Original subtitles

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.