harro and Libertas are both working for Nazi agencies,
but they both intentionally took these positions in order to gather
intelligence from the inside and share it with people
who could work against the Nazis.
While most Germans either endorse the regime or stay silent,
Harro and Libertas have joined
one of the few resistance networks in Germany.
As a student, Harro's Jewish friend was murdered at the hands
of Nazi stormtroopers.
What he says at that point is that he's not going to respond
at the moment.
He basically says revenge is a dish best eaten cold.
And that's the beginning of his plans to infiltrate
the Nazi military hierarchy.
Some of the things he sees are reports on air reconnaissance.
Some of the things he sees are planning documents.
He is able to find out what the order of battle is.
He is able to find out a lot about the forces
designated for the invasion.
So he makes contact with the Soviets.
Harro was aware
that Stalin was an abusive dictator.
It was never a matter of Harro serving Stalin
or promoting Stalin's interests in Germany, it was a matter of rescuing
Germany from Hitler.
Harro can see clearly in military terms how Hitler can be quickly
defeated, and potentially millions of lives can be saved.
Harro meets with a Soviet spy
and offers to become their man on the inside,
giving them the details of Hitler's attack plans.
He's assigned a code name, the Russian word for sergeant -
Starshina.
But Stalin has a vast espionage network.
He has eyes and ears everywhere at the heart of governments
across the world...
..from the Japanese cabinet
to the pillars of the British establishment,
and now inside the German Air Ministry.
So Harro's voice is just one of many.
Meanwhile, Hitler is preparing for Operation Barbarossa.
He needs to move a vast army of three million men
to the Soviet border.
And he has to do this right under the noses
of the watching Soviet generals.
MUSIC: Symphony No.7 in A major op.92 - Il Allegretto by Beethoven
Georgy Zhukov, he was one of the leading Soviet generals.
He would probably himself say,
"What do you mean, 'One of'? I am the leading Soviet general."
He was not without some vanity.
Zhukov clearly is
very concerned of German capability, of German deployments,
and there was this huge build-up of German military power
along the border.
Hitler has been busy working on a way to deceive Stalin.
Hitler had a very good eye for the weaknesses of his opponents.
Stalin was a very suspicious kind of man, he was prone to conspiracy
theories, and that, of course, means that you can supply Stalin
with many kinds of information and misinformation
that he will believe.
Hitler orders his spies to pump out conspiracy theories that other
nations are plotting against Russia, and spreads rumours that Germany
is going to attack Britain, and a smokescreen that troops
on the Soviet border are really just carrying out exercises,
preparing for the invasion of Britain.
The run-up to Barbarossa
is almost a kaleidoscope of information
which keeps changing.
Clever intelligence.
The Germans were quite good at deception.
Stalin relies on...
..what to me is a fairly transparent lie from Berlin
that these...assembly of forces is just retraining,
they're on exercise.
They're on exercise in preparation for the real thing.
Zhukov now does something that few others dare.
He tells Stalin something he doesn't want to hear.
I'm sure going through his head would have been,
"If I get this wrong, it's Siberia at best."
Zhukov is a patriot.
Yes, he was a Communist, but he was a patriot.
And therefore he would, I'm sure,
have been motivated by a patriotic stance
that we have to do everything we can to stop the Germans.
Zhukov is saying, "I have this intelligence,
"it's hard intelligence that the Germans are going to attack."
And Stalin says, "I have my own intelligence,"
discounting a warning which any,
any leader would have surely taken utterly seriously
because the stakes were unbelievably high.
Now, whether that was because he really, really thought
this would not happen or Stalin found the prospect
of a German invasion so awful,
he closed his mind down to it.
So Stalin makes no serious preparations for a German attack.
The whole story is very mysterious because it's this...
That's what I learned in my school in the Soviet Union.
That's what we learned from Soviet textbooks
and from the movies, that there was so much intelligence
and Stalin ignored it, Stalin ignored it,
and because he trusted Hitler.
No, Stalin didn't trust Hitler, Stalin didn't trust anybody.
There's only one rational explanation.
Stalin didn't care because he was also preparing to attack.
German invasion was inevitable.
They know there were four million soldiers or so
across the border.
You don't bring four million people at the border.
And do we believe Stalin could buy Hitler's story
that he had them there just to take a rest before invasion of England?
Come on, it's just... It doesn't fly.
So either Stalin doesn't believe Hitler is about to attack
or he is preparing an attack of his own.
Either way, virtually nothing is done.
What Hitler is planning is not a normal invasion.
This is something far darker even than normal warfare.
At a meeting with his generals,
he outlines his vision for Barbarossa.
Hitler tells them this is a war like no other,
this is not a conventional war.
This is a war between the races for racial supremacy.
It's a clash in which there must be no consideration
at all for the conventional rules of warfare.
The man on the other side is not your comrade.
He is someone who has got to be exterminated.
There must be no mercy. It must be absolutely ruthless.
He believes this is going to be a war of conquest above all
of Eastern Europe and of course, a war,
and this is the most important core belief of Hitler, against the Jews.
To be told you're going to be involved in a war of annihilation,
there's absolutely no pretence about the fact that this is going
to be a war about the mass murder of innocent civilians and human
beings who have absolutely nothing to do with this ideological fight
between Hitler and Stalin.
This becomes a tremendous burden for Brauchitsch.
All of a sudden it becomes clear
just what road they've started to go down.
Around the room, there is silence.
No-one utters any objections to Hitler's plans.
Brauchitsch's reaction is to, in a way, put his head in the sand,
the way a lot of them do.
He wants to think in terms of the military.
He wants to think in terms of, OK,
where are my divisions going to be going?
What about supplies and provisions?
What about weapons, ammunition, fuel?
These are the nice sort of rather, if you will, safe questions
that the military can busy themselves with.
It's a way of creating your own sort of moral bubble.
As if to ease his conscience, Brauchitsch makes insignificant
tweaks to Hitler's orders, but ultimately signs off
on commands giving carte blanche to kill anyone, including civilians.
He coordinates with Himmler's SS death squads,
who follow behind the German army,
murdering Jews in the name of security.
Brauchitsch is not the man pulling the trigger,
but the crimes that are going to be committed are so horrific
that just by being such an important cog in the wheel
of Hitler's machine makes him complicit.
Over three million troops are now stationed
along 1,100 miles of Soviet border.
In just under a week, they will attack.
With so many lives at stake, much is resting
on Harro Schulze-Boysen's covert intelligence.
I think about the story of Cassandra in Ancient Greece
and the way she saw disaster on the horizon,
and she desperately tried to tell everyone what was coming.
And if she could only warn them, maybe she could avoid the disaster.
That's Harro. Harro sees the disaster on the horizon.
He sees how it's going to unfold and the tragedy that
it's going to entail.
On June 17th, a report was sent quoting Starshina.
This lands on Stalin's desk.
He takes his pencil and he scrawls, "This is not information,
"this is disinformation, you can send your so-called source
"back to his whore of a mother."
A lot of authoritarian figures, they disregard intelligence,
they disregard expertise, they disregard the educated people
around them, and they go by their instincts and they go,
to some extent, by their cronies, who know how to tell them
what they want to hear.
You see this repeated in history time and time again.
And sooner or later, those qualities catch up with them
and they have this prediction that they make on instinct,
they're caught dead wrong, and
those are the seeds of their defeat.
MUSIC: The Seasons, Op. 37b - VI. Barcarolle by Tchaikovsky
On the eve of the attack, Hitler is in the Reich Chancellery
wracked with anxiety.
Hitler always gets nervous just before a big event.
He was nervous before the Night of the Long Knives,
he's nervous before the Anschluss.
He always gets kind of last-minute jitters.
And of course, in this case, there are spectres
hovering over Barbarossa.
There's the spectre of Napoleon and his defeat in Moscow,
the catastrophe of Napoleon's invasion of Russia.
He was a gambler, somebody who went for broke all the time
because he felt that the cards would fall in his favour.
Hitler believed that he was
a kind of favoured child of providence.
Fate had ordained that he would be victorious.
The invasion of the Soviet Union
is announced on all German radio stations
to the sound of Franz Liszt.
MUSIC: Les Preludes, symphonic poem No.3, S.97 by Franz Liszt
Across the entire Soviet border,
from the Baltic to the Black Sea,
the German army sweeps in,
killing indiscriminately.
In Moscow, the German ambassador arrives at the Kremlin
to tell Molotov that Germany have declared war.
He would be thinking, "I didn't judge this correctly.
"I've got to go and tell more to the boss,
"which is going to be difficult."
Er...he probably somewhere in his mind was thinking,
"Yeah, I'm going to be under stress now.
"This is the beginning of something really massive."
Stalin has been caught off guard
and the Red Army are in disarray.
It becomes clear in Moscow
that this is not just an incursion over the border,
but this is a strategic manoeuvre
to invade the Soviet Union.
Um...and you can imagine that
hearts would be in boots, um...in the Kremlin.
Stalin was stunned by
the reality of the German invasion.
Within days, German forces have advanced 200 miles
into Soviet territory.
By the time they reach the city of Minsk,
they've captured or killed over 300,000 Red Army troops.
With the Germans only 400 miles from the capital,
the gravity of the situation comes crashing down on Stalin.
The fall of Minsk happened on 28th June,
six days after the invasion.
Didn't take long.
And the scale of the defeat,
the destruction involved,
the killings involved of soldiers,
you know, it was a massive military failure.
I think Stalin was not knowing what to do.
I mean, he was...he was shocked,
panicked, frightened.
First time in many years,
maybe first time in his life, he didn't have a game plan.
Stalin retreats to his dacha like a cornered animal.
When his country needs him the most,
suddenly, Stalin is nowhere to be seen.
Hitler now bases himself at his front-line headquarters,
the Wolf's Lair,
a top-secret, high-security complex of camouflaged bunkers
hidden in a dense Prussian forest.
It's a strange world, penetrated by neither light nor reality.
Hitler is on course to control even more territory than Napoleon.
He feels that he's conquered the Soviet Union,
it's going to collapse any minute.
The atmosphere is one of continuing optimism and euphoria
as news rolls in of stunning military victories
over the Red Army.
The success of the invasion leads to a jubilant mood,
and this allows Brauchitsch to push any doubts he might have had to one side.
The relationship between officers and Hitler
is very much one like a magic show.
They had their doubts about the Soviet Union,
and now, once again, he seems to be like the great magician
pulling the vast rabbit out of a hat.
They're all going to be coming home by Christmas.
In the streets of Berlin,
confidence of a quick victory is sky-high.
But at the Ministry of Propaganda, Harro's wife, Libertas,
comes face-to-face with the reality of Hitler's war.
She's receiving these photographs and films
from soldiers coming back from the Eastern Front.
When you look at these photos, you see terrified women,
you see terrified children
looking into the eyes of their attackers.
At Babi Yar in the Ukraine, over two days,
34,000 men, women and children are massacred.
By the end of 1941,
half a million Jewish people are murdered.
It is known as the Holocaust by bullets.
Uncounted numbers of Russians,
many, but not all of them, Jewish,
are being massacred
by not just SS divisions,
but by Wehrmacht, German army divisions.
She feels a responsibility to archive this material
and to make it available in any way that she can.
And what she says is that
in the future, there will be accountability.
There will be a war crimes tribunal.
And she is assembling the evidence.
She is archiving it, it will be presented
in order to prosecute soldiers who have committed
these...these terrible atrocities
and the officers who have commanded them.
And she organises it. Er...
..this is her contribution to the resistance activities.
Meanwhile, her husband Harro and his resistance network
are desperately trying to get the next phase
of the German invasion plans to the Soviets.
But the Soviet high command is in disarray.
No-one has seen or heard from Stalin in days.
He refuses to sign documents or to speak to anyone.
The Soviet government is paralysed.
There's debate as to what extent he was actually breaking down,
or to what extent he was playing a game, in a true Stalin-type way,
to test the people around him
to see who was going to try and come forward and take his place.
Molotov knew that he had to deal with this situation.
He was clearly the number-two man.
It's an animal world. You know, the dictators, you know, they don't elect it.
They stay in power as long as they are trusted by their cronies.
It's like a mafia boss.
So, you...you...you lost? You're out.
And Stalin failed.
Stalin was desperate.
He was sitting alone, waiting for...for the worst,
because he was afraid that his own Politburo members
could actually arrest him for the failure,
because it was his fault, and everybody knew it was his fault.
The outcome of Stalin's gamble was disastrous.
This is like a mafia family.
So much, you know, reflects the mentality of the Soviet bosses.
And I know...I know this country, I grew up in this country.
And I-I could even... I could visualise this scene, you know.
They're entering the room and...
..it could go either way,
either just, you know, thrown in the dust,
or, um...he becomes the king again.
Molotov had to step in to try and control the situation,
but not in a way that made him out to be some kind of rival.
Molotov proposes the creation of a shiny new body,
the State Defence Commissariat...
..with Stalin, as supreme leader, at its helm,
a new superdictatorship.
At the end of the day, they proved to be weak.
And I think the fact that they proved to be weak
made Stalin stronger,
because that's...that's... Somehow it's a fluctuation of this energy
and spirit within the group.
So nothing...nothing could disappear.
Energy doesn't disappear.
So if they're getting weaker, Stalin's getting stronger.
And...and...and smelling their fear and weakness,
Stalin gained back his confidence.
So he's in charge again, so it's,
"Don't cry over spilled milk. It's behind me.
"Yes, we failed, now let's see what we can do."
This man, Molotov, who was a boring apparatchik,
best filing clerk in Russia, he kept his head.
And he was the one who knew Stalin best.
And then, to let him come forward
and show his strengths as a wartime leader.
Stalin reappears and tells the Soviet people
to resist the German invaders.
Stalin recognises it's time to change the tone.
He's no longer talking like a father of the nation.
His statement starts with, "Brothers and sisters..."
And that was the beginning of reorganising Soviet propaganda
towards Russian nationalists, towards the Great Patriotic War.
I can tell you something about Soviet propaganda.
Look at this picture.
And now look at this picture.
This picture, taken by anybody prior to the war,
suicidal. You disappear.
Because that's wrong. This is... That's...that's...that's...
That's the way, a triumphant, dear leader.
This picture, this is brothers and sisters.
This is a new image of Stalin who is suffering, who is thinking,
who is no longer all-powerful, he doesn't know everything,
but he's...he's with his people. Look at him.
Just, you know, ordinary man.
This is the image they wanted to present,
wounded by this betrayal of Hitler that he trusted.
But, you know, don't worry, we're all together.
As they get closer to Moscow,
the German attack is slowing.
And Brauchitsch becomes concerned
that this is going to take longer than expected.
He asks Hitler to focus the attack on Moscow.
And he'll need tank reinforcements,
and the troops may need winter clothes.
Hitler increasingly thought of himself as the military commander.
And when Brauchitsch tried to sway him
in favour of sending tanks to Moscow,
Hitler simply went berserk.
Hitler hates what he thinks of as defeatism.
For him, all you need is willpower,
the power of the will to overcome any practical problems,
whether it's getting bogged down in the mud in the autumn rains in Russia,
or getting frozen to death in the snows at minus 30 degrees.
All of this, he just brushes aside. These are not problems.
So he didn't really bother with getting the troops
adequate winter clothing.
It'll all be over by winter.
One push and the whole rotten edifice of the Soviet Union would collapse.
At this point, Hitler makes a controversial decision.
He decides that the attack on Moscow can wait...
..instead ordering his armies north, to Leningrad,
and south, to Kiev, to capture even more territory and resources.
Hitler was becoming increasingly detached from reality.
Hitler's limitless self-belief
made him think that he could do anything.
And those generals who pointed out the obstacles
in a sense of realism and military professionalism
were simply brushed aside.
By this point, the only reality that matters is Hitler's reality.
Brauchitsch made a Faustian pact with Hitler
when he decided that he would effectively bow to Hitler's wishes,
whatever his own personal views might be.
And in a way, this decision comes to bite him,
because Hitler was only always using him as a kind of mask
for what Hitler himself was trying to do.
Hitler sidelines Brauchitsch,
who is forced to watch what happens next.
Hitler wastes time capturing Kiev and laying siege to Leningrad.
It's October by the time he finally gives the order for Army Group Centre,
a force of two million men, to attack Moscow.
You had the German army advancing on Moscow
as a Russian winter was setting in.
Harro knew that the German military
were not prepared for the Russian winter.
And as Napoleon found out to his distress,
the Russian winter can be a greater enemy than the Russian armed forces.
Harro and Libertas meet with a Soviet spy,
handing over vital intelligence
showing that Germany is headed for military disaster.
They assure him that Hitler can be beaten.
Harro is supercharged with his adrenaline.
He's taking more and more risks.
When you're living with that addiction to adrenaline,
you're less attentive to danger.
And I watched various colleagues of mine who were journalists
who...who...who became totally addicted to the adrenaline
and just walked straight into situations that killed them.
And you realise that the adrenaline was driving them.
They forgot how to fear.
Harro forgot how to fear.
INDISTINCT RADIO COMMS
The agent radios vital intelligence back to Moscow.
The basic rule of thumb for these radio transmissions
is to keep them short.
But he's got so much information from Harro
that he stays transmitting for five hours.
And it also leaves him susceptible
to all kinds of detection from the German military and others
who are monitoring these transmissions.
INDISTINCT RADIO COMMS
The German army are converging on Moscow,
and the Luftwaffe are bombing the city.
There is panic in the capital.
With no air-raid shelters in the Kremlin,
Stalin has taken refuge in the subterranean halls of the Metro.
He is deciding whether to abandon the city.
Stalin was urged to leave Moscow
when the Wehrmacht were
supposedly in sight of the onion domes of the Kremlin,
when he must have known that if Moscow fell,
his life was likely to be short.
But Stalin has one last card left to play.
Having ignored the advice of the men around him,
he's finally ready to hear the truth.
He calls for General Zhukov.
An armoured train waits on the platform to take Stalin to safety.
The answer to one question will determine the outcome for Moscow.
He asks Zhukov whether he, Zhukov,
can keep Moscow out of German hands,
to which Zhukov says, "I can do that."
Stalin wanted to hear the truth.
But again, he's a dictator,
he wants Zhukov to say that.
So if anything goes wrong, Zhukov would be responsible.
The fate of the Soviet Union is in Zhukov's hands.
He's tough. Very strong-willed.
Something of a, um...street fighter.
He was so single-minded to achieve success
that once committed,
he was absolutely adamant that he would succeed.
Zhukov rallies thousands of civilians to defend Moscow...
..and sends battle-hardened Siberian troops to the front,
driving the Germans back 150 miles.
Moscow was saved by at least two generals,
General Zhukov and General Winter.
Zhukov telegraphed Stalin, saying, "Victory."
And then falls asleep, I think, for three days or more.
Over 100 years earlier,
Napoleon's army had taken Moscow, only to be driven back.
Hitler's army reaches the gates of Moscow, but no further.
So far, over three million Jews and Soviets have died
as part of Hitler's horrific racial genocide.
But this is only the beginning.
If you don't have people who find a way to stand up and say,
"No, this is not correct, this is not who we are,"
then you've lost the whole framework of civil society.
And Germany shows us better than anywhere else where that can lead.
One has to look at these Nazis
that particularly tried to hide behind
these elevated positions of power and of glory,
and they could separate themselves from the violence,
they could separate themselves from the crimes
and then carry on with their lives as if they really weren't involved.
At the Nuremberg trials, this was very much the position that Brauchitsch took
with his own career path and his own life.
"I didn't do anything wrong.
"I was separate from these terrible crimes.
"And anyway, I was dismissed in 1941,
"so I really had nothing to do with it."
But this is a cop-out.
Um...it shows again his lack of moral fibre,
the inability for him to look squarely in the face
of the Third Reich, of Hitler, of the Nazis,
and have his own role in that,
even if it was cut shorter than some of his other colleagues'.
For both Hitler and Stalin, this becomes a symbol of their conflict.
Stalingrad degenerated into the most bitter gutter fighting.
Speer doesn't feel guilt.
He talks Hitler into winning.
Die an honourable soldier's death,
like Roman generals falling on their swords.
If Stalingrad survives, if this battle is won,
that's him, Joseph Stalin.
That's where the German army could meet its match.
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.
MAN SPEAKS GERMAN
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.
GUNSHOT
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.
MUSIC: 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.
HE READS IN RUSSIAN
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.
TRAIN WHISTLE BLARES
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.
MUSIC: 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.
UPBEAT GERMAN MUSIC PLAYS
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.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
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.
LOUD GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS
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.
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.
MUSIC: 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.
MUSIC: 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.
Stalingrad is a really major setback.
Really, I think, it has an effect on him.
It makes him doubt, I think, inwardly,
his ability to...to lead Germany.
The physical and mental stress on Hitler is absolutely immense.
He has insomnia,
he finds it difficult to sleep.
He doesn't quite know what to do.
For once, there is no masterplan.
Hitler leaves it to the men around him
to pull Germany back from the abyss.
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 wanted to be the architect of Germany's reality.
In some ways, the only truth-teller.
Nazi rule relies on quiet complicity.
Ultimately, it's a study of why dictatorships are flawed,
and how those who rule through fear and terror
can never trust even the people closest to them.
He'll then lose everything and bring Germany down with him.
MUSIC: Requiem in D Minor by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
In 1943, the war has been raging for over three years.
On the surface, Germans remain united behind the Nazi regime,
but war fatigue is setting in.
And the crucial pact between the Nazis and the public
is starting to come under strain.
Their charismatic leader, Adolf Hitler, is nowhere to be seen.
Hitler's absence creates a power vacuum.
Senior Nazis go into competition to prove themselves
as Hitler's most valuable deputy.
Each has a different strategy.
Hitler's principle of rule
was what's been called "managerial Darwinism".
He would appoint different people and different organisations
to do more or less the same thing,
let them fight it out between themselves
and whoever came out on top, in his view, would be the most effective.
Master of Nazi spin,
Joseph Goebbels,
believes he is the man to return Hitler to his former strength.
Joseph Goebbels is the person that has made the lies so palatable.
Goebbels is the author of your reality in 1940s Germany.
He created the hero-worship cult of Hitler,
the idea of the Fuhrer's infallibility.
To Goebbels, Hitler isn't just a hero,
he's the incarnation of National Socialism.
But Stalingrad represents a total disaster for the Nazi regime.
He's getting regular reports from intelligence
about people's feelings.
It was Hitler's reputation,
and especially his infallibility, that took a hit.
Because, you see, the thing about infallibility
means that you never fail.
If you fail once, the whole myth is liable to collapse.
Everything Goebbels had built is at stake.
With Hitler in retreat, Goebbels attempts to do damage control.
He unrolls a barefaced lie...
..spinning the defeat in Stalingrad as a heroic sacrifice
on the part of Paulus and the 6th Army...
..proclaiming generals, officers and troops battled shoulder to shoulder
until the last bullet was fired.
"They died, so that Germany could live."
Within the top echelons of the Nazi Party,
Goebbels is not the most powerful man.
And he's constantly thirsty for more power.
Hitler's withdrawal provides Goebbels with an opportunity
to prove his intellectual superiority,
to inspire confidence.
Confidence that the war can be won.
Goebbels' radio broadcast is heard across the country.
But there are some Germans who see through the smoke and mirrors.
Nazi rule relies on quiet complicity.
It relies on people turning a blind eye.
But Sophie Scholl clearly cares deeply about right and wrong,
and believes that this is an active pursuit.
That there is an obligation to take a stand.
For months, 21-year-old student Sophie Scholl
has been questioning the actions of the Nazi regime.
Her boyfriend, Fritz, has been fighting on the Eastern Front,
and sends her regular updates
on the realities of the war with the Soviets.
READS: "For eight days, we have been in constant retreat.
"The situation here is pretty hopeless.
"It is frightening how heartlessly my commander talks about
"the slaughter of all the Jews in occupied Russia.
"He remains completely convinced
"of the justice of this action."
During the Nazi era, and especially during the war,
it was difficult to get access to information that was credible.
There was no freedom of press.
The country was saturated with Nazi propaganda.
Sophie sees the personal suffering of Germans
through this needless warfare,
and she also gets the sense of
the lies that the Nazi regime is propagating.
At this point in her life,
she decides she's going to expose the truth about the Nazi regime.
Sophie has joined an underground resistance movement -
the White Rose.
Based in the Nazi heartlands of Munich,
they have been producing and distributing
anti-Nazi material across the country.
Just walking down a street in Nazi Germany
feels like a precarious thing to do.
There are so many reasons for which you could be questioned,
interrogated, arrested. People were spying,
they were informants everywhere.
So imagine in that context, taking leaflets,
the discovery of which would certainly lead to your death.
Carrying them on trains,
trains that are full of Gestapo, guards.
It would really feel like carrying a bomb.
Sophie realises the defeat in Stalingrad
is the opportunity she has been waiting for.
Many ordinary Germans are starting to question
the regime's lies and propaganda.
People are finally ready to hear the message of the White Rose.
They draft a damning leaflet,
calling on the youth of Germany to rise up
and overthrow Hitler and the Nazi Party.
They decide that to make maximum impact,
hundreds of leaflets will be distributed
at their university campus during school hours.
Goebbels knows he must keep close control of the public mood.
He believes Hitler needs the fervour of the nation to propel him forward.
But Hitler has another deputy who is working on his own strategy
to get the nation, and his Fuhrer, back on track.
In many ways, Heinrich Himmler is the quintessential Nazi.
Coldblooded and extremely brutal.
And everyone in Europe is afraid of this man.
He is the mastermind of genocide,
he's the mastermind of the racial war,
he's the architect of the Holocaust.
Here is someone who wants to be the chief protagonist
of the racial re-engineering,
the racial reordering of Europe.
He knows how powerful he is,
and he knows that he's only becoming more powerful.
At only 42-years-old,
Himmler has risen to become the main architect of terror
in the Third Reich.
He is chief of all German police units, and his vast SS network
penetrates nearly every corner of German society.
Now, Himmler has a plan -
to turn the tide of the war by extending his tentacles
to the one area of German life currently out of his reach -
the military.
To the ire of the Army High Command,
Himmler has been building a special military branch of his prized SS.
The Waffen-SS has become famed for their brutality.
Himmler's main insecurity is
that in 1918, he's too young to fight
on the front line in the First World War.
And he really wants to prove himself as a political soldier.
And he hopes to impress Hitler
with the performance of the Waffen-SS.
Himmler viewed the Wehrmacht with some suspicion.
He thought that their main loyalty was not towards Hitler.
The whole history of Hitler's relationship with the senior
generals and field marshals of the army is a rather fraught one.
Senior generals, with their long tradition
of Prussian military conduct,
were less susceptible to Hitler's charm.
The German Army is in retreat,
facing relentless setbacks in North Africa and the Soviet Union.
But the Waffen-SS are proving their worth on the battlefield.
Himmler's troops score their own independent victory
against Russian forces,
taking back the city of Kharkov from the Soviets.
As the Waffen-SS began to score some victories,
Hitler found this was absolutely the right way to go.
These were noted for their fanaticism,
their total devotion to Hitler.
And the army might be failing him,
but Himmler and the SS were not.
Hitler does not like listening to many other people...
..but Himmler has Hitler's ear.
He knows that if he can produce the desired lethal results...
..he can become the most powerful man in Germany, just after Hitler.
Goebbels is watching Himmler's rise with frustration.
He is still struggling to get Hitler to buy into his efforts
to seize the nation's morale.
He plans a stunt, which he hopes will sway the public mood
and galvanise the Fuhrer.
He gathers thousands of top Nazi officials
at Berlin's Sportpalast Arena.
On the same day, Sophie Scholl is making her way across Munich.
The White Rose have decided that today is the day
to put their plans into action.
They have in their possession a suitcase, no less,
packed with leaflets.
Putting these leaflets in visible places.
In corridors, on notice boards, on doors.
It's incredibly dangerous.
But she knew that what she was doing was going to, in her words,
"make waves",
was going to be remembered as something that stood out
in this sea of oppression and complicity.
As the White Rose spread their message,
Goebbels' speech fills the Sportpalast.
HE RANTS
He hopes to renew a sense of German patriotism
by proclaiming a state of total war.
Total war involves devoting all national resources
to the conflict.
Britain and the Soviet Union were the first to do it.
The entire economy became subservient to the war efforts.
If he can commit every last German to devote all of their beings,
all of their economic lives,
victory is within grasp.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Are you willing to do what it takes to survive?
She's just feeling this rush of adrenaline.
And Sophie acts impulsively.
HE RANTS
He truly believes that if you can push a perception far enough,
it will become reality.
MUSIC: Requiem in D Minor by Mozart
CHEERING
APPLAUSE
At this critical moment,
Sophie's actions are spotted by a caretaker.
He reads the leaflets and informs the dean.
The local Gestapo are alerted
and officers rush to the university.
As Sophie is brought into custody,
Goebbels' Total War speech is being broadcast around the building.
SHOUTS OF AGREEMENT
She's brought into Gestapo HQ,
she's fingerprinted, then she has this mugshot taken.
You really get a glimpse of Sophie.
She looks trepidatious,
but at the same time, she looks quite resilient.
Defiant, even.
Looking straight ahead, giving very little away.
Goebbels' speech has failed to convince the public.
He receives reports from Security Service agents
who listen in on conversations across Germany,
revealing that support for the regime is crumbling.
Goebbels knows that these reports will be deeply damaging
to his standing with Hitler.
There is only one man who can help him.
As always, with leading Nazis,
there is quite a lot of jealousy
about who has more access to Hitler,
who is more important in Hitler's eyes.
Is it Himmler? Is it Goebbels?
But Goebbels does not want Himmler to present
the SD reports on public morale to Hitler
because Goebbels finds them too defeatist.
Himmler firmly believes that Hitler needs to know
about what the German people think.
He offers to his arch-rival, Heinrich Himmler,
to doctor these SD reports together.
This is a fascinating moment where the minister of propaganda
is actually trying to lie to his own superiors.
He's trying to doctor reality
even as seen privately by the regime itself.
How concerning must these reports have been
for Goebbels to need to conceal them
and doctor them for Hitler's benefit?
Himmler does not agree,
and Himmler refuses to doctor the reports
that are going up to the higher-ups, to Hitler,
about dissent in Germany.
Himmler has a close working relationship with Hitler,
so in all likelihood, Himmler still shows
these public-opinion reports to Hitler.
Hitler steps further back into the shadows.
Hitler identifies himself with the German people,
so it obviously becomes more difficult for him
if he has to admit that people are beginning to criticise him.
Mingling with ordinary people, as he'd done so often,
becomes rather less frequent.
And I think he begins to be a little bit afraid
that he won't get rapturous crowds
giving the Nazi salute and cheering their heads off.
Himmler is well aware of the need to reassert authority.
When Sophie Scholl's case reaches his desk,
he decides to make an example of her and the White Rose movement.
Germany's most notorious judge is to oversee a show trial.
The sentence is death by beheading.
She's allowed one last visit with her parents.
For Sophie, at that age,
you still feel like you need and rely on your parents.
And here they are, having to let you go
to a regime that's going to execute you.
But even in those circumstances,
Sophie had a serenity about her.
Her mother brought her sweets and she said,
"Oh, thank goodness, cos I haven't had lunch".
She projected confidence, strength of character, integrity.
But on the inside, she was terrified.
It's important to remember that fear,
because we would all feel it in those circumstances.
And I can only understand her composure
by imagining that she had confidence
that it would mean something long after she was gone.
Himmler may have eradicated the White Rose,
but in the summer of 1943,
a new crisis is brewing.
The allies launch merciless carpet-bombing raids
over major German cities.
Taking out factories, dams,
and the homes of ordinary German people.
One RAF raid sets Hamburg on fire.
In the space of a week,
over 30,000 men, women and children
are killed in the inferno.
If Stalingrad woke Germans to the possibility
that a German army could be defeated,
the bombing of major German cities showed them
that they were not invulnerable. Quite the opposite.
They would be killed, their cities destroyed by the Allies.
It became very obvious that it was going to hurt,
and it was going to hurt at home.
It was going to invade their lives.
And there is nothing that German propaganda could do
to soften the blow of the bombing.
In Hamburg, some survivors are moved to show open dissent
against the Nazi regime.
Swastikas are ripped down
and people dare to refuse the Hitler salute.
Goebbels' Total War propaganda is losing its resonance.
Dissent is now coming out into the open,
and directly linked to the failure of the Nazi regime
to keep these Germans safe.
But the RAF don't just drop bombs,
they also drop leaflets.
Thousands of them.
Leaflets that have been smuggled out by the German Resistance.
Leaflets written by the White Rose
and Sophie Scholl.
OPERATIC RECITAL
Interestingly, the White Rose leaflet mentioned Goebbels by name,
and insulting him, essentially, claiming that he is lying.
It proved that, unlike Goebbels' claim in his many speeches,
Germany was not united behind the Nazis,
and this was not the only necessary future for Germany.
It shows the power of these leaflets.
They had so much resonance, the British saw them as a weapon
against the Nazis in the war.
And to think that a group of students created that,
I think is just really remarkable.
By this circuitous route, despite having executed Sophie,
these leaflets actually came back to haunt the regime
just at the moment it was most damaging.
And I think that also would have given Sophie great satisfaction.
Goebbels repeatedly calls on Hitler to come out
and face down these gestures of resistance.
But he refuses.
Hitler's never comfortable with defeat or with attacks.
For him, war is all about the offensive.
And when Germany is on the defensive,
he gets rather, I think, isolated.
Doesn't know quite what to do
and certainly doesn't want to confront the population.
These expressions of dissent actually scare him quite a lot.
They terrify his sensibilities.
He just keeps refusing to turn up to events,
keeps refusing Goebbels' very numerous requests
for Hitler to do it like Churchill and other leaders,
and visit bombsites, commiserate with Germans
and be there for his people.
This makes the Fuhrer more distant from ordinary Germans.
Recognising his authority now rests with police repression
rather than the adulation of the masses,
Hitler appoints Himmler as Reich Minister of the Interior.
Goebbels was disappointed.
I think he probably coveted that position himself,
and more influence, but crucially, he also thought
that Hitler was missing a political opportunity.
This is a very clear signal
that Hitler believes that this problem will be resolved
not through more propaganda, not through more consent,
but rather, through more repression of dissent.
Himmler's methods.
He knows that he's only becoming more powerful in 1943
with this appointment as Reich Minister of the Interior.
The party and the SS begin to increase in power
and to put the screws on the German people.
Himmler is a very chilling figure.
The cold bureaucrat.
And that does, with the Gestapo,
cast a kind of chill of fear among the German population.
Himmler's new position of power
is a frightening move for almost all of Germany.
But a new threat is brewing in the one place
that still remains out of his reach -
the German Army.
Everyone who was ever in the presence of Stauffenberg
talks about how he's charismatic,
he has a real presence in the room.
He has a way with words.
He makes this impression on everyone around him.
He's a man of action.
Claus von Stauffenberg appears every inch the German war hero,
having been attacked by Allied fighter planes in Tunisia.
He's lost an eye, a hand, and two fingers.
Unable to return to the front on account of his injuries,
he has been appointed Chief of Staff
of the General Army Office in Berlin.
But Stauffenberg is harbouring a dangerous secret.
He wants to kill Hitler.
Stauffenberg has witnessed personally
the vast scale of slaughter that has become central to the war.
The losses on the Eastern Front are massive.
He sees this everywhere he turns,
and he sees German youth just being laid to waste for nothing.
And his whole outlook on the world has changed.
Stauffenberg is part of an assassination plot
that spans the political and military corridors of Germany.
Hitler's always had quite an uncomfortable relationship
with the army.
A lot of them have never really got beyond the idea
that he's this lowly corporal that somehow become Commander-in-chief,
and that he's not really one of them.
So there's this sort of separation between the two.
Stauffenberg knows Hitler is a danger to the nation.
He believes that it is his mission to assassinate him.
Of course, it's a vast undertaking.
He knows that there's a good chance
that he won't survive the attempted coup.
He'll also suffer the risk of being criticised
for the rest of history as being a traitor to his own country.
Despite the risks, despite the scale,
it's something that he feels is his duty.
Stauffenberg is in a valuable position.
His new role puts him within Hitler's orbit.
He could almost get close enough to plant a bomb.
Meanwhile, the plotters will take on strategic roles
within Reserve Army units across Germany.
Once Stauffenberg succeeds in killing Hitler,
he will initiate Operation Valkyrie.
Word will go out for the Reserve Army to start the coup,
arrest all high-ranking Nazis,
and take over the running of Germany.
Stauffenberg seems to be the sort of person
who enjoys pressurised situations.
When he's in the military, he enjoys being on the front.
He enjoys the sort of thrill of having his life on the line.
This is something, again, where he finds himself in a situation
where there are dangers and there are risks,
but this is not a situation in which he's uncomfortable.
This is the sort of place he likes to be.
They discussed their plans, as far as possible,
away from prying eyes and prying ears.
He's really clear about the fact that any documentation
should be destroyed.
He tells his secretary to write in gloves
so there's no fingerprints on it.
He knows the Gestapo have got their eyes open.
If anyone gets the merest idea that they're doing what they're doing,
then the likelihood is they'd be carted off to a concentration camp
and probably executed.
Stauffenberg and his conspirators
must outwardly support the war effort,
without letting the Nazi leadership know
that their biggest threat comes from within.
Meanwhile, the news on the battlefield
is going from bad to worse.
Sicily is lost,
mainland Italy has been invaded,
and the Allies now have a foothold in Europe.
At this critical moment in the war,
Hitler refuses to return to public life.
But Minister for Armaments, Albert Speer,
has a plan to give Hitler the psychological boost he needs
to stage a fightback against the Allies.
The story of Speer
is about admiration...
..belief...
..love.
He owes everything he has to Hitler.
But the weaker Hitler gets,
the stronger is Speer.
Now, more and more, he relies on this inner circle.
He relies on these trustworthy companions.
Speer understands that Hitler is a fantasist,
so he unveils a set of superweapons
that he claims will miraculously defeat the Allies
and win Germany the war.
Hitler's always looking for a way out,
and this is what seems to offer him
the way of reversing the debacle of Stalingrad
and the disasters of 1943.
With the weapons, it's the same as with Speer's plaster models
of the Reich capital, Berlin.
It's a vision.
The idea of the Wunderwaffe
was, of course, very attractive to propagandists,
and it's a kind of a slogan.
Hitler believes in Providence.
He believes that Providence and fate are steering him towards victory
all the time. And when things are going badly,
Providence will surely come to the rescue.
So the wonder weapons, the miracle weapons, for him,
are another intervention of Providence.
Speer fuels Hitler's dreams
of a bright and victorious future.
Convinced by Speer's promise of war-winning armaments,
Hitler finally agrees to do what Goebbels has been asking for months.
He comes out of the shadows
and addresses the nation.
Goebbels is terrified that most Germans are losing confidence
in the regime's capacity and willingness to triumph.
Now, in this set-piece speech,
Goebbels and Hitler are trying to set the clock back
to believing in the Fuhrer and having faith in his plan.
He's back to something like his form.
He gives all kinds of reassurances to the German people
that it's worth carrying on with the struggle.
Their sufferings in the bombing of the cities will be avenged
by the wonder weapons,
and that victory is still there
if only they hold fast to their beliefs
and their loyalty to Germany and to him.
Now Speer has sold Hitler and Germany his vision,
he needs help to make it a reality.
Himmler has a workforce in his concentration camps.
Speer desperately needs Himmler's workforce.
For Speer, it's very important to collaborate with Himmler.
Himmler likes the idea of producing these weapons
that will finally deliver the final victory over the Allies.
The SS will make itself indispensable
in ensuring that the miracle weapons will actually be built
and that they will deliver the desired results.
Himmler and the SS have been using concentration camp inmates
to build an economic empire.
Now Himmler sees an opportunity
to exploit this resource on a vast scale.
He persuades Hitler that rocket productions
should come under his control.
The SS built an underground factory complex
near the Harz Mountains
and put 60,000 prisoners to work.
The conditions were...
..indescribable.
It is hard to imagine how ghastly and appalling
working conditions were.
It is unspeakable.
Speer works very closely with Himmler.
For him, it's no problem at all
to work with concentration camp prisoners.
He knows the conditions.
Himmler is not interested in collaboration.
This has become another opportunity to impress Hitler
and extend the reach of the SS.
Remember, without Himmler,
without the repressive apparatus of the SS and the police,
without the essential contributions of the SS
to the genocidal war in the east,
Hitler's rule wouldn't be as robust.
But Himmler without Hitler is almost unimaginable.
Himmler is so powerful because he enjoys Hitler's backing.
Especially at a time
when the fortunes of war
have turned against Nazi Germany.
The Allied bombing raids increase,
in volume and destruction.
And the German people continue to question Hitler's leadership.
Hitler's inner circle can see the writing on the wall.
But deep rifts emerge over how to protect the nation
and the spirit of the Fuhrer.
By late 1943, Goebbels no longer believes
that Germany can win this war on two fronts.
Goebbels has an existential nightmare in his hands
because his beloved, worshipped Fuhrer
refuses to see the limitations
of the reality of the war they're fighting.
At this point, Hitler is ever-less amenable to having a conversation.
Hitler wasn't a good listener, that's for sure.
And you took your life in your hands if you started arguing against him
or opposing him, or suggesting to him things he didn't want to do.
It speaks to Goebbels' closeness and confidence with the Fuhrer
that he's able to tell him something that he does not want to hear.
And that is, we must make peace with one of the two sides.
Either the Soviets or the Anglo-American Allies.
This is yet another suggestion of retreat,
abandoning half the war.
Hitler is certainly not prepared to countenance this at all.
In his diary, Goebbels writes that several times,
he has lectured Hitler on the need to make peace with one side.
A war with the Soviet Union was fundamental
to Hitler's belief system.
But in any case, again, Hitler thought he could win.
Something was going to happen
that would enable him to defeat both sides.
Goebbels, here, is trying to face
the very real problem of the war is being lost.
And he concludes this diary entry by saying,
"I don't know what the Fuhrer will do in the end".
Goebbels, the creator of the Fuhrer myth
of the infallible leader of Germany,
does not know if Hitler has a solution at all.
Hitler isn't the only one who wants the war to continue.
Himmler acts quickly to ensure that senior party members
cannot abandon the regime.
In October 1943,
Himmler gathers high-ranking Nazis at Posen
for a series of speeches.
They are recorded,
and any absentees are noted.
On this rare occasion,
Himmler talks openly about the Final Solution.
He coldly describes the mass murder of Jewish men, women and children.
Himmler assures his audience
that these killings are morally justified.
But there is another motive behind these words.
By admitting this giant crime,
Himmler has turned all those present
into accomplices.
As Germany heads to almost-inevitable defeat,
the Nazi leadership are locked into their pact.
The war will continue until the bitter end.
CLICK AND WHIRRING
There's a very eerie movie that Eva Braun took
where Hitler starts to flirt with her in front of the camera
and pay her compliments.
And it gives one a very unsettling feeling that he's flirting with you,
you know, when you look at it from her eyes and her point of view.
As the final chapter of the Holocaust is carried out
in his name...
..Hitler withdraws to his official mountain retreat, the Berghof.
The atmosphere generally was very relaxed.
People were laughing and joking.
They had conversations, they looked at the scenery.
It was all very normal.
You weren't allowed to discuss the extermination of the Jews,
anti-Semitism, the policies towards the Jews or anything like that.
Particularly over dinner, and then afterwards,
when they were watching old movies,
he's in his own private world.
He won't have discussions of the military situation.
That's been dealt with earlier in the day.
He just holds these monologues
about the old days and tells stories.
Hitler is here on 6th June, 1944,
when the dramatic news comes in.
A giant armada of warships has arrived at the Normandy coast,
carrying over 150,000 troops.
D-Day has begun.
It was very difficult to dent Hitler's self-belief.
He slept late on 6th June as the Allies were landing.
When he was told after he'd awoken,
his reaction was rather strange, in a way,
but predictable in another way.
He took it very lightly.
He thought, "This is great. They're going to be defeated
"and we can make political capital out of this.
"The German people will be very angry about this."
But D-Day tips the balance of the war
irreversibly in favour of the Allies.
Stauffenberg sees this.
He knows now that Germany is starting to enter the endgame.
And he also knows that it creates a time pressure.
If he's going to make this attempt on Hitler's life,
he needs to do it now.
After months of meticulous planning, Stauffenberg's chance arrives.
He's promoted into the Reserve Army
and called to the Wolf's Lair,
where he will be face-to-face with Hitler in a reinforced bunker.
It's the perfect opportunity to plant a bomb.
So this isn't a practical act any more, as such,
this is a moral act. It's an act of conscience.
It's a statement to say, within this age of terror
and oppression and violence,
there were people who were prepared to do something about it and to act.
Stauffenberg's briefcase contains two bombs.
There was a 30-minute window from priming to detonation,
but no-one knows how accurate they are.
He will have to be fast and precise.
If anything happens that reveals his true purpose at this stage,
he risks calamitous harm to everybody around him.
He knows that he has the eyes of history on him.
He knows that the events of this day
could become fundamental to the rest of German history,
to the rest of European history.
When Stauffenberg arrives at the Wolf's Lair,
he's told the plans have changed.
The briefing has been brought forward,
giving him less time to prepare.
And the meeting has been moved to a wooden conference hut.
This is not what they'd planned for.
When he enters the Wolf's Lair, he's very much entering Hitler's space.
The people in this environment are people who are passionately
determined to serve Hitler with everything they have to give.
And so, whether or not it's real or imagined,
von Stauffenberg feels these eyes on him.
And so, the risks and the danger to him and to the plan
just grow and grow the further into this space that he moves.
As he's led to the briefing,
Stauffenberg asks for a private room
to change his shirt before the meeting begins.
This is his window to prime the bombs.
A staff aide knocks on the door to hurry him to the briefing.
This rattles him.
And in his haste,
he only primes one explosive.
For Hitler, Stauffenberg was a real war hero.
The kind of soldier he always wanted.
Someone prepared to make any sacrifice for him and for Germany.
And losing an eye and losing a hand
were obvious examples of his extraordinary bravery.
So Hitler greeted him very warmly.
He has a briefcase with him.
Nobody thinks there's anything unusual in this.
In this moment, Stauffenberg's mind must have been racing.
He must have been charged with a version of excitement.
After years of talking about it and months of concentrated planning,
it's finally happening.
Next to Hitler is a bomb
with a fuse ticking that's about to explode.
With limited time to leave the room before the explosion,
Stauffenberg has a pre-planned phone call,
ready to make an exit.
He makes his pardons and leaves.
This is the last time he will ever see Hitler.
EXPLOSION
Von Stauffenberg knows that the bomb's gone off.
The plot has happened, it's been successful.
He's killed Hitler.
Stauffenberg hurries to his waiting plane,
ready to carry out the next phase of Operation Valkyrie.
But when he lands in Berlin...
..he learns the dreadful truth.
Hitler has survived the bomb.
At the Wolf's Lair, Hitler is covered in cuts and bruises.
And his eardrums have burst.
Furious at the attempt on his life,
he looks for someone to blame,
and summons Heinrich Himmler.
Certainly, Himmler and the Gestapo did not look very good
because they'd failed to intercept Stauffenberg,
or to detect his involvement in the plot.
Himmler gets his act together very quickly,
and he talked to Hitler and says,
"We must crush this coup harshly and swiftly".
This is really the final blow
to Hitler's relationship with the army officers.
He thought they were incompetent, cowardly.
Here, now, he discovers they're trying to kill him.
And so, he gets much more suspicious, much more paranoid.
From now on, Himmler and the SS
have his trust to an even greater extent.
Rather than blaming him, Hitler is persuaded to entrust Himmler
with even more power.
To eliminate further opposition within the army
as ruthlessly as possible,
he appoints Himmler as head of the Reserve Army.
Himmler heads straight to Berlin,
sending SS units ahead
to round up conspirators in the army headquarters.
The SS and Himmler work in a concerted manner
to crush the resistance attempt.
Extremely speedily and extremely efficiently,
the suppressions and vengeance meted out by the SS,
the police and the German judiciary is brutal.
HE RANTS
Himmler moves to destroy the Resistance network.
Close to 5,000 people are rounded up
and are swiftly put on trial.
The loyal Heinrich has proved himself to be the man
who Hitler can count on to deliver no matter what.
Himmler is now at the peak of his power.
Second only to Hitler.
And the coup marks a moment of resurrection for Hitler.
He is now more convinced than ever
of his own invincibility.
Providence has preserved him yet again.
So his future is still to guide Germany to victory.
He sees this as confirmation
of everything that he's done up to that point.
Hitler will now never concede.
Rallied by the defiance and denial of his closest aides...
..he pushes Germany on towards untold destruction.
Hitler now had no boundaries.
Ultimately, Hitler's mission really becomes
one, literally, of annihilation or victory.
The result was total destruction.
Death on an almost unimaginable scale.
This is a kind of absolute nightmare
which has very few parallels in history.