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FULL MOVIES ENGLISH SUB (2026) - FULL | Reelshort
#drama #cdrama #romantic #love #movie #shortdrama #showhots #2026
FULL MOVIES ENGLISH SUB (2026) - FULL | Reelshort
#drama #cdrama #romantic #love #movie #shortdrama #showhots #2026
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00:041944. In Europe, the armies of the Grand Alliance finally had Germany within their grasp.
00:11Britain and the Dominions, American, French and Dutch, all have been tearing the guts out
00:16of the enemy's war potential in the West. But for Hitler, it wasn't over yet.
00:23He prepared one last roll of the dice, hoping to turn defeat into victory.
00:30At stake was the future of Germany and all of Europe.
00:41World War II was a conflict of immeasurable scale. A total war, laying waste to entire nations
00:49and changing the world forever. From this devastation, new powers would emerge.
00:57Allies would become enemies. And an iron curtain would fall across Europe.
01:04A fragile peace would be threatened by a new kind of conflict.
01:08As two major superpowers vied for supremacy. Once again, the world stood on the brink.
01:18How did this come to pass? How did the Cold War emerge?
01:33By December 1944, six months on from D-Day, the Western Allies had established a firm foothold
01:41in Western Europe.
01:43I think in 1944 that the war develops very much the way Roosevelt hopes it's going to develop.
01:49Germany is basically caught in a vice.
01:53With Stalin's forces surging through Eastern Europe, the Western and Soviet armies were now
01:59pushing the Germans back on two fronts.
02:10A lack of trust had emerged even during the course of the war because, as Stalin put it, the United
02:18States
02:18and its allies for so long refused to open up a second front. There was this argument for a long,
02:25long time.
02:26Why didn't you put more forces into the Soviet Far East? Why didn't you help us more in our fight
02:32against the fascists?
02:38By the middle of December, Dwight D. Eisenhower had 48 divisions spread along Germany's Western Front.
02:47In the previous few months, the Allied push towards Germany had been increasingly arduous.
02:54But their gains were significant.
02:58For the German high command, the situation was now desperate.
03:03As a bitter cold and heavy snow set in, Hitler prepared a secret and daring offensive.
03:13Hitler was increasingly paranoid.
03:15He believed he just needed a single victory on the Eastern Front, a single victory on the Western Front,
03:20and that would turn the tails.
03:22He was almost intoxicated by the Nazi blitzkrieg of 1940-41, desperate to replicate those sorts of successes.
03:31The nature of warfare had changed by that point.
03:34Certainly the Allies had learned the business of warfare. In fact, they'd turned blitzkrieg on Nazi Germany.
03:41Hitler's attempt to turn the tide, his last roll of the dice, would be codenamed Operation Watch on the Rhine.
03:50A surprise attack aimed at the weakest point in the Allied front.
03:55Hitler envisaged a German breakthrough to capture the Channel ports and sever Allied supply lines.
04:02The idea on the part of the German General Staff was to try to split the Allied armies where they
04:08were,
04:09and to make their way even to Antwerp, which was the source of much of the materiel that the Allies
04:16were using against the Germans.
04:21To catch the Allies off guard, the Germans planned to attack through the heavily wooded, difficult terrain of the Ardennes
04:28forest.
04:35On December 16th, 1944, the Germans launched their offensive.
04:44Attacking in bad weather to deprive the Allies of air support.
04:55The assault came as an unwelcome surprise, particularly for the Americans who thought that the Ardennes was a quiet sector.
05:03A lot of the units there were either recuperating or had only just arrived from America, so were green units.
05:13Nearly 1,000 tanks and over 200,000 German troops emerged from the forest and broke through the Allied lines.
05:23German forces seized key crossroads and pushed forward in spearheads towards the Meuse River,
05:30creating a bulge in the Western Front that would become the enduring name for this battle.
05:39The early success of the offensive was briefly reminiscent of Germany's invasion of France through the Ardennes forest in 1940.
05:50The Allies had been taken completely by surprise.
05:57Once the Americans had recovered from the shock, they very quickly began mustering forces to cut off the bulge to
06:05relieve the vital town of Bastogne.
06:10On December 17th, members of US 101st Airborne were rushed into action to defend Bastogne.
06:19If they could hold this crucial crossroads, they could slow the German advance.
06:25The American defenders were quickly encircled.
06:34Cut off from their rear bases and with dwindling supplies, the Allied troops endured heavy assault by the surrounding Germans.
06:42By December 24th, German forces were within six kilometres of the Meuse River.
06:49But here, the offensive ground to a halt.
06:55It was woefully misguided, trying to push panzer armies through mountainous, wooded terrain.
07:02Winter conditions led to gasoline shortages, a critical supply issue for the German advance.
07:09The men and materiel that the German generals asked for, said they would get.
07:16A lot of it didn't arrive.
07:19So that they were fighting with one hand behind their backs, in some fashion.
07:27The German forces also lacked crucial air support.
07:31With no ability to monitor Allied movements from the air, the Germans were essentially fighting blind.
07:40They had absolutely no ability to see what was going on on the other side of the lines.
07:47The Western Allies had complete control of the air, and the Germans couldn't look at what movements were being made.
08:06As well as bombing German positions, the Allied air forces were able to resupply the beleaguered garrison of Bastogne.
08:16On the ground, the tenacious American infantry had refused to surrender.
08:22Their defence of Bastogne was one of the most celebrated of the war.
08:29They held the town long enough for Allied tanks and reinforcements to arrive and relieve them on December 26th.
08:44And once that was done, the German offensive rapidly ran out of steam.
08:49The 50-mile gain, which the Nazis had achieved, is virtually wiped out.
08:54The Battle of the Bulge is won.
09:00I must say that the Germans fought it all at this point against the West was chimerical and shouldn't have
09:08been done.
09:09It was utopian on their part and was simply not going to happen.
09:14And chaos emerged from that.
09:15It was both calculated and it was chaos.
09:18Several of Hitler's senior officers had expressed concern about the plan, and they were proven right.
09:26The Ardenn offensive would be Hitler's last high-stakes gamble.
09:31His relationship with the German high command was breaking down.
09:39Hitler had increasingly micromanaged the war.
09:43Hitler became obsessed with moving units on maps that no longer existed and insisted on the Ardennes offensive against the
09:50advice of his generals.
09:52By the beginning of 1945, Germany's fate looked grim.
09:58Hitler, unstable and paranoid, refused to accept the reality of the situation.
10:06After his failed offensive in the West, German forces were in retreat.
10:13While on the Eastern Front, Stalin was readying his knockout blow.
10:27Through the latter half of 1944, Soviet forces had been cutting a path through Eastern Europe.
10:36By August, the Red Army had liberated Belarusia.
10:39Over the next few months, a series of Soviet thrusts into occupied Hungary and towards the Balkans pushed back the
10:47German front line.
10:49The war's endgame was underway.
10:52After years of brutal fighting, Stalin's final objective, Berlin, was at last in sight.
10:59Hitler's unsuccessful gamble for victory in the West had fatally weakened German forces in the East.
11:06So it meant the bulk of Hitler's armoured forces were on the Western Front and not on the Eastern Front.
11:12And that greatly helped the Russian race to the Oda.
11:17On January 12th, 1945, Soviet forces launched the Vistula Oda Offensive, which would bring them within striking distance of Berlin.
11:28This is another very fast and furious campaign, another deep operation-style manoeuvre warfare.
11:47The Soviets had spent six months gathering their forces for this campaign.
11:52German intelligence indicated a huge Soviet force was amassing, but Hitler refused to believe it.
12:01This denial would ultimately prove to be a fatal error.
12:07By the time Hitler allowed reinforcements to be sent to the region, they were too late and too few to
12:15slow the Soviet advance.
12:18On January 17th, Soviet forces entered Warsaw.
12:23They discovered a city in ruins.
12:27Following the failed resistance uprising in August 1944, the Germans had systematically destroyed the Polish capital.
12:37From Warsaw, the Soviets continued their drive west.
12:41They take most of Poland and isolate the remnants of Army Group Centre in the Königsberg region.
12:51So, at that point, they have taken much of Poland.
12:55By January 31st, Soviet forces had reached the Oda River and were now less than 70 kilometres from Berlin.
13:04For German forces, defeat now seemed inevitable.
13:15Nazi Germany was completely on the defensive.
13:19Its ability to conduct large-scale offensives had evaporated.
13:23It had no way really of fending off attack whatsoever.
13:27The thunder of the battle can now be heard on the very frontiers of the Reich.
13:32Over three weeks of brutal fighting, 295,000 German soldiers had been killed, and nearly 150,000 more captured.
13:43So, a lot of scores were being settled as well, and it wasn't just about vengeance.
13:47There was also a sense that here was a historic opportunity to change populations.
13:52Again, in Czechoslovakia and in Poland and in Hungary, there was mass expulsion of Germans.
13:57Millions of ethnic Germans in the region were displaced, making the difficult trek west,
14:03afraid to face the impending Soviet occupation, and believing they would fare better in areas occupied by Western allies.
14:11We're all talking, in the large part, about women and children who happened to be people who were from ethnic
14:17German backgrounds,
14:17who spoke German, and who had nothing to do with people who were fascists or who were sympathetic or who
14:22were Nazis.
14:25In the areas that fell under Stalin's control, it became clear that he was adopting a harsh, winner-takes-all
14:33approach.
14:35You know, the Allied political leaders were getting increasingly suspicious of Stalin and of his aims, of some of the
14:43brutality that went on.
14:45All of this kind of added to the sense that we're dealing, not with a normal person on the other
14:53side of this alliance, but with a monster of sorts.
14:57Churchill said before the House of Commons, I'll make a deal with the devil himself in order to leave the
15:03Nazis.
15:05And they understood, Churchill certainly understood, what Stalin was about.
15:12With all Soviet territory liberated from Nazi control, Stalin now faced a new challenge.
15:20How to motivate the ordinary Russian soldier to continue the fight into Germany.
15:27You needed to somehow find a way to continue to motivate the troops to fight,
15:33and they did that through relentless hate propaganda, which revolved very much around what the Germans had done to civilian
15:42populations in the Soviet Union itself.
15:45It revolved strongly around rape themes.
15:48It revolved strongly around violence against children, against women.
15:53And then with the liberation of the extermination camps, that also fed into that hate propaganda.
16:03As the Soviet army advanced, the Nazis sought to hide their crimes.
16:09Concentration camps were emptied, and inmates were forced to march west, with little hope of survival.
16:18The Germans march the remnants of inmates away in so-called death marches,
16:24so there's a really gruesome final episode of the Holocaust playing itself out there.
16:34In July 1944, Soviet forces had been the first of the Allies to liberate a major concentration camp.
16:41This was Majdanek, near Lublin, Poland.
16:47As the Soviets neared the camp, the German authorities destroyed buildings,
16:51in an attempt to hide the evidence of the camp's purpose.
16:55But enough remained to reveal the atrocities that had been taking place there, including the gas chambers.
17:06On January 27th, 1945, as the Soviet forces moved through Poland,
17:12they liberated what was left of Auschwitz.
17:17The largest Nazi concentration camp complex.
17:23When the Soviets arrived, they found around 7,000 prisoners who had been left behind,
17:29a tragically small number compared to the roughly 1.3 million people
17:35who were sent to the camp over the years that it was in operation.
17:45As the Soviets continued on through Eastern Europe and the Balkans,
17:50the fate of entire regions hung in the balance.
17:55It was the Soviet Union that liberated most of Central and Eastern Europe, almost all of it.
18:01It was a very slow and painful kind of liberation.
18:04It took a long time to get this long, slow march towards Berlin.
18:12Civilians in areas liberated by Soviet troops greeted them with a mixture of relief and trepidation.
18:21The Soviet liberation was a very complex liberation,
18:24because on the one hand, of course, there was rejoicing,
18:27and we've all seen the newsreels with the footage of soldiers being embraced and so on.
18:31But at the same time, the Red Army behaved in ways that also were notorious for,
18:37I mean, they were notorious for mass rapes, for looting,
18:40for kind of random violence, and also for destruction.
18:51By the end of January, Soviet forces had liberated large parts of Eastern Europe,
18:59taking back regions that had spent most of the war under Nazi control.
19:05They were now within reach of Germany itself.
19:12In February 1945, fresh from this success,
19:17Stalin travelled to Yalta in Crimea to meet once more with Roosevelt and Churchill.
19:24The Western Allies had achieved their own victory at the Battle of the Bulge.
19:29But despite these shared successes,
19:32tensions between the big three were now rising to the surface.
19:39So, by the time of the Yalta Conference in February 1945,
19:43Stalin essentially was holding all the cards.
19:45The Red Army was well into the Balkans and Eastern Europe and in Poland.
19:51So, he didn't really have to make any concessions to the Allies.
19:57The Grand Alliance was beginning to fall apart.
20:02The relationship really begins to fracture in early 1945.
20:07And you might say the most famous meeting of that is,
20:10it happens at the Yalta Conference,
20:12when, for the first time, Roosevelt and Stalin can't really paper over a difference.
20:18The fate of Poland is so central to Stalin's view of what the future of the Soviet Union's security is
20:26like.
20:26And on the other hand, it's very important to Roosevelt.
20:29And they can't really reach a solution.
20:33It's always hard to separate out ideology from power politics.
20:39The ideology of communism and anti-communism and power geopolitical interests reinforced each other and played into each other's hands.
20:51On the issue of who should rule Poland, the Allies were divided.
20:57Britain and the US supported the London Poles, the Polish government in exile.
21:04Stalin, however, supported the Polish Committee of National Liberation,
21:09a rival group based in Lublin that was dominated by communists.
21:16Churchill and Roosevelt would only agree to recognise the Lublin Committee as a provisional government,
21:23and only if their membership was broadened to include all political parties, and if free elections were held.
21:30Stalin agreed to a democratic and free, it's called free and unfettered elections in Poland, which never happened.
21:40In the end, the Soviet simply were able to establish, to set up their own government in Poland, a pro
21:46-Soviet government.
21:47So there was a sense of betrayal on the part of the West.
21:49And it's one of the reasons the Poles accurately, I think, say that the Western Allies sold Poland down the
21:57river to Stalin at Yalta.
22:02The agreement over Poland at Yalta reveals that the relationship is going to have real trouble going forward.
22:08It reveals a few things.
22:10One, Stalin is going to do what he wants in Eastern Europe.
22:13It also shows, by the way, that the limits of Roosevelt's power, that Roosevelt was seen as very powerful at
22:19that point,
22:20but he can't get his own way.
22:22It's not a surprise that after this agreement, he starts getting along very poorly with Stalin.
22:28The Soviets are basically in control of Poland.
22:34What do you do? How do you get them out of Poland?
22:37What if Roosevelt said, you know what, we're not going to accept Soviet domination of Poland?
22:42Well, then Stalin could have just said, sorry, but we're already in control.
22:45So what do you do?
22:49At Yalta, Stalin made promises to Churchill and Roosevelt to have free elections, not only in Poland, but also in
22:57Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.
23:02In the aftermath of the war, these promises would be broken.
23:08The Yalta Conference was not the first time Stalin had expressed his interest in expanding his sphere of influence in
23:16Europe.
23:17There's the famous percentages agreement that Churchill and Stalin made in the fall of 1944,
23:24where basically Eastern European countries were divided up in terms of who would be in charge.
23:32And that meant that the Soviet Union was able to create a buffer zone that included Poland, included the Baltic
23:42states,
23:43included parts of southern, central and eastern Europe.
23:48Months before Yalta, on October 9th, 1944, Stalin and Churchill had met without Roosevelt.
23:57Here, they discussed plans to divide Poland and the Balkans between them, based on percentages.
24:03The crucial thing about the percentages agreement is Roosevelt is not there.
24:08It happens in one of the times when Churchill meets Stalin alone, he goes to Moscow,
24:13and the two have this conversation about the post-war world.
24:19At the Tehran Conference in 1943, Stalin had managed to divide the Western Allies, sidelining Churchill.
24:30Now, it was Roosevelt who was left out in the cold.
24:34The Americans were not told about this.
24:37Churchill explains why.
24:38At one point, he says, if the Americans knew that we would be doing this, they would not be happy.
24:46Churchill saw himself as a 19th-century Stalin imperialist.
24:50Stalin was very much a 19th-century Stalin imperialist.
24:53What did they do in the 19th century?
24:55They would divide spheres of influence, right?
24:58They would carve up countries.
25:03At one point, and that's according to Churchill's memoir,
25:08he has this table, hands it to Stalin, says,
25:12here, you know, I've created a little crude document.
25:15Stalin makes a big checkmark, gives it back to Churchill.
25:20Churchill has second thoughts and says something like,
25:23oh, you know, that's so cynical of us to do,
25:26to divide, to decide the fates of nations in this kind of manner.
25:30Wait, maybe we should destroy this piece of paper.
25:33And then Stalin says, no, you keep it.
25:36Now, Churchill kept it.
25:40Churchill and Stalin each had plans for Europe's future,
25:45and each aimed to curtail the influence of the other.
25:50But these plans were based on the assumption
25:52that the US would leave Europe at the end of the war.
25:56Was that such a ridiculous idea?
25:58Well, not really, because this is what happened after the First World War.
26:02So Stalin was simply drawn on historical precedent
26:04and expecting America to return to its post-war isolationism.
26:07Nothing surprising there.
26:09From the point of view of Churchill and Stalin,
26:12when the war was over,
26:13they're going to be the two triumphant powers in Europe.
26:16They're going to have the greatest military force in Europe.
26:19And so they're the ones that are going to have to settle the European question.
26:26And so in 1944, without consulting the United States,
26:32Churchill and Stalin negotiated a settlement for post-war Europe.
26:40It does show that Stalin expected his sphere of influence
26:44to be recognized by the West.
26:47In some ways, you know,
26:49they are openly trying to manipulate each other.
26:52With Stalin and Churchill,
26:53there's no pretense about them being great friends.
26:56Churchill had been a violent anti-communist for most of his career,
26:59and Stalin had viewed Churchill as a typical British reactionary imperialist.
27:06Despite their ideological differences,
27:09the British and Soviet leaders settled on a plan for post-war Europe
27:14that did not factor in American ambitions.
27:18They were on the same page.
27:19It's the Americans who had a different idea,
27:22but Churchill and Stalin were on the same page.
27:30By the time of the Yalta Conference in early 1945,
27:35victory in Europe was within reach.
27:38And the Allies were intent on establishing
27:41a secure and lasting peace around the world.
27:44But different regions meant different questions to answer.
27:50It already was clear that Germany had lost.
27:55They were on their last legs,
27:57and so the question of post-war settlement in Europe and Asia
28:02became all the more urgent.
28:05For Germany, decisions were made
28:07to divide the country into four zones.
28:12The Allied powers,
28:14they agreed on how to divide Germany up into four occupation zones.
28:21And Berlin was divided into four separate sectors.
28:26Each Allied power was responsible for one sector,
28:29but all four powers were to agree jointly
28:33on how to administer the city of Berlin.
28:41The Allies were confident in their plans for post-war Europe,
28:45but the theatre of war in Asia was another story,
28:49and victory was far less certain.
28:52Churchill and Roosevelt knew all too well
28:55that Japan would not surrender without a fight.
29:00One thing that Roosevelt badly wanted at the Yalta
29:03was to make sure that Stalin would join the war against the Japanese.
29:09And so the expectation on the Americans' part
29:11was that the Soviet Union would join the fighting against the Japanese.
29:16Why did Roosevelt want that?
29:18The expectation was that the Soviet help would be needed
29:21somewhere in Manchuria, in China,
29:23in the occupation of proper Japanese in the Heartland Islands.
29:26So he wanted the Soviets to get involved.
29:29But Stalin himself was also desperate
29:33to get involved in the war against Japan.
29:38Having secured Soviet influence in the shape of post-war Europe,
29:43Stalin was keen to now do the same in the East.
29:49He wanted to improve the Soviet geopolitical position there
29:54by regaining the territories that the Soviet Union,
29:59or rather Tsarist Russia,
30:00had lost to Japan at the time of the Russo-Japanese War,
30:041904-1905.
30:09In the space of eight days,
30:12the Yalta Conference would change the face of nations around the world.
30:18And for the big three,
30:20it would be their last encounter face-to-face.
30:26Ruzelt's also much weaker at Yalta
30:28that he has noticeably deteriorated over the course of 1944.
30:35So by 1945, he simply doesn't have the strength.
30:40His system is really breaking down.
30:46On April 12th, 1945,
30:50Franklin Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
30:57All Washington said their last farewell
31:00to the man who had led them for so long
31:02with such wisdom and so great a sympathy.
31:06His death may have been sudden,
31:09but it followed years of poor health.
31:12No wonder the American people showed emotion,
31:15for FDR had won their hearts.
31:21His vice president, Harry S. Truman,
31:24was immediately sworn in as the new American president,
31:28inheriting the weighty task
31:30of seeing America through the final stage of the war and beyond.
31:35Truman faced a steep learning curve.
31:38As vice president,
31:39he had been deliberately kept in the dark by Roosevelt.
31:43Roosevelt doesn't like Truman.
31:45He chooses him to be his vice president,
31:47in the summer of 1944,
31:50because he thinks Truman will help him get re-elected.
31:52From that moment on, he hardly meets with Truman.
31:54He doesn't tell Truman anything about his post-war plans.
31:58Truman doesn't even know about the atom bomb.
32:01The vice president of the United States
32:03has no idea that the United States has built in the atom bomb.
32:07So Roosevelt, who is dying,
32:09doesn't actually share with his vice president
32:12any of the secrets of the country.
32:17By the time the Allies launched their major offensive against Berlin,
32:21on April 20th, 1945,
32:24Truman had been president for eight days.
32:27He entered office just in time to preside
32:30over the final stage of the war in Europe.
32:36In Berlin, with no hope of victory,
32:40Hitler turned on his own people,
32:43ordering complete destruction of German infrastructure
32:46and laying waste to anything that might fall into the Allies' hands.
32:55At that point, for some people,
32:57what he is doing is choreographing defeat.
33:00He feels humiliated by 1918.
33:02He was a soldier in the German army.
33:04He believed the German people, in a sense,
33:06threw in the towel.
33:07In his mind, Germans behaved disgracefully
33:09and betrayed their own army.
33:11So his view is, that will not happen.
33:32As Hitler continued issuing orders
33:35to virtually non-existent units,
33:38Stalin's forces, now massed along the Oder River,
33:41moved in for the kill.
33:46By the point the Red Army had reached the Oder,
33:49it had been agreed that the Red Army would take Berlin.
33:54It was nearest.
33:54There was no real point of the British Army
33:56or the American Army trying to secure it.
34:01The Americans and the Brits are advancing
34:04through Western Germany.
34:05Their advance is accelerating now.
34:07So there's a sense by Stalin
34:10that they might want to take Berlin
34:12and he really wants to have Berlin.
34:14He wants to have that prize.
34:19In a bid to push his forces ahead of the Western allies,
34:22Stalin pitted his generals against each other.
34:26Marshal Zhukov originally had been tasked with taking the city,
34:29but he also told Marshal Konev to the south
34:32that if he got there first, the honour would fall to him.
34:35And that's one of the reasons why there are so many casualties in that battle.
34:43They become bigger just because Stalin pushes the generals to go and to race each other.
34:52The fate of Berlin would ultimately be determined by US General Eisenhower.
34:59In late March 1945, he telegrammed Stalin,
35:03stating that Berlin was no longer the objective of the Western allies.
35:08He planned to halt his forces on the Western Front at the Elbe River.
35:13The reality was that the Allies had decided that casualties would not warrant them taking a city
35:18that had been agreed that the Soviets would take in the first place.
35:22To Eisenhower, Berlin was merely a symbolic prize.
35:26But Stalin saw the strategic value in conquering the German capital.
35:37On the Western Front, the Allies had reached the Elbe River five days earlier and stopped.
35:44They waited here, less than 100 kilometres from Berlin,
35:49leaving the way open for the Soviets to take the city.
35:56On April 16th, Soviet forces on the River Oda surged forward.
36:02Almost a million men assaulted the German lines.
36:06The final battle for Berlin had begun.
36:15The Germans simply did not have the ability to defend Berlin effectively.
36:21Its armies to the north and south were exhausted.
36:25The Berlin garrison itself had been depleted to defend the Silau Heights,
36:30which the Soviets had commenced their attack on the 16th of April.
36:36By April 20th, Soviet armies had encircled Berlin.
36:41From there, they also reached out and connected with the American forces waiting at the Elbe River.
36:47The German forces had nowhere to run.
36:52There's a ground battle outside of Berlin,
36:55which is part of a larger battle for the entire region.
36:59That is the most destructive part of it.
37:02Those trapped in Berlin were pummeled from the land and the air.
37:08They endured days of artillery fire.
37:11Nearly two million shells were dropped on the city in this final assault.
37:15It would be the most intense barrage of the war.
37:19Stalin's assault on Berlin was absolutely enormous.
37:23He'd massed around two and a half million troops,
37:26a million of whom were going to assault the city directly.
37:28The other armies doing this massive enveloping movement to cut the city off.
37:34The Germans had nothing like that in the way of manpower or equipment.
37:42In the ruins of Berlin,
37:44German and Soviet soldiers paid a heavy price for their leader's ambitions.
37:50Stalin called for total victory at any cost,
37:54while Hitler refused to surrender.
38:04Hitler's mind,
38:05he imagined that the two German armies to the south of the city would come to the rescue.
38:09Hitler instructed them to march on the city and save it from the assault.
38:14This was complete nonsense.
38:15Neither of the armies have the ability to do that.
38:20But spurred on by Hitler,
38:22the people of Berlin mounted a desperate, hopeless defence.
38:27Many of those who were left to defend Berlin were old men and boys.
38:33One battalion of Hitler youth sent into battle had an average age of 14 years old.
38:44In the final days of the war,
38:46much of the German army preferred surrender to the Western Allies,
38:51fearing Soviet vengeance for the brutal treatment of Russian prisoners and civilians.
39:00Without hope, Hitler had retreated deep within his bunker.
39:05On April 30th, he committed suicide.
39:11With this, the German command in Berlin were finally prepared to surrender.
39:21When the fighting in Berlin was at an end,
39:25around 80,000 Soviet soldiers lay dead.
39:31The number of German deaths would never be known.
39:40On May 7th, 1945,
39:44the Germans surrendered unconditionally to the Western Allies,
39:48taking effect on the 8th of May.
39:52But Stalin wasn't satisfied with this.
39:58He staged a second ceremony in Berlin.
40:02This time, the Nazis surrendered to the Soviet Union
40:05at one minute past midnight on May 9th, 1945.
40:14Stalin's victory over Nazi Germany was complete.
40:17He is the strategist.
40:19He is the grand strategist at this point.
40:21And he seems to be basically trying to have
40:24as strong a position in Central Europe as he possibly can.
40:30He's trying to secure a central position in Germany as possible.
40:34I mean, he knows he's got Eastern Europe.
40:36The Eastern Europe, he's conquered it.
40:38He's taken over.
40:38So it's more a case, I think,
40:40of making sure that the Soviet Union
40:42has this powerful position.
40:47Despite the surrender of the Nazi high command,
40:50Europe was in a state of chaos.
40:55I think part of the problem is
40:57we grow up thinking of wars as having started
41:00on a certain date and stopped on a certain date.
41:01And in fact, it's much messier than that.
41:04So although officially the 8th of May
41:06or in the Eastern Bloc, the 9th of May
41:08is supposed to be V Europe Day.
41:10So there were still people who hadn't had the news,
41:12who were still randomly killing each other.
41:14There was the beginning of rounding up
41:15and randomly killing people who spoke German,
41:18which was, again, an atrocity that was happening in plain sight.
41:21It was very ugly and very messy.
41:24With the war in Europe over,
41:26the role of the various allied states was unclear.
41:32It's an easily clear cut who is the dominant
41:35or not dominant military leader.
41:38In material terms, nothing comes close to the United States.
41:41On the other hand, what the Americans don't have
41:44is any, in 1945, political cohesion about their future.
41:47Do they want to stay in Europe?
41:48That's still not decided.
41:49Whereas, in some ways, the saddest is Churchill
41:52because he does have a political future.
41:55He's trying to maintain the British Empire.
41:56But on the other hand, his military is not nearly as powerful
42:01as the United States.
42:02And it's also not shaped the right way
42:04to fight the Soviet Union.
42:06Churchill was under no illusions about Stalin.
42:09I mean, we know that there were plans abroad
42:12in the summer of 1945, even after victory,
42:16for a potential attack against the Soviet Union
42:20on the part of the British troops.
42:23In the final months of the war,
42:25Churchill's concerns about the influence
42:28of the Soviet Union had grown.
42:30He began to consider a bold new strategy
42:33to deal with this threat.
42:35In May 1945, he instructed the British chiefs of staff
42:40to conduct a feasibility study for a military operation,
42:44which very appropriately was dubbed Operation Unthinkable,
42:47to drive the Red Army out of Germany and out of Poland.
42:52He did this without consulting the Americans.
42:55And really, to be fair to him,
42:57it's just contingency planning.
42:58It's quite clear that the British general staff
43:02was ordered to make these potential plans
43:05didn't really want to
43:07and didn't really think they could potentially work.
43:10The plans for Operation Unthinkable
43:13would never be finished.
43:15On July 5th, 1945,
43:18an election in Britain
43:19saw Winston Churchill's wartime conservative government ousted
43:23in favour of Clement Attlee
43:25and the left-leaning Labour Party.
43:29The incoming Labour Party
43:31had no desire for a war against the Soviets.
43:36Of the original Big Three,
43:39only Stalin remained.
43:41The next time the great powers met,
43:44both the British and US leaders
43:46were new to their role.
43:55As they began their negotiations
43:57for the future of Europe,
43:59the rivalry between the great powers
44:02entered a new phase,
44:04the race for technological supremacy.
44:09The war had driven the development of new weapons
44:12and spurred scientific breakthroughs of all kinds.
44:19These would have a lasting impact,
44:21not only on the dynamics of the Grand Alliance,
44:24but on the entire world.
44:27For Stalin, victory in Berlin was more than just symbolic.
44:32Control over Berlin gave the Soviet Union an advantage in the race to recruit German scientists and engineers.
44:40There was this, at the end of the war, very quickly a jostling for nuclear scientists, rocket scientists,
44:47jet engine scientists, anything that would give either side a technological advantage.
44:54And of course, for German scientists, it depended on which side of the occupied zones you were in
45:03The Western Allies worked together to search occupied Germany for scientists and their research material.
45:12At Bonn University, they uncovered the Ozenberg list.
45:16It detailed scientists and engineers put to work for the Third Reich.
45:22In July 1945, the United States began covertly recruiting as many German scientists as possible,
45:30as part of a policy codenamed Operation Paperclip.
45:36The United States exported, if you can call it that,
45:41about 1,000 between 1,400 scientists and their families to the United States.
45:48We only know about the most famous ones, including Graham from Brown.
45:54Von Braun was a former Nazi Party member and SS officer,
45:58and the head of the Nazi V-2 missile program.
46:03His weapons program used concentration camp inmates in the production of V-2 missiles.
46:10This program of forced labor was responsible for the deaths of at least 10,000 prisoners.
46:18Information that was classified by the U.S. Army.
46:27Incriminating evidence against these scientists was destroyed by U.S. intelligence agencies,
46:34paving the way for them to be brought to the U.S.
46:40They also used incentives, and it didn't matter whether these scientists had been part of the Nazi Party.
46:47It was very important for them to get their hands on the scientific knowledge that these Germans had.
46:53The Americans were not alone in their recruitment efforts.
46:59In 1946, the Soviet Union had also established their own version of Paperclip, Operation Osoviahip.
47:08Under this program, they recruited German scientists from across the Soviet-controlled zone.
47:14Who then proceeded to incentivize them to move to the Soviet Union, which many did.
47:23In one night, in October 1946, the Soviet Union forcibly deported and recruited over 2,000 German scientists.
47:32Some of them under duress, some of them because of a promise of good housing, better food situation, and also
47:40a better living standard for their family than what they would expect in Germany.
47:47This helped to quash any objections in the U.S., over bringing German scientists into the country.
47:54The looming threat that their expertise may instead fall into Soviet hands was too great to ignore.
48:04But as the gathering of Europe's top scientists began,
48:11the war in the Pacific ground on.
48:14On that battleground, the fate of nations would be decided by a new brand of weapon.
48:23The end of the war in Europe was only the beginning of a new era of chaos and uncertainty.
48:30Displacement is completely ubiquitous.
48:33It's nearly the normal state to be displaced in some way, shape or form.
48:39The top priorities were to get Europe up and running again as a viable economic entity,
48:45but also to be able to address the immense human tragedy that was going on at the time.
48:52There were so many refugees across Europe.
48:54People without papers, people without homes, people who had lost their families.
48:58It really was necessary to stabilise society and really get the whole continent up and running again.
49:06But the grand relationship between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies was crumbling and mistrust was growing.
49:16In the summer of 1945, the endgame of World War II would reach its devastating conclusion.
49:34The endgame where at the moment there was a mixture of sands.
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