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00:018th of May 1945. At last the darkness was lifted. The people celebrated victory over Nazi Germany.
00:15From the D-Day landings on the beaches of Normandy in June 1944, it took the Allies almost a full
00:21year to win the war.
00:3011 long months of fierce, often cruel combat to plant the red flag on the roof of the Reichstag.
00:5111 months of hopes and fears.
00:5411 interminable months to defeat a Reich which had promised to endure for a thousand years.
01:02Those 11 months, with the highest death toll of the war, left an eternal scar in hearts and on history.
01:25Devastated, occupied and humiliated after five years of war with Germany, Europe was still awaiting liberation.
01:32In the summer of 1944, the Allies were raising hopes. On the Western Front, the Normandy landings had been a
01:40success.
01:42At the same time, on the Eastern Front, Stalin was launching his huge army.
01:48The Reich was finally caught in a pincer movement.
01:54But nothing was yet won. In September, Hitler took the Allies by surprise with a terrible counterattack in the Ardennes.
02:03It failed, but tens of thousands would pay with their lives.
02:09The Allies were worried, and Hitler swore he would fight to the bitter end.
02:19In the new year of 1945, Hitler launched Operation North Wind.
02:24He used every plane at his disposal in an attempt to annihilate the Allied Air Force that had defeated him
02:31in the Ardennes.
02:32But the Anglo-Americans won this aerial battle.
02:45The Germans were unsettled to learn of this fresh defeat.
02:49But Hitler, with his exultant style, convinced them to dig in.
02:53And he has beaten him.
02:55He has beaten him.
02:56I expect from every German, that he has his duty to fulfill his ultimate goal.
03:00That he will be able to fulfill his duty.
03:02That he will be able to fulfill his duty and to his duty to his duty.
03:06I expect from the residents of the city, that they will be able to destroy the weapons for this fight.
03:29One German woman wrote,
03:31For the last months of the war, I had to fight back my tears
03:34each time I heard Hitler's voice on the radio.
03:38We didn't want to recognise the signs, which were ever clearer,
03:42announcing the impending downfall.
03:44In our hearts, we were afraid of the terrible truth.
03:55To boost the morale of the population,
03:58Goebbels planned the premiere of a feature film, Kohlberg.
04:02It was a film he had commissioned two years earlier.
04:06This mega-production told how the Prussian troops
04:09repulsed the attacks of Napoleon's armies.
04:18After one screening, Goebbels noted,
04:21Kohlberg is finally finished.
04:23The German people are going to need it.
04:30Meanwhile, to the east, the Red Army took back the initiative.
04:34Fresh supplies had reached the troops massed along the Vistula.
04:40But this concentration had not gone unnoticed.
04:44In Germany, General Guderian sounded the alarm.
04:49He implored Hitler to regroup his troops on the eastern front
04:52to counter a Soviet attack.
04:55But Hitler would have none of it, scoffing at the supposed threat.
04:59It's the biggest bluff since Genghis Khan.
05:02Who came up with this idiocy?
05:05Even Himmler refused to admit it.
05:08You see, General, I don't think the Russians are going to attack.
05:12General Guderian tried desperately to convince his superiors.
05:15Hitler repeated,
05:17This intelligence is completely idiotic.
05:19Whoever wrote it should be shut up in a lunatic asylum.
05:25Deaf to all counsel,
05:27it was Hitler who gradually shut himself into his own world.
05:37As Guderian had predicted,
05:39on the 12th of January 1945,
05:42first Konev, then Zhukov,
05:44sent their armies across the Vistula.
05:53Endless columns of T-34 tanks advanced along a front of more than 600 kilometres,
05:58stretching from the shores of the Baltic to the heart of Poland.
06:03It was a devastating attack.
06:05The Russian steamroller was back in motion.
06:11The gunfire was so loud that even Zhukov had to cover his ears.
06:17For Stalin, this offensive was of capital importance.
06:21In a few weeks,
06:21he was due to meet Churchill and Roosevelt in Yalta.
06:24He didn't want Poland to slip out of his hands.
06:42On the 17th of January 1945,
06:45five months after the start of the insurrection,
06:48the Red Army entered the Polish capital.
06:51They found a ghost town.
06:56As Stalin had calculated,
06:58there was no one left to contest the authority of the new occupying force.
07:01The Polish communists had no trouble taking over the reins.
07:09The Soviets paraded in the capital to celebrate a victory that came a bit too late.
07:25The Soviets discovered the Reich's biggest secret.
07:31The Soviets discovered the Reich's biggest secret.
07:32A camp the size of a town surrounded by barbed wire.
07:36Auschwitz-Birkenau.
07:43The camp had been evacuated by the SS a few days beforehand.
07:48All the guards had fled.
07:57The Soviets found 7,000 deportees abandoned there.
08:027,000 survivors for one and a half million people murdered.
08:23Before they left, the Nazis had tried to erase evidence of their crimes.
08:28They blew up the gas chambers and the crematoriums.
08:33But these factories of death also formed the centre of a system of plunder.
08:39The Soviets found hundreds of thousands of pieces of clothing
08:43and hundreds of thousands of shoes.
09:06In a shed, they discovered seven tons of hair.
09:19The deportees were not jubilant enough in front of the cameras.
09:24So the Soviets decided to restage the liberation of the camp a few days later
09:28using somewhat resuscitated deportees and some local inhabitants.
09:40The film would never be shown.
09:43It no doubt revealed too much of the reality.
09:56In January 1945, around 100 camps were still active across the Reich.
10:03Even in their downfall, the destruction of Europe's Jews
10:06remained a primary objective for the Nazis.
10:11For the Allies, the liberation of these killing grounds was not a priority.
10:16Especially since the accounts given by journalists were so staggering
10:20that those in the West refused to believe them.
10:24When the British reporter Alexander Wirth
10:26entered the camps of Majdanek and Treblinka in July 1944,
10:30he immediately wrote an article on how these death machines worked.
10:34The sorting, the gas chambers, the crematoriums,
10:38the bones ground as fertiliser for the adjacent cabbage fields.
10:43But the BBC did not broadcast his report.
10:47And the New York Herald Tribune wrote,
10:49We'd better await confirmation of the horrors we're hearing about from Lublin.
10:53Despite everything we know of the Nazis' savagery,
10:56these doings appear unthinkable.
11:03The camps were not the only theatre of Nazi crimes.
11:06And yet every town liberated by the Red Army hid mass graves.
11:11In the basement of this building,
11:13a laboratory performed pseudo-medical experiments.
11:18To the Nazis, the Jews, the Poles were nothing more than slaves or fertiliser.
11:38In 15 days, Zhukov and his men had covered 400 kilometres.
11:42No-one in the Nazi leadership had anticipated such a rapid advance.
11:48General Guderian wrote,
11:50The Russian tidal wave is taking on utterly disastrous proportions for us.
11:58And yet the Germans continued to fight,
12:02mainly because they were afraid.
12:06The Red Army had shown some particularly barbaric behaviour.
12:10Neighbourhoods and villages were sometimes torched.
12:15Stalin's army plundered shamelessly in this land of plenty.
12:18Radios, saucepans, watches.
12:23One soldier wrote,
12:24The Germans abandon everything and our men have invaded the houses.
12:30Everything is in flames.
12:32Down from pillows and feathers from mattresses are flying everywhere.
12:37Everyone from the foot soldier to the colonel is carrying away his plunder.
12:42This town has been crucified.
12:46The Germans are right to flee from us like the plague.
12:56Anyone suspected of being a Nazi could be shot.
12:59Almost 100,000 Germans were summarily executed.
13:13One Soviet soldier noted,
13:15The German mother should curse the day she gave birth to a son.
13:19The Germans are now going to see the horrors of war.
13:23Let them experience what they wanted to inflict on others.
13:35In eastern Prussia, the Soviets briefly occupied the town of Nemesdorf.
13:39The inhabitants were massacred.
13:42An orgy of violence was unleashed.
13:44Several women were said to have been crucified naked on barn doors.
13:59The Red Army was responding to the magnitude of the crimes committed by the Nazis.
14:04Millions of prisoners of war who died of hunger.
14:07Millions of civilians murdered.
14:08The camps of Madenek, Auschwitz and Treblinka had been exposed.
14:13Having lost 20 million of their own, the Soviets were burning with vengeance.
14:19The Soviet propagandist, Ilya Ehrenberg, had for months been urging in the Red Star newspaper,
14:25If you haven't killed a German each day, your day has been wasted.
14:29Kill the Germans.
14:30That's what your old mother asks of you.
14:32The children are imploring, kill the Germans.
14:35That's what your homeland demands of you.
14:38The divisions and armies are not advancing alone on Berlin.
14:42With them, there are the trenches, the mass graves,
14:45the ravines filled with the bodies of the innocent.
14:48The cabbage fields of Madenek and the trees of Videpsk,
14:51where the Germans hanged so many unfortunates.
14:54The boots, the little shoes and slippers of the little children murdered in Madenek,
14:59walk alongside them to Berlin.
15:04The Red Army became experts in nurturing hatred.
15:08And in its path, the enemy's womenfolk were particularly targeted.
15:13Rape became a weapon of war.
15:16One young Soviet officer recalled,
15:18women, mothers and their children were lying on both sides of the road,
15:22and before each of them was a noisy gaggle of men, their trousers down.
15:28And our men shot those women who tried to save their children.
15:33Smiling officers stood by, making sure each soldier, with no exceptions, took part.
15:50Stalin, in person, excused these crimes.
15:53He declared,
15:54imagine a man who fought from Stalingrad to Belgrade,
15:57who has seen his homeland devastated over thousands of kilometres.
16:02After all, what's the harm if he has a bit of fun with some women,
16:05after all the horrors he has suffered?
16:10Wassily Grossman saw the terror in the eyes of the women and young girls.
16:15Horrible things happened to the German women.
16:19Across the whole German territory, close to two million women are thought to have been raped,
16:24including wives and daughters of communists.
16:33After hesitating for a time, the Nazi regime publicized these exactions.
16:40Laufend rollt der Nachschub in die Kampfabschnitte der Ostfront,
16:44wo den deutschen Soldaten ein Gegner anrennt,
16:47der in den deutschen Städten und Dörfern mit einer Bestialität haust,
16:50die in der Geschichte der Menschheit kaum ein Beispiel findet.
16:57Und wie haben sich die Soldaten und Offiziere nun in ihrem Ort den Frauen gegenüber verhalten?
17:02Man kann hier gar nicht von Soldaten und Offizieren in diesem Sinne sprechen,
17:06man kann hier nur sprechen von bestialischen Horden.
17:08Denn die haben sich alle gleichmäßig benommen,
17:11alle täglich betrunken.
17:13Sie haben also Frauen, alle Frauen vergewaltigt,
17:16von Jugendlichen angefangen von 13 Jahren bis zu Frauen von 68 Jahren.
17:20Es ist in meiner Gegenwart eine 68-jährige Frau vergewaltigt worden in allergemeinster Weise.
17:24Und diese Volksgenossinnen hier auch, ja?
17:26Ja, sogar meine Mutter von 60 Jahren haben sie nicht geschont,
17:28sondern haben sie auch bestialisch vergewaltigt.
17:32Und Sie selbst auch hier?
17:33Ja. Sogar meine Schwester und meine Mutter
17:35in bestialischer und tierischer Weise haben sie misshandelt.
17:40Sie sind in der Nähe von 60 Jahren.
18:08deep in the snow. Gabi is not alone there. Thousands of mothers were walking with their
18:14children and like me, they buried their dead in the snow. To escape, thousands of terrified
18:21men and women swamped the stations and ports. In January 1945, nearly 7,000 of them packed
18:29onto the Willem Gyuslov. It was sunk by a Soviet submarine. More than 5,000 people disappeared
18:36beneath the waves, three times more than were lost on the Titanic. On the 29th of January
18:451945, 4 million Germans, 8.5 million, according to some estimates, were displaced. At the end
18:52of January, between 40,000 and 50,000 people were arriving every day in Berlin. While refugees
18:59clogged the roads of Germany, the Soviet troops who started out from the Vistula stopped about
19:0480 kilometres from Berlin on the banks of the Oder. Zhukov's offensive had been a success.
19:13In total, the Germans had lost 450,000 men. Having conquered most of Poland and imposed
19:22his domination on the Balkans, Stalin went into the Yalta Conference in a position of strength.
19:29Neither President Roosevelt, who was weakened by sickness, nor the British Prime Minister,
19:34Winston Churchill, whose country was drained after five years of war, could stand up to him.
19:40The big three agreed to divide Germany into four occupied zones. Churchill obtained a zone
19:46for France. This was not out of the goodness of his heart. Roosevelt had said that US troops
19:51would pull out of Europe as soon as possible, and Churchill didn't want to find himself alone
19:56in the cage with the Soviet bear. Poland was handed to the Communists, although Stalin had vaguely
20:03promised to organise free elections.
20:12To the west, there was one last hurdle to cross, the last natural barrier in Germany, the Rhine.
20:20All the bridges had been dynamited by the Germans. General Montgomery was still hoping to be first to cross the
20:27river.
20:28But the Americans beat him to it. An advanced unit of the first US army found a bridge still standing
20:35at
20:35Remergen, near Bonn. The Germans had rigged it with explosives, but had not yet detonated them.
20:46The Americans immediately established a bridge head on the eastern bank of the river.
20:54Hitler was furious and ordered the engineers, whose charges had not exploded, to be shot.
21:03Meanwhile, Patton had sent his troops across further south, at Oppenheim, without notifying his superiors.
21:09He was already spreading panic in German territory.
21:16Monty had dreamed of being first into Germany. In fact, he was last. But it was he who led the
21:22biggest
21:22offensive. He was in command of one and a quarter million soldiers.
21:28This time, the lessons of Arnhem had been learned. The drop zones for the parachutists were spot on.
21:35British troops pushed deep into Germany and captured increasingly younger soldiers.
21:46The French also wanted to take part in the action.
21:50De Gaulle knew that France's place in the victor's camp depended on its participation in the Allied war effort.
21:56He summoned Delattre, chief of the first army.
22:00You have to cross the Rhine, even if the Americans don't grant you passage and you have to go by
22:05boat.
22:05It's a matter of the highest national importance.
22:09Further south, the French forces under General Delattre also advanced.
22:14They fought on German soil, alongside the Americans.
22:22For the Allies, there was now a gaping breach. They could finally invade the Reich.
22:27This was good news for them, but not for Stalin.
22:31This was a good news for them.
22:32As soon as he heard, he ordered Zukov to take Berlin as soon as possible,
22:35to avoid the Americans beating him to it.
22:47Once the Rhine had been crossed, German resistance foundered.
22:51Hitler had chosen to concentrate his forces to the east.
22:55He had exhausted his already diminished reserves in the costly battle of the Ardennes.
23:00Now some towns, rather than fighting to the bitter end, were flying the white flag.
23:05The Anglo-Americans were making up ground.
23:10Churchill continually spurred on the Americans.
23:12We have to push on and shake the Russians' hands as far to the east as possible, he urged.
23:20But Berlin was in the future Soviet occupation zone defined at Yalta.
23:25Even if the Americans did take the city, they would have had to later withdraw.
23:30American public opinion would not accept the 100,000 dead that this might have cost,
23:35simply as a matter of prestige.
23:38Such humanitarian issues never hindered Stalin.
23:45So Eisenhower decided not to launch an assault on Berlin.
23:49His troops could even afford a break for some home-style R&R.
24:05Marlon Dietrich paid them a little visit.
24:08Hello, Boris.
24:10I want to say that sharing this entertainment with you today is to me more important than doing the entertaining.
24:16I'm certain that we can look forward to a speedy victory.
24:19Goodbye. Good luck. Godspeed.
24:26I'm certain that we can do it.
24:26I'm certain that we can do it.
24:27But Ike's armies did not down their weapons for long.
24:30To defeat Nazi Germany swiftly, without too heavy losses in their ranks,
24:33the Americans and British pursued a merciless bombing campaign.
24:41They relentlessly pounded German industrial areas and annihilated cities packed with civilians.
24:53Their aim was to smash the Reich's economic potential and to break the morale of the population,
24:58thereby undermining the regime.
25:02Between January and April 1945, 471,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Germany.
25:10Cologne, Hamburg and Berlin were all hit.
25:19Now that we've been the first ones to Berlin, how would you like to go back again?
25:30In mid-February, Churchill wanted to bombard the city of Dresden as a show of strength to the Soviets,
25:36who had been less than dazzled by Montgomery's performance.
25:39The city was consumed in a firestorm.
25:52In under 24 hours, more than 25,000 inhabitants perished.
26:05A city with no war-related industry and of no strategic importance,
26:11nothing justified the Allies' brutal attack.
26:16But destroying Dresden also meant driving up the number of refugees
26:20and perturbing the movements of the Wehrmacht.
26:27The Allied leaders may have felt some regret over Dresden, but not for long,
26:32because Hitler's obstinacy drove them to maintain the bombing campaign,
26:36whatever the cost for the civilian population.
26:49The war was no longer in any doubt.
26:56A German officer noted in his diary,
26:59We are reaching the end.
27:01Do our leaders have any exit strategy in mind?
27:04The death of our soldiers, the destruction of our towns and villages,
27:08is there any sense to this now?
27:11Another wrote,
27:12Is there no-one there to overpower the madmen and call for an end to this?
27:18Are they still generals? No.
27:20They are trash, wet rags, they are cowards.
27:26But these words of revolt remained confined to private diaries.
27:31After writing these lines, those young soldiers returned to the combat.
27:35And yet, German society could not manage to rise up.
27:40And as a result, it continued its plunge to new depths.
27:44The regime launched a new phase, radicalisation against the Germans themselves.
27:51Whoever was not prepared to fight would face execution.
27:58In Konigsberg, 80 deserters were executed.
28:05Often, victims' bodies were left at the roadside with a sign.
28:10I'm a deserter, and I refused to protect German women and children.
28:20Villages displaying the white flag were threatened with destruction.
28:26But this radicalisation was even more harsh on deportees.
28:31The progression of the Anglo-American armies to the west and the Soviets to the east,
28:36led Himmler to close the camps, sending the deportees on abominable death marches.
28:42The detainees were on the road, but not getting anywhere.
28:47The Nazis no longer had time to gas people, so they exterminated through cold and hunger.
28:53Those who could not keep up the pace of the march got a bullet to the head.
28:58When the Allies liberated the camps, they found most of them almost entirely empty.
29:06The Germans had only left certain deportees considered too weak to be evacuated.
29:19In April 1945, the British entered Bergen-Belsen.
29:25They found 30,000 prisoners hovering between life and death.
29:32Some 10,000 bodies lay around, rotting.
29:39It was an apocalyptic vision for the Liberators.
29:46British troops had to use bulldozers to shift the thousands of bodies to avoid epidemics.
29:58The same month, the Americans entered the Order of Concentration camp,
30:03an offshoot of Buchenwald.
30:08Eisenhower was overwhelmed.
30:10I've never had such a shock in my entire life, he confessed.
30:23It was a young soldier.
30:23Pattern was physically sick near a shed.
30:34Eisenhower ordered the population of the next door town to visit the camp.
30:41In front of a crematorium oven, where they burned 200 bodies per day, women fainted.
30:51Nonetheless, the officers insisted that the Germans confront the horrors
30:56which they had allowed to happen.
31:20On a table stood lampshades made of human skin.
31:26There were tattooed skins that a camp official had collected and shrunken heads.
31:33Trophies of Nazi barbarity.
31:41Discovering these horrors, one journalist wrote,
31:44the gates of hell had opened.
31:51Other camps were liberated,
31:53and more visits were imposed on local populations.
32:01Eisenhower declared,
32:03People tell us that the American soldier doesn't know why he's fighting.
32:07Now, at least, he knows against who he is fighting.
32:13The discovery of the hell of the concentration camps was a shock for the whole world.
32:24For ten months, the Reich had been shrinking.
32:28In April, the final act began.
32:31Berlin, the last citadel, was preparing for the ultimate battle.
32:43On the 12th of April, 1945, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra performed Wagner's Gotterdammerung.
32:57To make up for the lack of personnel, an army of children, women and the elderly,
33:03marshalled by several thousand SS fanatics, had to defend the capital.
33:08They set up obstacles.
33:13Kerbals did a good job,
33:14and all those defending the city had a smile in these propaganda images.
33:23They set up for years.
33:47To set ambushes, every German was equipped with a rifle or a Panzerfaust, an anti-tank weapon.
33:56The factories had churned out more than three million of them in recent months.
34:02In the streets of Berlin, people were given fast-track training.
34:06Many.
34:07Oh.
34:08Oh.
34:10Oh.
34:11Oh.
34:14Oh.
34:49Many Germans still had faith in the Reich.
35:14One young soldier wrote to his parents,
35:17I simply can't believe that the Führer would sacrifice us dumbly.
35:21No one can strip me of my faith in him.
35:23He is everything to me.
35:32Some officers confiscated white handkerchiefs to stop the defenders using them to surrender.
35:43Nazi dignitaries still believed, especially since on the same day in the United States,
35:48on the 12th of April, 1945, President Roosevelt died.
35:52Hitler rejoiced.
35:54The great miracle, the one I always predicted has happened.
35:57The war is not lost.
36:01Hitler was blinded by his own illusions, but the hope did not last long,
36:07because the Red Army was closing in on the capital.
36:16Around a model of Berlin, Soviet generals discussed the plan of attack.
36:25Supplies from the east had finally arrived on the banks of the Oda.
36:30Tanks, shells, planes, 30,000 cannons.
36:36On the 16th of April, the biggest artillery barrage of the war commenced.
36:48One million, two hundred and thirty-six thousand shells were fired.
36:58One hundred thousand tons of steel rained down on the Germans.
37:10Two million men moved on Berlin.
37:17Stalin encouraged rivalry between his generals.
37:20Whoever breaks through first can take Berlin, he declared.
37:25Zhukov made a direct thrust, but came up against stiff resistance.
37:30Konev went round the city to the south.
37:42The one hundred and ninety-six Soviet divisions attacked from every side.
37:52The Russians had one objective, the chancellery under which Hitler's bunker was located.
38:09Zhukov moved forward, but for every German killed, three Russians fell.
38:15Stalin wanted to see Berlin totally encircled to avoid the Anglo-Americans profiting from a sudden German collapse
38:22and entering the capital first.
38:27In Berlin, the ground itself shook.
38:35Each crossroads was defended, sometimes by young children.
38:42Hitler sheltered in his bunker.
38:46In these last pictures of the dictator, filmed one month earlier,
38:50the censor cut a piece of film which has never been shown.
38:57In it, one can see the Fuhrer trembling, incapable of controlling himself.
39:05Hitler is no more than a shadow.
39:07And yet, at no point, was there any question of surrender.
39:12Goebbels blustered and made out all was well.
39:15The situation is turning to our advantage.
39:18The Americans are marching on Berlin.
39:20The big turnaround is underway.
39:22We have to hold the city, at any cost.
39:25Another lie from the Minister of Propaganda, but then, that was his job, after all.
39:30And yet, 110 kilometres away, on the 25th of April, in Togo,
39:35the long-awaited day finally came.
39:38The Reich was cut in two.
39:40The Soviet and American armies met up.
39:46While, for the leadership, this was a time to be wary,
39:49for the ordinary soldier, it was a time of celebration.
39:55That said, certain Soviet soldiers avoided excessive fraternisation
39:59that might have sent them to the Gulag.
40:12In Berlin, two million civilians were caught in the tram.
40:17It was now a matter of survival.
40:21Here and there, a horse was cut up.
40:29However mighty the Soviet artillery power had been,
40:32even in a mechanised war, it is the infantry who have to finish the job.
40:41Street by street, cellar by cellar.
40:52In these last days, the motivation of the Germans changed.
40:56They were no longer fighting for their Great Reich,
40:59for the Führer, or for National Socialism, but to save their skins.
41:08The Russians were closing in on the bunker
41:10where Hitler was still positioning imaginary armies.
41:13The elites had fled the city.
41:16When Goebbels realised all was lost, he wondered,
41:19what's to be done with a people whose men don't even fight
41:22when their women are being raped?
41:24All the plans, all the ideas of National Socialism
41:27are too elevated, too noble for such a people.
41:30These folk deserve the fate they are about to meet.
41:36At the same time, in Italy, on the 28th of April,
41:40Mussolini was captured while trying to escape.
41:43He was shot.
41:46His body and that of his mistress were abused by the crowd.
41:55When Hitler learned of the death of Il Duce, he concluded,
41:59dead or alive, I don't want to fall into the hands of the enemy.
42:03After my death, my body is to be burned
42:05and no-one will be able to find it.
42:08On the 30th of April, deep in his bunker,
42:11Hitler committed suicide, along with his wife, Eva Braun.
42:15His body was then burned by his chauffeur,
42:18using 200 litres of gas.
42:21For 12 years, the dictator had ruled over Germany.
42:25He had dreamed of a thousand-year Reich.
42:28This mirage disappeared in the ruins of his capital.
42:33One last lie.
42:35The radio claimed that Hitler had died,
42:38leading the heroic defenders of Berlin.
42:50The same day, Zhukov's troops broke through.
42:53His soldiers seized the Reichstag.
43:01Vasily Grossman wrote,
43:03I wanted to shout, to call to all our brother fighters
43:07who lay in Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian and Polish soil,
43:11who were sleeping in the eternal slumber on the field of honour.
43:14Comrades, can you hear us?
43:15We made it!
43:26Two days later, the Russians reconstructed the scene.
43:30A photo was taken.
43:35But this historic picture had to be retouched,
43:38because one detail had been overlooked.
43:40One of the soldiers was wearing several watches on his wrists.
43:50But where was Hitler?
43:52This question haunted the Russians.
43:54Soviet soldiers found a body which bore a strong resemblance.
43:58But it turned out they were photographing themselves
44:00next to a doppelganger.
44:04A team of specialists was sent by Stalin to investigate.
44:09They found the charred bodies of Goebbels and his wife,
44:13alongside were the lifeless bodies of their six children.
44:20A few months earlier, they were still being used for party propaganda.
44:25Their parents had murdered them before committing suicide.
44:36Hitler's remains were finally discovered in a bomb crater.
44:41When he learned of the Führer's demise, Stalin exclaimed,
44:45that's the end of the Führer's death.
44:47That's the end of that bastard.
44:47A shame we didn't take him alive.
44:51The remains were secretly shipped to Russia.
44:55Even Zhukov, who savoured his victory and paid a visit to the beast's lair,
44:59knew nothing of this epilogue.
45:09With Hitler dead, capitulation became possible for his successors.
45:15On the 7th of May, in a modest school in Reims,
45:19at the headquarters of Allied forces,
45:21the German representatives accepted the terms of an unconditional surrender.
45:36After the signing, General Jodl had the temerity to stand up and declare,
45:41the German army is now in the hands of the Allies.
45:43I hope that the victor will treat us with generosity.
45:53With the pens used for the signatures, Ike made the V for victory.
46:06In January of 1940,
46:09the late President Roosevelt, Premier Churchill, met in Casablanca.
46:14There they pronounced the formula of unconditional surrender
46:18for the Axis power.
46:19In Europe, that formula has now been fulfilled.
46:24But these images were not yet shown,
46:27because Stalin was not satisfied with this capitulation.
46:31The strong man of the Kremlin bemoaned,
46:34it was the Soviet people who bore on their shoulders
46:36most of the weight of the war.
46:38Stalin demanded that a second surrender be signed
46:41the following day in Berlin.
46:43On the 8th of May,
46:45the American, French, German and British delegations
46:48crossed a shattered city.
46:55In Zhukov's headquarters on the edge of Berlin,
46:57they awaited the arrival of Field Marshal Keitel.
47:02When he entered, no-one replied to his salute.
47:12The various delegations signed all five acts of surrender.
47:17General de Lattre signed for France.
47:19It was 11pm on the 8th of May,
47:21but it was already 1am in Moscow.
47:24The Soviets noted the date as the 9th of May.
47:37But the surrender did not bring an end to the tragedy.
47:40The halt in hostilities was followed by a wave of suicides.
47:44Besides the high command like Himmler,
47:47many thousands of anonymous Germans killed themselves,
47:50sometimes with their families, for fear of the Soviets,
47:52or else to follow Hitler to the afterlife.
48:05In 1935, Hitler had promised the Germans,
48:08give me ten years and you won't recognise Germany.
48:13He kept his word.
48:30It's over. It's over.
48:32That was the cry that could be heard in towns around the world
48:35as they celebrated victory.
48:37The people hailed the liberation they had waited so long for.
48:45But the joy was also tinged with gravity.
48:49The dark shadow of Nazism would not be erased in a day.
48:54The suffering endured had left an indelible scar on memories.
49:00Nazism had plumbed the depths of horror.
49:04The extermination of the Jews, the massacres of civilians,
49:08the torture of resistance members would forever haunt the conscience of humanity.
49:17Yet, a continent had to get back on its feet.
49:20The ruined towns had to be rebuilt.
49:23The million of displaced persons had to return to home.
49:26These were the huge challenges of the post-war period.
49:34From this chaos caused by the Nazi order,
49:37a new era would nonetheless emerge.
49:40The
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