All language subtitles for adolf.hitlers.war.s01e02.720p.web.h264-skyfire_track3_[eng]

In the 1920s, Adolf Hitler promoted
the idea of Lebensraum -

"living space".

The German population was, he said,

"Too great, in every sense,

"to be confined within its present
borders."

And he knew that Germany could
spread in only one direction.

"We national socialists

"are ceasing the endless German
movement to the south and west

"and levelling our gaze at the land
in the east."

The war to seize the land in the
east

was a war of unfathomable cost.

It was Adolf Hitler's war.

Five days after invading the Soviet
Union,

German tanks linked up east of Minsk

and a day later, with German forces
ringing the city

and the Soviet third and tenth
armies trapped,

Minsk surrendered.

Battle of Minsk, which is a big
encirclement,

and you would think it's an
encirclement on Minsk.

Really, that should be called the
Battle of Belarus,

because it is an encirclement on an
enormous scale.

When the Germans appeared,

people were robbed, raped and shot
for no reason.

It was a part of Hitler's plan.

He didn't want to lose the precious
lives of German soldiers

in order to take the city.

The idea was to destroy it by
artillery fire and by hunger.

Hitler predicted that in four
weeks...

"..Moscow will be razed to the
ground."

He began to recite grand plans

that leapt beyond the Dnieper and
the Volga

to distant rivers - the Nile and the
Euphrates.

None of it happened.

A lot of paysans were moved by
themselves on the roads

and German Nazi planes were just
killing them

like targets on the road.

A lot of Soviet soldiers

were spreaded on the territory

where the German forces came.

And they do not know what to do.

The fall of Minsk shocked the
Kremlin.

The Red Army commanders in Minsk
were recalled

and on July 27th, an order was read
out

concerning General Pavlov,

his Chief of Staff, General
Klimovskikh

and all responsible for the failure.

They were to be shot.

In his first radio broadcast since
the invasion,

Stalin did not mention the
revolution

or the party.

He talked about Russia.

"Comrades, citizens,

"brothers and sisters,

"men of our army and navy.

"I am addressing you, my friends.

"The perfidious military attack on
our Fatherland is continuing.

"A grave danger hangs over our
country."

In this speech, he called his
compatriots "brothers and sisters"

for the first time.

Stalin spoke about comrades, about
citizens, but never about brothers
and sisters.

There was a famous quotation Stalin
told Churchill.

"They don't fight for Communism,

"they fight for their mother
Russia."

In June, the Organisation of
Ukrainian Nationalists

pledged itself to "cooperate closely
with the great Nazi German Reich."

Which, it believed, would "help the
Ukrainian nation

"liberate itself from Muscovite
oppression."

On June 30th,

Germans arrived in Lviv.

In the Lonsky prison,

they found rooms stacked with
corpses, some mutilated.

As they fled from the city,

the NKVD - The People's Commissariat
for Internal Affairs -

had killed 3,000 political
prisoners.

All sorts of people were in
partisan, as I knew this.

Not all of them were, you know,
so-called ardent opponents of
Nazism.

They enrolled local population for
their own greed.

The invasion created a vast occupied
territory...

..in which order was initially the
responsibility of anxious
reservists.

A report drawn up by German officers
declared...

"No partisan-infested area can be
cleared

"by a force composed of old men.

"If such security units fail to
accomplish their mission,

"they are likely to become the
laughing stock

"of an inherently antagonistic
population."

Hitler's view on how to deal with
the partisans was clear enough.

HITLER: "The swine have barricaded
themselves in a house

"in which there are also women and
children.

"Should the soldiers set fire to the
house or not?

"There shouldn't be any doubt about
this.

"He must burn it down."

In its first three weeks,

Barbarossa advanced 480 kilometres.

In its first three months,

twice as many Soviet prisoners of
war were taken

as in the entire remainder of the
war.

By the spring of 1942,

most of them were dead.

57.5% of Soviet prisoners of war

died in captivity.

The death toll for British and
American prisoners of the Germans

was 3.5%.

They didn't care about the fate of
the prisoners of war.

It was something like, you know, a
by-product.

It was not necessary to feed them,
to take care of their health

or whatever.

These people, prisoners of war,

are "rubbish".

The plan that the Germans had for
the occupation,

The Generalplan Ost,

made no concession to prisoners

or anyone else.

According to the Germans' Plan Ost,
so-called Plan Ost,

about Belarus territory,

only 25% of the population should
remain here.

75% should be killed

or removed to other territories.

Himmler saw the plan on June 12th
and wrote...

"It has very much pleased me."

In one of the documents of the
Generalplan Ost,

it was written that "It's too
expensive to kill all the Slavic
people.

"We don't need to. We need to keep
some of them

"but the others will die from
starvation."

It was quite, you know, "practical".

We are going to be using these
people

to serve the German empire

and they're gonna be in labourers'
roles and all the rest of it.

We certainly don't want to
enfranchise these people.

We certainly don't want to encourage
nationalism.

On July 16th, according to Martin
Bormann who was present,

Hitler said...

"We have now to face the task of
cutting up the giant cake

"according to our needs.

"This vast area must be pacified as
quickly as possible.

"This will best be done

"by shooting anyone who even looks
sideways at us."

In the same speech,

Hitler also noted the advantage of
the war against the partisans.

"It enables us to exterminate all
those who oppose us."

In Bialystok,

2,000 Jews were shot in June

by the 309th Reserve Police
Battalion.

When Himmler visited the city in
July, he complained that...

"The police had rounded up too few
Jews."

To govern areas captured in
Operation Barbarossa,

the Reichskommissariat Ostland was
created.

On July 18th, a Soviet prisoner of
war

was questioned at Luftwaffe
headquarters:

"Does the Red government consist
mainly of Jews?"

"That's all rubbish.

"They have no influence at all.

"On the contrary, the Russian people
has always hated the Jews."

After the war, the report of the
interrogation was sent to Stalin.

The prisoner, who would be killed
attempting to escape,

was his son, Yakov.

General Franz Halder, Chief of the
General Staff, wrote:

"It is no exaggeration to say

"that the war against Russia has
been won."

But on July 20th, Admiral Wilhelm
Canaris,

Chief of Military Intelligence,

reported that the mood at Hitler's
Rastenberg headquarters was...

"Very jittery."

The reason being, Canaris said, that
it was...

"..increasingly evident that the
Russian campaign

"is not going by the book."

On the 23rd, the Red Army launched
its first major counter-offensive.

Von Bock confessed to finding the
Soviet counter-offensives...

"Astonishing for an opponent who is
so beaten.

"They must have unbelievable masses
of material."

By the 28th, Joseph Goebbels
acknowledged that he was...

"Gradually becoming aware that the
eastern campaign

"is not a stroll to Moscow."

On the 31st, he admitted...

"It is clear that we have
underestimated Bolshevism."

It was equally clear that the
Germans had overestimated their own
capacity.

Panzer groups are driving into the
Soviet Union

on very poor infrastructure and on
single roads.

The talk sometimes about driving in
a cloud

and you can barely see the vehicle
in front of you.

And this is in the middle of the
day!

Because there's so much sand and
that's going into air filters.

Those air filters aren't built to
sustain this, not day after day.

Then the trucks and the tanks start
to drop out.

That's where you start to see huge
amounts of attrition.

By the beginning of August, the
three army groups

had suffered 179,500 casualties.

Replacements numbered only 47,000

with, in the occupied territory,

some regular units being diverted to
the wall behind the wall.

MAN: I think it would be fair to say
that a majority of Wehrmacht
soldiers

serving on the Eastern Front from
1941 onwards,

particularly during the first 12
months of the war,

were actually involved in war
crimes.

In Jerusalem, on trial for his life,

Adolf Eichmann said that Heinrich
Mueller, Head of the Gestapo,

had told him:

"In Minsk, they're shooting Jews.

"I want you to report on how it's
going."

So Eichmann went to Minsk,

which had housed a Jewish community
since the 15th century.

"They were shooting into the pit. It
was a rather large one.

"I didn't think much about it

"because I only saw it

"and that was quite enough."

On August 1st, Mueller sent a
message to commanders

of the operational groups,
the Einsatzgruppen.

"The Fuhrer is to be sent regular
reports

"about the work of the
Einsatzgruppen in the East.

"For this purpose, particularly
interesting material

"is required,

"like photographs, posters,
pamphlets and other documents."

The same day,

Himmler sent the Second SS Cavalry
regiment the first order

that explicitly included women in
the extermination policy.

It instructed that after the men had
been shot,

"that Jewish women be herded into
the marshes."

But things did not go smoothly.

"The driving of women and children
into the marshes

"did not have the expected success

because the marshes were not so deep
that one could sink.

"After a depth of about a metre,

"there was in most cases solid
ground

"preventing complete sinking."

Despite the "inconveniently shallow"
marshes,

an estimated 25,000 Jews were killed
in the Pinsk region

in a two-week period.

This is where the Holocaust starts.

The Holocaust does not start in
Auschwitz or in the camp,

but it starts on the killing fields
of the occupied Soviet Union.

Here, the Einsatzgruppen, they start
shooting Jews

and they systematically round up all
the Jews of the village

and then they murder them.

They do share a lot of the political
convictions

that were prevalent at the time

and so prevalent that they were just
accepted.

The soldiers didn't even need to
talk about them.

In their mindsets, they were just
part of the way they saw the world.

This was as a result of the
indoctrination and the
politicisation

and the propaganda of the previous
decade.

Von dem Bach-Zelewski's message was
amongst coded communications

deciphered at Bletchley Park.

But the British government could
make only broad comments

for fear of alerting the Germans to
the porous nature of their codes.

On August 25th,

Churchill told the British people
of "methodical, merciless butchery."

In his book, Axis Rule in Occupied
Europe,

Raphael Lemkin gave it a name.

He called it genocide.

Daily, the Einsatzgruppen were
shooting thousands.

The strain was too great.

There was, according to Helmuth von
Moltke,

who would be executed for treason in
1945...

"A nerve clinic where SS men are
cared for

"who have broken down while
executing women and children."

Reichsfuhrer Himmler offered
encouragement to his forces.

"I have to expect of you superhuman
acts of inhumanity.

"But it is the Fuhrer's will."

The Minsk experience did prompt him
to explore alternatives.

On September 1st,

100 Jews and 600 Red Army prisoners
of war

were taken to Auschwitz and gassed
with prussic acid.

"I must admit that the gassing set
my mind at rest."

It's been said before that during
the war,

if you want to know what Hitler was
thinking,

look at what Himmler was doing.

And Himmler did not do anything
without getting the green light from
Hitler.

This might have just been a nod, a
few words, or confirmation.

Nothing happened without Hitler's
approval.

On August 8th, Stalin became Supreme
Commander in Chief,

elevated to the rank of
Generalissimus.

He complained that the uniform made
him look like a hotel waiter.

On the 11th, offensives against
Moscow and Leningrad were suspended,

Hitler having decided that his
priority

was the industrial region of
Kharkov,

the coalfields of the Donets Basin

and beyond, and most important of
all,

the oilfields of the Caucasus.

The High Command was unconvinced.

Jodl, Chief of the Operations Staff,

and Halder, Chief of the Generals'
Staff, compared notes.

They are both convinced Moscow is
the best option.

That we should continue to drive on
Moscow.

And Jodl says to Halder,

"We have to be careful about forcing
Hitler to do something that he
doesn't want to do

"because he's been right so many
times in the past."

And here you have men whose
professional expertise

is major operations, that's what
they've spent their whole lives on,

they're convinced, many of their
colleagues are convinced,

this is the best course to victory.

And yet they're second-guessing
themselves,

based on a man who has no real
military expertise,

not at a high level, he was never an
officer.

On August 19th, Hitler told visitors
to Rastenberg...

"For the good of the German people,

"we must wish for a war every 15 or
20 years."

The following day, the siege of
Leningrad began.

A few days later,

the invasion was within sight of
Dnipropetrovsk.

And the Germans did not recognise
what they saw.

A population of 100,000 in the
1920s,

the vintage of German maps,

had jumped to 500,000

as a result of Stalin's forced
industrialisation programme.

The jewels in the crown of Stalin's
first five-year plan

were the dam on the Dnieper for
hydroelectric power

and the steel city of Magnitogorsk.

On August 28th, the Russians
destroyed the dam.

As Hitler and Benito Mussolini,
battlefield tourists,

flew over the occupied Ukraine,

Jews were being machine-gunned
outside the historic Ukrainian town

of Kamianets-Podilskyi.

Operational Situation Report
number 80

gives the figure of 23,600 killed at
Kamianets in three days.

By the end of August 1941,

the invading force had swept through
the Soviet Republics

and captured material and men in
vast numbers.

But not at sustainable cost.

You've encircled Belarus,

you've crushed Soviet armies near
the Front.

They're driving into the rest of the
Soviet Union

with small numbers relative to the
overall invasion force.

They're unaware of just how large
the Soviet reserve armies are

and the fact that they are already
there.

On September 8th,

with Leningrad, Russia's second city
and old Imperial capital

seeming on the brink of capture,

Stalin sent for Zhukov and asked
him:

"Where will you be off to now? "To
the Front." "Which Front?"

"The one you consider most
necessary."

Zhukov was sent to Leningrad, where
he acted decisively,

strengthening the defence.

Stalin said to him:

"My advice. No sentiment."

Stalin's style of administration,
style of governing,

he was ruthless.

The assault on Leningrad having
become too costly,

Hitler decided that Moscow and Kiev
were the prizes.

Leningrad could be starved into
submission.

He shifted the offensive to
Operation Typhoon,

the assault on Moscow.

"I will raze that damned city

"and in its place construct an
artificial lake

"with central lighting."

Both Moscow and Leningrad were to be
destroyed

as the symbols of Russian statehood,

as their political, industrial and
cultural centres.

It was a great plan of destruction
of the Russian state,

of the Slavic state.

On September 12th, the first snow
flurries drifted in the air.

Not settling, but threatening.

Field Marshal Keitel told commanders
in a briefing at Rastenberg
that their task...

"Demands ruthless and energetic
measures,

"above all against the Jews,

"the main carriers of Bolshevism."

On September 14th,

two Panzer spearheads met behind
Kiev,

which was transformed into a
cauldron,

the term that gained favour to
describe an encircled force.

In German, the "kessel".

Kiev, the Soviet Union's third
largest city,

fell on September 19th.

The biggest encirclements in the
history of wars,

they were here in 1941.

The biggest encirclement near Kiev
in September 1941,

when 600,000 Soviet soldiers were
taken prisoners.

It's not as much a Blitzkrieg as
people think,

where these encirclements are taking
place.

They're not what the maps represent

that there's these two big German
claws closing in.

This is part of the reason why there
is a partisan movement from 1941

because these are Red Army men.

Sometimes, they don't even know
they've been encircled.

It took until October 4th to process
the prisoners of war

and the vast quantity of captured
equipment.

When the fighting ended,

43 Soviet divisions had simply
ceased to exist.

And the road to Kharkov on the
Donets Basin was open.

"We were all so happy to see them.

"They were going to save us from the
communists who had starved us."

"In many cases, when the troops
moved in,

"we found that, according to a
Ukrainian practice,

"a table with a white cloth had been
prepared with bread and salt.

"In one case, there was even a small
band of musicians

"to welcome the troops."

German policy wasn't exactly the
same as people expected,

especially the old populations

who remembered the First World War

and now this wasn't at all the
Germans of the First World War.

When Erich Koch, Gauleiter of East
Prussia,

was appointed Commissioner for
Ukraine, he said:

"Our job is to suck from Ukraine all
the goods we can get hold of.

"If I find a Ukrainian who is worthy
of sitting at the same table as me,

"I must have him shot."

The occupied territories were a
patchwork

of formerly independent, partially
autonomous or simply aspiring
nationalities.

Every aspiration was to be
disappointed

by a German policy based on race.

And set out in the General Plan for
the East.

In the Ukraine and the Baltic States
particularly,

the dreams of statehood survived in
the partisan groups

that fought against the occupier,

and, in turn, against the liberator

and each other.

For most people, the challenge was
to stay alive.

OK, we will all buy your food,

we will all get acquainted with the
women and so on and so forth.

But after the German infantry came
Einsatzgruppen.

Ukraine's fate would be the
destruction of 700 towns and cities,

28,000 villages...

..and seven million of its people

including virtually the entire
Ukrainian Jewish population.

Posters went up throughout Kiev.

"All Yids living in the city of
Kiev and its vicinity

"are to report by eight o'clock on
the morning of Monday September 29th

"at the corner of Melnikovsky and
Doctorov Streets.

"They are to take with them
documents, money, valuables

"as well as warm clothes, underwear,
et cetera."

September 29th was Yom Kippur,

the holiest day in the Jewish
calendar.

"A large column gathered,

"which included my family including
six children

"and seven grandchildren.

"I stood at my father's side

"and held my three-year-old little
brother, Potenka, in my arms."

A teacher, Elle Natova,

was a witness to the events on
Korolenko Street.

She described what she saw in her
diary.

"I went out to the balcony. I saw a
crowd of Jews going along the
street.

"They were of different ages,
walking slowly

"and with such pitiful faces that it
was difficult to look at them.

"Oh, how terrible it is to live
here.

"How difficult it is to watch this
scene."

Fedir Pehido was on Lviv Street

at approximately 11 o'clock that
Monday.

"The children. My God, there were so
many children.

"All this was moving, burdened with
luggage and children."

Some of the women walking had
strings of onions round their necks,

food for the journey.

Dina Pronicheva was one of those
walking.

"I took my sick mother, and,
following the order,

"she and I started out on the way to
Babi Yar.

"Hundreds - no, thousands - of Jews

"were walking the same way."

MAN: "Both sides of Dokterivskaya
Street were planted with young
trees,

"and in-between them stood
Hitlerites.

"Many had dogs."

"If someone fell, a dog was let
loose

"which ripped things and the body."

"At Lvovskaya Street, they went
deceived and distraught,

"bunching up.

"They caused horror to those whose
gaze followed them."

"I heard shots from the direction of
Babi Yar

"and realised what they meant.

"I wept over those who had gone
towards their certain deaths."

"There were piles of clothes in a
wide-open field.

"My job was to fetch them.

"From where I was, I saw other
Ukrainians meeting the Jews

"and directing them to the place
where, one after another,

"they were supposed to remove their
belongings.

"Most people put up a fight when
they had to undress,

"and there was a lot of screaming
and shouting."

"Some of the policemen had brass
knuckles.

"I saw a group of men and women,

"elderly people and children

"being forced to take off their
clothes.

"All were taken to an open pit

"where sub-machine-gunners shot
them.

"The policemen ordered me to strip
and pushed me towards a precipice.

"But before the shots, I fell in."

In Riga, in 1946,

SS-und Polizeifuhrer Friedrich
Jeckeln

was hanged with 4,000 people
watching.

Mussolini's assessment of the
Germans was...

"They have no political sense.

"In those occupied countries,

"they had an opportunity to create a
good situation.

"And they let it slip.

"Now they are hated."

In the occupied territories,

people preferred to collaborate by
fear.

"Just to stay and to do what the
occupying power wants from me

"because I want to survive."

On September 30th,

Economy Inspectorate South

banned the supply of food to Kiev.

"The German military command closed
the city

"and blocked not only cars but
individuals from entering."

MAN: They just closed city markets
for peasants.

They had no possibility to deliver
food into the city.

There was starvation or otherwise

people were forced to leave the city
centre

and went to the countryside.

Nina Micolevic told how patrols on
bridges

confiscate everything.

By this time, the bread ration for
Kiev

was smaller than for the besieged
city of Leningrad.

"There is no bread.

"Many are already starting to swell
up.

"Olya is starving.

"She will die soon.

"What will become of her child?

"He is also hungry."

"A German did not stand in line.

"Whatever his rank, he would
commandeer the barber's chair

"even if ten people were waiting.

"He had a free ride on the trams and
always had a right to a seat."

Germans in the bigger cities were
living the good life.

They are really profiting from it.

They are looting cellars, they are
drinking good wine.

They have good food

and they live off the land.

CROWD ROARS

Cronies, toadies and bully boys

from the old days

staked their claim as Gauleiters,
administrators, commissars.

Inept, ignorant, they earned the
term "ostriten", Eastern nobodies,

recruited, Hitler said,

"Not on the grounds of having
judicial training,

"but because they successfully
passed through the school of life."

On September 30th,

Heinz Guderian initiated Operation
Typhoon,

the assault on Moscow.

The launch of Typhoon was announced
by Hitler

in a radio broadcast on October 2nd.

"Today begins the last great
decisive battle of the war.

"The final tremendous blow which,
before the onset of winter,

"will lead to the destruction of the
enemy."

Hoepner's 4th Panzer Group -

Hoepner would be hanged for his role
in the July plot to assassinate
Hitler -

smashed through the Soviet defensive
line,

looking to take Vyazma from the
south.

The following day,

Hitler announced...

"This enemy is already broken and
will never rise again.

"This would have been a second storm
of Genghis Khan.

"That this danger was averted, we
owe in the first place

"to the bravery, endurance and
sacrifice of the German soldiers."

Two days later, the Moscow Air
Commander reported

that a long column of German tanks

was advancing along the Uknovo
Highway,

100 kilometres from the walls of the
Kremlin.

The diary entry of Corporal Richard
Heidenreich

of the 354th Infantry Regiment
noted...

"There were approximately 1,000 Jews
in the village of Kraca

"and these all needed to be shot
today.

"Only a few of them kept their
composure.

"The children clung to their
mothers,

"women to their men."

How is it possible that these
people, Germans of moral character,

could carry out hideous crimes

without seeing - can't you just see
that they're people?

Can't you see the tears in their
eyes?

Undoubtedly there would have been a
need

to continually construct and
reconstruct the "them".

"These people are not us and they
will never be like us.

"You need not feel sadness. In fact,
you should feel fear."

On October 7th, Hoepner linked up
with Hoff's 3rd Panzer group.

To their west was a huge pocket

containing four Soviet armies.

Further south, Guderian's 2nd Panzer
group

had driven to take Bryansk from the
rear,

as the infantry of the German 2nd
Army marched on it from the west.

This double encirclement netted
Germany more than 700,000 prisoners
of war.

"In a military sense, Soviet Russia
has been vanquished."

By the end of the operation, no
major Red Army formation remained

on the approaches to Moscow.

And cadets, militia and police units

were being shuffled into the
defensive Mozhaisk line,

120 kilometres from the capital.

Zhukov told Stalin...

"All routes to Moscow are open.

"The weak covering forces on the
Mozhaisk line

"cannot be guaranteed against the
sudden appearance of enemy tanks."

On October 15th, Stalin signed a
decree,

ordering the evacuation of Moscow.

On the 18th,

Panzer spearheads broke through the
Mozhaisk line.

They were two hours' drive from the
Kremlin.

But by October 30th,

the Germans were stuck in mud,

between 80 and 100 kilometres short
of the capital.

Of course German generals blamed
Russian weather and frost.

But to be honest, it was not a state
secret of Russia

that we've got frost in December and
in January.

And the roads were never good in
Russia.

It was not a secret!

One and a quarter million Red Army
defenders

had met Operation Typhoon.

In the first ten days, one million
of them

had been eliminated from the battle.

A third killed, two-thirds taken
prisoner,

for German losses of 48,000.

The Soviet officers

have no idea how to survive these
soldiers.

They just send them in the massacre.

Even now, we have a lot of unknown
graves

on the territory of Belarus and on
the territory of Russia.

Over the next couple of months,

the Soviet Union would send 1.5
million new troops

into the line with 8,000 guns

and more than 1,300 aircraft.

By November 27th,

Eduard Wagner, quartermaster-general
of the army, the Ostia, was writing:

"We are at the end of our resources.

"We are about to be confronted with
the dangers of a deep winter."

In 1944, implicated in the Operation
Valkyrie plot

to assassinate the Fuhrer,

Wagner shot himself.

If you think what a General Staff
Officer is,

they're not just blundering in with
a machine gun.

They're making sense of this.

They're looking at numbers. They're
quantifying operations.

And all of those numbers equal "This
won't work",

and time and again on both sides,

they're trying to make it work.

Rundstedt's Army Group South broke
the Dnieper River line,

moving further into Ukraine on a
wide front.

Kharkov, an industrial city of
840,000,

fell on October 25th

and was soon gripped by starvation.

"Wonderful news from Russia",

wrote Erwin Rommel to his wife.

But he was in North Africa, where it
was not snowing.

On October 15th, the battle diary of
the SS Death's Head Division

recorded the first substantial
snowfall.

25 centimetres.

By the 16th,

it was reported that 15 centimetres
of snow

blanketed the entire countryside.

And the commander of the 10th Air
Corps confessed...

"Our wildest dreams have been washed
out by rain and snow."

Subtitles by Red Bee Media