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00:00Adolf Hitler was fully aware of the absolute necessity of success at the
00:07Battle of Kursk. He needed a success to re-establish the month lost in the
00:12disaster at Stalingrad.
00:18It was a gamble which was not destined to succeed.
00:30In the north, the effectiveness of a Russian defense limited the progress of von Klunger's
00:519th Army. In the south, von Mannstein's 4th Panzer Army advanced 25 miles and threatened
00:58to penetrate the Voronezh Front. Reserves from the steppe's front had to be pumped into the
01:05battle to bolster the salient's defenders and prevent the 4th Panzers from breaking through
01:11into open country.
01:20They succeeded and the Germans had fallen into Zhukov's trap.
01:28From now on, the enemy was in undisputed possession of the initiative.
01:39Having enticed the Germans into total but disastrous commitment to their armoured forces, the Red Army
01:46swiftly exploited their advantage.
01:48Even while the gargantuan tank struggle was still being bitterly contested, on the 12th
01:55of July, the Russians counter-attacked towards Orel, which was itself a salient in German hands.
02:02The respectable Army Group Centre, reinforced by units from the 4th Panzer Army, which had broken
02:09off its attack on Kursk, attempted to check the advance.
02:15The German Army Group Centre was the implacable enemy of the Red Army. It had been its most
02:21implacable enemy since 1941 and it was still its most implacable enemy in 1944.
02:27Numerous attempts had been made by the Red Army and the High Command to destroy Army Group Centre and they couldn't.
02:31They tried and tried. Army Group Centre held fast, absolutely and completely.
02:38Even at Stalingrad, by the way, what is very little is known about this, while Zhukov was actually
02:43organizing the counter-attack at Stalingrad, he was also, by the way, on the 25th of November 1942,
02:48organizing an attack against Army Group Centre. He was not distracted by Stalingrad, but he understood,
02:53as every Soviet commander did, that the enemy was Army Group Centre, stationed right in the centre of
03:01the Soviet-German front. Not only was it strategically important, it covered lines of communication,
03:05it covered important population centres, and above all, actually, it covered one thing the Russians
03:10desired above all, the shortest route to Germany and to Berlin. You couldn't go, well, you could go
03:16round, you could go down, but really, the only way was to blast the way through and get onto the highway
03:21to Berlin. So Army Group Centre was, as I say, an object of vital strategic importance for the Soviet
03:29High Command. But by now, the Eastern Front was not the only theatre of disaster for the German armies.
03:39On the 10th of July, Allied forces had invaded Sicily.
03:42By the 25th, Mussolini had been arrested and a provisional government set up in Italy.
03:55Fearing the defection of his Mediterranean ally, Hitler desperately needed to make troops available for
04:01the defence of the peninsula. On August the 1st, he ordered an immediate withdrawal from the oral salient.
04:09By the 5th of August, the provincial capitals of Oral and Belgorod had been liberated.
04:19Near Belgorod, the Germans attempted a counter-attack with 60,000 troops and 18,000 Hitler youth,
04:27who arrived at the front carrying flags with the ironic inscription,
04:31the world belongs to us. The frenzied German counter-stroke succeeded in pushing back the Red Army,
04:40but the Russian tide of resurgence was irresistible. After clawing their way forward for 10 days,
04:47the German advance was again flung backward towards the Dnieper.
04:51The great retreat was about to begin. The all-conquering German army, which had disdainfully swept aside the
05:03Russian border defences only two years previously, was now struggling to maintain a presence in the field of battle.
05:10The panzer units, which had sliced the Red Army to pieces in a series of dazzling pincer movements,
05:19now flung themselves headlong at the Russians in the desperate hope of slowing their progress.
05:28For the ordinary German soldiers, the notion of victory ceased to have meaning.
05:33The survival of themselves and their immediate comrades became the central concern of their lives.
05:40The situation in 1944 for the German army in the East looked catastrophic and was catastrophic.
05:46They had lost Army Group Centre. Army Group North was breaking up very rapidly. Army Group South was
05:53desperately trying to hold onto the remnants of Soviet territory in Ukraine.
06:00So it appeared that the German army was on the run. And in some respects, that was true. The losses were very
06:05considerable. They had lost many, many hundreds of thousands of men. Their losses in armour were considerable.
06:10And I suppose speaking objectively, one should argue that, yes, this was the end of the line, but it wasn't.
06:16First of all, the German commanders, as opposed to Hitler, decided that one way in which they had a fighting
06:21chance, more than a fighting chance, would be to adopt an elastic mobile defence. In other words,
06:27not take all these Russian blows on the chin directly, but move back. Then there was a reasonable
06:32chance that the German army in the East would, A, be able to survive. And even more important,
06:37what it would be able to do, would in fact be able to establish, if you like, some form of coherent
06:43defensive line, certainly further to the West, but against which very possibly the Red Army would
06:48throw itself and finally exhaust itself. The problem was that Hitler kept giving the opposite orders.
06:54On the Russian side, the liberation of the cities and towns was proving a bittersweet experience.
07:03In Orel, the Soviet troops arrived to find half the town and all its bridges destroyed by the retreating
07:10Germans. Of the pre-war population of 114,000, only 30,000 haggard souls survived to greet their saviours.
07:2225,000 had been sent as slaves to the labour camps of the Reich, 12,000 had been murdered by their German
07:30overlords, and thousands had died from disease and starvation.
07:34As the German forces began to move back, the partisan movement really exploded into life.
07:44Partisans taught demolition procedures, wireless operating, intelligence gathering,
07:49and how to forge and amend official German documentation.
07:53Soviet partisans really consisted of three elements. One, there were certainly, or there was,
08:01a well-organized but very small-scale organized underground movement, key members of the communist
08:07party who were assigned to stay behind and build up resistance groups. But that was very specialised.
08:11The second group were civilians who were forced out by German terrorist action. Their homes were burned,
08:17blown up, relative shot, people killed, slave labour was portending, who took to their heels and hid as
08:23best they could and would perhaps organise. The third part, of course, was, as I've said earlier, that
08:28the German army surrounded very large numbers of Red Army troops in 1941. You had encirclements of 300,000
08:34men. Not all of these men were taken prisoner and gradually broke up, hid, were able to establish
08:41themselves as, if you like, small independent combat units and would either get in touch with the local
08:47population to see what could be done or, in fact, a form of partisan organisation was built up very
08:55primitive but nonetheless in existence. But gradually, by 1944, the Soviet partisan movement had become
09:04very substantially organised and then placed and was conducting its operations more or less in
09:10coordination with the Red Army. That was certainly the case as the Red Army crossed the Soviet frontiers
09:15and then had to make use of certainly of partisans, yes, for scouting, for intelligence, for
09:23support. So the partisan movements passed through those several stages and by 1944 had become, I would say,
09:31it was and established a very considerable feature of the Soviet war machine. Besides the damage they
09:38inflicted on German troops and their morale, the partisans offered hope and example to
09:43those still in the midst of Nazi tyranny. Zoya Kosmodemianskaya, an 18-year-old member of the Moscow
09:53Komsomol, was caught setting fire to German stables in the village of Pestryevo. Although tortured,
10:01she revealed nothing about her comrades to the German interrogators. As she was led to the gallows
10:09with a placard around her neck describing her crime, she turned to her German captors and proclaimed
10:15defiantly, you can't hang all 190 million of us.
10:21The story of Zoya was circulated widely and she became a national heroine. Zoya grew to be a symbol
10:33not only of partisan resistance but the defiance of Russian womanhood in the face of the most terrible
10:39adversity. The necessities of the war in the east smashed through most of the remaining barriers to
10:46women's contribution to the Soviet war effort.
10:55Despite the suffering which the German invasion had brought about, the people of the Soviet Union
11:00had taken everything that the Germans could throw at them and the nation had helped.
11:06By now, the majority of the population were willing cogs in a gigantic war machine.
11:12civilians and soldiers alike seemed to grasp a new awareness of their role in the bitter conflict
11:19which raged all around them.
11:25The mood of the retreating Germans was one of intense frustration and manic desperation.
11:32Each man knowing he was staring death in the face.
11:35Their fury at certain death was unleashed towards civilians and soldiers alike.
11:49The Germans had been decisively defeated but the war in the east was far from over.
11:55Even though a strategic withdrawal to the river Dnieper seemed the only possible option for the
12:05ragged German formations, Hitler initially stuck to his policy of holding territory to the last man.
12:13Von Tippelskirch, one of the German generals in the east, summed up the helpless rage of the field
12:20commanders forced to sacrifice men and material to a principle of no withdrawal which had now been
12:27elevated to a moral necessity. A series of withdrawals by adversely large steps would have worn down the Russian strength
12:36besides creating opportunities for counter strokes when the German forces were numerous enough to make them effective.
12:42The root cause of the German defeat was the way her forces were wasted in fruitless efforts
12:49and above all fruitless resistance at the wrong time and place.
12:59By the 23rd of August Kharkov was once again in Russian hands. By the 30th, Taganrog had fallen.
13:06The capture of Donbass was followed by Novrosik and by the 25th of September Smolensk had also been retaken.
13:16The waters of the Dnieper represented the only possibility of regrouping the decimated German divisions.
13:25For the pursuing Red Army, the liberation of the towns and villages east of the Dnieper continued to
13:32fill the hearts of its soldiers with a succession of contrasting emotions. The scenes of devastation and
13:38cruelty on a scale never even considered before. Pits full of dead children and the starved remains of whole
13:47families could only make their determination to totally crush their opposition complete.
14:02Even in retreat, the elite units of the German army, such as the Groß Deutschlanddivision,
14:12managed to maintain something of their reputations by mounting a ferocious defense of the German rear.
14:23But the Dnieper was not to prove the refuge the battered German troops had been promised.
14:28Even as their defensive perimeter finally withdrew to the river's edge, they found the Russians already
14:36established there. Goaded onward by their commanders, by the atrocities they had witnessed,
14:43and the prospect of sweeping the enemy from the motherland, the Russians dispatched the German rear
14:48guard and immediately prepared to continue their pursuit.
14:51Between the 22nd and 30th of September, the Russians had forced numerous crossings of the 300 mile stretch
15:01of the river between the Pripyat marshes and Zoporozhya. Further south, by the 23rd of October,
15:11Zoporozhya and Melitop were taken by the Russians and the 17th army was isolated in the Crimea,
15:17reducing the dwindling strength of their eastern forces by a further quarter of a million.
15:24To the north, Kiev fell on the 6th of November, threatening the northern flank of Army Group South's defense of the Dnieper bend.
15:31This Soviet pressure continued throughout November and December.
15:39Despite von Manstein's pleas to abandon what was now a vulnerable salient,
15:44Hitler remained adamant that the Dnieper bend was to be held at all costs.
15:49By the new year of 1944, the line of German resistance from the Baltic to the Black Sea
16:02had either collapsed or was suffering such Russian pressure as to make it untenable.
16:09In Italy, the Allies had landed on September the 3rd and were battling their way up the peninsula.
16:15Back in Germany, the Reich was being subjected to destruction from the air on a scale never before
16:22experienced by any nation. In the first major blow against Hamburg, 30,000 people perished in a series
16:32of raids which left many more scarred and burned. The noose around Germany was tightening rapidly
16:41and a new year on the eastern front offered no relief from the process of strangulation.
16:49By January the 2nd, the Russians had advanced north of Kiev and were now just 18 miles from the Polish border.
16:58On the 14th of January, the offensive which came to be known as the Liberation of Leningrad was launched.
17:05Soviet forces smashed through the German defensive positions around the city, clearing the territory
17:12southwards as far as Novgorod. On the 17th of January, the besieged city was finally liberated.
17:21Leningrad had endured 900 days of isolation and unbelievable hardship.
17:26One million people had died. From the point of view of the Leningraders, the lifting of the siege of Leningrad could not really accommodate too soon.
17:38Remember, it was 900 days of starvation, bombardment, hunger, death, privation, even now, as the Russians admit, days of cannibalism.
17:47So rations were down to very little. There was malnutrition, there was, fortunately, there was very little disease.
17:55I think many people explain that thanks to the climate, it was very cold.
18:00But nonetheless, this was a city which had really suffered so dreadfully and appallingly.
18:07People were falling dead at their desks or at their workshops or at their places of work.
18:11There was a problem with children. Although many civilians had been evacuated, including civilians,
18:15there was still a large urban population. So the lifting of the siege of Leningrad was also very important militarily,
18:21because really what the Soviet command wanted to do, and it was crucial to the Soviet command,
18:26was to break the power of Army Group North, which, in fact, that was the German Army Group holding Leningrad,
18:32and indeed the Western approaches of the Soviet Union and the Baltic states. So releasing Leningrad
18:40and then once again striking into the rear of Army Group North did two things.
18:43Yes, it liberated Leningrad. It gave the Russians an important psychological boost. But even more
18:49important, it pushed this Army Group away. And again, it gave the Soviet command access to the Baltic
18:55states, which was yet another route into the west, which was obviously the main direction of their strategic
19:01strike. On the 4th of March, the northern flank of von Manstein's Army Group South was pierced
19:09by the 1st Ukrainian Front under direct command of Marshal Zhukov. By the 7th, after advancing 100 miles,
19:19the Russians were astride the Warsaw-Odessa railway line. And by the 28th, Nikodayev on the Bug had been captured.
19:26Further south, the river Denesta was crossed, and Klerksen at the mouth of the Dnieper overrun. By April, the Red Army's
19:39overstretched supply lines in the spring floods dictated an end to what was now being named the Mud Offensive.
19:46In the Crimea, however, the Russians continued to attack, and Sevastopol was taken on the 19th of May,
20:01bringing the northern shore of the Black Sea into Soviet hands once more.
20:05While the Russians were threatening the southern sector of the Eastern Front with collapse,
20:13events were unfolding off the south coast of England, which would completely alter the complexion of
20:19the war in the east. The long-awaited Second Front was about to be created. Until now,
20:28the Allied practical support had been limited to sending vehicles to support the Russians.
20:33What happened was Great Britain and the United States sent the Soviet Union, during the war,
20:39about 22,000 aircraft and about 12,000 tanks. But when you consider the fact that the Russians
20:44produced 106,000 tanks during the war, and therefore our tank supplies were roughly about, somewhere about
20:5210%. Though they were used, actually, but I think the Russians found the tanks not very much use.
20:59I mean, they weren't like the T-34. They weren't fitted for operational conditions or the Eastern Front.
21:05But clearly, the important thing from the Lend-Lease point of view was the 400,000 vehicles that we
21:10delivered to the Red Army. It made the Red Army mobile. Jeeps, Studebakers, you know, the whole panoply
21:17of motor transport. That gave the Red Army a degree of mobility, which was extremely important.
21:23Certainly, once the Red Army started to move westwards, that is after, or slightly before,
21:28but certainly after the battle of Kursk, the Red Army was not only an army of tank armies,
21:33it was also, from that point of view, a highly mobile army.
21:38Now, in addition to supporting the Russians with supplies,
21:41the Allies were about to make a real contribution in the field. A fleet of over 5,000 vessels had
21:49been gathered together for the invasion of France.
21:561,200 naval vessels were on hand to sweep for mines, bombarded the German coastal defenses,
22:02and to protect the invaders from airborne and naval assault. 4,000 ships, barges, tugs,
22:09and amphibious craft were available for the transportation of the two million men and their
22:13weapons, which were to be landed on the northern coast of France over a two-month period.
22:22Two mulberry harbours, as large as medium-sized ports, were to be towed across the channel in
22:28sections and constructed close to the French shore.
22:36In the air, 7,500 aircraft were mustered for the direct support of the invasion.
22:48In the early hours of the morning of the 6th of June, the first Allied paratroopers were
22:53dropped behind the targeted beaches.
22:58At dawn, five landing parties approached these beaches from the sea.
23:14By the first week in July, one million Allied soldiers had been landed.
23:19While the attention of the world focused on the D-Day landing in its aftermath,
23:23the Red Army launched a fresh offensive against Army Group Center in Belorussia.
23:30Stalin actually opened that attack on June 22, 1944, which was the anniversary of the German invasion
23:36of Russia, by the way. The point was not lost on lots of soldiers and many civilians. So Army Group Center,
23:41was a formidable mass of infantry and of armoured concentrations. Its extent was also very
23:51considerable. It covered both in the north and moving down to the south. It covered the key areas
23:55which the Russians wanted both for access and also for movement. And therefore, it simply had to be
24:00destroyed. And this involved actually a Russian plan which was really quite complex. It meant, first of all,
24:08conducting what you might call a limited encirclement. First of all, to encircle the nearest German armies
24:14and then break them up. And the next stage was quite different. And that happened around about,
24:19well, it only took them about ten days to do this, even less perhaps. And then to move out with
24:24mobile columns at high speed to conduct an even larger encirclement. And what the Russians did actually,
24:30towards the end of June 1944, was to repeat, almost in the same place, the gigantic encirclement of
24:37German soldiers, which the German army had done to the Red Army in June and July of 1941.
24:43The destruction of Army Group Center moved at lightning speed. Most of the Third Panzer Army was
24:49destroyed within a few days. At the beginning of July 1944, 100,000 German troops were encircled at Minsk.
25:03Within the week, Army Group Center had been effectively destroyed. An incision, 250 miles wide,
25:10had been sliced in the German front, and German casualties were estimated at 300,000.
25:16The Russian army now had a clear pathway to East Prussia and the Baltic. The failure of the Germans to deal
25:24with the summer offensive was emerging as a disaster on such a scale that even the debacle of Stalingrad
25:31had paled in comparison. The war correspondent Alexander Vert reported from the Russian capital.
25:44In Moscow today, all hearts are filled with joy. The new places now being captured by the Russians are in
25:51distant Lithuania or in western Belarusia. Division after division has been encircled and wiped out,
25:58hundreds of thousands killed, and about 100,000 taken prisoner. The score of generals captured is about 25.
26:08Of these 100,000 or so prisoners, 57,000 were paraded throughout the streets of Moscow with their generals at their head.
26:16The Germans had finally arrived in Moscow. When the parade was over, Russian sanitation trucks disinfected the streets.
26:32By the middle of July, the Germans had been swept from Belorussia and the Russians held much of northeast Poland.
26:38As they drove northwards into Lithuania, Army Group North was threatened with encirclement.
26:49Army Group North was a very formidable force. It contained veteran battle-tested soldiers who were an extremely hard nut to crack.
26:55And the fighting in the north, even after the liberation of Leningrad, was very severe and very intensive.
27:01And the Red Army made relatively slow progress, coming up against opposition like that.
27:05It did finally begin to break into the Baltic states, bit by bit.
27:08But that fighting went on largely until about March 1945, which shows you the nature of that resistance.
27:15And the very considerable importance of that corridor, which led westwards and northwestwards.
27:20South of the Pripyat Marsh, the Russians were making faster progress.
27:26Army Group North Ukraine were flung back beyond Lvov and Lublin.
27:30By the end of the month, units of the Red Army had reached the Vistula and were attacking the Warsaw suburbs.
27:38On the 1st of August, the Polish Home Army Command in London, anxious that the Polish capital should not
27:45fall into the hands of the advancing Soviets, ordered the Warsaw Partisans to rise against
27:50their Nazi oppressors. It was to prove a tragic mistake. The 20,000 insurgents held only enough
27:58ammunition for seven days fighting. By the end of the battle, after two months of bitter struggle,
28:05nine tenths of the city had been destroyed, 200,000 people had been massacred,
28:11and the rest deported to extermination camps.
28:20The SS had organized an orgy of savagery, sousing people with petrol and setting them alight,
28:27gassing them in the sewers and subjecting them to a nightmare regime of torture and out-of-hand execution.
28:35During this period, the Red Army remained on the outskirts of the city.
28:39Stalin was accused of standing by, while this barbarous campaign of reprisal wiped out any
28:46opposition to Russian domination of Poland.
28:51On the 20th of August, the Soviet Army unexpectedly launched a huge offensive against Romania,
28:57which was a major issue for Hitler.
28:59Hitler was obsessed with the southern flag. He maintained that if it was at all possible to
29:09destroy Soviet access to the oil fields, if it was possible, if you like, to cut the the lifeline of
29:16the Soviet Republic, then in fact, the war would come quickly to an end. He was intent, he said actually,
29:22that one of his main objectives was to seize the oil of the Caucasus. And even in 1940,
29:26that is long before the German invasion of Russia, Hitler had taken great care to send a very powerful
29:34German military mission to Romania, and to make absolutely sure that the Romanian oil fields were
29:38heavily protected. So his concern, if you like, for the economic potential of South Eastern Europe,
29:45which obviously involved Romania, was very important. And it had a political importance as well.
29:50This was to show, for example, that this wasn't just a German invasion of the Soviet Union. It was,
29:55in fact, the axis in action. And if you look at the composition of the forces which invaded the
30:00Soviet Union, they included Italians, they included Slovaks, they included, there was a Spanish element
30:08as well later on. There were Romanians, there were Hungarians.
30:11So from that point of view, it was, I think, if you like, in Hitler's terms, a kind of multinational,
30:19political and military crusade, which he was both organising and which he was intending to commit
30:27in what was his own crusade for the elimination of what he called Jewish Bolshevism.
30:33By the 23rd, 20 divisions of the German Sixth Army had been encircled in a giant pocket between the
30:40rivers de Nesta and Prut, an action which was admired by the eminent military historian Ziemke,
30:46who noted, in executing their breakthroughs, the Russians showed an elegance in their tactical
30:52conceptions, economy of force and control that did not fall short of the Germans' own performance in the
30:59early war years.
31:00The effect of these reverses on Hitler was catastrophic. Increasingly, he retreated into
31:12a semi-fantasy world, which did not correspond to the realities of the battlefield. It seemed that he
31:19hoped to hide from the public eye until he could once again force events to conform to the pattern he had
31:25enjoyed until 1942. So he continued to hide himself away in his headquarters, embarrassed to face up to the
31:34hollowness of his boasts. Hitler's ostensible reason for shutting himself away was the demands made on him
31:42by the war. In reality, he was hiding from the humiliating pattern of failure.
31:50The commanders in the East, nevertheless, had to deal with the orders of this shambling reclusive,
31:54who was now a pathetic shadow of the decisive, intuitive and supremely arrogant leader,
32:00who had launched Operation Barbarossa.
32:05Stalin sent the Red Army of Liberation northwards.
32:11And by the 31st of August, Bucharest had been entered, an essentially communist government was formed,
32:18and Romania was compelled to ratify its 1940 loss of territory to Russia.
32:24It was also forced to pay the Soviet Union a financial indemnity and use its army to fight
32:34against its erstwhile allies. The Red Army had advanced 250 miles in 12 days. In the next six days,
32:43it dashed a further 200 miles to the Yugoslav border at Tuanusevarin.
32:52From here, the Soviets launched a giant flanking maneuver against the Axis defenders of Hungary.
33:00By the 24th of September, the southeast salient of Hungary had been removed,
33:04and the Russians had advanced to within 100 miles of Budapest.
33:12From a strategic point of view, the whole of that southeastern area was of great importance,
33:16and its importance was no more dramatically demonstrated than in the summer of 1944,
33:23when Romania defected from the Axis alliance, from the German alliance.
33:27And what happened then was the whole of this, not the southern wing, but the southern front,
33:33began to cave in. In other words, Hungary and Romania were, in many respects, a strategic buttress,
33:41if you like, or a strategic glassy, which were very important to Hitler. And signs of disaffection
33:48after the defeat of and destruction of the Romanian armies in Stalingrad, or the Hungarian armies,
33:53signs of disaffection in southeastern Europe, I think, were more than slightly alarming to Hitler.
33:59I mean, the realization that, if you like, the structure of his alliance, and the nature of
34:06his military organization, that is in strategic terms, was beginning to crumble.
34:12Further south, the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, was liberated with the aid of the Yugoslavian resistance
34:19under Tito. Bulgaria, until now at war only with Britain and the United States, was pressurized
34:28by Germany into declaring war on the USSR as well. Four days after this declaration of the 5th of
34:35September, the Bulgarians surrendered. Further west, Slovakia, formerly a co-belligerent of Germany,
34:47had been in a state of upheaval since the previous year. A general uprising began in the second half
34:54of 1944, but a Russian advance, which began in September, was held up in the Carpathians by stiff
35:02German resistance and failed to reach Slovakia before the middle of October.
35:07By then, the 65,000-strong uprising had been quelled. The, by now, sickeningly familiar results of Nazi
35:20barbarity greeted Russian liberators, and more than 200 mass graves had been filled with slaughtered Slovaks.
35:27In the north, an armistice was concluded with Finland, and the Germans driven back into Norway before climatic
35:39conditions put an end to the fighting there. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were
35:46overrun, and the German army group north isolated in the Kurland Peninsula.
35:55By January 1945, with all German troops finally driven from the holy soil of Mother Russia,
36:02and Stalin in control of the Balkans and the Baltic states, the Red Army prepared for its final drive towards the right.
36:09Between June and November, the German army in the east had suffered over one million casualties,
36:17214,000 killed, and 629,000 missing in action. Another approximately 600,000 men had been seriously wounded.
36:301944 had proved Germany's most disastrous year of the war in the east.
36:35106 divisions had been destroyed, three more than the total number mobilized in September 1939.
36:46German intelligence estimated that in the assault on the Reich, the Red Army would possess a superiority
36:52of 11 to 1 in infantry, 7 to 1 in tanks, and 20 to 1 in guns.
37:00Hitler dismissed such estimates as bluff.
37:05On the 12th of January, the Soviets launched their expected offensive from the Vistula against the German
37:13Central Front. The 70 divisions of Army Group Center and Army Group A were pierced over an area of 200 miles,
37:23and almost 200 divisions of the Red Army poured through the breach.
37:27By the end of the month, Soviet forces reached the lower reaches of the river Oder and were now only 40 miles from Berlin.
37:39The remnants of Army Group Center had been encircled in East Prussia.
37:45Falling back on the ancient city of Königsburg, they pathetically attempted to carry out Hitler's order to defend the region to a man.
37:52The Soviet tide was finally halted on the line of the river Oder and Neisser in February.
38:04But the limited German counterstroke was merely postponing the inevitable.
38:08A fresh Russian offensive in Hungary progressed to the borders of Austria by April the 1st and six days
38:15later, the outskirts of Vienna were coming under Soviet fire.
38:21Hitler was not a German, he was an Austrian.
38:24And this, if one looks at his attitudes and his predilections, his commitments and,
38:29if you like, his emotional drive, it is towards, all right, South Eastern Europe, to Hungary,
38:36Romania and other areas. If you like, it's some kind of reflection, it's almost a shadow of the Habsburg
38:43Empire, which was, of course, crucially, crucially, strategically important. It was politically
38:49important. It was economically important. But also, I think, it had for Hitler this emotional attraction,
38:56this sense that if this entity or these entities broke up, if the Bolshevik hordes broke into this
39:02area, then indeed this was the final cataclysm and this spelt actual doom.
39:08To the north on April the 16th, the final thrust towards Berlin began.
39:13On the first day of the assault alone, 42,000 artillery pieces and mortars fired 2,450 freight car
39:23loads of shells towards the German lines. Zhukov, excited at the prospect of being the first Soviet
39:32commander to reach Berlin, opened the attack, lighting the battlefield with searchlights to blind the enemy.
39:43Having retreated to the capital, Hitler alternated between vitriolic outbursts about betrayal
39:57and demonic delight in the Holocaust which was descending on Germany. In the words of Albert Speer,
40:03he deliberately attempted to make everything perish with him.
40:17Army, state and economic leaders tried to mediate Hitler's destructiveness with varying degrees of success.
40:25By the 22nd of April, with Russian troops now fighting on the streets of the German capital,
40:30the insanity was about to end. But the street warfare in Berlin was bitter. The threat of a Bolshevik invasion
40:42had been hyped by the Nazi propaganda machine as the end of Germany and the German people.
40:48Even in the last chaotic days of the Reich, there was a common joke.
40:53The peace will be terrible.
41:05On the night of the 28th of April, with the Russian forces grinding ever closer to his headquarters,
41:11Hitler married his mistress, Eva Braun.
41:14After the wedding meal, he retired to write his last will and testament.
41:21He defiantly reaffirmed his belief in Lebensraum and indulged in one vitriolic attack on the Jewish race.
41:28On the afternoon of the 30th of April, having made his farewells, he poisoned his wife and his dog and shot himself.
41:41The Hitler's bodies were burned on a petrol-soaked pyre to be joined the following night by Dr. and Frau Goebbels and their six children, which they had poisoned.
41:52On the same evening that Hitler committed suicide,
41:57Sergeants Jagorov and Kantaria planted the victory banner of the Soviet flag on the Reichstag at 22.50.00 hours.
42:06It symbolized the triumph of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany.
42:22But the cost had been horrendous.
42:28By the 8th of May, when the German act of surrender was ratified at Russian headquarters in Berlin,
42:3428 million Russians, one in seven of the population, had died as a direct result of the war.
42:41They had died as soldiers, partisans, prisoners of war, slaves or innocent civilians.
42:49They had met their end through bombs, bullets, hunger, torture, burning and exposure.
42:56Less than five percent of the young people aged between 17 and 21 had survived.
43:01For each of the 1,418 days of the war, almost 19,000 Russian people had perished.
43:10The German invaders destroyed or burned 1,700 towns and more than 70,000 villages and hamlets,
43:21decommissioned 60 percent of the steelworks and 60 percent of the coal mines,
43:27destroyed 65,000 kilometers of railway lines and 4,100 stations,
43:3336,000 communication centers and tens of thousands of state farms.
43:41They looted and demolished 40,000 medical establishments, 84,000 schools and 43,000 public libraries.
43:5125 million people had been left homeless.
43:53But in the end, the Germans had been defeated.
44:03Throughout Western Europe, Germans from the SS, the army and the civilian administration,
44:09were put on trial for offences committed during the Nazi occupation.
44:13However, the number punished and the severity of their sentences
44:18was astonishingly limited given the massive scale of the crimes against humanity which had occurred.
44:23Even though the Russian government had the right to hold its own trials under Article 10 of the Four Power Ordinance,
44:31none took place.
44:34Stalin was far more concerned about taking vengeance on traitors to the Soviet Union.
44:40Some 250,000 prisoners of war, now in Allied hands, were Soviet citizens who had been captured in German uniform.
44:48Under agreements affirmed at the Yalta Conference in 1945,
44:55those accused of treason or desertion were to be returned to their native countries for judgment.
45:02Those who had fought for the Germans were now forcibly repatriated.
45:06Some took the only escape route open to them and committed suicide.
45:17The Soviet authorities regarded these traitors as human scum and treated them with a barbarity which reflected their hatred.
45:25Another two and a quarter million Russian prisoners of war had been captured during the occupation
45:37or had surrendered on the fields of battle.
45:40Tragically, Russian administrators seemed to view their very survival as an act of treachery.
45:47Many who had lived through years of gruesome warfare and the savage inhuman degradation of the German work camps
45:59were now to spend the remainder of their time in the penal colonies of their own motherland.
46:10Inside Russia, the pre-war status quo was rapidly re-established and strengthened.
46:17The cult of Stalin as a personalization of victory ensured that his position as dictator
46:23of an authoritarian, centralized society was unassailable.
46:28The reforms and liberalizations which had occurred during the organized chaos of the war years were gradually retracted.
46:38Religious toleration, a greater modicum of democratic involvement in civilian administration
46:43and the virtues of individual and collective initiative became incompatible
46:48with the need for the entrenched elite to control all aspects of social development.
46:56But none of this should detract from the awesome achievement of the Soviet people.
47:02Through their bravery, their labor and their sacrifice,
47:05they managed to halt and eventually crush a seemingly invincible war machine which,
47:11with chilling efficiency, had conquered almost the entire Western European continent in a matter of months.
47:19They annihilated a German army which had unleashed in its wake a regime of apocalyptic terror.
47:25A tyranny which had turned vast tracts of Europe into a surreal playground of sadists and perverts.
47:33The victory of the Soviet people may not have ensured an era of justice and democratic ideals,
47:40but rid the world of the cancerous malignancy of National Socialism,
47:45which had, for long periods, threatened to engulf it.
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