All language subtitles for The Making Of The Series -The World At War

To tell the story
of the Second World War

in 26 hours of film on television,

each film to be an essay
on an aspect of the war,

taking in, as well as the fighting,

the social and political experience
of the countries involved;

to present Britain's war

and to compare and contrast it with the
effort and suffering of other nations;

to appeal, if we could, to different
audiences of different age groups,

presenting events to those
who experienced them

in, if possible, a new light,

and to their children,

without the crusty covering
of another generation's nostalgia;

to omit nothing of supreme consequence,
but to leave out a very great deal,

rather than try to cram everything
into the limited airtime available;

to produce programmes worth watching

which might also help us understand
the times in which we live:

that's what I and my colleagues
at Thames Television set out to achieve

in The World At War.

The series has now been sold
and seen all over the world,

and in the U nited States,
since it was finished,

it's never been off the screen.

It's the making of that series
that I'm going to tell you about now.

I was seven years old in 1939,

and most of the people who worked
with me on The World At War

were younger than l,

born, like more than three-quarters of
all Germans and Japanese alive today,

after the war began
or even since it ended.

Not many of us knew all that much
about the war.

Distanced by a generation,

we were not interested
in just another telling

of our parents' old soldiers' tales.

Old men forget, particularly
when it hurts to remember.

And many in Britain
had happy memories of the war.

They remembered the excitement,
the danger, the comradeship, the fun.

But Britain was bombed, not invaded,
not occupied, not fought over.

Britain's war was not Poland's war
and not Russia's war.

The Desert Rats and the Africa Corps
shared a common experience.

Theirs was a clean war;
there were no civilians in the way.

Theirs was a very different war

from that of Poles or Yugoslavs
or U krainians,

who met and suffered
under the Gestapo and the SS.

Most of us were British
on the production team,

but we would try to do justice
to others' grimmer experience.

There was bravery, heroism,
glory, even, in it.

But the Second World War
caused untold suffering

and cost many millions of lives.

It was important that the series
should begin as we meant it to go on,

and The World At War began like this.

(narrator) Down this road on
a summer day in 1944, the soldiers came.

Nobody lives here now.

They stayed only a few hours.

When they had gone,

a community which had lived
for a thousand years, was dead.

This is Oradour-sur-Glane in France.

The day the soldiers came
the people were gathered together.

The men were taken
to garages and barns,

the women and children
were led down this road,

and they were driven into this church.

Here, they heard the firing
as their men were shot.

Then they were killed, too.

A few weeks later
many of those who had done the killing

were themselves dead in battle.

They never rebuilt Oradour.
lts ruins are a memorial.

lts martyrdom stands for thousand
upon thousand of other martyrdoms

in Poland, in Russia,

in Burma, in China,

in a world at war.

We started work in April 1971.
The time was right.

Some vital witnesses were already dead
when we started

and all were getting older.

Often our researchers were told,
"lf only you'd called last week."

The fellow they were looking for
had died only the other day.

The first problem
would be what to leave out.

There simply couldn't, wouldn't be room,
even in 26 hours of television,

to do justice to everyone.

I'm not a military historian.

I asked our historical adviser,
Dr Noble Frankland,

then director
of the lmperial War Museum,

to write down for me
on one sheet of paper,

he actually used an envelope,

not more than 15 decisive campaigns
which I mustn't omit.

I wanted each film that we made to tell
only one story, as all good films do.

And I asked for a list
of only 15 military subjects

because I had different plans for
the other dozen or so programmes.

There would be one programme
on the causes of the war.

There would be one
to deal with the results.

There would be programmes on the war
economy, the politics, the morale

of each of the major five combatants:

America, Britain, Germany,
Japan, Soviet Russia.

The Second World War was total war.

In it, civilians were in the front line
in the factories and under the bombs.

And they suffered as many casualties
as did the men and women in uniform.

In the First World War,
the point is AJP Taylor's,

the news that a relative had been killed
came in the telegram from the front,

telling a wife that she was widowed.

In the Second World War,
the news quite often went the other way.

The British soldier in Africa,
in ltaly and in France,

would learn in a letter from home

that his parents or his wife
had been killed in the Blitz on London,

on Coventry, on Plymouth.

And many a German fighting man
on the Eastern Front, say,

must have heard
that he'd lost his family

in the fires of Hamburg,
Cologne and Dresden,

and perhaps fought on
all the harder for it.

There would be a programme
on occupied Europe.

The moral choices faced by those
who live under tyranny

have a compelling fascination for me
and I think for us all.

"What would I have done?"
we ask ourselves.

"Raised my voice? Acted?"

"Risked my life?
Risked my family's life?"

"Stayed silent? Done nothing?"

"Collaborated, perhaps?"

In Nazi-occupied Europe,
everyone had to choose.

There would be a programme on what
the Nazi doctrine of racial supremacy

did to the Jews.

This is not a military subject, it
doesn't appear in military histories,

but I couldn't leave it out.

Our historical adviser made a list of
military musts on one sheet of paper.

It read : The German attack on Poland.

The German attack in the West,
leading to the fall of France.

The battle for Britain.

The German invasion of Russia.

Pearl Harbor
and the Japanese sweep to Singapore.

The battle of the Atlantic:
war against the U-Boat.

The war in the western desert.

Stalingrad :
the first massive German defeat.

The Allied air assault on Germany.

Russia's great victories of 1943,
particularly at Kursk,

the biggest tank battle in history.

It was clear, by the way,
that one object of the series

must be to try to help people
to be aware

of the importance of the Eastern Front.

The vast Russian and then
the vast German losses there.

Battles in which millions
fought on either side.

Two-thirds of all Germans who fought
fought on the Eastern Front.

The campaign in ltaly.

The Allied invasion of Europe
in Normandy in June 1944.

The land assault on Germany itself
in the battle for Berlin.

Naval air war in the Pacific.

American industrial might,
as well as Russian manpower,

assured victory in both wars
in Europe and in Asia.

The dropping of the atomic bomb.

And each of these great themes
would have only one hour.

Burma squeezed in
because it had been forgotten

and because it looked different.
The film was wet with monsoon.

But there was no room
for Abyssinia or Syria or Dakar,

and only a mention of Dieppe
and of the Arctic convoys

and nothing on Yugoslavia,

where in civil war and in resistance,
1.5 million lost their lives.

And there'd be nothing on the fate of
Europe's gypsies, all but exterminated,

and no film on Poland,

though according to some estimates
one in three Poles died.

We wouldn't be able to deal
with the experiences

of particular regiments or divisions,

though when we'd finished,
lots of folk wrote in

to tell us that they'd served
in the best damn flying squadron

or fighting regiment in World War ll.

Our style would be simple.

No narration to camera,

no authority to fix the viewer with
his eye, as I am looking at you now.

You can do without the piece to camera
in handling 20th-century history

when there are plenty of visual
documents and eye witnesses available.

You can't deal so easily
with earlier centuries.

Nor would we venture into the dangerous
territory of reconstruction.

If there were no visual records of an
event, we would look for eye witnesses.

If there were none adequate
to tell the story for television,

or if we could find
no other honest way to tell it,

we might have to leave
the subject matter out.

Resistance in Europe
suffered as a subject.

There's no film of it
and we hardly touched it.

Sea battles suffered also.

There's very little film
of battles at sea

and the same goes
for battles fought at night.

We used diagrams, therefore,
and graphics

to show what a U-boat assault
on a convoy was like.

But our rule was, don't invent,
don't reconstruct,

don't use material that you know
to have been reconstructed

unless you absolutely have to,

and don't do so even then
without saying that you're going to.

When the Russian army
closed the ring round Von Paulus

and the German 6th Army at Stalingrad,

newsreel film shows two masses of troops
advancing towards each other

in long, long Eisensteinian lines
across the snow,

meeting to embrace with warm bear hugs
just opposite, would you believe,

the Soviet newsreel's camera position.

We made the point when we used the film.
For our film on the Western Desert,

we didn't use the bits of desert victory
that were shot at Pinewood.

We used to look very suspiciously at,
but we sometimes did use,

battle scenes where the camera
is suspiciously steady

or is apparently quite safe in a
supposedly dangerously exposed position.

We met some Sherwood Foresters
who fought from El Alamein to Tunis

and from Anzio to Rome.

One of their most frightening encounters
though was with Pathé Gazette.

We got pulled out the... well,
we were out of the line at the time.

Of course, this...
I don't know what officer it was,

but he detailed so many of us
to go to a certain place in this truck.

And when we got there, he gave us...

"Right," he said, "put these on."

German green uniforms
and Jerry helmets.

I thought, "What the hell...?"

"What are they going to do, drop us
back over German lines or summat?"

Anyway, he said,
"No, you're alright," he says.

"Here you are, take these."
He gave us a box of fireworks...

These crackers.
Firecrackers, we used to call them.

"Go in that wood," he says,
"and act as Germans," he says.

"And such and such platoon
will come and capture you."

"When you see them coming,
throw these crackers."

So when we saw them coming, we were
throwing crackers and firing blanks.

Of course the English platoon
came and captured us

and we had to go out in this wood
looking frightened to death

with our hands up.

And this fellow was up on this truck
with his camera. Pathé Gazette.

That was British news. That was
in the cinema, that was, at home.

The reconstruction of history on film

is not only, unless it's clearly
labelled, deceptive in itself,

it also devalues authentic material
used alongside it.

There was plenty of film.

The lmperial War Museum told us
that they had 20 million feet.

They hoped we'd look at it all
and tell them what was in it.

Of course we never had time to do so.
Partly because there was so much

and partly because viewing films
stored in vaults

was then a slow, cumbersome,
but in the end productive, process.

The camera cannot lie.

But those who use film,
especially in wartime,

are no more honest than the rest of us.

The newsreels of the Second World War
were shot by brave cameramen

and they used bulky equipment:
35mm cameras, often on tripods.

Many war cameramen lost their lives,

but it's important to remember that
the material which they bravely filmed

was edited and censored in the editing

to make the points
the government wanted made.

Propaganda to cheer the home front,
seduce the neutrals, frighten the enemy.

Look now at two examples of newsreel,

one British, one German,
in the summer of 1940.

France has fallen.

♪ Wenn die Soldaten
durch die Stadt marschieren

♪ Öffnen die Mädchen

♪ Die Fenster und die Türen

♪ Ei warum? Ei darum

♪ Ei bloß wegen dem Schingderassa,
Bumderassasa

♪ Ei bloß wegen dem Schingderassa,
Bumderassasa...

(newsreel) Hitler in July 1940,
returning from France in triumph,

stood at the pinnacle of his power.

♪ Die Mädchen ach so gerne

♪ Ei warum? Ei darum

♪ Ei bloß wegen dem Schingderassa,
Bumderassasa

The speed and sureness of his victories
had astonished even his generals.

Their doubts had been answered,
their opposition could be discounted.

It was now that Hitler confided to them
it would be the Russians' turn next.

The British were ready for invasion.

The one-time foot-sloggers
have turned kick-starter pushers.

Shanks's pony has given way
to a spanking motorbike.

The left-right, left-right blokes
have both feet off the ground.

They're part of Britain's
mighty mobile mounties,

all keen to welcome Adolf when he drops
in for a cup of tea and a cream bun.

A battalion of infantry on wheels
is on exercise.

A swift-moving striking force
that will do the enemy a bit of no good.

They learn to take the rough
with the smooth

under conditions they might meet with
on active service.

U p and down they go, but unlike the Hun
they're always on the level.

"Always on the level."
"A cup of tea and a cream bun."

I don't know what those commentaries
did to the enemy, but they frighten me.

Although we added a commentary
to the German film

to integrate it into our narrative,

you can detect very clearly, I think,
the intention of each of those.

The Germans showing Hitler triumphant.

The German nation,
as we know now, overconfident.

The British whistling absurdly
to keep their courage up.

There wasn't a tank, Anthony Eden told
us, in the southeast corner of England.

And the contrast of style is compelling.

Nazi Germany had perfected
the art of film as propaganda,

as a political instrument to bind
the German people to their leader.

All the lavish skills of camera
and of editing

that went into Triumph of the Will
went into that.

We would use newsreels. Without them
there'd be no television series.

But we'd try to use them critically,

bearing in mind that the war that the
newsreels show is an acceptable war.

They don't show blood and wounds

and they don't bring us the cries
of pain or the stink of corpses.

Most newsreels are taken
by winning armies.

They show the victories,
but they don't show the cost.

The newsreels of the Second World War,
as a matter of fact,

show much more preparation for battle
than actual battle.

They show our boys in victory,
their boys in defeat.

Lots of prisoners, very few captors.

They show the dealing of death : guns
firing, planes diving, bombs dropping.

Newsreels do not show
the dead or dying.

The censors mostly cut them out.

More honest than the cut newsreel
are the cameraman's rushes,

if you can find them.

These are the raw material from which
the film editor under supervision

will hack out a short, crisp,
punchy story

with effects, music
and commentary added,

which will eventually
reach the screen.

Most cameramen's rushes are destroyed,
but some survive.

After the Germans
in their years of victory,

the best pictures
of the Second World War

were taken by the other great nation
with an advanced film culture,

the U nited States.

Here are the marines
in February 1945 at lwo Jima.

Have you noticed?

It's silent.

I suppose a radio journalist might have
used a microphone on this beach,

but the cameraman
could get by perfectly without.

Because by the time that anybody
had made any use of it,

a commentary and music, perhaps fairly
strident music, would have been added.

It's all a bit of a shambles, isn't it?

It's filmed in colour.

The Americans, particularly
in the last 18 months or so of the war,

were filming pretty well everything
in colour.

Look...

Shelling there, but no bang.

The bang goes on later.

In our work we tried to keep something
of the roughness,

the repetitions of this footage

by matching it to the voices
of those that were there

and who remembered what chaos
and what hell it had been.

You don't see rushes on television
very often.

Had we found more film rushes,

we would have presented,
particularly in earlier episodes,

a less tidy war.

When you watch The World At War,
you're watching not my work

but the combined skills
of many of us, about 50,

who worked together for three years.

Writers, producers, researchers,
graphic artists,

film editors, sound editors
and a dubbing mixer.

Here's what were once rushes
when that lot had finished with them.

Any sound that you'll hear
on this next clip, we added.

It's June 1944 in the Marianas

and this is our version of the great
naval air battle of the Philippine Sea.

The first shot is a phoney.

Many Japanese pilots were comparative
novices with no battle experience.

Their aircraft were poorly armoured.

For the American flyers
swooping down on their opponents,

it was as easy as shooting turkeys.

After the first encounter, all but one
of the American planes returned.

Rearmed and refuelled, the Americans
were ready for the next Japanese move.

There were two more onslaughts
to be faced.

However, the Americans
had nearly 900 carrier planes,

twice the number of the Japanese.

The Marianas turkey shoot
lasted just eight hours.

In one day, Japanese naval air power
was virtually destroyed.

The original force of 430 planes
was reduced to about 100.

American losses
were comparatively light.

Pilots mattered more than machines.

I hope you can hear the contrast between
that film as it ended up on the screen

and the rushes with which we started,

even if we started with newsreels
from which we stripped their sound

before we got to work again.

Sometimes the exception : film
that needed no polishing, no cutting.

Film that went in raw, as rushes.

This next clip was used in a film
I made at the end of the series

called Remember.

Our film researcher Raye Farr
found it in some cans

in a corner in the archive at Koblenz
that no one else had looked at.

It's film taken by
a German cameraman in Russia

not at the front, but filming quietly
behind the German lines.

Again, there's no sound on it.

We think that this remarkable cameraman

had licence to shoot
just what interested him.

Perhaps one day he was going to try
to make a documentary out of it.

What seems to be happening

is that a couple of soldiers
and a corporal in this village

are separating men from women
and children, dividing up families.

Either the men or perhaps the women

are being selected
for forced labour, I think.

Anyway, they have a pretty good idea

that they may never
see each other again.

If you watch carefully in a moment,
you can see a dog.

We always used to look out for dogs
in rushes.

There's the dog. Here it comes.
No barking.

Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill were
dead and not available for interview.

The field marshals had published their
memoirs and had little left to say.

The witnesses that we sought
would be of a lower rank.

For their personal experiences,

we were interested in the simple serving
man and woman and in the civilian.

They could tell us
what had happened to them.

For our narrative,
we needed the witness to great events.

The man at the commander's elbow,

the fellow in the statesman's
private office.

Our researchers turned up quite a list.

Churchill's private secretary,
RooseveIt's and Truman's aides,

members of Hirohito's cabinet,
Eisenhower's mistress,

Hitler's typist, Himmler's adjutant.

Some historians
doubt television's ability

to handle such witnesses critically
as source material.

Well, you have to do the best you can

and check out what your witnesses say
against what other people have to say.

Listen to the late John McCloy.

America is about to defeat Japan.

We gathered up our papers
and started to go out,

and Mr Truman spotted me and said :

"Mr McCloy, nobody gets out of this room
without voting or expressing himself -

everybody else has."

"Do you think I have
any other alternative?"

I looked over at Colonel Stimson -

he liked to be called Colonel,

he'd been colonel of a regiment
in World War l, rather than Secretary.

I looked over at Stimson
and he nodded, he said, "Go ahead."

So I started in,
and I said that I thought

we ought to have our heads examined

if we didn't begin to think in terms
of a political culmination of the war

rather than a military one.

And I said I'd give them some terms.

I'd send a message over to them,
I'd spell out the terms.

And Mr Truman said, "Well, what are
your terms? What would you do?"

I hadn't prepared for the actual
dictation of the surrender terms,

but I said, "ln the first place,
I'd say you can have the mikado,

but he's got to be
a constitutional monarch -

you've got to have a representative
form of government."

"You can have access to, but not
control over, foreign raw materials

so you can have a viable economy."
And I spelled it out as best I could.

And I'd say, "Besides that,
we've got a new force,

and it's in the form of a new type of
energy that will revolutionise warfare,

destructive beyond any contemplation."
I said I'd mention the bomb.

Well, mentioning the bomb, even at
that late date, in that select group,

it was like they were all shocked

because it was such
a closely guarded secret.

It was comparable to mentioning
Skull and Bones at Yale,

which you're not supposed to do.

But Mr Truman said,
"This is just the sort of thing

I was trying to reach for -
get that all spelled out."

At that point Stimson did come in
and joined support for my position,

but then later on Mr Byrnes,
who was then secretary of state,

who was not present, vetoed the idea
of offering them the mikado.

One can only speculate
as to what would have happened

if we had put the message
to the Japanese

in the form that I indicated,
including the mikado.

I always had the feeling, in view of
some of the information we've had since

of the tendency on the part of some
of the real military hotheads in Japan,

to think that this was perhaps
the best way out,

that we might have been able
to avoid the dropping of the bomb.

Mr McCloy rings true to me.

One of our researchers, Sue McConachy,
a fluent German speaker,

was given
the most difficult task of all,

that of finding ex-members of the SS and
persuading them to talk to us on film.

Her longest and hardest search

was for Himmler's adjutant, Karl Wolff.

This is from her account of that search,
and I'm going to quote from it.

"Nearly a year later,
after many phone calls

and a letter through a third party,
I finally met the old man."

"Not in his home.
I still didn't know where that was,

but in a hotel in Berlin."

"He was most charming, quite unlike
the fantastic figure we'd imagined."

"Again, the long process
of establishing trust began."

"l visited his home several times."

"He agreed to talk about subjects

where he claimed
he had first-hand knowledge."

"He wanted to explain
the ideology of the SS to us."

"A contract was drawn up

which gave him the option to read
a transcript of the entire interview

to check the factually accuracy
of what he said."

The interview was long and tricky.

It went on all day.

"After lunch," Sue McConachy says,
and they're filming this,

"After lunch, I asked him to repeat
the story that he'd told me

one evening over supper
about an incident at Minsk

at which he'd been present,

when a hundred people were shot
into an open grave

as a demonstration for Himmler,
who was sick when he saw it."

"Wolff looked a bit surprised."

"He'd forgotten
that he'd ever mentioned that."

"Then the film ran out."

"l wondered if, with time to think,
he would actually tell the story again."

"He did."

"l was relieved," says our researcher,
"not just because I'd got the story,

but because he'd had the time to reflect

on what the consequences
of telling it might be

and I could feel less responsible
if he did in fact end up in court again

when the programme was shown."

Every time the lie is put about

that there was no mass slaughter
of the Jews, no Holocaust,

I am grateful, as the world's archives
will always be,

to Sue McConachy and her like

for the pains that she took
to get Karl Wolff on the record.

She spent days with ex-SS men
and nights having nightmares about them.

She listened to them.
She didn't judge them. Nor did l.

I decided to leave judgement on all
our witnesses to you, the viewer.

I don't guarantee to you
that they tell the whole truth

or even a truth that you will accept.

Here are three very different Germans.

One of them is Albert Speer,
Hitler's Minister for War Production,

telling how they knew what they knew,

what they thought they could do
to save Europe's Jews.

Christabel Bielenberg's husband
was a conspirator against Hitler.

He was away from home when she was
asked to give shelter to two Jews,

and she consulted her neighbour.

I was astonished - overcome, really -

at the response
that I got from my neighbour

who told me that under no circumstances
whatsoever could I house these people,

that housing of Jews meant concentration
camp not only for me but for my husband,

possibly also for my children.

I can remember going through
and out into the road

and out of the darkness came a voice -
I knew there was somebody there -

came a voice saying :

"Frau Doktor... Frau Bielenberg,

haben Sie einen Schluss gefasst?"

which means, "Have you decided?"

And I simply couldn't say no.

I just said, "Well, I can't
for longer than two days."

And I let him into the cellar.

They stayed for two days

and on the second day

or rather in the evening,
they must have left

because in the morning she was gone,

the cellar was empty,

the little bed I'd put up
all tidily arranged

and they had gone.

I knew later that they were caught

buying a ticket at a railway station

and were transported to Auschwitz.

And why I say this is
the most painful and terrible story

for me to have to tell

is because after they left,

I realised that Hitler
had turned me into a murderer.

One day in '44,

Gauleiter Hanke came in my office
and told me

that he was visiting
a concentration camp in U pper Silesia

and warned me never to go
in a concentration camp there

because horrible things would happen.

This together with other hints I got

should have made my decision

to go to Hitler immediately
or to Himmler

and to ask them what is going on

and to take my own steps.

But I didn't do it and not doing it
was, I think nowadays,

the biggest fault in my life.

We felt that people should know
what was going on,

and maybe typical is this little
experience which I had one day

standing in the line for vegetables
or something like that.

I told my neighbours standing around me

that now they start to kill the Jews
in the concentration camps,

that it is not true that they
only are brought there

and can live there as they live here,
as it was told them.

They are killed
and they even make soap out of them.

I know that.

And they said, "Frau Bonhoeffer,

if you don't stop telling
such horror stories

you will end in a concentration camp too
and nobody of us can help you."

"It's not true what you're telling. You
shouldn't believe foreign broadcasts."

"They tell these things
to make enemies against Germany."

I said, "No, that's not from broadcasts.
I know that directly from first hand."

"You can be sure it is that way."

And coming home
I told my husband in the evening

and he was not at all applauding to me -
on the very contrary.

He said, "My dear, sorry to say,

but you are absolutely idiotic,
what you are doing."

"Please understand,

a dictatorship is like a snake."

"lf you put your foot on its tail,

as you do it, it will just bite you

and nobody will be helped."

"You have to strike the head."

Each of those witnesses I think reveals
there something of his or her true self.

We didn't judge them,
but a little bit of juxtaposition helps.

Emmi Bonhoeffer's husband Klaus
and her brother-in-law Dietrich

were among the staunchest
of Hitler's opponents

and both paid for their bravery
with their lives.

What sort of history
is The World At War?

It's television narrative history.

It doesn't propose different
interpretations of a course of events,

weigh the evidence for each,

invite you to keep all of them
in your mind while we consider them

and eventually plump for one
and put that forward.

The writing historian does do that

and you the reader can go back
on the printed page,

back if you like
to the previous chapter,

to check something
that you didn't quite understand.

But television, like music,
occurs in time,

and the viewer, unless
you're looking at a video recording,

cannot normally go back.

The programme producer, therefore,
must tell a clear story

that you, the viewer, can follow.

So when we tried to answer a question
that has puzzled historians of the war,

we made up our minds what we believed
and we gave you that.

but it's important that you
the viewers should understand

that we the makers
have made the selection

and that we know that the real story
is always more complex

than we present it as being.

There are only 2,000 words of narration
in most episodes of The World At War.

We know and we hope that you know
how much we've had to leave out.

But if we tried to be clear,
we also tried not to be too simplistic.

We wanted to hear different experiences,
different points of view.

In the end, I think
The World At War works

because interwoven
in one narrative line,

it contains contrasts
and even contradictions.

Those who bombed Germany and Japan,
for example, did their necessary job.

Those they bombed,
many of whom were innocent, suffered.

Hindsight enables both sides now
to see how others acted and suffered

in a way that they never did
at the time.

Some stories that we were told
we had to leave out,

but they were too good to lose

and so we made other, longer films
in which they find a place.

Christabel Bielenberg remembers an eerie
incident of her life in Nazi Germany

as the war neared its end

and the horrors of what had been done
and what was still being done

could no longer be suppressed.

Near the end of the war I had to travel
from Berlin to the Black Forest...

..and I happened to travel
in the same carriage as an SS man.

A raid had just started

and most of the people had left
the carriage when I heard this voice

saying, "l think it's better we stay put
because the train will probably move out

and we'll have the carriage
to ourselves."

And indeed I had it to myself
with this SS officer

for many hours on this train journey.

He explained to me that he
was on his way to the front now.

That all he wanted to do
was to get killed.

And... but...
He had tried again and again,

but always he'd seemed to survive
every battle he'd been in.

He'd transferred to the Waffen SS,
which was the military arm of the SS,

who were always in the thick
of the battle, but he'd survived.

He told me that in Poland,

they had...

..he had belonged
to one of the commandos,

which were called
the Extermination Commandos,

and on one particular occasion, when the
Jews were standing round in a semicircle

with the half-dug graves behind them...

..that the machine guns had been set up

and out of the ranks of the Jews
that were standing there

a wonderful figure
had come towards him.

He said, "He had long hair. I suppose
he was a priest of some kind."

And he'd said,
"God is watching what you do."

And he said, "We shot him down
before he returned to the semicircle."

Another little boy,
before they'd set up this scene,

had asked him,
"Am I standing straight enough, U ncle?"

And he told me these things
he could never forget

and that he only, as I said,
now wished to die.

I travelled with that man
all through the night...

..and as the carriage had no windows,
it was very cold,

and I can remember waking in the night,

strangely enough,
with my head resting on his shoulder.

And he'd covered my knees
with his sheepskin coat.

Next time I woke, he'd gone.

Her head on his shoulder,
his coat covering her knees.

You wouldn't find details like that
in most history books,

but it's stories like that that make
popular television history possible.

The Second World War
cost more than 50 million lives.

It shaped the world we live in.

The U nited States of America
came out of isolation,

becoming the greatest power
on the world stage.

Soviet Russia emerged
from another isolation

to impose her grip on half of Europe.

Germany was divided.

There has been peace in Europe
for more than 40 years.

The story of the Second World War

is a story with dark beginnings
and a happy end.

Mussolini's fascism,
Japanese militarism,

Hitler's Nazism, were smashed.

The right side won.