Secrets of World War II episode 10: There have been larger land battles and more protracted air campaigns than Okinawa but this was a combined operation, unparalleled in size, scope and ferocity. In April 1945, a U.S. bombardment of the Japanese-held island Okinawa rapidly escalated into the most intense battle of the Pacific. Thousands of Americans perished, and the Japanese […]
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Secrets of World War II episode 9: In 1944 as Hitler faced defeat he tried one last gamble of an offensive on the Western Front. The result was the ‘Battle of the Bulge’. But what the Germans did not know was the Allies were decoding their radio messages. By late 1944, the Allied commanders were confident that the Third Reich
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Secrets of World War II episode 2: With access to Eva Braun’s personal photograph album, this programme reconstructs the final days in the Dictator’s underground lair, and in particular it examines the possibility of escape for the selected few. Even a half century after his violent end, the death of the 20th century’s most sinister evil is still shrouded in
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Secrets of World War II episode 1: Little did the Germans know that the body they discovered on the coast of Spain in 1943 was part of one of the most elaborate hoaxes of World War II. On April 30, 1943. a British submarine surfaced off the coast of Spain and dropped a body into the sea. The corpse was
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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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Hitler’s Secret Weapons Manager: When SS General Hans Kammler, a key figure in the Nazis’ secret weapons programme, vanished in 1945 he was said to have taken his own life. Yet recently discovered documents cast doubt on this claim. ZDF History shows evidence of this for the first time. A US Air Force Secret Service document dated May 30, 1945
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Hitler Takes on the West episode 2: May 1940. France is in chaos. The French people take to the roads, trying to escape. The government signs an armistice as Germans take over half the country. The French and the English retreat desperately. In Dunkirk, there are more than 300,000 troops waiting to be transhipped in hundreds of ships, which perform
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Hitler Takes on the West episode 1: 1940 – Nine months after the onset of World War II, Hitler attacks the West – Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Great Britain – with intense violence. The “phoney war” ends, the real war begins, in an unleashing of violence never seen before. The devastating blitzkrieg exceeds all expectations in intensity and its
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Warsaw Ghetto – The Unfinished Film: The Warsaw Ghetto housed 440,000 Polish Jews and Roma during World War II. Typhus, starvation and random murders killed over 100,000 of the ghetto’s residents even before the Nazis began the massive deportations to the Treblinka extermination camp. Yet the Nazis created a mysterious propaganda film that juxtaposed meticulously staged scenes of Jews enjoying
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Hitler’s People: A Portrait of the Third Reich part 2: On 18 February 1943 Joseph Goebbels held his notorious “Total War” speech about being “faithful to the last” at the Berlin Sportpalast. But the Reich’s defeat in Stalingrad a few weeks earlier shook the faith of the Germans in the “final battle”, which saw Germany crumbling more and more every
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