Original subtitles

By the start of 1943,

Germany and Japan have been at war for several years.

Although the people of both nations have endured

battlefield casualties from the beginning,

two critical events are about to bring the war home.

The leaders of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan

respond in very different ways.

All wars change the world,

but none of them changed the world like the Second World War did.

Japan's on the march, Germany's on the march.

No-one can imagine the nightmare they're about to unleash...

...the most destructive war in human history.

Suddenly, the world is turned upside down,

and all hell is let loose.

The West is stunned by the speed of the advance.

You get the Allies led by the big three,

Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin:

men who were dealing with immensely complicated questions.

It's the biggest military operation of human history.

The Allies have to come together,

not just militarily but industrial scale: it's a global perspective.

They have to fight in every climate,

from the Arctic to the jungles of the Pacific,

to the deserts of Africa and the depths of the ocean.

But there was no certainty of victory.

It was going to be a horrific bloodbath.

We see humans at their absolute worst...

how they treat other human beings.

And we see them at their absolute best,

willing to give their lives that others might live.

World War II was a struggle in which there could be one victor...

and one vanquished.

By early 1943, the Nazi Third Reich has absorbed much of Europe.

Great cities have been bombed.

Whole nations have been occupied.

But in Germany, success on the battlefield

allows life to go on as before.

Hitler wants to maintain

the semblance of normalcy even in wartime.

So theatres remain open, stadiums remain open,

sporting events go on as scheduled.

Germans are encouraged to go about their daily business.

The Germans, from the beginning of the war,

have really been sheltered and shielded by Hitler

because there is a belief that Hitler has

that one of the main reasons that Germany collapsed in 1918

was because the population didn't have enough to eat,

their morale failed,

and all of a sudden, they turned against the government.

Hitler constantly tells the German people they're a master race.

But, you know, deep down inside, he doesn't trust them at all.

He was seared by the events of the First World War.

Nothing could've looked stronger than the Kaiser's government,

in 1918, and it was overthrown in a revolution lasting a single day.

And so Hitler believes

that the German people are, in a sense, fickle.

If they aren't given what they want, if they don't have enough to eat,

if they don't have the materiel,

that they're going to somehow turn on him.

And so he is very, very determined to make sure that the German people

don't feel the pinch of the war.

But in early February,

Germans across the Reich are told in a short radio broadcast...

that the 6th Army has been destroyed at Stalingrad.

Germany suffered enormous casualties at Stalingrad.

90,000 captured...

...and over 200,000 dead.

Hundreds of thousands, if not millions,

of Germans had a family member,

or a friend, or knew someone who fought at Stalingrad.

This is the greatest catastrophe in German history.

Nobody's been prepared for this.

For the families of people who are serving on the Stalingrad front,

it unleashes a wave of panic.

It is the first admission of a Wehrmacht defeat.

But Hitler and his military leaders are busy planning a counter-attack.

Hitler is now up in the Wolf's Lair, the Wolfsschanze,

his massive headquarters up in East Prussia,

in almost complete isolation.

He rarely appears in public, and so the task of rebuilding morale

amongst the people is left to others.

Joseph Goebbels,

Hitler's Reich Minister of Enlightenment and Propaganda,

has been at the centre of the Nazi Party

since it was formed in the 1920s.

Joseph Goebbels is one of the most unusual Nazi officials.

And he looks like anything but the image of the Nazi superman.

He has no military background,

but he's brilliant about the use of propaganda.

Goebbels decides that the time has come to deliver a speech

exposing the German people

to the realities of what 1943 is gonna give 'em.

For the first time, a Nazi Party official

stands up and says the war isn't going well.

Only the German people are capable of lifting Germany up

from the defeated at Stalingrad to ultimate victory.

It's time to fight total war.

Total war is the commitment to a complete

and full national mobilisation,

meaning that all businesses and then all people,

all men, all women, absolutely everyone,

become dedicated toward securing victory.

The 'Total War' speech is both an attempt to rally public opinion

and an attempt to persuade Hitler to go to total war.

Think of this as like a closing argument at a trial.

Goebbels is making a case to Adolf Hitler

that if this war is going to prevail,

you're gonna have to accept the commitment to total war.

And so this hand-selected crowd of followers and sycophants...

...they're saying 'Ja!' to every word that he says.

And Adolf Hitler is saying, 'Nein.'

Hitler is reluctant.

He promised triumph, not sacrifice.

People say Goebbels giving that speech, that's the switch

when Germany really goes to total war, but it isn't.

That would, for example, have meant mobilising women

into industrial jobs, as had happened in the United States.

The conservative Nazi regime wants women to stay in the home...

...so they can raise children, care for the family.

But with so many men serving in the Wehrmacht,

primarily on the Eastern Front...

...Germany desperately needs workers.

Albert Speer, Reich Minister of Armament and War Production,

must find a solution.

Albert Speer is a complex figure.

He begins his career as an architect,

and he is the architect for the Nuremberg rallies.

And these become a huge propaganda success.

In 1942, Hitler appoints Speer as his new armaments minister.

Speer has absolutely no background in armaments production at all.

But nevertheless, he's a good organiser,

and he does quite an amazing job.

But if you're gonna increase production

but not tap into the German people

because we're trying to keep everything normal back home,

well, you gotta find that manpower somewhere.

Albert Speer has another strategy at hand,

and that's to use slave labourers...

recruited from the various occupation zones.

Massive numbers of people were brought into the Reich

to work as slave labourers, people from Western Europe,

from France, from the Netherlands, but also from Poland, from Ukraine.

In 1943, 12-15 million people were brought in from 20 other countries

to effectively make up for the manpower that Germany has lost.

However, it is also at a high human and moral cost.

They're barely fed. They're practically chained to the machine.

Whenever we look at the dramatic increase

in German arms productions in 1943,

we should always look behind the gleaming weapons,

and tanks, and aircraft, to realise

that these were produced by human skeletons banging out

parts for German weapons until they died.

Production will rise 56% in the first six months.

It is an armaments miracle.

It also gives Germany a propaganda story to tell.

Look at what we've done. We've turned armaments around.

Look how many planes, look how many tanks we're producing.

Things are difficult, but it's going to be OK.

But the RAF and the American Eighth Air Force

are expanding their relentless bombing campaign

aimed at destroying Germany's industrial infrastructure

and German morale.

The Germans may not yet be fighting total war,

but the war is coming home to Germany in 1943,

and it's the Anglo-American round-the-clock bombing campaign.

American B-17s flying from England

bomb the Reich's war factories by day.

At night, the RAF hits German cities.

Germany is forced to divert more and more men and materiel

to defend the skies over their cities.

In facing the Allied bombing campaign,

the Nazi regime does take steps.

It builds these monumental flak towers,

which... they're almost impossible to demolish.

These massive flak towers are also air raid shelters.

They have infirmaries, they have schools.

The German government is saying to its people,

'These air raid shelters are there to protect you.'

But there's never enough for the population.

And when the bombers come, most Germans wind up

going into a neighbourhood cellar.

They're cramped, they're hot.

You're there all night long, and the children are getting sick from fear.

It was a terrifying experience and also exhausting.

This happened night after night after night.

You stay down there for hours.

Maybe you're down there until the next morning.

And then finally, somebody cracks the door,

and you walk outside, and you see your neighbourhood is gone.

This is the first time that war

has really come home to the German people.

And many of them are asking, 'Where is our government?'

While German cities are being bombed by the Western Allies,

the skies over Japan remain clear.

Germany is much more vulnerable than Japan

because it is within flying range

of the British and the American bombers.

Bombing Japan is not possible for the Allies in 1943

because Japan enjoyed an enormous defence perimeter.

The Japanese have conquered an empire that spans much of Asia.

Distance, and the capture of several remote Pacific islands,

have created a defensive perimeter of over three million square miles

that protects this empire.

But American victories at Midway and Guadalcanal

have breached this defensive ring.

Japan's home front still has not faced daily air raids,

but military leaders know...

...the tide is shifting against them.

In June 1943,

Tokyo citizens gather to pay tribute to a fallen war hero.

It's a solemn event.

Admiral Yamamoto was this huge figure in Japan,

the mastermind of Pearl Harbor,

the hero of the early months of the war, and now he's gone.

Acting on intercepted radio messages,

the American air force shot down Admiral Yamamoto's plane...

...over the Solomon Islands.

His body was found and sent back to Japan.

Japan tightly censors all news of the war.

But the death of the navy's Supreme Commander...

cannot be hidden from the Japanese people.

You've got up to a million people lining the streets

as this funeral cortege goes past, a hugely sombre occasion.

There's a sense of a really significant figure passing.

Imagine what losing MacArthur would've done.

These figures are seen as irreplaceable.

And so when this pierces the news blackout for the public

on what's really going on in the war, it's huge.

This is a real concern in the Japanese government.

Prime Minister Hideki Tojo...

was an early advocate for war against the United States.

Tojo at this point has been in power in Japan

since shortly before Pearl Harbor.

As the war situation is going increasingly badly,

he needs a victory to be able to continue in power in Japan.

Tojo is driven by honour.

He's driven by loyalty to the Emperor.

And more than anything else, he wants to make sure that Japan...

escapes the war with its empire intact.

The Japanese intended the attack on Pearl Harbor

to be a knockout blow against the Americans.

They understood they couldn't win a protracted war

against the economic might of the United States.

Even when Japan was winning in the initial phase of the war,

Japan's wartime production capacity is, roughly,

only one-tenth of the United States'.

So by 1943, the government really needs to use

whatever they can get their hands on

to keep the wartime production going.

Oil from the East Indies,

rubber from Malaya, iron ore from Manchuria...

...are all vital to Japanese war industries.

The problem is is that you look at a map,

you can see that that has to be transported over water.

They have a huge merchant marine, the third largest in the world,

to move resources from Southeast Asia.

Now, all of it is threatened

by the tightening stranglehold of the American navy.

The United States' submarine operations

have been quite successful...

...in cutting Japanese supply routes.

Japanese natural resources

are increasingly lying at the bottom of the ocean.

So we begin to see critical material shortages

on the Japanese home front.

To maintain the nation's war effort,

Prime Minister Tojo and his government

impose severe austerity...

...on the Japanese people.

Unlike Nazi Germany, in Japan,

there never was this phenomenon

of trying to keep the Japanese people totally comfortable.

In general, Tojo believed that if Japan were to be successful

against the Americans and others, in lieu of natural resources,

it'd take the active mobilisation of its human resources, its people.

The message to people is if they will make

these sacrifices at home, then soldiers abroad will keep them safe.

They will keep the Allies at bay, they will do their bit...

if people at home do what they're supposed to do.

They must sacrifice everything.

The American naval blockade...

is choking the Japanese.

Food is scarce.

The everyday necessities of modern life disappear.

But Prime Minister Tojo demands even greater sacrifice.

We certainly have rationing going on in the United States.

This is on a national scale that is unmatched,

really, in a lot of the Allied nations.

Electricity is being rationed.

They're relying on sort of primitive ways of even just cooking food...

...and having to burn their libraries for fuel to try and keep warm.

No-one has enough to eat.

You've even got people going into the countryside to forage.

The Japanese are producing cars that run on coal

rather than oil because oil is being taken for the war effort

on such a large scale.

You've got temple bells, railings, pots and pans being melted down

so that they can make bullets and armour.

In many ways, Japan is reverting...

to almost a pre-industrial society as the war goes on.

However, Japanese people are not automatons.

They don't necessarily willingly part with their food.

The police realise there are widespread black markets

all over Japan, so this is a real problem.

And so Japanese leaders mobilise these neighbourhood associations:

in Japanese, called Tonarigumi.

The Tonarigumi has been woven into Japanese culture

for over a century.

But in wartime, it becomes a tool for the neighbours to keep an eye...

on each other.

The Tonarigumi are groups of five to ten households

that work as a means of mobilising the people behind Japan's war.

They ration the food. They carry out civil defence drills.

They do many of the things that we would think

that government officials would do elsewhere,

but it's done by the people themselves.

But really, the key is mutual surveillance.

The idea that Japan's leaders have is that the cheapest

and the surest way to keep an eye on people

is to get people, essentially, to keep an eye on each other.

Someone is always watching you.

By the end of 1943,

this whole network of neighbourhood associations

looks like a very well-oiled machine, and operates like that,

collecting resources for the home front.

But Tojo and his government,

they have an enormous problem: labour shortages.

As in Germany, because of massive military conscription...

...Japan suffers from the serious labour shortfall.

Women have been working in Japanese war industries for some time.

Now... they employ their children as well.

They're increasingly using very young labour, teenagers,

boys and girls who are not very skilled, quite hungry themselves.

If you're older than 12, study days were cut short.

There is extremely limited time in class

because most of their day is spent in factories.

Everybody is mobilised.

Despite the American blockade,

Japanese manufacturing continues.

Keeping the wartime production going to some extent

is truly remarkable.

There is one motto that...

the Japanese people live by during the war.

'Don't ask or want anything until we win.'

So essentially, let's sacrifice everything until we win.

But now, in its seventh year of war,

the Japanese military needs to replenish its ranks.

So up until this point,

students are being kept out of the war effort.

For the Japanese, education is extraordinarily important.

So you can get an exemption from conscription

if you're studying at university.

But by October 1943, things have become so serious in Japan,

you can no longer have that exemption.

October 21st 1943.

25,000 university students arrive in Tokyo Stadium.

These students are being inducted into the Japanese armed services.

This is something we see in other nations.

For instance, in the United States, they are progressively conscripting

more and more university students as well,

but not so much at this scale.

I mean, this is Japan's future,

these ambitious young people, where so much investment...

has been made over their entire lives,

education, raising, the whole thing.

It's the mark of a pretty desperate war effort.

You can't think about the future when the near future is very dire.

So this event is really a giant piece of propaganda by Tojo.

These young people are being asked to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Who's going to be next? The inevitable message is...

everyone.

As 1943 draws to a close,

every Japanese citizen feels the war's impact.

But in Berlin, stores and cinemas are still full.

Goebbels and the Nazis continue to deceive the German people

with propaganda from the front.

A rout on the Eastern Front is called a strategic retreat.

Allied bombers are consistently shot down...

...and do little damage.

The German people in Berlin are being fed a pretty steady diet

of positive propaganda about the progress of the war.

They had every reason to remain optimistic.

And then at the end of 1943, everything changes.

The RAF has been concentrating its bombing

on the Ruhr, the industrial heartland of Germany.

But in November of 1943,

they shift their focus to an even juicier morale target.

Berlin.

It's an incendiary raid.

That is, bombs that are meant to start fires throughout the city.

The bombers believe that if you break the morale of Berlin...

...you've broken the Third Reich.

It's always important to have somebody taking care

of the population at a time of great trauma,

very much like Churchill in London during the Blitz.

But Hitler's gone off to the Wolf's Lair.

He won't have anything to do with the population of Germany any more.

He seems to have abandoned them almost.

And once again, the person who takes up that gauntlet is Joseph Goebbels.

Goebbels is meeting the survivors.

So he'll bring a crew with him, they'll film.

And what he's doing is reassuring the German people:

if bombers show up over your city, we'll be there to help you.

First aid stations are set up,

free food and drink handed out to the population.

And a big huge show is put up into showing

how we're going to protect the population.

Propaganda can come back up and say,

'Look at these terrible things they're doing.

Look what would happen if they win the war.'

And in some ways, the bombing raids actually increased morale

and increased the determination to fight on.

Japan remains out of range of American bombers,

but Prime Minister Tojo, and other Japanese leaders,

understand that it may be only a matter of time

before the Americans secure air bases

within flying distance of the home islands.

Once the military leaders...

saw that fire bombs had been used against Germany,

they realise that this may be in Japan's future.

The cities that are being bombed in Europe have big stone buildings

in a lot of places, and it's still a nightmare.

The Japanese use a lot of wood.

These are wooden cities.

They are particularly vulnerable to these kinds of attacks.

And you don't have to be a genius to figure out that's gonna be an issue

if all of a sudden, you have round-the-clock raids.

There's a big difference in civil defence

between Nazi Germany and Japan.

The Japanese make the decision not to construct huge concrete bunkers,

and air raid shelters, that could hold thousands of people,

thinking that it would be better off devoting their scarce resources

to the military and not spending much money on defence.

The Japanese government basically said, 'Look.

You have to prepare yourselves. You want a shelter? Dig it yourself.'

If there was a fire, there would be, basically,

a sand and water bucket brigade

that would try to put out the fires this way.

And then they came up with the strategy to tear down houses,

to isolate areas so that the fire wouldn't spread.

So ordinary people are given hand tools, they're given ropes,

and in some cases, they're literally pulling down their own homes

and carting away the pieces.

In places like Tokyo and Osaka,

tens of thousands of houses were torn down.

These really cold messages go out from the government

that essentially say, 'Ask your family if you can stay with them.

Maybe someone will house you.'

Yet, again, there's a sense that the government...

just consider ordinary civilians to be expendable.

In the summer of 1944...

...Japan suffers a major defeat in the Pacific.

A key piece of Tojo's inner defensive ring has fallen.

After a month and a half of heavy combat,

Japan has lost Saipan...

and the entire Mariana Island chain.

This puts the Americans and their B-29 Superfortress

in range of Japan's major cities...

including Tokyo.

For the Japanese,

the loss of the Marianas is absolutely catastrophic.

Because they understand that there is this new bomber out there,

called the B-29, and they know that bomber

will now be within range of almost all of Japan.

The fall of Saipan

is a huge psychological blow back at home in Japan.

Because there's been this pact that if you do your bit at home,

if you sacrifice, if you put up with rations,

if you work hard in the factories, we will protect you.

The Allies will come nowhere near the home islands.

So the government has failed at its most fundamental promise

to the Japanese people, and only one person can take the fall for this.

Tojo.

The loss of Saipan and the Mariana Island chain

is a serious blow to the Japanese.

Now Japan itself is at risk.

Now civilian populations are potentially on the frontline

in a way they've never been before.

Now, Japan needs to reflect on its own leadership.

There is an undercurrent in Japan

that people are feeling very hostile towards Tojo.

There are stories of people phoning up Tojo's wife, saying,

'Why has your husband not killed himself yet?'

Now it's the government who has to make a sacrifice.

And they choose a scapegoat.

Emperor Hirohito has lost confidence in Tojo,

and he steps down.

Launching from the Marianas,

hundreds of B-29s begin bombing Japan's cities.

Osaka, Kobe,

Nagoya, Tokyo.

Hundreds of thousands of civilians are killed.

When the serious bombing of Japan starts,

it will be unrelenting.

The enemy is there. They're right above you.

The cities will become killing grounds.

Two days after Tojo's fall...

...there is an attempt on Adolf Hitler's life.

A real turning point in the German home front story is July of 1944,

the assassination attempt on Hitler's life.

A small group of officers realised that...

the war was probably lost.

They believed that if they killed Hitler,

that they would be able to make peace

and start a new German government.

And the person that was chosen to go and try and kill him

was Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg,

who went on the 20th July 1944 to the Wolf's Lair.

He had a meeting with Hitler.

He planted a bomb under the conference table

where Hitler was speaking and then took off.

That bomb, it's positioned underneath this heavy oak table

that absorbs a great deal of the blast of the weapon.

Stauffenberg comes back to Berlin

thinking that he'd killed Hitler: he saw the explosion.

He believed Hitler had been killed.

But unfortunately for him, the Fuhrer was not dead.

At one o'clock in the morning of the 21st,

Adolf Hitler comes on the radio.

He says there's been an attack against his life done by traitors.

One of the first responses when Hitler speaks on the radio

is an outpouring of relief.

And there's spontaneous demonstrations across Germany

by the civilian population.

Things are not going well in 1944.

The Soviets are on the move in the east.

The Allies in the west have landed in Normandy.

But German society has hitched its horse to Adolf Hitler.

It's good to know his hand's still on the wheel,

and that there's a degree of stability.

On the radio, Hitler vows that he's going to take revenge

on the traitors who've tried to kill him.

Stauffenberg and a few other conspirators

are quickly arrested and executed.

But their deaths are only the beginning.

Hitler had survived assassination attempts before,

but this was something on another level.

And the people that were trying to kill him,

these are some of his most important military figures.

Hitler believes he's been betrayed,

and he no longer trusts anyone,

not the army, not those in his intimate circle,

not even the German people.

Hitler orders the investigation and arrest

of anybody associated with the July 20th plot.

Anybody who had anything to do with this plot,

anybody who's related to those people,

anybody who might be a problem in the future, he will hunt them down.

Adolf Hitler takes this as an opportunity to clean house.

Berlin, 1944.

Hundreds of Germans arrested

after the attempt on Hitler's life are put on trial.

It's referred to as the People's Court.

The defendants are brought in front of Roland Freisler,

who's the head of the People's Court,

who's an absolutely fanatical Nazi.

Very often, to humiliate them,

their belts have been taken away so they have to hold their trousers.

The verdict is never in doubt.

Every defendant is guilty,

and every punishment severe.

They're put in a place called Plotzensee Prison,

and they're tortured, they're beaten.

These people are executed,

and Hitler insists that they will be hanged from meat hooks.

And that it will be filmed.

Hitler's vengeance knows no bounds.

He wants to make it clear to anybody else out there in the Reich:

if you try and kill me, this is the kind of vengeance you can expect.

Not just for you, but for your family and anybody who knows you.

So you're never going to be safe.

Nazi control of Germany is now complete.

But Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich is crumbling.

By the fall of 1944,

the Allies are on the verge of crossing into the German Fatherland.

Up until this point, Hitler had resisted the call for total war.

It wasn't necessary to enlist the entire population.

But now, if he ever cared about the German people,

he certainly no longer does.

And so why not enlist every last one of them

and let them get ground up at the front?

As far as Hitler is concerned,

the entire population is nothing but cannon fodder.

November 1944.

Tens of thousands of Germans gather

before Joseph Goebbels' headquarters.

After swearing a blood oath to Hitler,

they enter the ranks of the Volkssturm.

The Volkssturm, literally translated,

means the people's storm or the people's militia.

These are young boys and old men

put together into pseudo-military units...

...and sent off to do or die against the Allied armies.

The Volkssturm units are given very little training

and are supplied with the most basic German weapons.

An anti-tank missile known as the Panzerfaust, the armoured fist,

it hits the side of a tank, and with enormous force,

blasts a hole through the armour.

Now, the most important thing we need to know about it

is that it was a single shot, and that to use it,

you had to come very, very close to the tank you were firing at.

So we're talking about a 65-year-old man or a 14-year-old boy

given a single-shot weapon and sent out as a tank destroyer.

You may destroy the tank,

but you are almost certainly going to destroy

the person wielding the Panzerfaust.

In both the Eastern and the Western Fronts,

the Volkssturm fight and die in their tens of thousands.

It's the Volkssturm which often goes on fighting until the bitter end.

For five years, the Nazis have tried

to shield Germans from the consequences of war.

But with the Wehrmacht in retreat...

...their cities in ruin,

and hundreds of thousands of their sons

dead or grievously wounded...

...that is no longer possible.

That whole bubble of normalcy is now shattered.

All the other things that were being done in society to shield them...

...sporting events, cinemas, all that, they all get closed down.

And the real war that they are in

is now readily apparent to all of German society.

This now is the total war vision

that Goebbels and Speer had in '43.

They finally arrive here in 1944.

By the close of 1944, the people of Germany and Japan

are paying for their country's aggression.

The price steepens as the war heads to its conclusion.

In Nazi-occupied Europe,

where violence and terror have become routine,

increasing numbers of people...

begin to resist.