The Fall of Nazi Germany: The Final Year of WWII Uncovered DD

In the spring of 1944, Germany was firmly in the grip of war. The Allies had long since gained air supremacy over the Third Reich. German cities were hit by bombing raids almost daily. Apocalypse was normal. The war had arrived on the home front, and its catastrophic course could no longer be concealed.

[Music] The bombing of cities like Cologne, Bremen, Hamburg and Berlin was part of everyday life of a significant part of the German population. The war was quite close at hand in and around the Reich, especially since we’re talking about massive losses on the part of the German civilian population as well as the massive losses in the BMA.

That means that from the regime’s point of view, the war was not going at all as they imagined. Nevertheless, maintaining the morale of the people was the job of the homeront dictator Joseph Gerbles. In his function as gallowiter of Berlin, he personally took charge of the fate of the bombed out citizens.

Perseverance was the motto. The mood could certainly crumble in one place or another. The regime conceded that or that there was sadness about losses or worries and hardships after bombing raids. But at the same time, the decisive factor was the people’s attitude in the language of Nazi propaganda, and the attitude seemed to be quite stable for a long time from the regime’s point of view.

The Germans reacted differently to the tense situation with fanatical defiance, with equinimity, or even fatalistic resignation. Above all, faith in Adolf Hitler helped many to persevere. The cult of the fur was very important because the fur despite all the disputes that existed in the system including the conflicting interests of internal groups and organizations the fur was always seen as a figure of identification as the one who held everything together and brought it all together and really also as a kind of luminous figure.

If one assumed that national socialism was an atheistic regime, then the fur took on a quasi godlike character. Despite major failures in the second half of the war, which more and more couldn’t be denied, the Hitler cult nevertheless remained intact to a large degree because Hitler was the central figure to whom people had already been orienting themselves for years and there had been no alternative for a long time.

The dictator hadn’t been seen in Berlin for quite some [Music] time. On the occasion of his 55th birthday, Hitler’s most loyal supporter, Joseph Gerbles, organized a propaganda event in the capital in his absence on April 20th to demonstrate the loyalty of the Folks Mineshaft. A parade was held on Den Linden for the Furer as well as for the national socialist news reel.

in the right list [Music] in Vice Minister Dr. G. [Music] FL Susanna comfort. You also had to demonstrate a touch of

normality in 1944 since everyone knew that April 20th was an important date. Hitler somehow had to show himself. He rarely spoke. He rarely appeared in public. So they had to stage something. Gel’s speech in the Schlutoah at the concert of the Berlin Filmonic Orchestra and so on.

That was the minimum program put together to show that Hitler was still there and he was still alive. Instead of building more and more fighter planes for defensive battles against the Allies, Hitler ordered the production of mainly bombers, weapons designed to impede the Allied advance. also met with the furer’s approval, such as this device for destroying railroad tracks.

Hitler didn’t comment publicly on the devastation of the air war. He left it to Gobles all this propaganda work and withdrew more and more from the public eye. Officially, of course, this was with work overload. Hitler was, as it was already described in the propaganda, day and night for Germany’s victory and Germany’s fate. and therefore he had no time to make speeches.

But of course it was also connected with this with this loss of prestige that he then withdrew from public life and thus this myth of course continued to have an impact for most of the year. Hitler retreated to Burgof in the Burkusan Alps. The dictator who had always been confident of his effect on the masses gave only three radio speeches in 1944 and made no public appearances.

Gerbalt tried for months to persuade Hitler to give a speech in public to give the people hope again. And Hitler didn’t want to. He always said first we need victories again. So as things were, he didn’t want to do them. In view of the lack of success on all fronts, the dictator increasingly doubted his general’s willingness to persevere.

Hitler didn’t tolerate criticism of his decisions. No one in his entourage dared to point out to the commander-in-chief the hopelessness of the situation. On the [Music] contrary, there was this famous scene at where Hitler gathered his generals and shouted at them and I expect the generals to stand around me with their sabers drawn to defend me till the end.

Then field marshal for Manstein stood up and said yes my fur that’s exactly how it will be. Meanwhile, in the capital, which had been hit by numerous Allied bombing raids, the air raid alarms blared more and more often, and not just at night. Since March of 1944, US bombers had also been conducting daytime air raids on Berlin.

More than half a million civilians would fall victim to the bombing. Joseph Gerbles held the fort for his furer in the capital of the Reich. The minister of propaganda used every opportunity as a stage for the news reel. In his capacity as the Galiter of Berlin, Gerbles was close to the people. Nazi propaganda unscrupulously presented the Berliners as steadfast heroes of the air war.

[Music] Gerbles just had a built-in instinct to give the people what they wanted. Of course, because he had a large news network that he could pick from where fluctuations and reversals were also perceived, registered, passed on, and then reacted to. The Germans were to be kept happy until the bitter end.

The Minister of Propaganda had vaudeville and cinema performances moved from bombed out venues to buildings that were still intact. Entertainment during total war. The news reels did not show the true face of war. Amateur footage of a funeral for bombing victims in Nordonham near Bremaen revealed the grief and despair of the people.

Despite the horror and fear, Germans had to go on with their daily lives day after [Music] day. The challenge especially for women in the war was very high. Most of the men were at the front or dead or missing. Life was hard every day. Imagine that you had to work 10 hours in a factory, then come home, take care of the children, do homework, then there were air raids at night.

You couldn’t sleep. You’re afraid. The children are afraid. And the next day, it starts all over again. And the whole thing is fraught with a lot of uncertainty as to whether everyone would even survive. The allies were already preparing for the next blow against the Third Reich, the invasion on the coast of northern France.

The onslaught was to be stopped by the so-called Atlantic Wall, a chain of defensive positions on the Channel Coast. The hero of the failed African campaign, Field Marshal Ern RL, was responsible for protecting the Reich’s borders on the Atlantic. He was responsible for the expansion of the fortifications and making them impregnable. However, this Atlantic wall wasn’t finished yet.

It was a wall with big gaps. You can’t think of it as a wall that was more or less like a string of pearls with several points loosely connected. Here’s where the focus of the combatants were. The coastline between Calala and Normandy. The Germans weren’t sure exactly where the landings would take place. The expansion of the defensive facilities faltered due to the disastrous war situation, which meant that supplies weren’t coming in.

Raml recognized the hopelessness of the venture and put all his eggs in one basket. It was clear to the Germans where the allies would land. They would either come in at the Padal or in Normandy. In the end, the Germans and especially RML chose the and that was the wrong choice. In England, meanwhile, the Allies preparations were in full swing.

The decision of where to land had already been decided. A different location than what the Germans expected. [Music] Normandy was chosen because Padal, which would allow a shorter channel crossing, was relatively well fortified by the Germans and Normandy had the great advantage of being conveniently located.

One could approach from all ports. The whole of southern England resembled a huge army camp. The allies prepared for the invasion with elaborate maneuvers. In the meantime, their intelligence services launched deliberate deceptive maneuvers to mislead the Germans. Fictitious units were set up and dummy tanks and aircraft were used to make the Vey believe that a channel crossing would take place at Calala.

Germany first was Winston Churchill’s motto. The only thing the British couldn’t agree on with the commander and chief of the Americans, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was the timing of the landing on the continent. And then there’s the question of when. And that was a big point of contention between the Americans and the British. The British didn’t really want to do it at all.

Ultimately, the British wanted to defend their empire and wanted to secure the Mediterranean. The Americans said, “What on earth are we doing in the Mediterranean?” And then ultimately got their way. But there was a struggle over the crucial question, when would they have enough landing craft? And while a material battle of gigantic proportions was being prepared on the Atlantic, there was a festive mood in Oba Zaltzburg.

Ava Brown’s younger sister Gretle married SS Gopenfurer Hinrich Fageline on June 3rd, 1944. The Furer was also present at the reception at the Bearhof near Berta’s garden. The celebrations among Hitler’s closest friends lasted 3 days. No one here seemed to be thinking about a possible defeat. Hitler was convinced that he could turn back the allies in France.

Hitler’s strategy was as follows. We can lose ground in the east and that wouldn’t threaten our but in the west if the western allies land there, they could immediately advance into the ruer and thus capture the heart of our industry. Therefore, Hitler ordered reinforcements to be sent to the west in the future.

But by the 4th of June, the Germans had lost the capital of their most important ally. The Vey had been unable to hold Rome and had declared it an open city. The Allies now marched in in triumph and the Romans enthusiastically celebrated their liberation. Enraged, they stormed the Palazzo Venetsia, the former seat of government of their duche Venito Mussolini.

Fascism has never been as strongly entrenched in Italy as national socialism was in Germany. Mussolini had been deposed by the fascist ran council. It was of course inconceivable that somehow a national socialist ran council would depose Hitler and in Italy at least part of the population saw the state as corrupt and didn’t see why they should fight for this fascist state.

Of course there were a few but not as many as in Germany. And actually in Italy war fatigue was much greater than in Germany. And it was clear it was over. German soldiers were taken prisoner. The Vmach was able to delay the advance of US troops in southern Italy for half a year.

However, they had nothing to go against the Allied superiority in men and material. The German military leadership drew no conclusions from the defeat for its future strategy. And so now you could say that the fall of Rome didn’t really matter. But the big question was how were they actually going to stop the Allied advance? Did they have any means at all to ever become offensive again? They didn’t really have that and they didn’t really learn from it.

The real problem that actually existed was that the allies landed in Salano in September of 43 and in Anion near Rome in January of 44. And both landing operations were a bit of a prelude, very similar to the procedure to the later landing in Normandy, which was bigger of course, but in similar principle, and the Germans found they couldn’t stop the allies.

It was really a principle of hope, but the prelude as to how D-Day would play out had already been experienced on a smaller scale in Italy, and both battles were lost. In England, the Allied commanderin-chief, General Eisenhower, was planning the final details of the invasion. It was important to determine the right time.

The landing had already been postponed several times due to bad weather conditions. The man with the final say was Eisenhower. He was the commanderin-chief. There was a structure. The British and the Americans had divided the world into theaters of war and Eisenhower gave the orders. But of course, he also had to coordinate with the British.

But he had the final word. And the weather, after all, gets bad in early June. So bad that the Germans didn’t think they could land at all. And then, for example, RML went to see his wife for her birthday. And that’s when Eisenhower gave the green light. Eisenhower. On June 3rd, 1944, the first Allied troops boarded ships.

More than 1 and a half million US soldiers were standing by for Operation Overlord. They were joined by nearly 20 divisions of British, Canadians, Poles, and Free French. The German troops couldn’t grasp the scale of the attack until it had already begun. The Normandy landings were indeed one of the very great failures of German intelligence.

It was a complete surprise that the largest amada in the history of the world could wham suddenly appear at dawn off the coast of Normandy like a rabbit coming out of a top hat who said oops here I am. There was no round table of intelligence services in Germany who said so what have we heard from which sources and what is now the most probable but rather the air force did its own thing the navy did its own thing it was a complete model and that of course meant in principle that a surprise could succeed all began in the early morning hours of June June 6th,

Dday, decision [Music] day. The Allies had assembled an amada the likes of which the world had never seen. Over 5,000 ships, including 4,000 landing craft, and over 1,000 battleships, cruisers of various kinds. And so on the first day alone, this amada put about 130,000 men a shot. The soldiers were preparing to land on nearly 100 km of beach.

The battle would be won or lost within 24 hours. There was no plan B. If the Allied troops failed, there would be no second chance. There was no turning back. The Allied landings were meticulously planned. First, Allied naval artillery was to open fire on the German position. Shortly thereafter, squadrons of Allied bombers would continue to bomb the German position.

And only shortly thereafter would the landing fleet start to come in and quickly overcome the bunkers and move inland. But from the start, heavy seas hampered the operation. Ships drifted for miles. Landing craft capsized. Soldiers drowned with their heavy equipment in the freezing waters. The soldiers knew that they would have to land at low tide and run for more than 800 m with no cover and that this was probably not going to be a walk in the park.

Some of them had experienced similar landing operations in Italy, but the hope was always that the Allied fire would be so strong that they would get through it all right. But a lot of bomber squadrons had missed the German positions. There was little cover. The soldiers had to run directly into German fire with their eyes open. Allied casualties on the various beaches varied widely, ranging from a few hundred, for example, at Sort Beach or Utah Beach 2 3 to 4,000 at Omaha Beach, the famous bloody Omaha.

However, despite all these losses, they were not as high as Allied planners had originally planned on. They had expected to suffer up to 10,000 casualties on the first day of landing alone. Whoever gained the upper hand on this longest day held the key to occupied Europe. World War II.

It’s the great battle that signified the beginning of the liberation of Western Europe. For the British, it was the last great military victory for their army in a conventional way. If you compare it to other battles in world history, the battle of the S or Stalingrad or whatever, June the 6th, 1944 was not a particularly bloody day. And it’s so hyped up particularly in American history.

So it has a lot of historical significance. But it wasn’t because of the casualty. There were other days in the Battle of Normandy that were bloodier for the soldiers. On June 6th, the Allies also dropped troops on the continent. During the night, about 20,000 men landed behind the front lines. They too had to struggle with considerable difficulties.

On D-Day, the Allies landed not only from the sea, but they also used paratroopers and cargo gliders in the rear to occupy areas from the rear and prevent the Germans from getting reinforcements to the landing points. American losses were quite high because the Germans had damned up the rivers there because they had also built obstacles against cargo gliders in which the material some of the material was transported.

Some parachuted, some landed in gliders and it was quite a considerable fighting force which also ensured that the Americans could advance in land from the beach relatively quickly and that also prevented the first German counterattacks. In the morning, they fought their way to their units. In land, the Allied troops suffered unexpectedly high losses.

Allied planning prior to the landing was totally focused on the amphibious landing itself. The planners weren’t really aware of what happened next. And contrary to expectations, the Germans put up dogged resistance, especially in the hatchros of Normandy in the so-called there were major battles in a very small area where the allies advance was bloody moving from field to field and sometimes these fields were no larger than 100 by 100 meters.

And there were also American reports that refer events there to a jungle war which reminded some of the war in the Pacific. There were six weeks of heavy fighting in Normandy, very similar to trench warfare in the first world war. In terms of casualties, the battle was similar to that of. And for many participants, this battle was one of the most formative of their lives.

And you can also glean that from German files how officers, high-ranking officers who experienced this experienced this battle and how thousands, tens of thousands of Germans died there. And by the way, the allies had similar losses, but then they realized that they were no match against Allied superiority and how that changed their view of the war. big fan.

Commander and Chief RML tried to convince Hitler that the situation was hopeless. He stubbornly insisted on them holding the front, but the Allies fighting strength and air superiority were overwhelming. German counter offensives came to [Music] nothing. For these Germans, the war was over.

Going into captivity was easier for them than for their comrades on the Eastern Front. If you look at German casualty figures at the end of the Battle of Normandy, 400,000 soldiers died, were wounded or became Allied prisoners of war. At the same time, there were about 600,000 German casualties on the Eastern Front. The big difference, however, is that German losses in the West were largely due to captivity.

It was clear to German soldiers that as a prisoner of war of the allies, you were likely to be treated somewhat in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. And so it was much easier for a German soldier on the Western front to throw up his hands and stop fighting than it was on the Eastern front. In the Soviet Union, Stalin also took the initiative.

Operation Bagration began on June 22nd, 1944. On the third anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Red Army struck back. Now that the Allies had finally opened the long- aaited second front in the west, Soviet troops launched a devastating strike against the Veyart. The Soviet offensive against Army Group Center in the summer of 1944 was underrated for a long time.

It was overshadowed by the second front, the Allied invasion of Normandy. But it was actually the greatest military catastrophe that the German Reich had to endure. Within a few weeks, this Red Army succeeded in crushing the entire army group center. The Germans were hopelessly outnumbered. 2.

5 million Soviet soldiers against 1 million Germans. The line of the front was very awkward for the Germans. There was a huge front area sticking out. The rear was partly or to a large extent already in the hands of the Soviet partisans. German reconnaissance of the enemy drew completely wrong conclusions and believed that the main attack would take place much further south.

And finally, Hitler was also against any sort of mobile warfare. The dictator had long since tied his personal fate, as well as that of the entire country, to the outcome of the war and forbade any retreat. He didn’t have a convincing strategy. There was always the hope that the Fura was a genius, that the Fur would still do something, that the Fur would pull something out of his back pocket, some miracle weapon, or that he still had some reserves.

You just had to hold out long enough. That was actually the propaganda [Music] slogan. [Music] Foreign of the Soviet state. [Music] in Austin. [Music] Stalin also knew how to use propaganda

and presented himself as the savior of the Soviet Empire. 2 days before the offensive, he had his submissive comrades award him the medal for the defense of Moscow. However, the dictator left the planning of Operation Bagration to his generals. [Music] Stalin, like Hitler, was a military control freak.

But he was, one doesn’t really know because the files haven’t been released yet. He seems to have held back more than his German counterpart. The Red Army had learned from its failed defenses and attacked with a significantly superior force on a front that was 1,100 km long. The Soviets managed to break through and advance up to 600 km to the west. Army Group Center was crushed.

The defeated troops now became part of a perfidious propaganda show. On July 17th, 1944, Stalin paraded 55,000 defeated Vermach soldiers through Moscow’s streets. Stalin very cleverly combined this demonstration with a message to the people. The Viamat is not invincible. The Viamat consists to a large extent of old men.

The time of the young worldly warriors was over. It was important for him to show his citizens what the people who had invaded their country looked like. And of course it was a deliberate act of humiliation which was of course forbidden under the laws of war. According to the Geneva Convention, prisoners of war may not be lined up or paraded.

They were given castor oil beforehand so they couldn’t contain themselves. And after the soldiers had marched through, Moscow street cleaning vehicles cleaned up after them. That was a cynical and nasty spectacle. They wanted to show the master race were just poor witches. And that worked quite well. You saw fat generals who corresponded exactly to this image of the fat over fat general.

and you saw emaciated soldiers who were often much older, the last troops that Hitler had left marching through the streets. It didn’t trigger the effect on the people that it was supposed to. The police didn’t have to keep the citizens of Moscow from attacking the Viamat soldiers. Instead, they simply stood silently at the side of the road.

They actually felt sorry for these soldiers because they saw in them their own soldiers. Nevertheless, it was important to Stalin and his people to demonstrate precisely that they had come as the master race. And now they showed the people this is what they look like. 3 days earlier, Adolf Hitler had traveled to his headquarters in Rastenborg, East Prussia.

Many of the buildings in the complex had been covered with bunkers to protect them from air attacks, but the Nazi leadership was not prepared for an attack from within. [Music] On July 20th, 1944, a bomb exploded during a meeting with the Furer. It had been smuggled into the barracks by Klaus Shank Grath vonbeek.

He had gathered a circle of conspirators around him. They were convinced that Hitler had to die in order to save Germany from ruin. On the one hand, he recognized the criminal character of this war and that this war was lost and that more and more people would die. There could no longer be a victory and therefore it had to be stopped.

The problem for Stalenberg was how to get to Hitler. He was just a small fly in the high command of the army in the Bendlo. He couldn’t just walk into the Fura’s headquarters and say, “I would like an appointment with the Fura and give him an explosive.” The problem was that very few conspirators had access. But he finally got access when he became the chief of staff of the Army Reserve on July the 1st, 1944.

That gave him the right to attend briefings, and that then put him in a dual role, being the head of the coup and also the one to plant the bomb. The destroyed barracks meeting room bears witness to the force of the explosion. But Adolf Hitler survived the assassination attempt and later that same afternoon, just 3 hours after the attack, welcomed Benito Mussolini at Wolf’s train station.

Together, they visited the destroyed barracks. That night, in a mobile radio van he had brought in specially for the purpose Hitler delivered a radio address. He presented himself in his tried and tested manner as the leader chosen by fate. Fore. Then the machinery of the Third Reich began to unear this conspiracy and there are hundreds of people 800 900 who are also executed and anyone who had a connection with the 20th of July then died.

Most are subjected to a show trial before the people’s court. This film footage shot on Hitler’s orders was never shown. Even Nazi propaganda found the grading roar of presiding judge Roland Fryler unsuitable for publicity. [Music] Many of the conspirators retained their dignity, although the verdicts were a foregone conclusion. Death by hanging.

They were executed in Pliten prison with wire nooes hung on meat hooks and filmed for Hitler. The terror of Nazi rule reached one of its cruel climaxes. The assassination was actually a decisive moment because afterwards the Nazi system had a much tighter grip on society. After July of 1944, all checks to the system had gone.

And now there was no buffer at all between them. Anyone who stuck their head up now lost it. And now the system could really take action and had such a tight grip on German society that they were able to divide the society and track it down with them. In the course of their offensive, Soviet troops reached Lublin on July 24th.

Here they stumbled upon the remains of a monstrous crime. As the Red Army advanced toward Lublin, Soviet soldiers also liberated the Maidan death camp. And Maidan was actually the first real death camp that the allies liberated. In view of the rapid advance of the Red Army, SS troops had hastily tried to cover up their misdeeds just a day before and ordered the camp to be closed.

However, they weren’t able to destroy the gas chambers. As early as August, the first journalists visited Maidan and published photos and reports. Tens of thousands were murdered in this camp. Here, for the first time, the full extent of the genocide made possible by this criminal war was revealed. Maidan was by no means the largest and most important extermination camp but for the first time the allies had an idea of what had transpired and they had issued a communic.

It was then translated into five languages and the effect cannot be imagined strongly enough because of course all war propaganda tends to be exaggerated. But the allies were suddenly confronted with a reality that actually completely confirmed these exaggerations. And that of course was a completely different dimension.

And then there was also the practical attempt to preserve it as a place of remembrance even during the war and in the months that followed things continued and I think it was Thomas Man who wrote this secret is about to be revealed and the disgrace of Germany will lie before the eyes of the world. While the war was still in full swing, a memorial service for the victims of the death camp was held on August 6th and was reported worldwide.

I think the liberation of the concentration camps had a very decisive impact on how the Germans were viewed. For the Americans, the war was a conventional war against another military power fought more or less according to the rules of the Geneva Convention. Eisenhower couldn’t have imagined what was happening in those camps and the first camp Eisenhower saw shocked him in such a way that after that the Viamat was no longer a subject worthy of discussion for him.

He also refused to receive any German general. After they had seen that, they had a completely different view of the VMA because they saw they defended it. They had camps like that in the hintterlands and they knew it and they defended this regime. The victors forced the German soldiers to see the horror with their own eyes.

Even if not all of them were direct perpetrators. Blind obedience often led to inconceivable crimes. And yet, no one made another attempt like the conspirators on July 20th to overthrow the criminal regime in order to end the Nazi [Music] terror. On the Western Front, Allied troops struggled for weeks to break out of the Normandy beach head.

They wanted to advance toward the Sain as soon as [Music] possible. The Germans put up stubborn resistance. For weeks, they engaged in heavy fighting with the Allies. By the end of July, the Vermacht had suffered almost 115,000 dead and wounded, plus more than 40,000 were made prisoners. Supplies also failed to arrive.

Finally, the German front line collapsed. [Music] It took 8 weeks for the Allies to finally break through. That’s because the Allies, using their artillery and air power, inflicted heavy losses on the Germans until the Germans simply didn’t have the ability to reinforce their front lines. And so, the breakthrough occurred on July 25th.

US troops reached the suburbs of Paris where the liberators were greeted enthusiastically. The fight for France’s freedom seemed to be over. The allies had landed in Provence as well. But Hitler, enraged, ordered his generals to raise the French capital to the ground before they retreated. Hitler’s idea was that Paris had to burn and that his general there, General Kitz, should destroy Paris.

General Cortitz was told by the American general, I think it may have been Eisenhower, that if you destroy the city of Paris, you will be held responsible after the war. The warning was that he would be treated as a war criminal if he dared to carry out the destruction order. In fact, on the day of the liberation of Paris, there were still sporadic exchanges of fire between US troops and German soldiers.

It’s possible that those were only mock battles with which Coltitz wanted to cover up his refusal to obey Hitler’s orders. Coltitz was maneuvering. He was in charge and he maneuvered back and forth until he actually no longer had the means. He used his leeway in such a way that at some point he no longer had the means or let the necessary explosives to reduce Paris to rubble.

On the afternoon of July 25th, Coltitz officially handed the city over to French forces under the command of Major General Nelair. Anan was the cry those days. At last we can breathe a sigh of relief. All of Paris was in the streets. The Germans had been defeated. The summer of 1944 meant three heavy defeats for the Germans.

First, in the west, occupied France was lost. In the east, army group center was crushed. And in the south, Rome was lost and the Germans had to retreat to northern Italy. Nevertheless, that didn’t mean that the war was over. There were several reasons for that. One of them was that the Germans were not thrown back on their borders and that created a special motivation for many soldiers.

Now they were fighting for their homeland, for their own farm, for their own house. For these soldiers, the war was over. Many were relieved to have finally escaped the hopeless struggle. But many were also driven by fear. Soon the allies would be at the borders of the Third Reich. They would not be able to save their country from the ravages of impending [Music] doom.

In the summer of 1944, the United States Pacific Fleet was headed for the Marana Islands. US forces reached Saipan on June 15th. After a hard-fought amphibious landing on the tropical beaches, the Marines advanced inland, waging protracted battles kilometer after kilometer because the defenders had fortified the island extremely well. Pacific.

In 1944, Pacific islands like the Marana Islands were bitterly contested and fiercely fought over because Japanese officers were ordered to halt the Mariana Islands to the last man and to the last bullet. Because it was quite clear to the Japanese military leadership that from the Mariana, American bombers would be able to reach the Japanese mother islands and would be able to bomb Tokyo as well.

During the war against Japan, US forces combined two thrusts. One was via New Guinea and the Philippines, the other via the Central Pacific. The decisive thrust of the war was in the Central Pacific because the Central Pacific divides the Japanese sphere of power into a northern and southern half and because from the Central Pacific from the Maranas, American B29s could bomb Japan.

The images of the bloody amphibious landings were similar to those taken a few days earlier in Europe. The Normandy invasion began on June 6th, 1944 on the beaches of France. Here, as there, the Allies threw incredible quantities of men and material into battle. But that’s where the parallels between the two theaters of war ended.

It was really a global war which also had very different reasons, a different course but each with its own logic. The Pacific war was not just an offshoot of Europe. It had its own value, a war of its own logic. And then there was this parallelism. It was quite remarkable what was achieved logistically. [Music] 12,000 defenders had entrenched themselves on Saipan after the Japanese fleet was crushed in the Battle of the Philippine Sea.

They were cut off from all supplies. The Japanese soldiers were hiding in the jungle and in extensive cave systems. Propaganda, Japanese war propaganda quite strongly fueled the will on the part of Japanese soldiers to really fight to the death to hold on to these small and seemingly insignificant islands. The Japanese demanded the utmost from their opponents.

In accordance with the Bushidto code, they didn’t give an inch. To force the defenders out of their cave systems, the American soldiers perfected their flamethrower tactics. They attacked the caves in groups supported by artillery and machine guns. Japanese who rushed out of their caves on fire were gunned down by the GIS. The slaughter lasted 3 weeks.

Japanese soldiers rarely surrendered. Instead, they preferred to throw themselves to their deaths. The Marines prisoners were almost exclusively Korean forced laborers. And then they entered an area with the Japanese civilian population for the first time. Before that, you were only in the outposts.

In Saipan, the Japanese had massive casualties. They performed these bananzai attacks where they were being mowed down by the hundreds and thousands. And it was compounded by the fact that whether voluntarily or force, probably more by force, the Japanese civilian population was also jumping off cliffs to their deaths.

This led the Americans to wonder, what if even the Japanese civilian population wouldn’t surrender? How was the war going to end? We were to have them kill every Japanese person one by one and we might be able to do that. But that also meant there could be enormous casualties on our side. By the end of the Battle of Saipan, some 26,000 Japanese army soldiers and about 3,500 US Marines had lost their lives.

Meanwhile, in Moscow, Joseph Stalin was making plans for the further course of his offensive against the Third Reich. The Red Army had been advancing successfully since June 22nd, 1944, which was the third anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet [Music] Union. Within 5 weeks, they had advanced as far as Poland.

As Soviet troops approached Warsaw, Stalin seized the opportunity to extend his claim to rule [Music] Poland. While the Red Army advanced to the Vistula, the Polish underground resistance finally tried to strike against the Germans. The Polish home army had set itself the goal of liberating the country and saw the time had come to act.

The Poles were of course massively anti-German, anti-Nazi, but probably antis-s Soviet to a similar degree. The question now was, it’s of no use to us if we get rid of German rule and then come under Soviet rule. And that’s why they thought if we liberate Warsaw, liberate our capital on our own before the Soviets arrive, that would give us political weight in shaping postwar Poland.

On August 1st, 1944, the Polish home army, the Arma Kryova, dared to revolt in Warsaw. 45,000 men were ready, but many of them were inadequately armed or not armed at all. The insurgents completely lacked any sort of heavy weaponry. The German Vermacht brutally put down the uprising. As always, the Germans reacted extremely quickly in such situations.

They brought in troops from everywhere and fought that uprising with the most brutal force. And the Amy Cryova couldn’t do anything but try to go down heroically and fight against the Germans. And it was clear relatively quickly by the first days of August that they didn’t stand a chance against these Germans who were bringing in troops on a massive scale.

[Music] An inferno broke out over Warsaw. The Germans were using this to actually wipe out this Warsaw. That’s why they were fighting not only militarily against the Polish home army, but especially in those first days of August. The concept was to put down this uprising with brutal force in order to punish the Polish civilian population at the same time.

So there were hundreds of thousands of dead in that struggle. It was a zenith of violence, a zenith of terror that Poland was experiencing there from the Germans. Stalin did nothing to save Warsaw. He planned to secure his power in Poland by means of a puppet government. Stalin ordered the Red Army to wait until the Germans had finished the job.

It was clear to him that after the war, there would be no independent nationalist Poland because he knew that the Polish nationalists were the worst enemies of the Bolsheiks. And he didn’t want to see anyone from this force in the Polish government. And therefore, he quite cynically let the Germans do the bloody work, which he then didn’t have to do.

and the Red Army only marched into Warsaw when that fight was over. SS Chief Himmler ordered all inhabitants of Warsaw to be killed and the city raised to the ground. The slaughter lasted 63 days. No one knows the exact number of victims. Among Polish civilians alone, the figures vary between 150 and 225,000 dead.

The West played along with Stalin’s game. In October of 1944, Winston Churchill traveled to Moscow. Together with Stalin, the British Prime Minister drafted a plan for the division of Eastern Europe after the war. Famously infamous was the so-called note on which was noted in handwriting into which spheres of influence the eastern territories of Europe should follow.

The Baltic states and Poland were to be completely under the influence of the Soviet Union. Romania to a large extent to the Soviet Union, Bulgaria likewise, Yugoslavia 50% to the Soviet Union and 50% under Western influence. It is rumored that Churchill wrote the note and Stalin checked off each point noted on it. The note has generally been regarded as a rather cynical expression of great power behavior that decided the postwar fate over the heads of millions of people.

On their retreat, the Vermach left behind scorched earth. The order which officially read, “Loosening, clearing, paralysis, and destruction, resulted in the Germans devastating entire areas. Supplies were destroyed, machinery destroyed, towns and villages burned down, people deported, the marauding soldiers soon became almost unstoppable.

What actually happened then was basically an unprecedented program of destruction. Everything of value was destroyed. There was, just to give you one example, this infamous rail wolf that ripped up all the rail ties. Dams were being blown up. There was a really huge plane that lot of times the only thing left standing were chimneys, villages of chimneys made of bricks.

And those chimneys were still sticking up in the air and everything else was just flattened. The Germans on the home front hoped for the promised miracle weapons to bring the wartime enemy in the British Isles to their knees. In the propaganda jargon of the Third Reich, the rockets developed by Vayner Fon Brown were called V2s.

V stood for retaliation. Tests failed time and again. Now the V2 together with the V1 cruise missile was supposed to turn the tide and at Adolf Hitler’s behest wipe out cities in Great Britain. Technically, the V2 was actually a very modern device, which initiated the development of the moon rocket, but it was wonderful for the Allies that the Germans built it because it was so infinitely expensive and so infinitely complex.

If the Germans had built conventional weapons, airplanes, tanks, they could have done much more damage with it. The effect militarily was at almost zero. They killed a few thousand civilians, but that was it. On September 8th, 1944, the first launch was successful. By the end of the war, 1,400 V2 rockets had been fired, mainly from mobile launch pads in Holland.

The V2 was so fast that British anti-aircraft systems failed. Without warning, the rockets hit residential neighborhoods whose residents couldn’t get to safety in time. In London, thousands died. Another prestige object of the Nazis was the newly developed Me262 jet fighter, which was produced at enormous cost in terms of material. The aircraft, which could reach speeds of up to 900 km per hour, was intended to put an end to Allied air supremacy.

However, the first jets weren’t ready for operation until November of 1944. Due to the lack of fuel, the fighters could only rarely take off. In the end, the ME262 was unable to break the superiority of the enemy air force. The Massaches 262 was a revolutionary aircraft, clearly ahead of its time. But no airplane decides a war.

When we examine air warfare, we find time and again that technology is not actually decisive. That depends on tactics and above all on numbers. And of course, the maximum 200 jet fighters would not have any significant effect at all. On the contrary, they shot down some bombers, but lost just as many of their own fighters, so that fizzled out and was mainly a means of propaganda.

The Germans had tactical weapons, so they were almost always superior to their opponents. The Germans undoubtedly had the best tanks and according to Allied statements, the Germans had excellent infantry weapons. The MG42, the assault rifle 44, the Germans really made superior tactical weapons, but the strategic weapons, strategic bombers or something like that.

In all these things, the Germans were inferior because they neglected that. The battle for the Japanese occupied Philippines had been raging in the Gulf of Lee since October of 1944. Island by island, US troops had pushed Japan’s soldiers back across the Pacific. The largest naval battle in history ended in favor of the Americans. Ever since he retreated from the Japanese with his troops in December of 1941, US General Douglas MacArthur had declared that the recapture of the Philippines was a personal matter.

[Music] Douglas MacArthur. Douglas MacArthur was a man who came from a very traditional military family and for family reasons, he also felt very connected to the Philippines. His father, for example, had also already served in the Philippines. His failure to hold and defend the Philippines was a very great shock for him.

He made a promise when he left the Philippines, and he wanted to keep that promise. At the time, he said, “I’ll be back.” very much like the Terminator, I’ll be back. That’s what it was all about for him. And for him though, reconquest of the Philippines was above all symbolic, a personal symbolic value. [Music] During the battle of Lee, Japanese suicide squads known as kamicazi planes were used for the first [Music] time.

Japanese pilots deliberately flew their aircraft into American warships. [Music] While the phenomenon did not decisively weaken US forces during those war years, it exposed soldiers and sailors to extraordinary nervous strain. On the western border of the Third Reich, the so-called west wall was unable to stop the Allied forces. The troops goal was the [Music] Rine.

During their advance, however, the US soldiers encountered unexpectedly strong resistance in the forests near Aken. They engaged in fierce battles with German Vermach units. Supplies which had to be brought in from southern France and Normandy also came to a standstill. They could take some German villages, but there they were stuck because they ran out of gas.

That’s where the priorities were misplaced and the Germans could reorganize themselves. But the Germans were not as well prepared as the news reel would have you believe. [Music] Although the war was clearly lost by the summer of 1944 at the latest, the Viam continued to fight. They didn’t want to endure another 1918, no defeat, where it could be said, what that we surrender too soon.

What the soldiers had in mind this time was that it was better to surrender 5 minutes after 12 than 5 minutes before 12. All of this, of course, with horrendous losses, which far exceeded anything we had seen before. days later, they closed the ring around the city. Hitler demanded that the Imperial City was to be defended to the last drop of blood.

About 3,000 men followed his orders. Among them, numerous SSmen and volunteers from the Hitler Youth. They initiated a house-to-house battle with heavy losses. On October 21st, the German commander finally surrendered officially. Anyone who wanted to surrender before then, despite the hopeless situation, had to expect to be fanatically persecuted.

Anyone who hung a white cloth out of the window and wanted to surrender. Aken was one of the first cities to be liberated was then considered a defeist or could be [Music] murdered. The SS also now turned on its own population. The desertion of soldiers was pursued more intensely than before. So order collapsed on the one hand in the Reich and violence struck back at the Germans from the outside.

But the Nazis, so to speak, beat their fellow Germans to persevere. [Music] [Music] Even without words, it becomes clear that Germans still saw an encounter with Adolf Hitler as an honor, and the news reel was supposed to motivate them to persevere with such grotesque propaganda campaigns. In Berlin, Joseph Gerbles mobilized the remnants of the German population for a march to destruction.

The staging of the so-called folkm was intended to demonstrate the invincibility of the reich. [Music] Million couldn’t find. The fog storm was the very last contingent and everyone at least that was the idea. All 16 to 60 year olds were mobilized, mostly equipped with looted weapons or not at all. But as the war progressed, however, these folk storm battalions were increasingly deployed to the front line.

And that deployment was, of course, completely pointless. The war in the air also took on new dimensions. No longer were only large cities bombed, but medium-sized cities with industrial sites as well. To defend themselves, the Germans were forced to withdraw their air forces from other fronts.

Although militarily effective, the usefulness of the devastating air war is still being disputed to this day. In my opinion, it shortened the war considerably because the Germans were forced to invest the majority of their armament resources into the air war to protect the they actually hoped to achieve two goals with the bombings, namely to break the morale of the general population, but that didn’t succeed and to paralyze arms production, which basically succeeded only very late.

And as we know not as much through the direct destruction of the production facilities but the more effective thing was the destruction of the logistic system that is the infrastructure the railroad facilities that’s what brought production to a standstill a destroyed production hall of Daimler Works. During the war the company had mostly built trucks and aircraft engines.

However, as before, not only industrial sites, but also civilian targets were bombed, which by the fall of 1944 seemed at least questionable from a moral point of view. One could argue that the war was actually decided in September of 44. It was just a matter of time. Yes, that’s right. But the war had yet to be won, and the British and Americans weren’t on the Rine yet.

And they had a lot of respect for the line and a lot of respect for the Germans. And the question was, of course, we’re going to win the war, but at what price? And when will this shitty war finally be over? Because there was war fatigue. And to end the war, we had to hit it hard. The British in particular bombed civilian targets in the Reich.

Bombs were loaded on bases in England almost daily. These included 4,000 lb blockbusters that would detonate while still in the air, covering as many house roofs as possible and paving the way for incendiary [Music] bombs. Because the British still had the idea that if they kept burning down the inner cities, then the Germans would somehow give up and the British further wars, further advances, further fighting on land.

And that then led to the fact that the British were particularly successful in destroying cities. And those incendury attacks that they flew also took a particularly large number of human lives. It was certainly the most radical form of warfare against the German civilian population. About 600,000 German civilians fell victim to the Allied bombing war.

In light of such numbers, it was difficult to understand why the Germans continue to support the criminal Nazi regime. [Music] Towards the end, fear really prevailed more and more. As you hear from personal testimonies, we had to win the war because with what we had done, if we lose, we don’t even want to imagine what they will do to us.

that created a great will to persevere even after the sometimes terrible bombardments by the allies which were aimed at breaking the will of the population to persevere. That simply didn’t happen because this total dictatorship of national socialism still worked so well in capturing large parts of the population that the distribution of goods of services still reached the people.

The Nazi regime not only had to ensure the survival of the population, but it also had to maintain the production of armaments which was necessary for the war. In order to escape the increasingly precise attacks by the British and Americans, production facilities were moved underground throughout the Reich.

One response to the air war was to say, “We’re now moving what we consider to be the most important and central production areas to bomb-proof underground production facilities. The factories were put in mines, tunnels, and underground galleries. New tunnels were also built for some of the underground production facilities.

The news reel does not reveal that mostly forced laborers and concentration camp inmates were used for the construction and operation of these facilities in order to carry out the dangerous work. That was a big program that was set up there which again entailed a change in the character of forced labor because concentration camp inmates were systematically used in those underground relocation projects and that was where the most deadly working conditions for forced laborers prevailed.

When US troops reached the middle manufacturing plant in the Harts Mountains in April of 1945, they found the remains of one of these terrible factories. Prisoners from the Middle Bodora concentration camp had to build the engines for the V2 here. The labor camp only operated for 18 months, but the inhumane conditions cost the lives of 20,000 people.

All the GIs found were a few completely exhausted prisoners. there. Above all, Jewish concentration camp prisoners or concentration camp prisoners in general were used because it was very dangerous. The work was very dangerous, but it was also detrimental to their health and it was the kind of work that was expected from those in whose survival they had no interest in anyway and where the term extermination through labor absolutely summed up the situation.

Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were forced to slave away on large construction sites and in factories throughout the Reich. The prisoners were kept alive only as long as they were able to work. Those who became weak and sick were left to their fate or sent to the gas chamber. [Music] The minister of armaments who was responsible for using the now 7 million forced laborers was Albert.

He would visit the deployment area of the latest Vermach offensive. He wanted to follow the battle personally. Adolf Hitler planned to overrun the allies in the Ardens. All reserves still available were mobilized for this purpose. The decision was to be made in the hilly forests of the Arden. The Nazi leadership concentrated hundreds of thousands of Vermach soldiers in the border area between the German Reich, Belgium, and France.

The Aden offensive was Hitler’s attempt to turn the war once again, to give it a military twist. He really believed the Western allies were at the weakest point in this opposing alliance. And if you beat them, so to speak, as you did in 1940, then possibly the whole Western front would collapse. The Western Allies would withdraw and then only the Soviet Union would be left and then, so to speak, the German war machine could focus its full power once again on the Eastern front.

concentr. The US forces had been trying to advance toward the Rine for weeks in the Hutkan forest between Aken and Duran. They had unexpectedly suffered heavy losses. On December 16th, 1944, the VeyK offensive, Operation Autumn Fog, began. At 5 in the morning, the German artillery opened fire.

20 divisions were ready to attack. The Allies were taken completely by surprise by the German offensive. They hadn’t expected the Germans to be able to pull together so many tanks and troops. But unlike in 1940, now there were allied troops in the Aden. In 1940, no one was there and they just marched through.

Now there were troops there and they were fighting too. If we do not succeed, Adolf Hitler declared at a briefing, I don’t see any chance of a favorable outcome to this war, but we will get through. The deluded dictator still failed to recognize the sheer superiority of his opponents. But for the US troops, the offensive was much harder to repel than expected.

In the battle that is now known in US military history as the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans inflicted heavy casualties on them. [Music] For the Americans, the Battle of the Bulge was a very significant experience because American troops for the first time actually experienced what land warfare had meant in Europe during the previous wars.

wars under terrible weather conditions and wars in difficult terrain. And of course, these are all the reasons that contributed to this myth. It was also the bloodiest land battle fought by the US Army during World War II. About 19,000 soldiers were killed during that period. At first, the Germans had the element of surprise on their side.

Entire units with thousands of soldiers fell into their hands as the newsre reported [Music] triumphantly. the karma of the writer. With racist condescension, Nazi propaganda tried to cover up the hopelessness of the Vermach’s military situation. The plan to crush the Allies no longer had much to do with reality. [Music] The idea that this plan was based on was that you had to get your fuel from the American depots.

And that was of course a plan that was based on so many intangibles that the German divisions, there were a lot of SS divisions involved. So it was really again what the Reich was somehow able to scrape together including weapons. The Germans then managed to advance about 100 km into Belgian territory. kilome. The element of surprise fizzled out very quickly.

You also couldn’t use an initial shock to advance quickly enough to create reality. And in certain parts of the front, the attack failed completely. It all went completely wrong, especially with the Vaffan SS. And then there’s also the fact that anyone who had ever been to the Aden could see for himself that it wasn’t the ideal area for a 60 ton tank.

The army that marched through there in 1940 marched through with light tanks, with light trucks. And now the army of 1944 was marching through there, which was equipped completely differently and which wasn’t suitable for these mountain roads. The allies reacted quickly and were therefore able to hold their key positions.

Reserves and supplies arrived quickly. Even the bad weather couldn’t save the VeyK. Its units suffered massive losses. After 2 weeks, the Germans found themselves on the defensive. Then the Americans counteratt attacked and by the end of January, basically everything was back to the way it was at the beginning. The German American front was restored during Christmas week 1944.

The Allies seized the military initiative again. In the evacuated town of Eshva, American GIS celebrated Christmas, the last one of this war. In a few weeks, the German offensive would collapse. On the home front, the Germans also celebrated the holidays which was staged for the news reel in line with propaganda.

At the same time, their fathers, brothers, and sons were facing Soviet superiority in Hungary. On December 25th, the ring around German troops in Budapest closed. The Red Army set out to conquer Hungary’s capital. Germany’s former allies were now to be liberated. As early as the spring of 1944, the alliance between Hungary and the Third Reich had become fragile.

Hungary had been an ally of Nazi Germany since 1941 when the military defeat of Nazi Germany became apparent. Hungary launched its first attempts to reorient itself and established contact with the Allies. Hitler then immediately summoned the Reich regent Miklo Horthy to Berlin for a report.

While the dictator was pressuring him with one of his tantrums, German troops marched into Hungary. When Horthy returned, the country was occupied. The Nazis began deporting the Jewish population to Avitz. Starting on March 19th, 1944, German troops entered Hungary completely unexpectedly and without a fight took power there.

Of course, the old Hungarian government was still there. The Hungarian regent Mikloshi was still there. But he didn’t really have that much to say anymore. All the power was in the hands of the German representatives. There was a R ple potentiary. That’s what he called himself. And there was also, of course, a so-called special task force that was set up specifically to deal with the Jews.

The bad thing was, after all, that the Germans already had a lot of experience and murder. This special task force under Aishman initially began to empty the country and by the summer of 1944 they deported about 430,000 people to Awitz. There it was 2/3 went immediately to the gas chamber and one/3 remained.

They did forced labor and most of them still died there. So it was a terrible situation and of course it was one of the last brutal highlights of the Holocaust. It was also referred to as the final chapter. In January of 1945, the Red Army under the command of Marshall Ivan Konv advanced towards Brelau and Krakow without encountering any significant resistance.

In the face of imminent defeat, the German occupiers began to cover up their crimes with murderous thoroughess. This was also the case at the Avitz Birkinau camp complex. [Music] As the Soviet army approached, the SS cleared most of the camps and the detainees went on so-called death marches.

Attempts were made to bring them on foot to the Al in order to cover their tracks. However, most of the people who were sent on these marches were no longer physically able. So, the marches basically meant death marches because a large proportion of those who were sent on those marches simply perished. He Himmler was responsible for the evacuation of the concentration camps.

The SS Reich Fura instructed his troops to systematically destroy all evidence of the regime’s mass murders before it fell into Allied hands. There was this infamous Zonda Commando 105. They started digging all these mass graves in 1943 and burning the dead. And that’s what they did in the middle of the whole extermination program.

That’s what they did in Awitz with a certain amount of success. Files were destroyed. The crerematoria were dismantled. The gas chambers were blown up. When the first units of the Red Army reached the concentration camp on January 27th, 1945, most of the barracks were empty. The soldiers found only a few prisoners left who could bear witness to the horrors that took place there.

I think there were 6 to 7,000 prisoners that the Red Army found there completely exhausted. Of course, they tried to help those people immediately, but it’s also a well-known phenomenon among people who have been starved very badly that they actually die the moment they get something to eat.

And that’s exactly what happened there. And another 20% of those people died in the following weeks. The liberated also spoke of the gas chambers where up to 10,000 people were murdered every day. What was new about Avitz was the dimension of the whole thing. That is it is now assumed that about 1.3 million people were killed there and that was new and of course it had a corresponding effect.

Anyone who has been to Awitz knows that much more has been preserved than the perpetrators would have liked. the glasses, the hair, the suitcases, everything is still there. And that actually left no doubt as to what actually happened there. Ashvitz Berkanau has become a symbol of the worst mass crime in history. The survivors describe the selections at the ramp, the hunger, the torture, the human experiments.

In the face of this kind of horror, mankind is still searching for explanations today. Talk of a relapse into barbarism is nonsense. I believe the opposite is the case. Modern states have many more possibilities to move people away. sophisticated transportation systems, railroad cars that quickly be used to move hundreds of thousands of people, airplanes and bombs that completely wipe out cities in a few days.

The technical possibilities of the modern state are so great that if a dictator makes use of them, he can quickly implement very large killing programs. Modernity has not only increased the possibilities. It has introduced the division of labor in which everyone is a small [ __ ] in the wheel and can say yes I signed some files.

I put together the trains but I didn’t do it myself. That has a relieving effect. It’s a process of civilization that paradoxically made it possible for this monstrous murder program to be born. Some children survived the horror. They willingly showed the tattoos on their arms that identified them as victims of the national socialist racial fanaticism.

They too will describe the unimaginable, which at first many Germans refuse to believe. But the genocide of 6 million Jews is a bitter [Music] truth. Early 1945 in Corland on the Baltic Sea. For several months, Army Group North of the Vermacht had been surrounded on the peninsula by the Red Army. The immense losses of men and material over the past years of the war had shattered the once-feared army of Nazi Germany.

Amateur photographs captured the sorry state of the trapped units. Nazi propaganda on the other hand still clung to the myth of military strength. The news reel shows the commissioning of so-called folks in the homeland. Folks, men, youths, and stragglers formed the personnel of the newly formed units.

What was particularly perfidious, even in a hopeless military situation, the men swore an oath to the furer. [Music] Oh my god. Hallelujah. The idea was not to give up. And the concept of self-sacrifice was a very strong and important one. That’s why Hitler thought the war navy was so great because they went down with man and mouse.

He thought that was great. That was the way to do it. On January 12th, 1945, the Red Army launched a major offensive into East Prussia. At 4:45, the sky suddenly turned bright as day as up to 300 Soviet guns per kilometer of front opened fire on the German positions. Red Army cameramen filmed apocalyptic scenes behind the Vermach’s defensive lines along a broad front after it quickly collapsed.

In previous years, the Vermacht had waged a campaign of extermination in the Soviet Union against the racially inferior population. This was according to the ideology of the national socialists. Now the theater of war had shifted east to the territory of the German Reich and with the Red Army soldiers came fear of revenge in many places. People were simply afraid.

They were told that the subhumans of the Red Army were coming. They also knew what sort of atrocities had been committed before in the Soviet Union. So, it was a mixture of prejudices and a real fear of Red Army brutality. And people recognized what crimes Nazi Germany had committed. and they knew people would want to take revenge.

In view of these prospects, many of the approximately 2 and a half million people who lived in East Prussia at the time wanted to leave their homeland as quickly as possible and flee to the west. But there was a problem. The Nazis forbade escape for a long time. They wanted the positions to be held and thus to be able to counter the Red Army, which contributed to the fact that the escape then took place so abruptly.

People left at the last minute with makeshift luggage and were often wiped out in the course of the war. Who was fleeing on these journeys? mothers with children and old men. Which meant, as always in war, it hit the weakest who had to fend for themselves and who were held responsible for the failure of an entire nation, as well as a lack of evacuation plans.

Because the land route to the west was largely cut off by the Soviets, many people fled across the frozen lake. But further dangers lay in these coastal waters. The provisional destination for many was the Baltic Sea coast near Gdansk. People hoped to continue their escape from there by ship because the ports in the region were still under German control.

Gotenhathan was one of them. It was there on the 30th of January 1945 that thousands of people boarded the Vilhelm Gustloff. The ship had previously enjoyed nationwide fame. Adolf Hitler had personally traveled to Hamburg in May of 1937 for its launching. For years, the ship had served as a cruise ship for the Nazi organization dures relaxed on its decks during cruises through the Mediterranean and North Sea.

Now, the ship was supposed to help bring refugees and soldiers to the west. It was overloaded with thousands of people on board when it set sail. Because of the heavy weight, the captain selected a course through deep water. This led the ship far out into the Baltic Sea, where the Soviet Navy also cruised.

At around 900 p.m., the ship the Wilhel Gustlaf, which was named after a leader of the National Socialist Party who was murdered in 1936, was discovered and torpedoed by a Soviet submarine. It sank in the icy waters. At least 9,300 people died in the disaster. It wasn’t a war crime in legal terms because the Gustloff was sailing dark in hostile seas, was armed and there were soldiers on board.

So in a way, according to the laws of war, it was legal to attack the Gustaf. Whether it was legitimate is another question and everybody has to answer that question for themselves. On the other side of the world too, the war raged on unabated. US naval units were cruising off the Japanese island of Ewoima about 1,000 km south of Tokyo.

In midFebruary of 1945, battleships opened fire on the island, which is only 21 km in size, but was strategically important. US bombers took off from the Marana Islands and provided air support for the operation. The volcanic island of Evoima was an important location because there were airfields and because it was useful as an emergency landing site for bombers.

So, it became a strategic asset. And that’s why Evoima came into focus. Shortly before 9:00 in the morning, war correspondents from the US government office of war information filmed tens of thousands of US Marines as they landed on the island 3 days after the attack began. This footage of the fierce fighting around the so-called Sulfur Island later formed the basis of the documentary film To the Shores of Ewima.

We run into trouble on Green Beach. From their fortified positions on Mount Sabbachi, the chaps look right down our throats. In addition to the cameramen, there were also photographers among the war correspondents. A few days after the start of the landing operation, one of them captured US Marines raising the US flag on the summit of the extinct volcano Mount Suribachi.

Although it was only a reenactment of a previous raising of the stars and stripes, the photo has gone down in history. World War II was a war of images. Yes, out of millions of photos, we have five or six photos that we all know. And the flag raising on Evoima, the reenactment symbolized the victory of the Americans in the Pacific.

anik Pacific. But it would be several months before American victory in the Pacific was achieved. The fighting around Eoima alone raged on for weeks after the photograph was taken on the volcano’s summit. The Japanese defenders pursued bloody tactics. The commander was fully aware that he wouldn’t be able to defend the island.

The goal was to inflict as many casualties on the Americans as possible. so that the war would become unpopular and that the war would then be stopped. That didn’t succeed, but nevertheless, the number of dead was immense. More than 6,800 Marines died before the island was completely taken. Added to this, there were nearly 20,000 wounded.

On the Japanese side, a large part of the approximately 20,000 defenders lost their lives. only 216 surrendered to the enemy. Overall, the Americans were very surprised by the Japanese willingness to make sacrifices which were shown in the operations of the defense of Evoima. No one actually believed that the Japanese would really fight so rigorously to the last man.

And that played a very big part in the Americans changing their mind because at some point they said we’re going to have to end the war differently. Japanese troops were not just vehemently resisting the threat of defeat on Ewima. Since October of 1944, their commanders in the Pacific had been using a new approach.

Kamicazis pilots swooped down on enemy warships in their planes, risking their own deaths. Vice Admiral Takajiro Onishi, commander of the Japanese Naval Air Forces, had developed the idea. That was of course a complete shock for the Americans. They hadn’t expected it. It was a completely new form of warfare. They hadn’t expected that willingness to make sacrifices.

The squadrons of suicide pilots had names like Morning Sun and Mountain Cherry Blossom. It was not difficult to recruit fanatical new blood for these suicide missions. However, if you look at it in terms of results, it wasn’t very efficient. A lot of planes were shot down by US defenses. And even the ones that did get through had little effect.

It was more of an element of shock. Element Images like these contributed to this. This footage from January 21st, 1945 documented the aftermath of a kamicazi attack on the USS Ticeroga near the Formosa Strait. Although the aircraft carrier was not sunk in the attack, more than 100 men aboard the ship were killed, further increasing the toll of American troops in the Pacific.

Almost 2 weeks later, the big three of the anti-Hitler coalition met at the Soviet seaside resort of Yaltta. For years, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States had been united against Nazi Germany. Now the war in Europe seemed to be decided in their favor. Its end was just a matter of time.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt made plans for the future and fleshed out the agreements of a post-war order that they had agreed on at the Thrron summit about a year earlier. The big three gathered at Yaltta and now the issue of the westward shift of Poland was decided and it was clear that there would be occupation zones and there was also discussions about what would happen in the Pacific.

So far the Soviet Union had not taken part in the fighting against Japan. The US president, who was in poor health, wanted to change this in order to end the war in the Pacific quickly and to avoid further heavy losses. There Roosevelt approached Stalin and negotiated with him and said, “We need you in the Pacific.” And he got a promise from Stalin that the Red Army would attack in Europe 3 months after the end of the war, which they did to the day.

In return, the Western Allies pledged to further expand their support for the Red Army by bombing the German Reich. 2 days after the end of the summit, Dresdon became the focus of their air force. Around 800 British Lancaster bombers took off on the 13th of February, 1945 to attack the then seventh largest city in Germany, which had previously been largely spared from air strikes.

In this situation, Churchill said, “Give me something to show Stalin that we support the Soviets.” Soviet. The idea then became, if we flew air strikes to the rear of the Soviet front and cause chaos there, that would somehow help the Red Army. The British planes reached Dresden shortly before 10 in the evening. An automatic camera shot footage from the air of how the explosive and incendurary bombs were dropped.

The attack was not about hitting exact targets. The city was to be extensively destroyed. Within 15 minutes, 3/arters of the city center was in flames. The fact that Dresden was such a devastating attack was also due to the circumstances. Dresden had no anti-aircraft defenses. The anti-aircraft guns had been moved to the eastern front.

And some of the night fighters were not allowed to take off. It was a clear night and the British were able to come in relatively low. So it was a textbook attack. A few hours later on Valentine’s Day 1945, American bombers attacked Dresden again in daylight. A US newsre described the event. The veteran first division of the eighth air force today carried its 200,000 ton of bombs to help and alive.

Now they hit Dresden hardest of all. A total of four waves of attacks hit the important transport hub on the Elb. The blitz here blasting away for the Russians now 45 mi away links a two-front drive from east and west on Berlin. The consequences of the Anglo-American air strikes were devastating. It was estimated that up to 25,000 people fell victim to the bombs.

I never believed,” said an official at the Dresden Missing Person Center, who described his impressions, that death could approach people in such different forms, burned, charred, dismembered, apparently sleeping peacefully, contorted in pain, completely cramped, clothed, naked, and as a pitiful heap of ashes, and above it all, the acrid smoke and the unbearable smell of decay.

Images taken months after the attacks gave an idea of the scale of the [Music] disaster. Meanwhile, on the western front, the Vey was falling further into a defensive mode. In the fall of the previous year, the Allies had liberated Aken, the first major German city. In December of 1944, a surprising German offensive in the Arden initially led to a slowdown of the Anglo-American advance.

Only after the complete defeat of the German counterattack in January 1945 could US forces fully concentrate on the advance eastward again. They encountered fierce resistance at Yulish. A German newsre reports. from Gage. The German defenders had blown up the Rur Dam. As a result, the level of the river at Ulik had also risen noticeably.

Only after the flood waters had receded were US units able to cross the rarer and move into the city center on February 23rd. There the GIs were greeted with a shocking picture. Ulik no longer existed. For months the town had been under fire. Countless artillery shells and aerial bombs had landed on it. The last remaining inhabitants of Ulik had already been evacuated in December of the previous year.

What remained was a field of ruins in which the German defenders barricaded themselves and engaged the Americans in a battle for mountains of rubble that was as fierce as it was futile. In early March, the commander-in-chief of the US forces in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, arrived in the conquered city and visited Ulik Citadel.

For a long time, the structure had been considered impregnable. No enemy soldier had entered it since the Napoleonic Wars. Eisenhower’s propaganda photographs from the Citadel were intended to convey confidence and make it clear that there was no doubt that the entire German Reich would be conquered just like the centuries old fortress.

Meanwhile, in the east, the Red Army continued its advance unabated. In addition to East Prussia in the north, it also advanced further south in Sisia towards what was then the territory of the German Reich and advanced rapidly. The region was of great strategic importance because of its numerous industrial plants. Our tanks have crushed everything, wrote a Red Army soldier in his diary on January 23rd.

Their tracks flattened wagons, horses, and everything else that was on the road. The reasons for the success lay in the Red Army’s numerical superiority in men and material and in serious tactical errors on Hitler’s part. In November of 1943, Hitler focused his emphasis on the West. In 1944, it went all wrong.

But he still had the feeling that he had to fight the West allies who had pushed back the Germans from their new territories. And that at a time when the Red Army launched their greatest attack on the Nitel River, by doing so, he made himself Stalin’s best alliance partner. partner from Stalin. In recent years, many Germans had fled from the bombing raids of the Western Allies to Sisia, which had long been spared the air war.

With the advance of the Soviets, they now found themselves in the middle of the war. Similar to East Prussia, many people there had only one goal, to flee from the Red Army. The revenge will be terrible because what we did in the course of the Eastern campaign, especially against Soviet civilians, what crimes we committed, that will come back to us as revenge.

The fears often prove to be justified. Many Red Army soldiers then actually took revenge for the crimes that the Vey and SS had previously been guilty of. What we had there was an escalation of violence against German civilians through the shooting of civilians and of women and children, the abduction of German civilians, and the mass rape of women, the sexual violence against German Women can be explained in several ways.

First, it is said that a woman’s body is symbolic of the nation. Thus, a desecration of the woman stands for a desecration and dishonor of the enemy. Nazi propaganda regularly picked up on these desecrations and thus continued to stir up fear and hatred among the population. A news reel report from January 1945 from Sisia. [Music] [Music] Fore! Foreign! Foreign! [Music] [Music]

Despite the militarily hopeless situation, leading national socialists continued to say that capitulation was a no-go. Instead, they continued to cling to strategically outdated concepts to stop the Red Army. The question for the Germans was, how can we stop this avalanche of a Red Army? And one concept that was developed as early as 1944 on the Eastern front was to introduced fixed sites that were then later declared fortresses which were located at traffic junctions and that you defend at these points and so

you had breakers on which the ways of the Red Army attacked breaks. One of these breakwaters was to be breastlau in lower Sisia which was declared a fortress by Hitler. On January 20th, Carl Hanka, the Gowiter of Lower Sisia, ordered the civilian population to leave the city. However, due to a lack of organization and fear of the dangers of fleeing, 200,000 people stayed in Breastlau.

The militarily inexperienced population was to defend the city together with units of Fuldorm, Vmach, and SS. Those who refused were shot. This led to absurd measures. They created taxiways in the city. They tried to defend the city in house-to-house fighting which drove up the death toll among the civilian population to an exorbitant degree.

Hut. While Breastlau was still under siege, the Red Army advanced to the odor on other sections of the front. Some 370 km downstream. It had built bridge heads on the west bank near Kustrin. Nevertheless, the Nazi leadership remained unimpressed. In the middle of the month, Gobles wrote in his diary, “As far as the east is concerned, the furer is no longer too concerned.

He has the impression that we are slowly regaining solid fronts. An idiosyncratic reading of events which was picked up by war correspondents. A bizarre interview took place on the odor. Even though it was never shown in the cinemas, it illustrated the absurdity of Nazi propaganda. While the Red Army had conquered large parts of Cisia and Pomerania in the east, the Americans, British, and Canadians had made rather slow prog.

progress in the west. Their next major objective was the Rine. US forces had been fighting their way towards Cologne since the end of February. So the Rine was now the big natural border in the west. That’s why the fighting on the way to the Rine was still relatively heavy with relatively heavy losses.

February 45 was one of the most deadly months for the US Army. On March 5th, American units reached the suburbs of the cathedral city. The third US armored division moved in through the districts of Boklemund and Vulgang. The ordinary citizen of Cologne has nothing to fear from Allied troops read leaflets that have previously been dropped over the city.

[Applause] A day later, the GIs fought their way into the city center and witnessed a young woman who was apparently caught between the lines in her vehicle on Kristoff Strasa. Though seriously injured, she could be saved. A few hundred meters away, the Americans encountered a last German pocket of resistance near Domelutz.

A Panther tank blocked the way to the Rine, but even it couldn’t stop the offensive for long. With one well- aimed hit, it was taken out. Only three of the fiveman crew could save themselves from the burning wreck. The last significant resistance had been broken. Late in the afternoon on March 6th, peace returned.

In the districts of Cologne on the left bank of the Rine, the Second World War was over. The next day, the high command of the Vmach reported succinctly, “The heap of rubble that is Cologne has been left to the enemy.” The US military, on the other hand, reported extensively from the conquered city. Cologne was one of the great German cities, by far the largest city conquered by the Allies up to that time.

Hamburg, Leipzik, Berlin, Munich was still far away, so it made sense to conquer Cologne. The Cologne Cathedral was a landmark in the west of the Reich. So you document this more widely than the conquest of Visel. As part of the special film project 186, Army Air Force cameramen accompanied the advancing US troops in Cologne.

They captured the immense extent of destruction on 16 millimeter color film. To this day, their images provide a depressing testimony of the city, almost threearters of which had been destroyed. US leadership placed great value on the work of the cameramen. Film had already played a big role in World War II as documentation, but also as propaganda.

Camera technology was portable and practical and eventually also in color, shot in color by the Americans. And they wanted to bring the images home with them. They wanted to document not just for the cinemas but also for the military internally. Before the defeat, the defenders of Cologne had successfully blown up the bridges over the Rine.

Thus, for the time being, the Allies were denied a way across the river. A day after capturing Cologne, the Americans pulled off another coup some 55 kilometers upstream. A small advanced party of the 9inth US Armored Division reached Ludenorf Bridge which spans the Rine near Remagan. To their surprise, the bridge had not been blown up and there was also little or no resistance from enemy troops.

The Ray Folk the Rayan Folk Storm didn’t assemble. If the Rayan Folktor battalion had been there, had fired a few more rounds, then this small patrol, there weren’t that many American soldiers, wouldn’t have been able to reach the bridge head so easily. The bridge was successfully captured in a surprise attack. The action was reenacted for propaganda purposes a few days later.

Thus, during the next 24 hours, more than 8,000 US soldiers reached the eastern bank of the Rine. Very units tried to correct their mistake and destroy the bridge by air strikes and artillery fire. However, it took 10 days for the bridge to actually collapse. By then, US sappers had erected a pontoon bridge and continued to move units across the Rine on a large scale.

It was a severe blow to the defense of the Reich, which was not without consequences for those responsible. Hitler was absolutely furious. And the Brit commander was executed right away. And all the others they could find, they were tried and murdered. I’d say the furer no longer appeared in public on the 20th of March.

He allowed himself to be filmed one last time in the garden of his Reich Chancellery. Did Hitler realize that the war was lost? And if so, when did he realize it? One argument was that Hitler was not stupid and knew how things were going. This led to him withdrawing and showing himself only when he could announce a victory.

Well, these announcements of victory failed to materialize and he became more and more depressed. Physical decline set in because it was clear to him how this was going to end. Here the furer awarded Hitler youth who had distinguished themselves militarily. The fact that the war was lost does not change the sense of duty to continue fighting.

The younger generation in particular fell victim to the inhuman fanaticism. In this last phase of the war, the kits were the last reserve of the Third Reich very individually as cannon foder. All of these children were used as cannon foder for the final battle. End camp. [Music] The boy with the bazookas was Wilhelm Hubner. At the time he was the subject

of numerous news reel reports. The lower Silisian city of Laoban in present-day Poland had already been largely captured by the Red Army in February of 1945. In early March, however, it was recaptured by the Vey, one of the extremely rare German success stories of those days. [Music] Propaganda Minister Joseph Gerbos immediately traveled to the region and shortly afterward gave a fanatical speech in nearby Geritz.

It was his last appearance in a news reel. to those of medieval unra. [Applause] [Music] Bon and God would [Music] [Applause] Gerbles in particular, if you will, comes into his own with his speech in the spring of 1945. It is of course also a staging of the

downfall and the emphasis is that we will not survive it. That’s it. Actually, there’s always talk of the turning point and of victory. But the underlying motive is actually it’s Nazi ideology or nothing. In January 1945, Gerbles called for a people’s sacrifice for the As in the Napoleonic wars in the previous century, the population had to donate.

[Music] [Music] In the face of impending doom, the regime desperately tried to compensate for the losses, including with women. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] The brutal thing of course was the distance of these bazookas which was a maximum of 100 m usually 50 60 in order to be really effective. Those who fired them of course always paid with their lives.

Of course that was also the cynical calculation of the regime. A folktor man who then carried it out who destroyed an enemy tank. It was the choreography of doom. The territory still under German control was shrinking day by day. According to the will of the Nazi leadership, people had to now sacrifice not only clothes and iron, but also themselves.

This was an indication of the regime’s lack of inhibition and brute willingness to die, which in the end was ready to open all the floodgates, to discard any form of responsibility, and to do everything possible to continue this war, no matter how futile it had become. to the last bullet. On March 19th, 1945, US B29 superfortresses were loaded with bombs on Saipan, the main island of the Maranas.

The target of the longrange planes was the Japanese capital. Mission commander, Major General Curtis E. Lame, had previously made a major decision. As part of Operation Meeting House 2, Tokyo was to be attacked not only with explosive bombs, but also with incendiary bombs. These were also to be dropped over residential areas.

An armada of bombers took off from three island airfields on the afternoon of March 9th. Each of the more than 300 planes was loaded with 40 cluster bombs, each containing 1,500 napom bombs. The GIS called them Tokyo calling cards. Original footage of the large-scale night attack is not available. Scenes shot later showed the Superfortresses dropping their deadly load.

More than 1,600 tons of bombs were dropped from a low altitude over the urban area. Japanese houses were mostly made of wood and paper and immediately burst into flames. Strong westerly winds ignited a firestorm. Up to 100,000 people were reported to have died in the operation. Over 40 km of the city was destroyed. The attack is still considered the heaviest conventional air strike in history.

The intent was to convey the message to the Japanese opponents of the war that Japanese war propaganda had very strongly stirred up the will on the part of the Japanese soldiers to really go to their deaths. [Music] The fanaticism with which the Japanese military fought was once again evident on Okinawa.

The largest island in the Ryuku chain is located about 500 km off the southern main island of Nippon. The US military had assembled 180,000 troops for an invasion of Okinawa. When the enterprise launched on Easter Sunday 1945, the GIS initially encountered little resistance. The defenders had retreated into the hinterland where they put up fierce resistance.

When you think about the battle of Okinawa, a lot of civilians there were holed up in caves and Japanese Americans were deployed here to deliver the message in Japanese. Come out of the caves. Surrender. It doesn’t make sense for you to kill yourselves or to wait to die by flamethrowers or by hand grenades. But not everyone was willing to give up.

For example, teachers would throw themselves and their students to their deaths from cliffs on the island to escape life under US occupation. It would take months before Okinawa could be brought completely under American control. On April 12th, 1945, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt died at the age of 63.

In a funeral procession through the streets of Washington, Americans bid farewell to their head of state. Vice President Harry S. Truman became his successor. In Berlin, the news caused a furer. Here you have the miracle I always predicted. Hitler is said to have shouted when he heard of Roosevelt’s death. Now, who’s right? The war is not lost.

April 1945 on the Odor River a good 60 km northeast of Berlin in what was then Netheren a Vermacht infantry battalion was engaged in combat with units of the advancing Red Army. This footage was among the last scenes shot by German propaganda units in that war. Despite the Third Reich’s hopeless military situation, shots of good humored German soldiers and fallen Red Army soldiers was supposed to spread optimism.

According to Nazi logic, surrender was not an option. Hitler decreed that it was a kind of duty to die, which many soldiers did. It was simply that they didn’t want to suffer another 1918. That is a defeat because they surrendered too early. This time the soldiers would rather surrender 5 minutes after 12 than 5 minutes before 12.

All this of course with horrendous losses. January 1945 was the month with the most casualties of the entire war with 450,000 dead. And in the weeks that followed, the great dying continued. Despite the omnipresent danger of death, many German soldiers fought on doggedly, especially on the Eastern Front. The idea of surrendering from today’s point of view, one would say that the war was lost after all.

But that wasn’t an option for the vast majority of soldiers on the eastern front. You only go into captivity when you look down the barrel of the tank and have no alternative. Otherwise, the measure is to avoid, if possible, captivity, which one imagines terrible. By midappril, the Red Army had reached almost every part of the western bank of the odor.

On the Zo Heights, a natural elevation in the Od. German units entrenched themselves in order to achieve the impossible and to stop the advance on Berlin. In the early morning hours of April 16th, some 900,000 soldiers of the first white Russian front supported by heavy artillery fire began the assault on the Zo Heights.

The German defense consisted of worn out frontline fighters, Hitler youth, and KBH soldiers, which the Vmach administration translated as fit for war. In soldier jargon, can limp excellently. Numerically, the Soviet enemy outnumbered them at least 4 to one. Nevertheless, they succeeded in stopping the Red Army for the time being.

Russian commanding general Gorgi Zukov became increasingly nervous. The Soviet side was under enormous pressure. It was an unspoken goal to conquer Berlin by Mayday. The Soviet leadership reacted accordingly and tried to break through the German front line by any means possible. In their desperation, the commanders resorted to unconventional means so they could announce the demanded breakthrough.

In doing so, they showed no consideration for their own soldiers. One example was that the Soviet attackers tried to illuminate the battlefield with the help of search lights. As a result, the German defenders saw the silhouettes very clearly and knew exactly what to shoot at. The toll in blood on both sides was enormous.

The Russians suffered more than 30,000 casualties while the Germans lost at least 12,000 men. After four days, the road to Berlin was cleared. In the west, the situation for the German defenders continued to deteriorate. After crossing the Rine, the Allies advanced inexraably eastward, conquering city after city. The strength of the Viamat had been exhausted in February 45.

And by March of 45, they no longer had the strength to maintain an orderly defense. Everything was collapsing like the Red Army in the east earlier. As they advanced, the forces of the Western powers were faced with the evidence of the crimes of the Nazi era to which millions of people had fallen victim over the past years.

In midappril, British units reached the Bergen Belin concentration camp near Cela. For years, people were tortured, abused, and murdered there. The battle hardy soldiers were used to death and suffering, but what they saw there dwarfed what they had experienced so far. British soldiers have described that they thought they would be greeted with cheers and that they would arrive as liberators.

Instead, what they saw in Been Belen was terrible emaciated figures, corpses on the street. The survivors were not able to move at all. The cheers were quite limited because everyone was too weak to express human emotion. By the end of the war, at least 75,000 prisoners were crammed there, including many women and children. The German Jewish girl, Anne Frank, who later became famous, was also interned there and died in the camp.

The British immediately set about feeding the survivors. They succeeded in arresting Ysef Kramer, the camp commander. To their surprise, the ardent Nazi showed no remorse. The camp commander still acted as if he was the boss because he assumed that the conquerors who arrived there also considered the people lying there on piles of corpses to be subhumans that they would consider that normal in the separate room he was in at some point when the job of murder became routine.

He felt that he was doing a job that was not morally wrong in the Nazi regime because after all they were the enemies of society and he was putting things in life in order. A few days earlier US troops had liberated several concentration camps in Tangia. They had taken control of Bkhanvald and the Ordruff satellite camp.

For many gis what they saw in the camps changed their attitude toward the enemy. Most of my comrades had no personal reason to fight the Germans. One soldier later recalled, “They thought that many of the stories they had read or heard in newspapers were made up, or at least exaggerated. Now the soldiers were proved wrong. After the liberation of the camps, the Allies forced the population of neighboring towns to visit the complexes and see for themselves the horror.

For many Germans, that was a shocking experience. [Music] The idea was when they were fully confronted with the crimes, it would start their cognitive process which should lead to the purification of the German civilian population. It is well known that this didn’t work immediately. Some people reacted rather defensively to this. But one can at least theorize whether it was a beginning so that parts of the civilian population came to terms with the crimes in the first place and that at least hopefully then did lead to a reorientation. On the 19th of April, US

units reached Leipzig. Joseph Gerbles appealed to the German population on that Thursday. bravely take on a fight that is inevitable and unavoidable. To stand upright before one’s fate with a clear conscience and a pure heart. To endure all suffering and every trial, but never even think of wavering in the agonizing hour of the final decision and throwing in the towel.

That is not only manly, it is also German in the best sense of the word. Pathetic words that were unable to stop the advance of the gis in Leipig. The main train station was quickly taken. There was only isolated resistance. Resistance groups had been distributing leaflets for days with slogans such as end the insane war of the Nazis and bring out the white flags.

Many leipers had obviously taken the messages to heart and hoped for a bloodless end to the war. [Music] They kind of just wanted to get through it. They waited for the Americans. That’s when you had the most hope. And somewhere at some point this madness would end. At least that was the dominant feeling among the people who no longer believed in national socialism.

But as in all parts of the Reich, there were also fanatical supporters of the regime in Saxony. At city hall, the Americans made a gruesome discovery. The mayor had committed suicide along with his wife and daughter. The city treasurer also followed them to their deaths. [Music] This situation was accompanied by an unprecedented wave of suicides.

So for many people it really was the downfall and they couldn’t imagine a world beyond the NS. But they could imagine a world beyond these conditions. That was of course the unique mood of doom that prevailed at that time. 50 km northeast of Leipig lies Togo. The small town on the elb became world famous shortly before the end of the war.

On April 26th, 1945, soldiers from the Red Army and the US Army celebrated their meeting there. In fact, their units had met for the first time the day before. Three and a half years of a brotherhood in arms against the Nazis lay behind them. The new US President Harry S. Truman spoke from Washington. The joining of our armed forces at this moment is a signal to ourselves and to the world that our nations working together in the cause of peace and freedom is an effective cooperation. But reality was different.

It was a friendship whose end would not be long in coming. While propaganda images were still being taken on the shore, people were fleeing in boats across the el to the west. They wanted to flee the Soviet sphere of influence. It was a step that many soldiers also took during those weeks.

As here in Tanga Munda, soldiers were desperately trying to get across the el. Their motive was clear. For German soldiers, it was clear in Allied captivity, you were likely to be treated somewhat in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. And so, it was much easier for a German soldier to raise his hands on the Western Front than on the Eastern front.

Having arrived in the territory that was barely under Western Allied control, many of the infantry men surrendered. During that time, US troop cameramen documented on almost a daily basis with color film how more and more members of the Vmach were putting their hands in the air instead of on a gun. This was not without danger. The commander-in-chief of the German army group south issued an unequivocal order at the end of March.

Anyone who strays from the troops in combat must report immediately to the nearest fighting troop. Finding them is not difficult. The noise of battle is the shest guide. Anyone who disobeyed the order ran the risk of being sentenced to death for desertion. But more and more soldiers were willing to take that risk. The Americans took millions of prisoners of war.

The bat was crumbling as they crossed the Rine. And now the question was what to do with them. The men were initially locked up in fencedin openair meadows and fields. Then the idea came up to group them together in huge camps. Thousands of infantry men were loaded onto military trucks and taken to the rhinand. In April, huge open spaces along the river were fenced in with barb wire.

The so-called Rin Meadow camps were built to make it difficult for the prisoners to escape. The complexes were built on the west bank of the river. They were officially called prisoner of war temporary enclosures. The sanitary conditions and the food supply in the camps were catastrophic from the very start. Now the policy was that the Germans should feel that they had lost the war.

They should understand what they had done. There had to be punishment. That’s what the soldiers had to endure there because they were barely fed. Thousands died. And you have to say quite clearly they died senselessly because the Americans could take better care of him. But they accepted the fact that a few thousand would die there. While hundreds of thousands of soldiers in captivity in the west awaited the end of the war, people in Berlin faced the prospect of a final battle proclaimed by the regime.

For weeks that spring, the Berliners had been setting up 1945 barricades and roadblocks and armed themselves as best they could for the impending attack by the Red Army. An endeavor that was as helpless as it was hopeless. On the 1st of February, the city was declared a fortress. The battle for Berlin was the last act of the war.

At that time, in 1939, Berlin was a city that had over 4 million inhabitants. At the end, there were about 2.5 million left, and this very densely populated area now became a battlefield. On April 21st, the first Soviet units crossed the Berlin ring road. As heavy artillery fire began and the Soviet air force attacked and Red Army troops advanced into the outlying districts, propaganda minister Joseph Gobles addressed the city’s population by [Music] radio.

for the final a last loyal contingent of the regime was forming up in the ruins to defend Berlin and the Fura. The dictator had decided to stay in the city. Before these battles began, they had considered flying Hitler out to be garden. But he deliberately chose a really big stage, a stage on which he could act as a statesman and a general.

The Red Army soldiers fought their way inexurably through the outskirts toward the government district. There was heavy fighting in the ruined landscape, which was documented by Russian cameramen. 30,000 meters of propaganda footage were created during those bloody battles. The Soviet commanders showed no consideration, neither for German civilians nor for their own soldiers.

Berlin could have been surrounded. Instead, they took it house by house and 10,000 Red Army soldiers died in that senseless fighting. And the way the Soviet Union waged war, well, that surprised even the allies. On the German side, too, the price that had to be paid was enormous. Exactly how many people lost their lives in Hitler’s capital is unknown.

At noon on April 25th, the Red Army closed the ring around Berlin. Their tanks advanced toward the center of the city. Hitler remained in his bunker under the Reich Chancellory, refusing to acknowledge defeat. For the last time, the Furer let himself be seen in the ruins of his official residence. It is not known exactly when this photo was taken.

Hitler then asked how long they could hold out. And the commander said only 24 hours. No longer. And only then, you can imagine only then after some delay did Hitler decide to commit suicide. He really tried to continue the fighting until the last conceivable moment. Hitler dictated his political legacy. Then he married his longtime lover, Ava Brown.

In the early afternoon of April 30th, they both retired to their private rooms in the bunker. These are photos of the rooms taken weeks later. The dictator shot himself in the head with a bullet. His wife died by poison. Both bodies were then doused with gasoline in the garden of the Reich Chancellory and [Music] burned.

Hitler always repeated, “I will not stop until 5 minutes past 12.” That was basically brutal, inhuman, but also a simple strategy which he implemented to the end. Even after the death of the furer, the fighting continued. On the 1st of May, the Red Army had taken parts of the government district and stood within sight of the Brandenburg gate and the Reich Chancellery.

Joseph Gerbles was now in command here. Hitler had decreed that Grand Admiral Dunitz would become Reich President and Propaganda Minister Gerbles Reich Chancellor. The latter tried to start negotiating surrender terms with the Red Army, but the Soviets on Stalin’s orders insisted on the immediate and unconditional surrender of the city.

On the 1st of May 1945, the majority of Berliners recognized the reality on the ground and hung white flags from their windows. In the evening, the Greater German radio reported a lie. Austin. In the next few hours, Joseph Gobles also took his life. his wife died with him. Earlier they had poisoned their children. In the mind of the fanatical Nazi Gerbles, that was inevitable.

Gerbles wrote in his diary that when a fortress commander surrendered, he didn’t even have the courage to kill himself. He was consistent. And it was also consistent to kill his children because after a Soviet occupation, life would no longer be possible. and they shouldn’t have to endure that. [Music] A life in a postNazi era.

The charred remains of the gobbles and the bodies of their six children were lined up by Red Army soldiers in the garden of the Reich Chancellery a short time later. In the meantime, Berlin had surrendered unconditionally. The Soviets took command of the city on the 2nd of May 1945. But there was still no peace. A woman in Berlin described the apocalyptic scenes in her diary. Panic reigns in the city.

Dismay and horror wherever we go. Robbery, looting, violence. In unrestrained lust, the army of our victors has pounced on the women of Berlin. They ravish our daughters. They rape our women. The men complained. Not once, no, six times. No, 10 times. and 20 times. There is no other conversation in the city.

Even after the fall of the German capital, the war was still not over. The new government under Reich President Donitz tried to delay the impending surrender. Their logic to buy time so that as many German soldiers as possible could reach the areas controlled by the British and Americans and thus escaped the dreaded Soviets.

Here, as in Saxony, long lines of soldiers formed in many places. All were headed [Music] west. The commander-in-chief of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, US General Eisenhower, had been based in Ron, France since September 1944. On the 6th of May, a German delegation under Colonel General Alfred Yodel went to the city.

In a middle school in Ru Jolikur, a decision was made to end the war. Completely misjudging the situation, the German negotiators still believed they had room to negotiate. There was still this idea we’ll negotiate, we’ll surrender only in the west. But then it was total surrender. After all German attempts had failed, Yodel radioed Reich President Dernitz at a/4 to 10 in the evening.

I see no other way out than chaos or signing. A few hours later, he received a reply. Authority to sign granted. At 2:41 on the morning of May 7th, Yodel signed the document. In a little schoolhouse in Rance, France, came the unconditional surrender of Germany. General Alfred Yodel, Nazi Chief of Staff, signed the document formally ending all German resistance as drawn by the representatives of Russia, Britain, France, and the United States.

General Walter Beetle Smith signed for the Supreme Command. And the end of one of history’s most massive and most brilliant campaigns brought a moment of well-earned joy to an American soldier named Ike Eisenhower. As in London, joy erupted across much of Europe when the news from France was announced.

After more than 5 and a half years, peace would return to the continent. But not everyone was celebrating exuberantly. On the Soviet side, mistrust mingled with the joy of victory. unsettled the Soviets because there was a great fear on both sides that so to speak one side could make a separate peace with the other side and then somehow still continue the war or something like that and the Soviet Union then insisted that this surrender ceremony will be repeated again.

The procedure was repeated on May 8th in a former Vermacht Pioneer and Engineering School in the Berlin Carl district. That way Soviet fears were to be allayed and the contribution made by the Red Army in the liberation of Europe could be properly recognized. General Gorgi Zukov took part in the ceremony on behalf of the Soviets.

In addition to the British and Americans, French representatives were now part of the delegation of the victorious powers. Field Marshall Vilhel Kitle, the head of the Supreme Command of the Vermach, arrived to represent Germany. The surrender was signed on the night of the 8th of May. It read, “We, the undersigned, acting by proxy for and on behalf of the Supreme Command of the German armed forces, hereby declare the unconditional surrender of all land, sea, and air forces under German command or control at the present time

simultaneously to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces and the Supreme Command of the Red Army. At that moment, which was the process of several days, when the Germans capitulated, everything that the German Empire had to offer in terms of power was used up. Zero hour is a very old-fashioned term, but it describes it.

There is nothing of substance left of the military and politics. A few days after the formal end of the war, one of the best known leaders of the Third Reich fell into the hands of the Allies. Rash Marshall Herman Guring had long been second in command. In the last days of the war, however, he fell from grace and was deposed by Hitler.

After the collapse of the regime, he now saw himself once again in a stateup supporting role and was surprised to find that like any ordinary soldier, he was first disarmed and then imprisoned. [Music] The moment he was captured by the Americans, he adopted a different role and claimed that he had been the foreign policy officer who tried to prevent what happened.

He claimed to be the moderating factor. He said that the allies now needed him as a prominent man of the state to now lead the German population into a new era. Stuff like that, wrong, confused assumptions. In 1935, Guring had promulgated the Nuremberg laws which sealed the disenfranchisement of Jewish citizens.

Later, he signed the order for the so-called final solution of the Jewish question and thus played a part in the Holocaust. A few months in the fall of 1946, after these films were made, Guring along with other Nazi criminals were indicted by the Allies and sentenced to death in Nuremberg. However, the sentence could not be carried out.

He had hidden two poison capsules in his luggage and had written a farewell letter. In it he wrote, “The German rice marshall will not let himself be executed by hanging. So I choose the death of the great Hannibal.” And then shortly before the execution, he poisoned himself. German war criminals. On the 20th of May, they noticed a man who called himself Hinevik Hittinger and claimed to be a member of the secret field police.

The policeman looked suspicious and was arrested. During his interrogation in Lunborg, he was caught up in contradictions. They also noticed that he resembled the most wanted Nazi mass murderer. Hinrich Himmler was caught. When they went to search him, he bit down on a cyanide capsule hidden in his mouth.

After Hitler and Gerbles, the former Reichfurer SS thus also cowardly evaded responsibility for his murderous actions. Wednesday the 23rd of May 1945 also marked the end of Grand Admiral Dunit’s insane attempt to rule Germany from Fenceborg. Dunit had been appointed Reich President by Hitler, but in fact remained completely powerless. Together with other men of his cabinet, he was arrested.

Thus, only three weeks after the suicide of its leader, the Third Reich was history. On June 24th, 1945, victory over Nazi Germany was celebrated in Moscow with a huge military parade in Red Square. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] For the Soviet side, of course, it was existential, especially after what they went through. There were about 26.

6 6 million victims. That’s the official figure, both civilians and soldiers. And that moment of victory was, of course, quite central to the Stalinist regime. With Stalin watching, 10,000 soldiers from all branches of the armed forces marched past Lenin’s mausoleum. General Zukov, who had led the offensive against Berlin, played a central role.

[Music] Sukov was the one who embodied this. This big heavy man on a strong white horse that embodied victory for the people. The downside for Zukov was that his military career as well as his political influence in general was of course over because Stalin as General Lissimo was of course considered the actual architect of this victory and that legend should not be changed.

Stalin was at the height of his power. With the victory over Hitler’s Reich, Eastern Europe had fallen into the hands of the Soviet leader. From then on, Stalin’s soldiers were his most loyal supporters. With their help, he could consolidate the Soviet Union’s status as a superpower and stand up to the United States in a new conflict that was slowly brewing, the Cold War.

A time when hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers were sent to their death seemed to be forgotten. In Berlin, the picture was different. The city lay in ruins. More than 28 square kilometers of the city had been destroyed over the years by air raids and the defensive battle against the Red Army.

The city center had been hit particularly hard. The magnificent boulevard Linden where 12 years earlier Nazis had celebrated Hitler’s seizure of power and paraded through the Brandenburg gate with torches lay in [Music] ruins. Some Berliners lived in apartments without exterior walls called bird’s nests. But almost immediately after the Soviets moved in, people set about rebuilding.

Cleanup crews were on the move everywhere. Their pay for the hard work, 72 fenigs an hour. The four victorious powers officially assumed supreme government power in Germany. It was exercised by the Allied Control Council, which was made up of representatives of Great Britain, France, the US, and the Soviet Union.

At the beginning of July, the agreed upon division of Berlin into sectors was implemented. The three western allies moved into their areas in the city. US troops were accompanied by cameramen of the special film project 186 unit. Their job was to document the bomb damage on the German side. More and more frequently, however, they also filmed people like these children in Berlin, who presumably in search of relatives spoke directly into the camera.

The sound on the film of these scenes did not survive, nor is there any information about whether their search was successful. In the middle of the month, the new US President Harry S. Truman landed in the city. Seeing the condition of Berlin made the democratic politician pensive.

He noted, “I witnessed a great world tragedy, and I was grateful from the bottom of my heart that my country had been spared this unimaginable destruction.” Truman had traveled to Germany to consult with the Soviets and the British about how to proceed in the future. The venue for the summit meeting was Sicilian Hof Palace in Potdam. It was the home of the German crowned prince and his family before 1918.

Starting on July 17th, representatives of the three main allies met in the palace. It was an effort to publicly demonstrate unity after their triumph over the enemy. In addition to US President Harry Truman, Stalin was also there. The British side was initially represented by Winston Churchill who was replaced during the course of the conference after an electoral defeat.

The aim in potlam was we have won and we are now collectively responsible for moving this continent securely into the future. But as we all know, war and violence continued. An end to the common ground of the anti-Hitler coalition was not long in coming. Just before the conference began, President Truman received news that after a long effort, a new weapon with highly destructive and threatening potential was at his disposal.

The US had been working on an atomic bomb for a long time. The tests had progressed to a point that the bombs could then be used. It was also apparent to the United States that sooner or later, for ideological reasons, the Soviet Union would become an adversary. and they wanted to demonstrate that the US was technically able and ready to use atomic bombs.

In the coming weeks, intensive negotiations took place at Sicilian Hof Palace. The big three agreed on the amount of reparations Germany had to pay and on the denazification, democratization, and demilitarization of the country. Geographical changes were also determined. East Prussia and the areas east of the Odor and Nisa rivers, for example, were separated from Germany.

What they also decided in Potam was the resettlement of the Germanspeaking population of Eastern Europe. That is the so-called contractual definition of resettlement. All remaining Germans were to be removed from Eastern Europe. In the run-up to the summit, German speakaking people had been expelled from Eastern Europe.

Those expulsions took place mostly in the Sudatan land, which had been annexed by the German Reich in 1938, but also in Poland, and often it was done with great brutality. The Czech government in exile under Bennis said they would not be punished, but that such an expulsion was a logical consequence because of the previously German forced rule and German property could be taken away from them without any further ado.

After the agreement in Pottsam, a regulated phase of expulsions followed in late summer. Once again, large streams of refugees set out for the West. But those people were not always welcome in their new homeland. After the war, Germany had to deal with a multitude of problems. There were many who had been bombed out, poverty, worries about the future.

So that an influx of a large number of people was not exactly celebrated. In fact, many were greeted with blatant rejection. They were also perceived as foreign, had a different dialect, looked different. In addition, there was interconfessional mixing. Catholics came to Protestant areas and Protestants went to Catholic areas, which was problematic at the time.

In total, at least 12 million people of Germanic origin were affected by flight, expulsion, and forced immigration. Despite the challenges, many managed to quickly settle into their new homeland. [Music] It was a very very great achievement that these people were accommodated in the occupation zones.

But there was also a concerted effort on the part of the people who came to build a new life under difficult conditions. And it was amazing that people managed to get a foothold there in a relatively short time. While the guns were silent in Europe after more than 5 1/2 years, World War II was not yet over in the Pacific.

The Japanese Empire was fanatically resisting the threat of defeat. The battles for Okinawa had been raging since the beginning of April. The island’s defenders had entrenched themselves in the hinterland and often fought to the death against the attacking US units. It was only after nearly 3 months of fighting that the island was finally conquered at the end of June 1945.

After a darely bought victory, the US military leadership began to consider its further action against the enemy. Okinawa. The Battle of Okinawa, as well as other battles in 1945, had shown the United States that it would probably be unrealistic to conduct a landing operation on the Japanese mother islands. And that then led to the decision to use atomic bombs.

The logic being, it’s better if the Japanese die rather than if American soldiers die. ly in common. The plan was quickly put into action after Japan refused a US ultimatum for unconditional surrender in late July. US B29 bombers were loaded with a new type of weapon of mass destruction on the Pacific island of Tinian in early August.

On August 6th, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. 3 days later, Nagasaki was the target of another atomic bomb. At least 100,000 people were killed instantly in the attacks. Tens of thousands of others were irradiated, pushing the death toll higher in the years to come. But it also became clear that protecting the Japanese, protecting Japanese life of course was not how people were thinking.

The question, should we do this? That had been lost during the course of the war. Footage shot weeks later in Hiroshima. At 8:16, the bomb had been detonated at an altitude of about 600 m, obliterating the city. The pictures showed the devastating extent of the destructive power of the new weapon and heralded a new age.

On August 15th, Emperor Hirohito addressed his people over the radio. It was the first time the Japanese had heard the voice of the [Music] emperor. for [Music] On the morning of September 2nd, 1945, the battleship USS Missouri was anchored in Tokyo Bay. Also aboard the flagship of the US Third Fleet was Commander George Costco.

He had a small camera loaded with color film with him. And so he shot this footage of the formal signing of Japan’s [Music] surrender. Aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. On Sunday, September the 2nd, 1945, the most horrible war in history came to its complete and formal end. Foreign Minister Shikamitsu signed for Japan. Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander General Su Yong Chang, signed for China.

In New York City, as throughout a rejoicing nation and world, vast throngs of grateful, happy people celebrate the end of fighting, the dawn of peace. Two million New Yorkers jammed Time Square. It’s official. It’s all over. It’s total victory. The balance sheet of the Second World War was staggering. The number of its victims can only be estimated.

But there were at least 60 million war dead, a number that cannot begin to describe the unimaginable suffering that began with Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland. The costliest war in the history of mankind lasted six years and one day, 2,193 days of suffering and death.