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21:05to clear before they pushed on.
21:10Germany's situation was disastrous.
21:13Her forces were hugely outnumbered, they lacked air support, and they were desperately short
21:19of fuel.
21:23Nevertheless Hitler, against the advice of his senior commanders, decided to launch
21:27a huge counter-attack.
21:30It was a desperate gamble, but if it paid off, it might just change Germany's fortunes.
21:40His plan was to burst through the Allied lines in the Ardennes hills and head for Antwerp.
21:47If he could retake the port, the Allied supply lines would be cut once again.
21:58Some 200,000 German troops and 950 tanks and tank destroyers were assembled in total radio
22:06silence.
22:10Hitler was calling on what was, in effect, his last remaining strategic reserve of troops.
22:20The Allies missed the build-up completely.
22:29As a result, the lines facing the German positions were only lightly manned.
22:39on December the 16th, 1944, the Germans opened fire.
22:48Soon afterwards German tanks and infantry crossed the US lines.
23:06In fact, during the first day, General Omar Bradley, commander of US 12th Army Group, even refused
23:21to believe a major German assault was underway.
23:25American confusion was made worse when the Germans sent in English-speaking special forces,
23:30in captured US uniforms and jeeps to carry out sabotage behind the US lines.
23:40American troops became so nervous that even General Bradley was stopped and asked to produce
23:45his identity papers to prove that he was not a German.
24:00But despite this, the US forces regrouped.
24:07Any Germans captured wearing US uniforms were summarily shot as spies.
24:21the Americans began to fight back.
24:34But the German advance had created a huge bulge in the Allied lines.
24:42The attack would become known as the Battle of the Bulge.
24:59It was now on the northern flank of this bulge that the Germans committed one of the worst
25:04atrocities of the war in Northwest Europe.
25:12SS Colonel Joachim Piper captured some 150 members of a US artillery observation battalion
25:19near the village of Malmedy.
25:27When, later, US forces retook the village, they found 85 bodies.
25:34Their comrades had been shot by their SS guards.
25:40It was a sign of how desperate the fight had become.
25:44As the German advance near Malmedy continued, US combat engineers blew up bridges to slow it down.
26:02The Germans were forced to use precious supplies of fuel to look for alternative crossings.
26:07Meanwhile, on the southern flank of the bulge, US troops blocked road junctions to slow the German tanks.
26:26One of the most important crossroads was at the small Belgian town of Bastogne.
26:37Here, the Allies sent in reinforcements.
26:55The Germans were forced to bypass it, but the US forces holding Bastogne blocked their supply lines.
27:07Two days later, however, the Germans were approaching the town of Dinan, some 30 miles further west.
27:22Despite the setbacks, Hitler's gamble appeared to be paying off.
27:27The German bulge was moving forward.
27:29But their supply lines were now dangerously overextended, and they were running desperately low on fuel.
27:44The advance slowed.
27:46For almost a week in the biting cold, the two sides remained dead.
28:02Neither could gain the upper hand.
28:04Then, on New Year's Day 1945, the Luftwaffe launched a do-or-die assault on Allied bases.
28:25Over 300 Allied planes were destroyed.
28:30But the Luftwaffe lost several hundred too, far more than it could replace.
28:41As the weather now improved, the Allies took advantage of their overwhelming air power.
28:58U.S. troops, temporarily under Montgomery's command, pushed in from the north.
29:06U.S. General George Patton's forces squeezed from the south.
29:13Allied air power pummeled the German lines.
29:18The German bulge was slowly pushed back.
29:37By early February 1945, Hitler's gamble had failed.
29:49The Germans had retreated to their original positions.
29:52The attack had taken a heavy toll on their already depleted resources.
30:10Over 120,000 men were killed, wounded or taken prisoner.
30:15Meanwhile, on the other side of Europe, Stalin now began to move on Germany's eastern border.
30:35In doing so, he would begin to redraw the political map of Europe.
30:39During the summer and autumn of 1944, as the Allies overran France and Belgium,
31:00in the east, the core of Stalin's Red Army was camped outside the Polish capital of Warsaw.
31:11For the Russian leader, the aim of the war had by now changed.
31:17It was no longer a matter of survival, or even of pushing the enemy out of the Soviet Union.
31:27It had become a political affair.
31:32Top of Stalin's agenda was building a buffer zone between the Soviet Union and Germany.
31:38One of the keys to this was Poland.
31:47The Russians and Poles had long hated each other.
31:54Soviet armies had collaborated with the Germans in carving up Poland in 1939.
32:08Then, in April 1943, German soldiers found the bodies of more than 4,000 Polish army officers
32:16in the Katyn woods near Smolensk in the Soviet Union.
32:25They had been murdered by the Russians.
32:28Stalin denied any involvement and blamed the Germans, but the Poles never believed him.
32:45Then, in the summer of 1944, the Polish home army in Warsaw rose up against its German occupiers.
32:52It was now that hostility between the two countries came to a head.
33:03The home army had been spurred on by a broadcast from Moscow on July the 29th,
33:09urging a popular uprising.
33:15In the first few days of the rising, it seized some two-thirds of the city.
33:19It had about 40,000 men and women, armed mainly with captured German weapons.
33:32There were also more than 200,000 unarmed helpers.
33:36But they lacked any weapons capable of repelling the German heavy armour.
33:55The Poles looked to the Soviet army, still camped, just to the south, for help.
34:00But Stalin ordered it to do nothing, and dismissed the home army's leadership as power-seeking criminals.
34:09German reinforcements poured into Warsaw, under the command of SS-General Erich von dem Bach Zalewski.
34:25He was an expert in crushing and slaughtering partisan groups.
34:30The situation in the city became desperate.
34:41Savage house-to-house fighting raged for two months.
34:44The home army was forced back into an ever smaller area.
34:53The German advance was accompanied by rape and murder.
34:58Wounded prisoners were burned alive.
34:59Women and children were used as human shields.
35:01The Polish forces were forced back into an ever smaller area.
35:03The German advance was accompanied by rape and murder.
35:08Wounded prisoners were burned alive.
35:13Women and children were used as human shields.
35:20Women and children were used as human shields.
35:25The Polish forces were forced back into the cellars and sewers.
35:30But still, the Red Army sat back.
35:41Stalin's reasoning was simple.
35:43He saw the Polish home army as pro-Western and anti-communist.
35:48He reasoned that if it and its supporters were destroyed, it would clear the way for the Polish communists to take power.
36:01By October 2nd, the Germans had done just what Stalin had hoped.
36:19The home army and its sympathisers were crushed.
36:24Over 15,000 army members and 200,000 civilians died.
36:31Some 15,000 people surrendered.
36:41Hitler now set about the complete destruction of the city.
37:01Warsaw was raised to the ground.
37:13The remnants of the home army went underground.
37:24Later, when the Red Army finally moved into Warsaw, they would be hunted down by Soviet secret police.
37:30Stalin's scheming had worked.
37:35Pro-Western Polish forces had been smashed, and a country would, after the war, become a key buffer state between Russia and the West.
37:44In London, the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was appalled by Stalin's conduct.
37:55But he was also a pragmatist.
37:57In October 1944, Churchill went to Moscow.
38:07It was several months after the crushing of the Warsaw Uprising.
38:10There, he agreed with Stalin on a division of the European spoils.
38:17According to a document Churchill scribbled down, the Soviets would have 90% of the influence in Romania, and the British 90% in Greece.
38:26In Bulgaria, the Soviets would have 75% influence, and 50% in Yugoslavia and Hungary.
38:39The future of Poland was left vague, probably deliberately.
38:47Churchill described it as the naughty document.
38:51The wording was confusing, and nobody was sure quite what it meant, but Stalin happily agreed to it.
38:58He was probably aware that the winner would take all, and he intended to be the winner in most of Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
39:11Churchill never told the Americans about the document.
39:14He knew that they would be horrified by such old-fashioned imperialism between the European powers.
39:20But the U.S. found out soon enough.
39:33In late 1944, the Germans pulled out of Greece.
39:41The country descended into a civil war between the monarchists and the communists.
39:50Churchill wanted his 90% influence, and sent in British troops to support the pro-Western monarchists.
40:02Stalin, mindful of the naughty document, did not object.
40:12But the Americans were outraged at what they saw as such blatant meddling in another country's affairs.
40:20But by the end of 1944, there was a more pressing issue.
40:27Western and Soviet forces were about the same distance away from Berlin.
40:34The race was on to be the first to get there.
40:40But even before it began, new and shocking news came out of the East.
40:45On July the 23rd, 1944, as Soviet forces advanced through Eastern Poland, they overran a small village called Majdanek.
41:06Nearby, they found a prison compound.
41:08They quickly realized it was no ordinary camp.
41:22They found specially built gas chambers and incinerators.
41:26Near them were piles of corpses.
41:29It was a camp designed for the mass murder of Jews.
41:35It was a camp designed for the mass murder of Jews.
41:50Adolf Hitler had always been anti-Semitic.
41:52When, in the 1930s, he had come to power, many German Jews had been forced to flee.
42:11Those who couldn't were persecuted and deprived of their rights.
42:15Then, in the summer of 1939, the Germans invaded Poland.
42:35Suddenly, the German Reich found itself ruling two million more Jews.
42:39So the Nazis sent in special SS squads, the Einsatzgruppen, whose job was to round them up.
42:59Many Jews were immediately shot.
43:00The remainder were herded into walled ghettos in the major cities, while the Germans worked out how to solve what they called the Jewish problem.
43:21Life in the ghettos was harsh.
43:23People were systematically starved and beaten.
43:30Two years later, the German army entered the Soviet Union.
43:46Millions more Jews suddenly found themselves under Nazi rule.
43:51Here, the Einsatzgruppen were helped by the local population, which was often anti-Semitic and only too willing to carry out pogroms of its own.
44:13Hundreds of thousands of Jews were rounded up and exterminated.
44:16The most notorious pogrom occurred at Babi Yar in Kiev.
44:2933,000 Jews were shot in cold blood.
44:31But machine gunning was an expensive way of dealing with the Jewish problem.
44:44Nor was it popular with many German soldiers.
44:46So at a conference in January 1942, the SS leadership cast round for more efficient solutions.
45:00First, it tried using carbon monoxide fuels.
45:05First, it tried using carbon monoxide fuels.
45:13But that didn't kill enough people quickly enough.
45:16The conference eventually agreed to set up a series of camps where Europe's Jewish population would be systematically exterminated.
45:29There would be six of these death camps, all in Poland.
45:33They were at Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, Belzec and Birkenau.
45:42As the camps were being built, the Jewish ghettos were liquidated.
45:54One notorious example was in Warsaw.
45:59Here, as the Germans moved into the ghetto to clear it out, the inhabitants fought back.
46:05They held out for nearly a month.
46:187,000 died in the fighting before they were overwhelmed.
46:27Those who had survived it were rounded up and sent to Treblinka.
46:35Here they entered what was rapidly becoming a highly organised system of slave labour and extermination.
46:48New inhabitants arrived at the camps in cattle trucks from all over Europe.
46:55At places like Birkenau, the extermination facilities were next to work camps like Auschwitz.
47:01At facilities like this, the new arrivals were sorted.
47:07Able-bodied men and a few women went to the work camp to be worked to death as slaves.
47:15Children, the old and most of the women went straight to the gas chambers.
47:22They were stripped and their heads shaved.
47:39Next, they were herded, up to 2,000 at a time, into sealed rooms disguised as showers.
47:45SS officers then poured Zyklon B crystals through a trap in the roof to form a deadly gas.
47:58It was far more effective than carbon monoxide.
48:04At Auschwitz Birkenau, the gas chambers could kill over 10,000 people a day.
48:09Small groups of prisoners known as Sonderkommandos were used to clear the bodies out of the chambers.
48:24Some bodies were burnt in pits, some in crematoria.
48:29The camps could also be profitable businesses.
48:38Major German companies built factories near them and paid the SS, which administered the camps, to hire Jews as slaves.
48:46The belongings and hair of those gassed were sold off.
48:57Their gold teeth melted down and hoarded.
49:09For most Jews, resistance was almost impossible.
49:12At Treblinka, Sobibor and Birkenau, however, the Sonderkommandos mounted brief and doomed rebellions.
49:31But in July 1944, most of this was still unknown.
49:35As news began to seep out of the Russian find at Majdanek, most people simply found it unbelievable.
49:45Yet today, we know that people in the West, like Churchill, almost certainly knew more than they admitted.
49:52During 1943 and 1944, several reports reached London about what was going on inside the extermination camps.
50:02But nothing was done.
50:10Today, it is estimated some six million Jews were exterminated in Hitler's camps.
50:19What the Allies had never understood, until the war was over,
50:24was the vast scale of the Nazi extermination campaign.
50:27Nor did they grasp the sheer quantity of resources the Germans were prepared to devote to it,
50:37when Germany was facing its final days.
50:39the Allies
50:40were in the war from the War of 19
50:41in the war of 20 15.
50:42The Allies
50:43in the war where they were routed in the war of 1916.
50:44At their main jump,
50:46The Allies became a very used for the Nazis.
50:49The Allieså°† wasclothed in avania which was made in the war of 1916 in 1560,
50:52the time of the Allies.
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