Stalingrad: A Trilogy episode 3 – At the beginning of January 1943, the situation for the soldiers of the 6th Army was hopeless: completely exhausted, half starved and apathetic, the men lay in their positions in freezing temperatures. They can no longer defend themselves, the ammunition is almost gone. Then, on January 8, 1943, the Soviets offered the Sixth Army […]
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Stalingrad: A Trilogy episode 2: In the early morning of November 19, 1942, one of the most moving chapters of World War II began. A dense fog lay in the lowlands between the Don and the Volga. At 5:20 a.m., several thousand Soviet guns and Stalin organs opened fire. “It was breathtaking,” Captain Gerard Dengler recalls with a shudder. The
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Stalingrad: A Trilogy episode 1 – With a force of over half a million men, the German army advanced towards the Caspian Sea and Stalingrad to capture the center of Soviet military industry. Hitler’s Sixth Army faced strong resistance from all sides and German soldiers perished in bloody battles. Yet Hitler still boasted on November 8th in Munich that Stalingrad
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Rise of the Nazis episode 6: Facing defeat on the Eastern Front, Hitler retreats. Deep rifts emerge, and his inner circle vies for power. The resistance gets a student voice, and an enemy within plots to kill Hitler. A fresh perspective on how Hitler brutally seized and kept power – and the missed chances that could have stopped
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Rise of the Nazis episode 5: The Nazis have lost in Moscow. Hitler and Stalin take charge of their armies – with no-one to hold them back. In Stalin, Hitler has met his match – it’s now a fight to the death. A fresh perspective on how Hitler brutally seized and kept power – and the missed chances
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Rise of the Nazis episode 4: At the peak of his power, Hitler now faces fellow ruthless dictator Stalin. He tries to deceive Stalin with a plan to invade Britain, all while preparing an attack on the Soviet Union. A fresh perspective on how Hitler brutally seized and kept power – and the missed chances that could have
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KGB: The Sword and the Shield episode 2: By August 1949, at least five years earlier than expected, the USSR became the world’s second superpower, thanks to its spies who had stolen America’s atomic secrets. But by March 1953, Stalin is dead and KGB chief, Beria, is executed later the same year. Nikita Kruschev tries to reduce the power of
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KGB: The Sword and the Shield episode 1: Cheka was the predecessor organization of the KGB, the notorious secret service of the Soviet Union. Founded in 1917, the Cheka’s employees were tasked with tracking down unreliable government officials and anarchist forces. Set up as a ‘temporary’ measure by Lenin, millions of Soviet citizens would die at the hands of the
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Gulag – The Story episode 3: At the end of the 1950s, populations of the newly occupied territories of the East and intellectuals remained two categories particularly suspected of anti-Sovietism. Subjected to exhausting tasks like men, women, including many war widows condemned to heavy sentences for petty food pilfering, now represent a quarter of the zeks. Nearly 2 million detainees,
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Gulag – The Story episode 2: Glorified at the XVIIth Congress of the Communist Party, in 1934, Stalin launched major projects that would go down in history. The NKVD, which succeeded the GPU, multiplies the camps. The number of deportees passed the one million mark in 1935. A spectacular showcase for the great terror unleashed in 1937, the Moscow trials
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Gulag – The Story episode 1: In 1918, only a few months after the October Revolution, the first concentration camps appeared. With the aim of getting rid of political adversaries and re-educating the so-called “asocial” elements through work, the new Bolshevik regime conducted its first large-scale experiment on the Solovki archipelago, very close to the Arctic Circle. Thousands of political
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World War II: Behind Closed Doors episode 6: The dramatic story of the collapse of the Alliance in the wake of the end of the war, and Stalin’s desire to turn on his wartime comrades. Joseph Stalin was a tyrant responsible for the death of millions, yet he was also a vital ally of Britain and America during
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