♪ [theme song plays] ♪
[narrator] By the summer of 1944,
Allied troops were racing towards Paris.
The final phase of the war in Europe was
about to be played out.
The western Allies were squeezing in
on Germany through France.
The Soviet Union was approaching from the east.
Hitler, caught in the middle, made a last desperate attempt
to break out of the Allied stranglehold.
While he was doing so, Stalin was beginning
to redraw the political map of Europe
in an attempt to secure the Soviet Union's future.
But as the Russians now advanced into German
occupied territory, they came across the most
shocking discover in modern history.
A series of camp that would call into question
the very nature of humanity.
The world was about to discover the
true horror of the Nazi regime.
[gunshots]
In August 1944, Allied troops arrived in Paris.
[gunshots]
Even as Hitler desperately signalled to his generals,
"Is Paris burning?" the German forces
occupying the city surrendered.
[reporter] Paris free again, and the beginning
of the last act and its amazing story.
The surrender of Lieutenant General von Choltitz,
German commander of the Paris region.
At a dingy office in Montparnassee station.
Formal end of German rule.
[horn honking]
[crowd singing]
[narrator] Paris threw itself into
an orgy of celebration.
[cheers and applause]
The following day, Charles de Gaulle, the leader
of the Free French government in exile,
arrived in the city to claim the glory for its liberation.
[speaking French]
Meanwhile as De Gaulle claimed the credit,
the Allies continued the fighting.
They crossed the River Seine
and moved east towards Germany.
As they did so, the German army
was retreating in confusion.
But the Allies were running into
severe logistical problems.
The fleeing Germans had trashed the French ports.
That meant Allied supplies had to be brought in
from Britain across the beaches of Normandy
and then transported several hundreds of miles
along tortuous roads.
Truck convoys, nicknamed the Red Ball Express
from their identification sign, rolled forward day and night.
But it was impossible to bring in enough supplies,
particularly fuel, to maintain the Allied advance.
A US armoured division drank up to
25,000 gallons of fuel a day.
Meanwhile, as supply problems slowed the Allied advance,
Hitler was planning a new fight back.
His plan, to destroy Allied morale
by attacking civilian targets, particularly in Britain.
His method, a new miracle weapon, the flying bomb.
On June 13, 1944, ten were fired at London.
[explosions]
Six struck home.
The Germans called it Vengeance Weapon 1, the V1.
The British simply called it the doodlebug.
[explosion]
Armed with a warhead of just under 2,000 pounds,
it could be launched from sites 130 miles away
and could fly at 400 miles an hour.
For the next few weeks, up to 100 doodlebugs a day
were fired at British cities from launch sites
along the German occupied channel coast.
They caused panic and confusion.
More than 20,000 people were killed or wounded.
[gunshots]
The British set up a screen of
anti-aircraft guns around the capital.
Many flying bombs were shot down.
[explosion]
The British also sent up fighters to intercept them,
including their first operational jet
the Gloster Meteor.
[explosions]
But still the V1s kept arriving.
Only when the Allies tracked down
their launch sites in northern France
did they stop.
But the reprieve was only temporary.
The Germans had a second miracle weapon up their sleeves.
Hard on the heels of the V1 came
the much more sophisticated V2 rocket.
[explosions]
The first fell on London on September 8, 1944.
The V2s were launched from easily concealed
mobile launchers 200 miles away.
They travelled at 3,500 miles an hour
and carried a one ton warhead.
For six months, Britain had no response.
Over 1,100 V2s landed on defenceless British cities.
They only stopped when the German positions
in Europe were pushed so far back
the launch sites were, once again, out of range of Britain.
Yet despite the horror and damage the V2s caused,
British morale remained unbroken.
[cheers and applause]
Meanwhile in mainland Europe, the Allied advance
reached Brussels on September 3, 1944.
[cheers and applause]
The next day, British forces took the huge
Belgian port of Antwerp.
It was still intact.
Here at last seemed an answer
to the Allies' logistic problems.
New supplies could pour in through the port.
But it was not to be so simple.
Antwerp is 40 miles from the sea up the River Scheldt.
As the Germans pulled out of the city,
they dug in along the waterway,
turning it into a corridor of death.
The river was also mined.
It meant the port was unreachable from the sea.
The Allied advance, now desperately low on supplies
was in danger of grinding to a halt.
By autumn 1944, the Allied advance across western Europe
was running short of supplies.
They needed a new plan if it was to move forward.
It was now that the methodical and ultra-cautious
British Commander Bernard Montgomery
came up with a bold, even reckless, idea.
Instead of large numbers of troops
advancing across a wide front,
why not send a smaller force
to punch a single hole through the German defences?
It would be faster and much more economical.
The idea was drive a narrow corridor
from east of Antwerp across southern Holland
to the Dutch town of Arnhem near the German border.
The Allies would then push across the Rhine into Germany,
outflanking the huge German defensive positions
of the so called Siegfried line,
and drive deep into the heart of Hitler's Reich.
Montgomery's boss, General Dwight Eisenhower,
the Supreme Allied Commander in the West,
had until now favoured a broad, steady advance.
But he unexpectedly agreed.
However, it was never going to be easy.
The route went over a mass of waterways.
Airborne troops would have to be sent in
to seize strategic bridges behind German lines
at the towns of Veghel and Zon,
Grave and Nijmegen,
and finally across the Rhine at Arnhem.
Their task would be to hold the bridges
while the main attack, led by a column of tanks,
drove up from Belgium.
Timing was critical.
If the tank column took too long
the airborne troops holding the bridges
would be overwhelmed.
Operation Market Garden
began early on the afternoon of September 17, 1944.
30,000 British and US airborne troops,
equipped with gliders,
landed in German occupied territory.
[crowd cheering]
The US 101st Airborne, the Screaming Eagles,
swiftly captured the bridge at Veghel.
But their second objective, the bridge at Zon,
was blown up by the Germans just as the Americans approached.
[explosion]
Further north, the US 82nd Airborne, the All Americans,
successfully seized the bridge at Grave.
[gunshots and explosions]
But stiff German resistance prevented them
from capturing the second crucial bridge at Nijmegen.
Meanwhile at Arnhem, two brigades
of the British First Airborne Division
landed safely about eight miles west of the town.
But as the paratroops advanced
towards Arnhem's vital bridge across the Rhine,
they ran into two German Panzer divisions.
[explosions]
The British dropped reinforcements
of men and machines.
But as they drifted down to earth,
they were cut to pieces by German fire.
[gunshots and explosions]
Finally, by eight in the evening,
after a day of fierce fighting,
an Allied battalion reached
the northern end of the bridge.
But the Germans still held the other end.
Operation Market Garden was in trouble.
At the same time the tank column,
advancing up a single track road,
was also running into difficulties.
As it drove towards the Dutch border on the first day,
the lead vehicles were ambushed by German troops
using the lethal handheld Panzerfaust antitank rocket.
[explosions]
The advance was halted
while infantry was brought in to clear the way.
[explosions]
The following day the tank column reached Zon,
but was delayed overnight while the bridge
was replaced with a temporary structure.
[explosions]
By the third day it had crossed the bridges
at Veghel and Grave,
but was held up again by fierce resistance at Nijmegen.
Finally, four days after starting out
the column was at last within striking distance of Arnhem.
But it was too late.
The British paratroops holding the northern end of the bridge
had surrendered.
Montgomery's daring plan had failed.
Arnhem had proved a bridge too far.
The war on the western front
seemed to have ground to a standstill again.
Then, ten days later,
the Allies launched a new effort to break the deadlock.
The plan was to clear the seaway into Antwerp
so that urgently needed supplies could be brought in.
[gunshots]
It was slow going.
The Germans had flooded much of the area.
It took Canadian troops three weeks to clear the riverbanks
of German soldiers and machine gun nests.
[gunshots]
But still the Germans
clung on to the strategically important Walcheren Island.
It had massive guns that commanded the river entrance.
On November 1, 1944, British commandos
were sent in to flush the Germans out.
They were supported by two World War I monitors
with huge 15 inch guns.
[explosions]
The Germans held on for another week
before they were finally overwhelmed.
Allied mine sweepers could now clear the seaway.
Three weeks later, on November 28, 1944,
the first supply ships reached Antwerp.
Now at last, the Allies could move on
towards the German frontier.
But then just as the supplies had begun to flow,
the weather changed.
[thunder]
Autumn rain turned the battlefield into a swamp.
By late 1944, the Allied advance had to stop again.
The final defeat of Germany
would have to wait until the spring.
But even as the Allies waited,
Hitler was preparing a massive response.
[explosions]
By autumn 1944 the Allied armies were virtually
lined up along the Belgian German frontier waiting
for the winter weather to clear before they pushed on.
Germany's situation was disastrous.
Her forces were hugely outnumbered,
they lacked air support,
and they were desperately short of fuel.
Nevertheless, Hitler,
against the advice of his senior commanders,
decided to launch a huge counter attack.
It was a desperate gamble, but if it paid off,
it might just change Germany's fortunes.
His plan was to burst through the Allied lines
in the Ardennes hills and head for Antwerp.
If he could retake the port, the Allied supply lines
would be cut out once again.
Some 200,000 German troops
and 950 tanks and tank destroyers
were assembled in total radio silence.
Hitler was calling on what was, in effect,
his last remaining strategic reserve of troops.
The Allies missed the build-up completely.
As a result, the lines facing the German positions
were only lightly manned.
[explosions]
On December 16, 1944, the Germans opened fire.
[explosions]
Soon afterwards, German tanks and infantry
crossed the US lines.
The Americans were caught completely by surprise.
In fact, during the first day General Omar Bradley,
Commander of US 12th Army Group,
even refused to believe
a major German assault was underway.
American confusion was made worse
when the Germans sent in English speaking special forces
in captured US uniforms and jeeps to carry out sabotage
behind the US lines.
American troops became so nervous that even
General Bradley was stopped and asked to produce
his identity papers to prove that he was not a German.
But despite this, the US forces regrouped.
Any Germans captured wearing US uniforms
were summarily shot as spies.
[gunshots]
The Americans began to fight back.
But the German advance had created
a huge bulge in the Allied lines.
The attack would become known as the Battle of the Bulge.
[explosions]
It was now, on the northern flank of this bulge,
that the Germans committed one of the worst atrocities
of the war in northwest Europe.
SS Colonel Joachim Peiper captured
some 150 members of a US artillery observation battalion
near the village of Malmedy.
When later US forces retook the village,
they found 85 bodies.
Their comrades had been shot by their SS guards.
It was a sign of how desperate the fight had become.
As the German advance near Malmedy continued,
US combat engineers blew up bridges to slow it down.
[explosions]
The Germans were forced to use precious supplies of fuel
to look for alternative crossings.
Meanwhile, on the southern flank of the bulge,
US troops blocked road junctions
to slow the German tanks.
One of the most important crossroads
was at the small Belgian town of Bastogne.
Here the Allies sent in reinforcements.
[explosions]
The Germans were forced to bypass it,
but the US forces holding Bastogne
blocked their supply lines.
Two days later, however, the Germans were approaching
the town of Dinant, some 30 miles further west.
Despite the setbacks, Hitler's gamble appeared
to be paying off.
The German bulge was moving forward.
But their supply lines were now dangerously overextended
and they were running desperately low on fuel.
The advance slowed.
[explosions]
For almost a week in the biting cold,
the two sides remained deadlocked.
Neither could gain the upper hand.
[explosions]
Then on New Year's Day 1945, the Luftwaffe
launched a do or die assault on Allied bases.
Over 300 Allied planes were destroyed.
But the Luftwaffe lost several hundred too,
far more than it could replace.
[gunshots]
As the weather now improved, the Allies
took advantage of their overwhelming air power.
US troops temporarily under Montgomery's command
pushed in from the north.
US General George Patton's forces
squeezed from the south.
Allied air power pummelled the German lines.
The German bulge was slowly pushed back.
[gunshots]
By early February 1945, Hitler's gamble had failed.
The Germans had retreated to their original positions.
The attack had taken a heavy toll
on their already depleted resources.
Over 120,000 men were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Europe,
Stalin now began to move on Germany's eastern border.
In doing so, he would begin to redraw
the political map of Europe.
[crowd cheering]
During the summer and autumn of 1944,
as the Allies overran France and Belgium, in the east
the core of Stalin's Red Army was camped outside
the Polish capital of Warsaw.
For the Russian leader the aim of the war
had by now changed.
It was no longer a matter of survival
or even of pushing the enemy out of the Soviet Union.
It had become a political affair.
Top of Stalin's agenda was building
a buffer zone between the Soviet Army and Germany.
One of the keys to this was Poland.
The Russians and Poles had long hated each other.
Soviet armies had collaborated with the Germans
in carving up Poland in 1939.
Then in April 1943, German soldiers found the bodies
of more than 4,000 Polish army officers
in the Katyn Woods near Smolensk in the Soviet Union.
They had been murdered by the Russians.
Stalin denied any involvement and blamed the Germans.
But the Poles never believed him.
[explosions]
Then in the summer of 1944, the Polish Home Army
in Warsaw rose up against its German occupiers.
It was now that hostility between the two countries
came to a head.
[explosions]
The Home Army had been spurred on
by a broadcast from Moscow on July 29
urging a popular uprising.
[explosions]
In the first days of the rising
it seized some two thirds of the city.
It had about 40,000 men and women,
armed mainly with captured German weapons.
There were also more than 200,000 unarmed helpers.
But they lacked any weapons
capable of repelling the German heavy armour.
The Poles looked to the Soviet Army,
still camped just to the south, for help.
But Stalin ordered it to do nothing
and dismissed the Home Army's leadership
as power seeking criminals.
[explosions]
German reinforcements poured into Warsaw
under the command of SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski.
He was an expert
in crushing and slaughtering partisan groups.
[gunshots]
The situation in the city became desperate.
Savage house to house fighting raged for two months.
The Home Army was forced back into an ever smaller area.
The German advance was accompanied by rape and murder.
Wounded prisoners were burned alive.
Women and children were used as human shields.
The Polish forces were forced back into cellars and sewers.
[explosions]
But still the Red Army sat back.
Stalin's reasoning was simple.
He saw the Polish Home Army
as pro-Western and anti-communist.
He reasoned that if it and its supporters were destroyed,
it would clear the way
for the Polish communists to take power.
[explosions]
By October 2, the Germans had done
just what Stalin had hoped.
The Home Army and its sympathizers were crushed.
Over 15,000 army members and 200,000 civilians died.
Some 15,000 people surrendered.
Hitler now set about
the complete destruction of the city.
[explosions]
Warsaw was razed to the ground.
The remnants of the Home Army went underground.
[cheers and applause]
Later when the Red Army finally moved into Warsaw,
they would be hunted down by Soviet secret police.
Stalin's scheming had worked.
Pro-Western Polish forces had been smashed
and the country would, after the war,
become a key buffer state between Russia and the West.
In London, the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill,
was appalled by Stalin's conduct.
But he was also a pragmatist.
In October 1944, Churchill went to Moscow.
It was several months after the crushing
of the Warsaw uprising.
There he agreed with Stalin
on a division of the European spoils.
According to a document Churchill scribbled down,
the Soviets would have 90% of the influence
in Romania and the British 90% in Greece.
In Bulgaria, the Soviets would have 75% influence,
and 50% in Yugoslavia and Hungary.
The future of Poland was left vague, probably deliberately.
Churchill described it as the naughty document.
The wording was confusing and nobody was sure
quite what it meant, but Stalin happily agreed to it.
He was probably aware that the winner
would take all and he intended to be the winner
in most of Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
Churchill never told the Americans about the document.
He knew that they would be horrified
by such old fashioned imperialism
between the European powers.
But the US found out soon enough.
In late 1944, the Germans pulled out of Greece.
The country descended into a civil war
between the Monarchists and the Communists.
Churchill wanted his 90% influence and sent in
British troops to support the pro-Western Monarchists.
[gunshots]
Stalin, mindful of the naughty document, did not object.
But the Americans were outraged at what they saw
as such blatant meddling in another country's affairs.
[crowd yelling]
But by the end of 1944, there was a more pressing issue.
Western and Soviet forces
were about the same distance away from Berlin.
The race was on to be the first to get there.
But even before it began,
new and shocking news came out of the East.
On July 23, 1944,
as Soviet forces advanced through eastern Poland,
they overran a small village called Maidanek.
Nearby they found a prison compound.
They quickly realised it was no ordinary camp.
They found specially built gas chambers and incinerators.
Near them were piles of corpses.
It was a camp designed for the mass murder of Jews.
[speaking German]
Adolf Hitler had always been anti-Semitic.
[cheering]
When in the 1930s he had come to power,
many German Jews had been forced to flee.
Those who couldn't were persecuted
and deprived of their rights.
Then in the summer of 1939, the Germans invaded Poland.
Suddenly the German Reich
found itself ruling two million more Jews.
So the Nazis sent in special SS squads,
the Einsatzgruppen, whose job was to round them up.
Many Jews were immediately shot.
The remainder were herded into walled ghettos
in the major cities, while Germans worked out
how to solve what they called the Jewish problem.
[crowd yelling]
Life in the ghettos was harsh.
People were systematically starved and beaten.
[explosions]
Two years later the German army entered the Soviet Union.
Millions more Jews
suddenly found themselves under Nazi rule.
Here the Einsatzgruppen were helped by the local population,
which was often anti-Semitic
and only too willing to carry out pogroms of its own.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews
were rounded up and exterminated.
[gunshots]
The most notorious pogrom occurred at Babyi Yar in Kiev.
33,000 Jews were shot in cold blood.
But machine gunning was an expensive way
of dealing with the Jewish problem.
Nor was it popular with many German soldiers.
So at a conference in January 1942, the SS leadership
cast round for more efficient solutions.
First it tried using carbon monoxide fumes.
But that didn't kill enough people quickly enough.
The conference eventually agreed to set up
a series of camps where Europe's Jewish population
would be systematically exterminated.
There would be six of these death camps,
all in Poland.
They were at Maidanek, Sobibor, Treblinka,
Chelmno, Belzec, and Birkenau.
As the camps were being built,
the Jewish ghettos were liquidated.
One notorious example was in Warsaw.
Here, as the Germans moved into the ghetto
to clear it out, the inhabitants fought back.
They held out for nearly a month.
7,000 died in the fighting before they were overwhelmed.
Those who had survived it
were rounded up and sent to Treblinka.
Here they entered what was rapidly becoming
a highly organised system of slave labour and extermination.
New inhabitants arrived at the camps
in cattle trucks from all over Europe.
At places like Birkenau the extermination facilities
were next to the work camps like Auschwitz.
At facilities like this, the new arrivals were sorted.
Able bodied men and a few women
went to the work camp to be worked to death as slaves.
Children, the old, and most of the women
went straight to the gas chambers.
They were stripped and their heads shaved.
Next they were herded, up to 2,000 at a time,
into sealed rooms disguised as showers.
SS officers then poured Zyklon-B crystals through
a trap in the roof to form a deadly gas.
It was far more effective than carbon monoxide.
At Auschwitz Birkenau, the gas chambers
could kill over 10,000 people a day.
Small groups of prisoners, known as Sonderkommandos,
were used to clear the bodies out of the chambers.
Some bodies were burned in pits.
Some in crematoria.
The camps could also be profitable businesses.
Major German companies built factories near them
and paid the SS, which administered the camps,
to hire Jews as slaves.
The belongings and hair of those gassed were sold off,
their gold teeth melted down and hoarded.
For most Jews, resistance was almost impossible.
At Treblinka, Sobibor, and Birkenau, however,
the Sonderkommandos mounted brief and doomed rebellions.
But in July 1944 most of this was still unknown.
As news began to seep out of the Russian find at Maidenek,
most people simply found it unbelievable.
Yet today we know that people in the west,
like Churchill, almost certainly knew more than they admitted.
During 1934 and '44 several reports reached London
about what was going on inside the extermination camps.
But nothing was done.
Today it is estimated some six million Jews
were exterminated in Hitler's camps.
What the Allies had never understood,
until the war was over, was the vast scale
of the Nazi extermination campaign.
Nor did they grasp the sheer quantity of resources
the Germans were prepared to devote to it
when Germany was facing its final days.
[explosions and gunshots]
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