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0:03
The Poles have been slandering us for the first time, even though we are two minutes away from the end of the war. We have been stopped by regular soldiers. We will be stopped by the 5th Regiment of the 5th Regiment. The war is over.
0:21
We will defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We will fight on the beaches, we will fight on the land you run, we will fight in the fields, and in the deep, we will fight in the hills, we will never surrender.
0:40
I don't know what to do.
0:53
United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. We will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God. God bless you.
1:38
You won't hide until the house is exposed, Senate President! Not soon after this war, a big around the town was to be doing a favor that could bomb everybody else, and nobody was going to bomb Red.
2:28
Berlin, the 1st of May 1939. Model National Socialist companies are awarded gold flags and publicly feted for their services to the nation and regime.
2:40
Among them is aircraft manufacturer Siebel Flugzeugwerke in Halle an der Saale.
2:48
Around six years after seizing power, the National Socialists seem to have established almost total control over German society.
3:00
As a totalitarian ideology, National Socialism seeks to penetrate and control every area of life.
3:08
Nazi institutions are created with the aim of governing people's lives from cradle to grave.
3:15
The National Socialists knew they didn't have the support of the entire nation. And they needed that support to achieve their goals.
3:27
At the new Reich Chancellery on Wilhelmstraße in the center of Berlin, Adolf Hitler makes only rare appearances these days.
3:37
He spends much of the summer at his mountain court, his retreat at Ober Salzberg. In the company of close allies, the dictator crafts his plans to dominate the continent.
3:51
The National Socialists see themselves as fighting for the revision of the Treaty of Versailles and the restoration of German national greatness.
4:01
But there are racial and territorial conditions. They believe Germany is entitled to colonize lands in the East. And they believe in the superiority of the Aryan race. Hitler set that out in Mein Kampf, claiming that the racially superior German nation ultimately had a right to dominate inferior, less cultured groups, particularly in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
4:26
But it is still too early for a confrontation with the Soviet Union. The first stage of Third Reich expansion is planned elsewhere, after the annexation of Austria and the breakup of Czechoslovakia. the dictator switches his focus to Poland.
4:42
Hitler actually saw Poland as a junior partner for his war against the Soviet Union. That's why he signed a non-aggression pact with Poland in the early 1930s. But it soon became clear that Poland planned to pursue its own policies and had no intention of being Hitler's acquiescent friend and helper. So Hitler tears up the non-aggression pact and demands that Danzig be incorporated into the German Reich.
5:10
Danzig looks back on a turbulent history between Poland and Germany.
5:16
Unlike East Prussia, it was separated from the German Reich under the Treaty of Versailles. and placed under the authority of the League of Nations.
5:27
Most of Danzig's population are German, and many are reluctant to accept the city's new fate.
5:34
So are the National Socialists, who skillfully exploit the situation for their own ends.
5:45
That played right into their hands of course, because they could always say, 99% of the population are German, why can't they be part of the Reich? The Nazis had been presented with an open goal and their propaganda machine sent the ball singing into the net.
6:07
Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels makes several trips to the historic Hanseatic city and delivers inflammatory speeches to cheering crowds.
6:32
But Hitler would never have been content with just Danzig. And he says that quite clearly on several occasions. He tells the chiefs of the armed forces so in briefings ahead of the Polish campaign. It is no longer just about Danzig. It is about a great deal more than that. Danzig is just a symbol of a sense of entitlement to Polish territory.
6:58
Goebbels knows full well at this time that war on Poland has long been a certainty. His appearances in Danzig are just part of the game. Back in May 1939, Hitler told army chiefs that the decision had been taken to attack Poland at the earliest opportunity. The dictator's words were recorded by his adjutant-in-chief Rudolf Schmundt. The Führer issues the order to prepare for an early invasion.
7:29
But in public, the regime insists it wants peace and denounces Poland as the aggressor. In newspapers and newsreels, reports of assaults on the German minority in Poland are systematically exaggerated.
7:47
While the Danzig population, calm and confident, is waiting for the return to the Reich, the Germans within the Polish borders are exposed to the wildest terror.
7:58
Many thousands fled from the violent activities of the Poles in the protection of the Reich and were found in collection and collection. You have to present a convincing level of distress, so that the long-planned military intervention that is being prepared, and has been since at least May 1939, can be credibly presented as an act of national defense. And that calls for agitation, propaganda, reports of alleged Polish atrocities against German civilians.
8:30
It's just unbeatable propaganda material.
8:34
The tension between the two countries escalates. Poland launches a program to modernize its army, which stages a public demonstration of strength under the eyes of Commander-in-Chief Marshal Rydz-Schmig.
8:48
The parade is presented in Nazi propaganda as a sign of expansionist intent.
9:09
The German Reich holds maneuvers on its eastern border. Among those taking part is the 6th Tank Regiment, a part of the newly formed 3rd Tank Division. On the 20th of August 1939, the units head east.
9:25
One of the officers has a camera and films the operation.
9:30
In summer 1939 it is already clear that war is imminent, that Hitler wants war,
9:40
and that the maneuvers on the eastern border are being held for precisely that reason.
9:46
They give troops a chance to acclimatize and hone their skills.
9:57
The 6th Tank Regiment arrives in Razebourg near Chechnya, a strategically favorable location for a strike. But the time is not yet ripe. Hitler has a problem. He doesn't know how his arch-enemy, the Soviet Union, will react to a German attack on Poland. He fears that Stalin might side with the Western powers against him.
10:19
On the 23rd of August, Foreign Minister Joachim von Rippentrop flies to Moscow in Hitler's personal plane. In the Russian capital, he surprises the world by signing a non-aggression pact with his opposition number, Vyacheslav Molotov. Josef Stalin is delighted with the agreement.
10:40
The really interesting thing about the Hitler-Stalin pact is the secret protocol included in it. It defines spheres of influence in the event of action being taken against Poland. Basically speaking, Germany gets the Western territories and the Soviet Union the Eastern ones. notably Eastern Galicia.
10:58
Hitler is well aware of the treaty's huge strategic importance. On the evening of the 23rd of August, he and his inner circle wait impatiently at Berghof for news from Moscow. The message that the treaty has been signed does not arrive till after midnight.
11:15
The pact paves the way for Hitler to go to war. Nationwide, there are growing signs that armed conflict is imminent. One clear indication... is the issue of ration cards. The sale of certain commodities, such as fat, was already controlled. Now there is general food rationing. The moment war breaks out, the first priority is to supply soldiers at the front. So the laws of the market are basically suspended by issuing ration cards.
11:50
Even if people have money, They cannot get food for cash. They have to show entitlement. And that system of entitlement is the real crux of rationing. It gives the state systematic control over consumption.
12:12
People prepare for the anticipated food shortages. The older generation still remember the hunger endured during the First World War. Provisions are stockpiled. just in case.
12:28
The newsreels present footage of men reporting for military service.
12:38
But unlike in 1914, there is little enthusiasm for the impending conflict in the late summer of 39.
12:52
The German intelligence services note that the public mood is somber. People know what happens when a great war is waged on the Western powers. They know it brings death, suffering and deprivation. And for the majority of Germans in 1939 that is a ghastly prospect.
13:15
Regardless of the public mood, the German Reich flexes its muscles. There's a demonstrative naval presence in the Baltic. After the loss of much of the high seas fleet in the First World War, the country has redoubled its rearmament effort since the mid-1930s.
13:36
The fleet includes SMS Schleswig-Holstein, which calls at Danzig on the 25th of September. A propaganda film shows the reception.
13:49
The old Handelsstadt is welcoming the ship of Schleswig-Holstein, which offers the largest war submarine.
13:57
On the afternoon of the 25th of August, Hitler gives the order for the assault on Poland to commence the next day. But only hours later, the order is revoked when it is learned that Britain has signed a mutual assistance pact with Poland and the Italian dictator Mussolini says his country is not yet ready to go to war.
14:20
In the days that follow, diplomats try to save the peace, among them the UK ambassador in Berlin, Neville Henderson. Hitler makes a half-hearted show of engaging with attempts at mediation, but his mind is made up. The specter of war casts a shadow over Europe.
14:40
At the end of August 1939, Poland's ally France mobilizes for war, building a fighting force of around 90 divisions. And despite the war, the Allies are still fighting. diplomatic endeavors, preparations for a conflict with Germany are also made in London.
14:58
The Anglo-Polish mutual assistance pact will kick in if either of the two nations is attacked. So Hitler looks for a way to present Poland as the aggressor.
15:09
He says, I will provide a propagandistic casus belli. Its credibility doesn't matter. The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth.
15:22
Hitler orders a series of false flag operations, faking Polish attacks on Germany. One of the best known is the Gleiwitz incident, where a German radio station is attacked by SS operatives in Polish army uniforms.
15:37
Shortly after 8 pm on the 31st of August, the SS group breaks into the radio station on Tarnowiczer Straße in Gleiwitz, posing as anti-German saboteurs The men broadcast a communique in Polish. To make the assault more credible, they leave behind the body of Silesian farmer Franz Honiok, who had been abducted and murdered the previous day. The operation lasts only minutes, but it gives Hitler the excuse he seeks to issue the order to attack.
16:10
The whole charade was staged to persuade the international public, and especially the Germans, that this was war in self-defense. that Germany was the victim, not the aggressor.
16:25
More than 55 German divisions stand ready to invade Poland. Among them is the 6th Tank Regiment, which moves into strike position on 31 August and awaits further orders.
16:45
Recent arrival Schleswig-Holstein is still at anchor in Danzig port. She's been assigned a special role in the attack on Poland. At around quarter to five in the morning, German radio broadcasts this message.
17:06
The Westerplatte peninsula is the site of Polish munitions dumps, which now come under fire from the sea. World War II has started, and a radio reporter gives people in Germany a blow-by-blow account.
17:26
Positioned a couple of hundred meters from the Schleswig-Holstein and around a kilometer from Westerplatte, he describes with growing excitement, the hail of shells falling on Polish soil.
17:43
Minutes earlier, the German Luftwaffe had appeared without warning and bombed the Polish town of Wilun, east of Breslau. Wave after wave of planes reduced the town center to dust and ashes. The demonstration of German air power claims more than a thousand lives. And shortly afterwards, German dive bombers join the battle for Danzig.
18:08
Another direct hit.
18:14
While the naval shelling and aerial bombardment continue, the German army advances. A force of more than a million and a half men and over 3,000 tanks enters Poland in a multi-pronged invasion.
18:30
In September 1939, Poland was very exposed, geographically isolated,
18:37
and on three sides by East Prussia, Silesia and Slovakia, where German troops were also stationed. Another problem was that Poland's leaders were determined not to give an inch of ground, so they could perhaps have chosen better defensive positions. As it was, the German troops overran the Polish front line very quickly.
18:58
Polish front very quickly. Within hours, Hitler speaks to the German nation and announces the outbreak of what he calls the defensive war.
19:14
Since tonight, for the first time, regular soldiers have not been shot on our territory.
19:24
In Danzig, the fighting spreads to the city center. In the early hours of the 1st of September, Polish personnel hole up in the Polish post office building.
19:35
They have access to a cache of weapons stored away in anticipation of a German attack. Several attempts to take the building are successfully repelled, but late in the afternoon, German engineers blast a hole in the facade.
19:50
Petrol is then pumped into the basement and the buildings set on fire. The situation becomes increasingly hopeless for the defenders and they surrender. Some are shot on the spot, most of the others are later executed. War shows its brutal face from the very beginning.
20:11
The Wehrmacht soldiers did not need to be persuaded to go to war against Poland. What with the consequences of the First World War, the status of Danzig and so on, German perception of the situation was not good. The objections of Poland were very negative. There was no appetite for a major war against Britain or France, but there was no objection to taking up arms against Poland.
20:39
In the evening of the 1st of September, less than 24 hours after the outbreak of hostilities, Danzig is declared German again. The Wehrmacht enter the city amid cheering crowds. while the fighting on Westerplatte continues.
20:59
In Berlin, Hitler appears before a tame Reichstag and defends the military action. Britain and France issue an ultimatum for Germany to withdraw its troops from Poland, but the Führer brushes off their demands. On the 3rd of September, the two powers declare war on the German Reich.
21:23
Hitler was horrified because he hadn't really expected Britain to stick to the common defense pact with Poland. He always dreamt, right up to 1945, of standing alongside this global power, the British Empire.
21:41
He would create a pan-Germanic empire on the continent, and the two of them would rule the world together.
22:20
Poland in the east has now been joined by an enemy on Germany's western border, France. The response is immediate.
22:29
Border villages are evacuated to give the Wehrmacht room to operate. German army units take up positions along the frontier, but they initially find they have little to do.
22:47
Britain and France do not attack. Why not? They are easily the more powerful force. Most of Germany's troops are in the east, in Poland. But French military doctrine says that success is best sought in defense, not attack. First let enemies advance, then attack when they are weakened. That's the lesson the French learned from the First World War. And they think
23:11
It will work again now.
23:16
The waiting game that follows is known in Germany as the Sitzkrieg, the sitting war. The French know it as the Drolle de Guerre, the funny or strange war. Apart from a few propaganda exercises, the German armed forces remain passive. And despite having declared war on the German Reich, Britain and France also take little military action.
23:39
They are simply not willing to engage in ground warfare for a little country like Poland. There is a move towards borders, to the peripheries, but there is no desire as yet to intervene in Central Europe.
23:54
The German Wehrmacht can thus focus on the campaign in the East, both Army Group North under Field Marshal Fedor von Bock and Army Group South under Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt rapidly make major territorial gains. Tactics play an important role. Of all the armed forces in the Second World War, the Wehrmacht proves most adept at launching combined arms operations, especially in the early stages of the war.
24:25
That means coordinating service branches so that they mesh and work together, like teeth in a gearbox.
24:58
Educated officers and teams enable strategic and tactical evaluation of the loot brought in by the scouts through good work division. The developed material provides important documents for planning and carrying out further operations.
25:15
The advancing German armies leave behind a trail of devastation. On the 3rd of September, a soldier in the 14th Army notes in his diary, the routes of the advancing divisions are easy to identify. On our way to the front, we pass endless streams of civilians and burning homes. The fields near the road are littered with the bizarrely twisted corpses of Polish civilians. We all look, but few grimace. Everyone just thinks it's war.
25:46
For many of the inexperienced German soldiers, the distinction between civilians and partisans becomes blurred.
25:57
In the campaign against Poland, German abuses, German crimes are committed at a very early stage. In the Wehrmacht, it's primarily because soldiers are nervous and inexperienced and fear an ambush at every turn. They are quick to overreact. They set whole villages on fire and they kill hostages.
26:19
We don't know whether there really was some kind of guerrilla war in Poland, but the Wehrmacht certainly came to believe they were caught up in one. Then they started shooting at anything that moved.
26:35
Apart from these acts of violence, there is early evidence of ideologically motivated crimes against Polish civilians.
26:49
It is a war of annihilation from the outset, a war aimed at the absolute decimation of the Polish nation. Einsatzgruppen, SS death squads, are operating behind the Wehrmacht lines and the result is the murder of at least 60,000 civilians, politicians, clerics and academics, many of them members of the Jewish faith.
27:13
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Jews make up around 10% of the Polish population. Before long, that minority becomes a focus for the Einsatzgruppen and a victim of excessive violence. National socialist propaganda has demonized Jews for years and seeks to stir up hostility even more. Propaganda films and newsreels become vehicles for incitement campaigns specifically targeting Jews. This East Jewish subhumanism has always had...
27:42
Westeuropa das internationale Verbrechergesindel geliefert. Von hier aus wurden die Demokratien mit Taschendieben, Zuhältern, Rauschgift- und Mädchenhändlern, internationalen Bankschiebern und Hetzjournalisten versorgt. Das sind dieselben Juden, deren Brüder, Söhne und Pettern in London und Paris für die Humanität und Zivilisation das große Wort führen.
28:06
Five Einsatzgruppen with a total of around 3,000 men were initially formed for the Polish campaign. While they commit murder behind the front line, the German armed forces press on with their advance. On the 6th of September, the 10th Army significantly breaches the Polish defenses. The Polish High Command orders its troops to retreat behind the San, Bug and Weichsel rivers. The same day, German units take numerous cities in the south of Poland, including Tarnow.
28:34
The ground force benefits from a new form of support from the air.
28:41
Back in the First World War, the air arms primary function was reconnaissance. Now planes are used to provide tactical support for troops on the ground, a new idea that is embraced only by the German Wehrmacht in the early war years.
28:57
In the invasion of Poland, the Wehrmacht deploys two air fleets with over 1,100 aircraft. Particularly feared are the Stuckers, the German dive bombers. As they dive, they make a screaming sound that terrifies and undermines morale.
29:18
Each Stuka can carry a payload of 1,800 kilos, and it's feared by soldiers and civilians alike.
29:41
On the home front, the military successes in the early days of the war are followed with keen interest. Newspapers put out special issues reporting on developments at the front line. But no one can expect the truth here. The press has been under National Socialist control for years.
30:03
The same goes for radio, but despite censorship, the dark side of the war quickly becomes apparent.
30:12
Trainloads of casualties arrive from the front line. Military hospitals and infirmaries spring up all over the country. Here, a converted school at Chorbach in Hesse. An amateur filmmaker records the busy hospital at work and the surgery that is performed.
30:30
By the end of the Polish campaign, around 30,000 German soldiers have been wounded and some 15,000 have lost their lives.
30:41
Before long, scenes like this are an everyday sight in Germany. 21 years after the end of the First World War, fallen soldiers are again laid to rest.
30:59
In the early days of the war, when soldiers killed in action are still returned home for burial, the regime's stage manages the funerals as tributes to heroes. The entire family of the deceased are showcased to put across the message that if something bad like this happens, it is a life sacrificed for the regime. And the regime will not forget the family.
31:33
The Nazi propaganda machine prefers to present other images. Since the war started, Adolf Hitler has paid regular visits to troops in the field, and he makes sure they are filmed. Here, the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces salutes German units crossing the River Saan.
31:51
Hitler likes to be seen with the troops during the Polish campaign. He does so primarily for propaganda reasons, of course, to show Germans that their Führer and Chancellor is now also a soldier. He knows what it's like, he knows from the First World War what it's like to be a simple serviceman on the frontline. And for the troops, the message is, he is with you. The intention is to boost morale, of course, and strengthen the bond between members of the
32:18
armed forces and their Führer and supreme commander.
32:25
The Bacura River near Kutno in central Poland. Undetected by German reconnaissance, parts of the Polish Pomorce and Poznan armies join forces here and confront the advancing Germans.
32:39
For a while, the German 8th Army under General Blaskowicz finds itself hard-pressed by the Polish offensive. But with the help of parts of the 4th and 10th Armies, the Polish forces are ultimately surrounded. On the 19th of September, the battle is won.
33:01
Around 170,000 Polish soldiers become German prisoners of war and thus face an uncertain future.
33:10
Crimes against the civilian population and against prisoners of war are documented from a fairly early stage in the Polish campaign. I think ideology certainly played a part, but there is also what you might call a cultural divide. As in the First World War, Poles are seen as culturally inferior. It's a fairly old perception with the potential to arouse and unleash violence.
33:37
Above all, the Nazi regime and Wehrmacht institutions do nothing to curb that violence.
33:49
What is more, the Wehrmacht cannot cope from the outset with the large number of prisoners. On the 8th of September, the 7th Army Corps of Army Group South reports that Conditions behind the rapidly advancing ground force are appalling. More than 6,000 prisoners and internees are entirely without food and virtually unguarded. A total of 400,000 Polish soldiers fall into German captivity during the campaign. Many of them are later deported and forced into slave labor.
34:27
On the 17th of September, the Polish armed forces suffer another heavy blow. The Red Army invades from the east.
34:39
When the Red Army crosses the border on the 17th of September, it's effectively game over for Poland. The country cannot possibly win a war on two fronts. There might have been a chance of staying off defeat if there was only one front. But even that would have been difficult. And the events of the 17th of September can mean only one thing. It's every man for himself.
35:01
In the protocol to the Hitler-Stalin pact, the Third Reich and the Soviet Union divided up Poland between them and defined the Bug River as the demarcation line. Within days of the Red Army entering Poland, the invaders meet at Brest-Litovsk and mark their success with a celebratory joint military parade. Less than two years later, Wehrmacht and Red Army troops will meet again, but as enemies. after Germany invades the Soviet Union in June 1941. The outcome of the war in Poland has been decided,
35:34
but the fighting is not yet over. Military action is now focused on the battle for the capital. Warsaw has been surrounded since the 13th of September, but German troops have so far failed to take the city.
35:55
American filmmaker Julian Bryan is one of the last foreign journalists present in Warsaw in September. His camera records the people's desperate attempts to protect their city.
36:10
The Germans start to wonder if they'll surrender. A short, sharp offensive fails. Before long, German tanks are outside Warsaw, but they are kept at bay by the Poles. The question now is, how can the Poles be made to surrender?
36:55
It is eminently important for the end of the war, because the German army does not relish the prospect of a long house-to-house fight for Warsaw.
37:04
Wasserkante enables it to break the defenders' spirit, but it also means the civilian population suffers.
37:13
Large parts of the city are razed to the ground. No distinction is made between civilian and military targets. Julian Bryan films the devastation at a hospital that fell victim to the bombing. The nursery ward was evacuated in time. Other people in the city were not so lucky.
37:32
More than 25,000 people are killed. A propaganda film presents the Nazi version of events, blaming the Poles for the inferno. They should have surrendered the city earlier. The commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring, boasts about the air arms achievement. This air weapon has achieved great achievements here, which will remain unremarkable forever. When this wonderful weapon was taken by the German people in Versailles, one did not suspect that under the leadership of Adolf Hitler,
38:07
this weapon would be reborn stronger and more powerful.
38:15
Two months later, the top brass of the Luftwaffe deliver a triumphant report on the bombardment. They speak in particularly glowing terms about the incendiary bomb B-1 F. The resounding success of the Warsaw operation removes any doubt about its outstanding efficacy in residential areas, they say. It was dropped in large quantities to maximize the number of fires and interspersed with waves of high-explosive and shrapnel bombs
38:44
to keep the population in shelters so that fires can spread to catastrophic levels.
38:51
Only a few years later, the same strategy will be used against German cities. Allied bombers will fly similar missions, fully aware that tens of thousands of civilians will perish.
39:07
Blanket bombing always targets civilians. The point is that this is the first time it was used in the Second World War.
39:15
It's also perhaps important to note that it was not the British or Americans who ordered the first bombing raids. The first blanket bombing was carried out by the German Luftwaffe.
39:25
In theory, the German bombardment may have been compliant with the Hague Land Warfare Convention. Warsaw was a defended city in a combat zone with substantial fortifications. In effect, the assault was a terror attack. Within hours, the city commander announces Warsaw's unconditional surrender. 120,000 soldiers in the city are now taken into German captivity, every moment captured on film by a Nazi propaganda team.
39:58
With men and trust and courage. Quoting a poem about Napoleon's ultimate defeat, the narrator stresses the scale of the Polish capitulation.
40:08
The Polish defense now collapses nationwide.
40:12
The commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Marshal Rydz-Schmig, flees to Romania, following the footsteps of the government, which did the same in the middle of September.
40:24
Sporadic fighting continues through to the 6th of October, but then all resistance ceases. 36 days after the invasion, the campaign is over. An average of around 1,940 Polish soldiers a day have been killed since the 1st of September.
40:43
The final death toll is at least 70,000, and the list of wounded runs to 130,000. Apart from that, thousands of civilians have been murdered.
40:59
The brutalization of war is seen clearly in the invasion of Poland, and I think it is a very significant development, one that has rightly been highlighted by research in recent years. We see here the suspension of inhibitions against violence, also on the part of the military and individual soldiers, which will be a hallmark of the subsequent war with the Soviet Union.
41:23
The day before the last Polish units surrender, the Wehrmacht holds a victory parade in Warsaw in the presence of its supreme commander.
41:36
The dictator enjoys the moment of triumph, but he is already making new plans for war.
41:43
What Hitler really wants to do after the Polish campaign is immediately launch a strike against France. But the army and its commander-in-chief, Walter von Brauchitsch, persuade him the time is not right. Winter is coming, we have no more bombs and we have no more fuel. Hitler has no real idea what a desperate state the armed forces are in.
42:06
Victory in the Polish campaign masks the Wehrmacht's problems, which have become increasingly acute in recent weeks.
42:20
The ranks of the Wehrmacht swell from 100,000 men in 1933 to 2.6 million in 1939. That's a 40-fold increase in manpower within a few years. And it can only be achieved, of course, by significantly lowering recruitment standards. The Wehrmacht has endless problems in Poland. Advances and shelling in the wrong direction, action taken without consultation. It is a poorly prepared fighting force. with significant shortcomings and massive problems.
42:53
And it is only victorious in Poland, because the chaos is even greater on the Polish side.
43:03
Tactical errors aside, the Wehrmacht has major supply problems. It is a far cry from the super army presented in the newsreels.
43:17
Even this fairly brief military campaign against Poland pushes the arms industry to its limits.
43:24
Internal communications in Winter 39-40 speak of a munitions crisis. It's an extraordinary situation. Parts of the Wehrmacht don't have enough grenades or ammunition. There's a shortage of bombs. And there are supply problems.
43:47
that there are problems with the supply of bombs. An important...
44:06
An important solution to the munitions crisis is found, again with Hitler's intervention, by defining the areas on which armament should focus in the future.
44:18
They are air armament, that is aircraft construction, and the manufacture of ammunition. These are the two areas defined as crucial to the war effort. absolutely central and in the center of attention. On the 17th of October, the submarine U-47 under the command of Günter Prien enters the port of Kiel after a successful patrol. It has just attacked the British naval base at Scapa Flow. In October 1939, when there's nothing newsworthy happening on the front lines, a German U-boat commander,
45:09
Günter Prien, manages to penetrate the Scapa Flow defenses and sink an old British battleship, Royal Oak.
45:45
over the U-boat captain's achievement. He is the propaganda machine's dream.
45:55
Nazi propaganda teams are always on the lookout for personal stories and images. An infantryman crouching in a trench is not a story I can tell. But I can tell stories about achievers. So, submariners are hailed as heroes by the propaganda machine.
46:15
They tick all the boxes. They are young and dynamic. They are Valiant fighters.
46:21
Unlike the grey ranks of the army and infantry, they are perfect for inspiring the young.
46:33
Footage like this boosts the number of volunteers for submarine service.
46:38
U-boat crews see themselves as a naval elite, but the majority of the men will pay for their delusion with their lives. Around three-quarters of all servicemen assigned to German U-boats do not live to see the end of the war.
46:54
In Poland, after the military campaign is over, millions of people lose their homes. As early as the beginning of October, Hitler announced in the Reichstag that hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans would be resettled in the west of Poland and the ethnographic situation adjusted. The resettlement areas are cleared, existing communities brutally expelled. The Polish state is erased from the map.
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The Germans' primary objective is to regain the eastern territories that had to be ceded under the Treaty of Versailles and swiftly reincorporate them into Germany. This results in the establishment of two new administrative subdivisions, Danzig-West Prussia and Wartegau, around Poznań. A few smaller areas are also assigned to East Prussia and East Upper Silesia.
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But the bulk of Polish territory forms a separate zone known as the General Governorate. From the outset, this is intended as a place to deport undesirables.
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On the 26th of October 1939, Hans Frank is appointed Governor-General. A lawyer by profession and a convinced National Socialist, he takes up office in Wawel Castle in Krakow, once a residence of Polish kings.
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From the moment he is appointed, Frank pursues a brutal policy of exploitation against the population of the General Governorate.
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One of the factors at play here was a national self-image. We are the new master race, and what we say here goes.
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You are our slaves, and you are here to work for us, to grow food for the German Reich.
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Apart from that, you are good for nothing.
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There is no thought of providing security for the civilian population. The purpose of administration and government is to extract the most from the Poles and secure German authority.
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Civilian suffering is accepted from the start. If the food situation is bad, if the harvest is poor, let them starve. That is more or less the attitude. Then there is the extremely brutal treatment of the Polish Jews in the General Governorate, and there are around 2 million of them.
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In the early weeks of the war, thousands of Jews were murdered by SS death squads. Now, ghettos are created in many Polish cities, their inhabitants overcrowded and exploited. For many, life in these ghettos is the first phase of a harrowing ordeal, one that ends in millions of deaths.
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People defend our art, whatever the cost may be. To fight on the beaches, to fight on the landing grounds, to fight in the fields, and in the streets, but to fight in the hills, but to never surrender.
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Here we will do the way we did the beginning, and we will screw you in the head. We're not going to do the same thing we did the last time we did it. We're all right, Sidney.
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The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. We will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God. Oh God, help us! Oh dear, take your promise!
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I mean,
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when you're in the streets, fuck father, or daddy, or sire, and the way you won't turn to the hog, or the smoke that it doesn't. . I think a lot of the challenges for me was being a federal doctor to bomb everybody else, and nobody was going to bomb me. We are taking this state for our state, very big. So, we are going to fight. We are going to go over our singing and singing, and we are going to do it in the future.
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The Hanseatic city of Korbach, an important railroad hub in the north of Hesse. About six months after the outbreak of the Second World War, the residents publicly demonstrated their support for the Wehrmacht. In March of 1940, they gathered for a dinner of stew. in the streets. After the swift victory over Poland in the fall of the previous year, weapons had been silent on all fronts for months, but the war remained present in everyday life.
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The aim of the event was to encourage the saving of resources and to convey another message on behalf of the regime. Whether soldier or civilian, everyone contributed to the war effort.
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It's relatively difficult to speak of a civil society in National Socialism. Certainly since the outbreak of the war. Because what one would generally call the civilian population was also deployed on the so-called home front. So that's what he's saying linguistically, that all that was being done there was also part of the war effort, that scrap metal was being collected, that there were public stew dinners, which now encouraged conserving resources.
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So now this separation between soldiers and the civilian population is blurred. More and more. because everyone had to contribute to the success of the war, so to speak. And then in the first phase, while the war was still successful, they all felt successful together.
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The war was also experienced in the capital. On the 10th of March, Heroes Memorial Day was celebrated in public. Six years earlier, the National Socialists had established a holiday in place of the Day of National Mourning in order to commemorate fallen soldiers. Here's Adolf Hitler with an emotional assessment. of the world situation from his point of view.
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For the dictator, the key to success lay in further campaigns, which the German Reich soon quickly began.
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Ever since the Soviet Union's invasion of Finland in November of 1939, the countries of Northern Europe had become the focus of world politics.
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Great Britain toyed with the idea of sending troops to Scandinavia. The region also increasingly became a focus for the German Empire, for a number of reasons.
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First, the Germans needed a secure supply of ore for armaments via Norway, northern Sweden and northern Norway. Secondly, the navy wanted to have further operation bases in the Atlantic against the British. And third, the British and French also saw Norway as an important strategic area to enable them to encircle Germany from the north. And as a practical matter, the Germans wanted to beat the Allies to it.
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Under the cover name Unternehmen Weser Übung, the Wehrmacht invaded Scandinavia on the 9th of April 1940. Germany's neighbor Denmark was quickly overrun.
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The Danes offered no resistance at all and agreed with the Germans that the Danish government would remain in office because they realized resistance was futile.
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In Norway, the Wehrmacht launched a huge air and sea landing operation. Seven divisions went ashore supported by strong naval units. Within a few hours, German units had been able to capture many of Norway's strategically important cities and harbors. But surprisingly, unexpected problems arose when they tried to occupy the capital.
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The Germans had a very clever plan. They wanted to sail the cruiser Blücher through the Oslo fjord. At dawn on April 9th, 1940, they were going to Moer, the quay in Oslo, and a band was going to march up to the car. with a ringing tune to convince the king that it would be better to place himself under German protection. And it was believed that the king would agree and that there would be no resistance at all in Norway. Stupidly, the Blucher was sunk at the narrowest point of the Oslofjord.
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The German military attaché was standing at the pier. waiting for the Blucher. Whereas the Blucher and the chapel and the German soldiers, they didn't come because it had been sunk. And this allowed the Norwegian king to escape. Norway decided, because he was not captured, to fight, to resist.
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In the following weeks, fierce fighting ensued. The German divisions were opposed by around 60,000 Norwegian soldiers. After the occupation of Denmark, the Wehrmacht had numerous airfields in the region at its disposal to support German units in Norway, but there was no quick end in sight to the fighting.
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There were several reasons why this campaign in Norway lasted longer than the Germans actually thought it would. On the one hand, the Norwegian army put up fierce resistance, even though they were surprised by this attack. And secondly, because the British and French still managed to land large numbers of troops in Narvik.
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The ice-free deep-sea port of Narvik was of particular strategic importance. The ore imported from Sweden and northern Norway, which was needed for German armaments, could thus be shipped to the German Reich all year round. The battle for the city was correspondingly fierce.
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However, the reality on the ground was initially different.
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At Narvik, the Wehrmacht suffered its first tactical defeat of the war. The mountain troops under General Dietl were driven out of Narvik and had to retreat to the mountain ranges around the city. And Hitler went into a panic. He ordered Dietl to leave for Sweden and to be interned there. Dietl, however, said no. He continued to fight. He disobeyed one of Hitler's orders. He fought on and held out until the Allies withdrew. And that really impressed Hitler,
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that a general demonstrated these so-called defiant qualities like that. He fought and didn't give up. And that was something that impressed Hitler very much for the rest of the war. And it was a quality that he also demanded from his generals again and again.
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The order not to surrender would cost hundreds of thousands of soldiers their lives in the further course of the war. After the Allies had withdrawn some of their troops, German units were able to recapture Narvik on the 8th of June. A few days later, the last resistance on the Norwegian side was broken and King Hakon fled into British exile. After two months, Unternehmen Weserübung had come to an end. The German Navy suffered heavy losses during this time.
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It lost 10 destroyers off Narvik alone. Here is some film footage from a German military doctor in Norway. The pictures give the impression of a harmonious coexistence of soldiers and civilians. Even though there were isolated massacres, the Nazi regime basically pursued a different occupation policy here than in previously defeated Poland.
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The Nazi worldview postulated a hierarchy of cultures in which Scandinavian culture was relatively similar to German culture for racial reasons.
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The occupation of Scandinavia was seen as a special case, especially because a connection between the Wehrmacht and the SS as an elite institution and the local population was desired, encouraged and not restricted in any way. Marriages were also possible there. Children who were conceived were cared for, and looked after and were allowed to stay with their mothers. This was virtually an expansion of the Germanic living space, if you want to call it that, to its original territory.
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Accordingly, the propaganda reported intensively on the campaign and the occupation. Joseph Goebbels allowed himself to be accompanied by a camera crew during a visit to Oslo. The Minister of Propaganda commemorated the more than 20,000 German soldiers who died during the campaign.
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The fate of the sunken ship Blücher is also mentioned.
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A pathetic glorification of a military failure. The newest ship of the German navy at the time was hit by two cannons that were about 50 years old.
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Two further torpedo hits sent the Blucher and her several hundred crewmen to the bottom of the Oslo fjord.
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Since the beginning of May 1940, another theater of war had moved into the public eye, the German western border.
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For months, German and French units had been lying largely idle opposite each other there. It was a time of the so-called sit-down war. Although attempts were made to influence the enemy with loudspeaker announcements and other propaganda campaigns, there had been no significant military offensives, despite the fact that France had declared war on the German Empire in September of 1939. The French didn't want a war either, and their strategy was one they used in the First World War.
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It was successful. A long war, a war of attrition, and at some point defeating a weakened Germany in an offensive. And that's the same strategy... that they had now in World War II. So you waited, you hoped for a long war of attrition in which you would then eventually defeat the German opponent.
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For their defensive strategy, the French had built a line of massive military fortifications on their eastern border in the 1930s. Named after the Minister of War André Maginot, the defensive line included bunkers and forts and was designed to protect the country.
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Like France, the German Reich had refrained from major military action on the Western Front since the declaration of war. Thus, boredom was the greatest enemy of many soldiers awaiting further orders. Despite its success, the Polish campaign had revealed clear deficiencies in the Wehrmacht that made another blitzkrieg seem inadvisable.
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It was interesting that the Wehrmacht didn't want a war against France, because all these generals had the First World War in their bones. How were they supposed to beat the French army with this Wehrmacht, which wasn't able to prepare itself, which had the Maginot Line to contend with, which wasn't neutralized, which had always been upgraded? How was that going to work? And all three commanders-in-chief of the army group were against it. Even a Nazi general like Reichenau, commander of an army,
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was against it. Everybody was against it, except Hitler.
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Hitler had wanted to start the long 4 Western campaign as quickly as possible. At the Berghof, he became increasingly impatient in the spring of 1940. Time and again, the offensive he had planned for November was postponed, often because of bad weather. With the approach of spring, a fair weather front appeared, much to the delight of the Führer.
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On the night of the 9th of May, the dictator boarded his special train. The destination? His new headquarters, Felsenest. near Bad Münstereifel. From there, he wanted to lead the imminent campaign. That same night, he issued an appeal to the Wehrmacht, stating, Soldiers of the Western Front, the hour of the most decisive battle for the future of the German nation has come. The battle beginning today will decide the fate of the German nation for the next thousand years. A few hours later,
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the Wehrmacht crossed the borders of Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg without a formal declaration of war.
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Strong airborne units supported the advance of troops on the ground. This was the case in the Netherlands, where the Wehrmacht advanced rapidly.
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Nazi propaganda proudly reported on the military successes. A bridge over the Juliana Canal is being built. It was built to be able to be blown up by the Dutch.
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In fact, the Dutch army was no match for the Wehrmacht. Only eight infantry divisions and a small number of armored units were able to resist the German invasion.
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By the 14th of May, ceasefire negotiations had begun. To emphasize their demands, the Wehrmacht threatened to use its air force on the still embattled city of Rotterdam.
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An ultimatum was issued. From the German point of view, the Dutch didn't answer in time. And when the Dutch did reply, the Germans tried to call off the attack. However, it was too late. Only part of the air force could be recalled, and the remaining air force left large parts of Rotterdam in ruins.
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Over 800 civilians were killed in the German Luftwaffe attack on the afternoon of the 14th of May 1940. Eighty percent of the historic old town went up in flames. The ruthless bombardment achieved its aim. On the evening of the same day, Holland's surrender was announced. Queen Wilhelmina had already gone into exile in Britain.
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After the invasion by German troops of Belgium and the Netherlands, the French high command assumed that the expected German attack on France would take place via these two states. That was how Germany had attacked the Grande Nation in the Great War. Consequently, France moved numerous divisions to this region to repel the expected attack there. However, the Germans pursued a different tactic from that of 26 years earlier. The idea which had become known as the Sichel-Schnittplan,
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called for the strongest German advance to be made through the Ardennes,
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the Sauer in the southern Eifel. The river here forms the border between Germany and Luxembourg. The small duchy was one of the first stages for the planned advance of the Wehrmacht through the Ardennes.
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The Ardennes is a wooded, hilly area with relatively poor infrastructure and is therefore a place where no one would have thought that the Germans would attack there with their tank forces. However, the Germans did the unexpected and completely surprised the enemy.
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Lieutenant General Erich von Manstein had designed the operation. The World War I veteran quickly convinced Hitler to go along with his plan.
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The Allies reacted as expected and advanced with strong units against the German advance in the north. Largely unnoticed, German units pushed through the Ardennes at the same time. After crossing the Meuse River at Sedan, they swung north and advanced to the coast of the English Channel. Thus were the Allied units routed.
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On the morning of the 10th of May, the plan was put into action. With over 40,000 vehicles, and 45 divisions, Army Group A, under Colonel General Gerd von Rundstedt, set out in the central section of the front. In order to keep the strength of the advance a secret from the enemy for as long as possible, it had to proceed quickly. Within a few hours, Luxembourg had been crossed.
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Although there were roadblocks, the country's lightly armed forces, which totaled about 1,200, had previously received orders not to oppose the attackers. The result of the operation, which lasted about 180 minutes on the part of the Grand Duchy, was six wounded gendarmes and 75 prisoners. The German troops then continued their advance.
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Although the Ardennes were densely forested and the road network there poorly developed, the Wehrmacht managed to lead its tank units through the impassable terrain. The units played a decisive role in the success of the offensive.
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In the interwar years, every army experimented with tanks. What was the best way to use tanks? The French, for example, came to the conclusion that tanks were best used in support of infantry. as rolling artillery, while the Germans were the first to come up with the idea of mixing infantry and tanks together and letting them operate separately from the rest of the troops.
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In other words, the tank units could lead a battle independently and thus manage to bring a momentum to the battlefield, which the enemy couldn't withstand.
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One of the most popular generals of the Panzertruppe, the tank-armored units, was Heinz Guderian. His corps consisted of three divisions and played a decisive role in the advance through the Ardennes. Here's Guderian at the Semois River in Bouillon, Belgium. The town was considered the gateway to France. The first units of the Wehrmacht quickly reached the town. A short time later, Guderian's units crossed the Belgian-French border. In three days, they had covered more than 160 kilometers and
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were on the banks of the Meuse River near Sedan.
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The French protected their border with the Maginot Line, construction of which began at the end of the 1920s, and was a fortification like the world had never seen in modern history. The Germans, however, knew that this Maginot Line was too short, that is, it didn't go all the way into Belgium. And that was exactly where the Germans attacked.
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Sedan. It was here that the Prussians had crushed French Emperor Napoleon III in 1870. Including World War I, the city was now the target of a German attack for the third time in 70 years. Guderian called for air support. For many hours, 850 fighter planes bombed enemy positions on the Meuse River. Then the artillery opened fire before German units managed to cross the river at several points. The Frenchman seems to have taken leave of his senses, noted the commander-in-chief of the army group
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B. Fedor von Bock.
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Otherwise, he could have prevented it. Again, it was also Guderian who had pushed the advance.
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Guderian was one of the pioneers of German armoured weapons use. He achieved a decisive breakthrough just a few days after the start of the offensive at Sedan, which brought the German forces into the interior of France.
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As envisaged in Operation Sichelschnitt, or the Sickle Cut Plan, the German units then made a swing northward.
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On their way to the coast of the English Channel, they met resistance.
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France had modern tanks, but they were used primarily as auxiliary weapons of the slow-moving infantry. The German approach was quite different.
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This war of movement that the Wehrmacht waged was revolutionary in its tactical operational concept. Nobody expected it. It was a surprise, and the Germans came up against a French army that was mentally stuck in World War I and couldn't deal with it. And it was a catastrophic defeat, and thus the French were not able to exploit German moments of weakness that existed.
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One German unit managed to cover 120 kilometers in a single day. Faced with this speed, many French soldiers panicked and fled or were captured. Their high command couldn't come up with an adequate response to the German offensive.
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Thinking on the spot, making quick decisions. This was not something that French military doctrine favored at this time. All decisions first had to be brought down from the very top, whereas German commanders very often made decisions spontaneously on the spot, sometimes even against the wishes of their superiors.
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Traditionally, the infantry determined the pace of the advance, as it had to secure its flanks. However, since the beginning of the campaign, generals of the tank divisions had been breaking with this rule and succeeded in doing so. Their behavior, nevertheless, caused controversy in the high command of the Wehrmacht.
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Meanwhile, Allied formations were increasingly on the defensive. The British Expeditionary Force and French units had retreated to the Channel Coast and regrouped at Dunkirk.
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On the 24th of May, German units were less than 20 kilometers from the French city, when a dispute within the General Staff escalated over the speed of the advance. Hitler put his foot down and ended the dispute with a fateful decision.
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Then, just outside Dunkirk, near the Channel coast, Hitler's famous Halt Order came at the end of May. Instead of having his tank forces approach the Channel, Hitler gave the order, no, stop, no further here. Since then, there has been much speculation.
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What actually prompted Hitler to give this order? The most likely variant seems to be that Hitler gave this order to chastise his generals again. The back story was that days earlier, weeks earlier, many of his generals didn't follow his orders and simply advanced with their tank forces as they saw fit, as they judged the situation. And Hitler wanted to restore his authority, so to speak, with this Dunkirk order.
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It wasn't until two days later that the order to halt was lifted. The forced pause had bought the Allies precious time. Under the codename Operation Dynamo, a huge evacuation mission had been undertaken. An armada of several hundred ships launched from Britain to help the troops escape. The Germans tried to prevent the operation.
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The enemy fleet is on the coast. English destroyers are trying to cover the fleeing transporters. The
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German flag is quickly at its place. Everywhere is being hit by lightning and the enemy is getting more and more confused.
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But the confusion was only propaganda. Around 320,000 Allied soldiers were successfully evacuated. From the German point of view, it was a sobering result.
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The order to halt outside of Dunkirk was actually a major defeat for the Germans, if you will. The Germans had failed to beat not only France here, but Britain as well. The best trained British troops were at Dunkirk. And as they escaped, it was clear. that Britain still had an army, now back on the island, ready to continue the fight.
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By the time the Wehrmacht was able to take Dunkirk on the 4th of June, 100,000 French soldiers had managed to escape alongside the British Expeditionary Force. They later formed the core of the Free French Forces that continued to fight against Nazi Germany. The Wehrmacht mostly found just war materiel left behind in the city.
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In general, high speed had characterized the advance of the Wehrmacht. There was hardly any thought of taking breaks or sleep. Guderian had even requisitioned 20,000 tablets of the stimulant drug Pervitin for the 1st Panzer Division to counteract the men's expected lack of sleep. After the capture of Dunkirk, many soldiers now had a moment to breathe for the first time since the beginning of the campaign. Back home, people took a lively interest in the course of the war.
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Their thoughts were as follows. were with the soldiers in the field. The Deutsche Rundfunk sent from Berlin the concert for the Wehrmacht.
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Since October of 1939, the radio program of the same name had been broadcast regularly by all Reich stations. The focus was on music requests from soldiers and their families. Now a telegram. Soldat Karl Scheer in the West.
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The song requested was about a submarine captain, Prien, and performed by Heinz Ruhmann and colleagues.
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The show enjoyed great popularity among soldiers and civilians. Celebrities regularly appeared in the production of the propaganda show at the Haus des Rundfunks in order to grant music requests. Among them was Marika Röck, a 26-year-old actress and singer who was a star at the time.
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We say good night.
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Since the beginning of June, Adolf Hitler had regularly visited his soldiers. He traveled to places he had known as a private in World War I and other places in the war zone. Here, his chief pilot Hans Bauer filmed the dictator in Lille on the 2nd of June. Hitler showed himself to be down to earth, which included a snack at the field kitchen. Why was that important? Well, on the one hand, to show that as commander-in-chief, Hitler was pulling the strings.
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even though he wasn't a high-ranking star general and, as was generally known, didn't understand as much about the craft of war as he perhaps should have in this position. But it was above all to show presence, to demonstrate loyalty to the soldiers, but at the same time to convey to the population the image of a defensible Reich Chancellor and leader who was, above all, someone appropriately prepared for the future. On the 28th of May, Belgium surrendered. After the capture of Dunkirk,
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the Wehrmacht was able to fully concentrate on the conquest of the rest of France. Falle Rote, or Case Red, triggered the second phase of the Western Campaign. After heavy losses in the final weeks, the French were only able to put up less than 70 divisions to oppose the attack. The Wehrmacht then advanced from northeastern France in two main directions.
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On the 9th of June, German units had reached the Seine near Rouen. Some 500 years earlier, the French national saint Joan of Arc had been burned at the stake here. The symbolic city fell into German hands. In the process, Rouen's Gothic cathedral was threatened with destruction.
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The Wehrmacht as guardian of French cultural treasures. This was a distorted image created by Nazi propaganda. It wasn't long before German soldiers looted cultural and artistic items on a grand scale.
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On the 19th of May, General Maxime Weygand had taken over the supreme command of the French forces from Maurice Gamelin and had withdrawn his troops to the eponymous Weygand Line. The interception position ran south of the Somme, Ailette and Aisne rivers.
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Despite this measure, it did not succeed in decisively stopping the Wehrmacht.
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The German advance knows no pause. Every man has one big goal in front of him, Paris.
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After short, tense battles, the Weygand line, the last hope of France, was quickly overcome here, too. Only 37 km to Paris.
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The government left the capital and fled to Bordeaux. On the 16th of June, President Le Brun instructed Marshal Philippe Pétain to take the nation's fortunes into his own hands. The 84-year-old veteran of the First World War was considered a national hero in his homeland, but the hopes that had been placed in Pétain were not fulfilled. On June 17th, he delivered a sobering radio address. It is with a heavy heart that I tell you today that the struggle must be stopped.
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A short time later, Adolf Hitler received a request for a ceasefire from Petain at his headquarters.
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Here, we see a brief outburst of emotion with his circle of confidants. The hated Treaty of Versailles had finally been avenged in a symbolic way.
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The Nazis staged the day as a humiliation for France. They met in the same railroad carriage in which the German Reich had to sign the armistice in the First World War 22 years earlier. Hitler had had the carriage specifically brought out of the museum for the ceremony. General Hunzinger took part in the negotiations on behalf of the French side. In the end, they crafted a treaty which said that about 60% of France would be occupied by the Wehrmacht. In the remaining part of the country,
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a regime was established named after the spa town of Vichy, which collaborated closely with the German Reich. For the Führer, it was a day of triumph.
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A report from the Führer headquarters of historical significance. The Prime Minister of the newly formed French government, Marshal Pétain, has explained in a radio address to the French people that France should now lay down its arms.
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About 80 kilometers southwest of Compiègne lies Paris. Shortly after the negotiations, Adolf Hitler arrived in the capital for a visit. At about 5.30, his plane had landed at the military airport at Le Bourget. Next was a morning sightseeing tour in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.
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I think that was actually a private triumph on his part. A private, quiet triumph. The pictures that came out of it were staged beautifully. No background noise, so to speak, no people. But I think that for Hitler, apart from these scenes, it was simply about this personal triumph. To be there calmly, quietly, with his inner circle, his entourage, in the lion's den. To stand there, to have achieved that, to be in Paris. To have defeated the fearful adversary of the First World War.
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and to savour that moment privately on a small scale. That, I think, was what that morning visit to Paris was all about.
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Paris is the world-class city Paracelones, and for many Germans it was also a kind of place for longing. And Hitler appeared there not only as the little private from the First World War, but now as a leader and Reich Chancellor of the Germans in the capital of the defeated enemy. This was, of course, a great theme for Nazi propaganda, which they knew how to use.
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At the Wehrmacht victory parade in the city, however, there was no sign of the Fuhrer.
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On the 14th of June, after the negotiations, the 18th Army under General von Kuechler entered Paris without a fight.
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What the Imperial German Army had tried in vain for years in the First World War, the Wehrmacht had now accomplished in a few weeks. German soldiers proudly climbed the Eiffel Tower and hoisted the Imperial war flag over the city.
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For a long time, the generals had opposed the Western campaign. At the moment of triumph, these concerns seemed forgotten. Hitler praised the men for the services rendered to the victory of German arms in the fight for the freedom and future of our Greater German Reich, and promoted numerous generals to the rank of Field Marshal, including Gerd von Rundstedt and Fedor von Bock, the commanders-in-chief of Army Groups A and B, respectively.
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Hitler very cleverly flattered the generals. He promoted many of them to Field Marshal. And being a Field Marshal, well, that was a special thing. Hindenburg was a Field Marshal. You became a Field Marshal when you took a fortress. And how many of them became Field Marshals? They hadn't taken a fortress, and they didn't really have any special merits, but they had the rank of Field Marshal. He showered them with medals, and in doing so, Hitler bought their loyalty to the end of his days.
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A wave of euphoria broke out all over the Empire. To celebrate the victory, church bells were ordered rung for seven days and flags were to be hoisted for ten days.
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Soldiers who returned home received an enthusiastic welcome, like this cycling squadron in Bruchsal Baden.
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Also, to celebrate the campaign, propaganda films such as tank's attack and victory in the west were made tank general heinz guderian played a big part in these films in 1940
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was known as embedded journalism. In that war, correspondence were closed to the troops photographing or filming. And newsreels were then made from these recordings. Or a film like Victory in the West, which painted a very smooth picture of the war. Not so smooth, in other words, that there would have been no need to make any more effort, but smooth enough that there was never actually any risk of defeat.
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The war was depicted as a romantic male adventure without danger. Criticism of the military's actions was dismissed. Despite the rapid success against France and the Benelux countries, it would have been wise to discuss their strategies there.
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Nowadays, when we think of the Western Campaign of 1940, we very often still have all those Nazi propaganda images in our minds. Tanks and planes working together. and a highly modern, well-equipped army. In truth, this was only part of the Wehrmacht, and quite honestly, just a small part of the Wehrmacht in 1940. The French campaign was actually won by 10 German armoured divisions, and the infantry, they marched behind just as they did in the First World War.
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And there you can see that the Wehrmacht had not yet then fully become the war of movement. They had done it in their minds, but there were great problems in actually doing it, because one unit was marching ahead, and there were huge gaps with the infantry lagging behind. This could be solved relatively easily in France, but it became a serious problem in Russia. On Saturday, July 6, 1940,
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Adolf Hitler returned to Berlin from his headquarters. Seven and a half years after seizing power, the dictator had reached the the height of his popularity following the victory in the Western Campaign. The crowds cheered him on at Anhalt train station.
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The drive to the Reich Chancellery in his open Mercedes was a triumphal procession. The head of the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht, General Wilhelm Keitel, proclaimed Hitler the greatest commander of all time.
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As the successes came, he really became like a cult leader, in the sense of cult. There was a kind of godlike worship of this man, who was almost no longer perceived as human. And also, as he was depicted in the propaganda, that he hardly ever slept, and was always awake and cared for his people. So now it's starting to look like he's God Almighty, so to speak.
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With the victory over France, enthusiasm knew no bounds. That's when people thought that we could actually walk on water.
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It took just 10 months for Nazi Germany to gain hegemony over the European continent after the outbreak of World War II. But it would take years and cost millions of lives to liberate Europe and Germany again.
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People depend on us, whatever their job may be. To fight on the beaches, to fight on the landing ground, to fight in the fields, and in the streets, to fight in the hills, but to never surrender.
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Here we will give the wedding to the bridegroom, and to the screen of humanity, and the future will be a pleasant and beautiful. We're all ready,
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United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. We will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.
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Berlin, the summer of 1940. In the capital of the Third Reich, Germans went about their daily business. It had been less than a year since Adolf Hitler had plunged Europe into war. The fact that German soldiers were in Poland, Scandinavia, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France was barely noticed at Berlin's Wannsee.
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All in all, I don't think we should forget, these were all campaigns that the Germans were able to live with easily, because they had remained completely free of all the effects of the war up to that point. And another essential element, the wars had been so short that the losses, from wounds or by actual deaths of the soldiers, had been very small.
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Actually, they didn't want England as an adversary, but as an ally. In this respect, speculation about whether things would then continue had calmed down a bit.
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But in hindsight, some Germans didn't quite know what to make of this precarious peace either. On July 19, 1940,
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their leader, Adolf Hitler, made an official peace offer to England. The British did not dignify it with a response. Hermann Göring, the commander-in-chief of the German Luftwaffe, was now responsible for the success of Unternehmen Seeleufer. Planning for the invasion of Great Britain had been going on for weeks.
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German airborne units were to take off from airfields in Belgium, Holland and northern France to first conquer the airspace over the
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After that, German troops were to land on England's shores. The German Luftwaffe was well prepared. Since their devastating mission in the Spanish Civil War, their pilots had become adept at aerial bombing, Stuka attacks, and dropping incendiary bombs. After initial skirmishes over the English Channel, German airborne units began bombing the British mainland.
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The Battle of Britain began on August 13th with the so-called Eagle Day, when stronger German bomber units attacked British industrial centres. At first, the Germans only attacked the British infrastructure, airfield, radar stations and were relatively successful there as well. They believed that with a few days of... air raids on British airports one could smash the British air defense, the fighter command, and gain air superiority. And then, if Hitler wanted to,
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he could order a landing on the south coast as well.
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Great Britain was expecting an invasion of the Wehrmacht, and so the men of the English Home Guard armed themselves against the enemy. The Germans had to be prevented from landing on the island by any and all means. To prevent Nazi landing craft from even reaching the Channel coast, the British had installed flamethrower systems there.
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With Winston Churchill as Prime Minister, the British had an avowed opponent of Hitler. He wanted to prevent Hitler's rule over Europe at all costs. Otherwise, as Churchill said, the world would sink into the abyss of a new dark age. The Prime Minister rejected any discussion. of a negotiated peace with the Nazis. Churchill was an interesting figure in that he initially admired Hitler. He wrote a portrait of him. In the early 30s, I think it was printed in 34 or 35. It's kind of famous,
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so he couldn't hide an admiration for Hitler's successes. And then only toward at the end of the 30s, when he saw that the whole matter would amount to a highly aggressive policy. which would ultimately also involve Great Britain, did he change his mind and say, we must fight this man?
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Blood, toil, tears, and sweat, Winston Churchill prophesied for his people, and a war against a monstrous tyranny such as had never been surpassed in the dark catalogue of mankind's crimes, which must end only with victory at all costs. British combat morale was high.
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On August 25th, British bombers took off for the first air raid on the capital of the Third Reich.
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The inviolability of Berlin, noted German judicial official Friedrich Kellner in his diary, of which there had been abundant talk, had proved to be a vain haze. In the face of such attacks, Adolf Hitler clamored in Berlin's Sportpalast.
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200,000 or
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300,000 or 400,000 kilograms of bombs. Then we will be in one night, they will be attacking us from the ground. We will raid your town.
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For the first time since the beginning of the war, the Germans were made aware of their own vulnerability. Despite various blitzkrieg victories, the Luftwaffe was unable to keep enemy plane formations out.
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Berlin did not seem particularly impressed by this. What could be said, however, was that doubts about Goering's abilities and capacities to defend the Reich were beginning to grow.
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The Reichsmarschall then received orders from Hitler to target London in retaliation for the Royal Air Force's night raids on Berlin.
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On the afternoon of September 7, 1940, 364 German bombers took off, escorted by 515 fighter planes. Their target were the docks in the middle of the East End, a working-class neighborhood.
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On that first evening, more than 400 Londoners died and another 1,500 were seriously injured.
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In the air battles with the Royal Air Force, the German pilots suffered defeats, some of them heavy. Their losses by wounded, imprisonment, and death were significantly higher than those of the RAF. The British pilots fought over their homeland and were quickly ready for action again after an emergency landing. Their Spitfires and Hurricanes were fast and maneuverable. The German Air Force failed to gain air superiority over the island.
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On September 17, Hitler postponed Unternehmen Seelewe until the following spring. Eventually, the landing in England wasn't even attempted. For the first time, a nation had successfully defied the Nazis.
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In a way, this was seen as not a bad thing. As one diarist said, this was a terrible week for us, but it was not seen as a defeat. And conversely, it has to be said, also very importantly, the British did indeed see it as a victory. It was the first time that a nation had been able to put a stop to the Nazis. So for their self-confidence, it was an incredible boost. whereas the Germans tended to talk it down as, these things can happen.
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At the end of October, Hitler traveled to Henday to meet Francisco Franco. The dictator urgently needed support against an England that was resisting fiercely. The Spaniards were to take Gibraltar from the British, but the meeting turned out differently than planned. Franco's special train arrived too late.
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The unity of the two fascist leaders, as depicted by the newsreels, was only a façade. Franco had no intention whatsoever of entering the war. He had ruled over a devastated Spain for only 18 months, which he had just gotten under control after three years of civil war and with German help. The caudillo stayed out of it.
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Meanwhile, in order to put political and military pressure on England, the German air force continued to take off in the direction of Great Britain. But the Luftwaffe had problems.
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When they sent bomber units to England, they always had to send fighter planes with them for escort and protection. And the problem with these fighters was that the fuel tanks were relatively small. They could only fight for a certain time in English airspace, sometimes only for 14 minutes. and then they had to immediately return. In other words, a German plane on a mission against Britain could only fight there for a short time, while a British plane could fight there for hours.
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After the conquest of British airspace failed, thus putting a landing on the island out of reach, Hitler wanted at least to force an armistice. For this, the British arms industry had to be weakened and, at the same time, the morale of the British people had to be broken. Now, the civilian population was targeted.
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In 1940, it seemed that bombing London was somehow a way to get Britain ready for peace.
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The British called the attacks on their capital the Blitz, after the Nazi propaganda word Blitzkrieg. In the weeks that followed, only a few days and nights passed without bombings. Again and again the Luftwaffe carried out small, targeted attacks. Londoners had come to feel the hum of German Heinkels, Dorniers and Junkers at all times.
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There were no air raid shelters in London. People took refuge in the subway stations, which saved the lives of tens of thousands. Some 650,000 children had already been moved to the countryside. Since the beginning of November, the bombers had been coming mainly at night. During Christmas week 1940, London experienced the most devastating conflagration since the city's great fire in the 17th century.
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But the British remained steadfast and pragmatic. Cardboard coffins, lime bags and body pits were prepared in order to be able to quickly recover and deal with the fatalities. What people in Germany tend to forget, however, is that German bombing raids in 1940 caused very high casualties among the British population, up to 40,000 deaths in the first weeks and months after the Battle of Britain began.
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When Buckingham Palace was hit, King George VI and his wife Elizabeth escaped with a scare, but the royal couple stayed in London to assist their people.
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The British didn't see it as a tax on the air armament industry. They saw it as a tax on civilians. The Germans wanted to hit civilians. Naturally, the bombing was inaccurate because churches were also hit, because hundreds of people were killed. And then the amazing thing for the Germans and maybe for the British was that the civilian population came together. The morale didn't collapse. The British were far from capitulating. Actually, it was just the opposite.
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Fiery speeches from their Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who was determined to do whatever necessary, also strengthened the morale of the British considerably. We shall defend our island. Whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing ground, we shall fight in the field and in the tree, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender.
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Starting in mid-November, the Air Force shifted the focus of its attacks and aimed primarily at industrial targets outside of London.
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On November 14, under the cover of Unternehmen Mondschein Sonate, German units flew a heavy night bombing raid on Coventry. The extent of the destruction was enormous. In the future, to Coventry was the name given to the destruction of a city from the air in the cynical parlance of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
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Visibly shaken, Prime Minister Winston Churchill visited the ruins of the historic St. Michael's Cathedral and the rubble of the industrial city in the heart of the British Isles the following morning.
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Coventry was chosen because it was the center of the British aircraft engine industry. They were hit, but these aircraft engine factories were located in the city center. Spread around the city center, the whole city burned down, 500 dead. The term Coventeering was then used because of the great damage. But there was one thing that wasn't achieved, and that was lasting damage to the armaments industry, because after just a few weeks, it continued to produce at the old production levels.
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The day before the devastating bombing of Coventry, British pilots took off on an airstrike. Target, Berlin. Stalin's foreign minister was expected there for talks.
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Winston Churchill later wrote in his memoirs, We had heard of this conference beforehand, and though we had not been invited, we did not wish to be left entirely out of the negotiations.
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Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov arrived at Andhalt railway station. He was there to negotiate spheres of influence in Scandinavia and the Balkans for Stalin. Hitler, on the other hand, wanted to bring the Soviets into an alliance to secure himself against England. But Molotov was a difficult negotiator who did not trust the Germans. There was a memorable situation at the state banquet.
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During the meetings with Hitler, Molotov had to go into the air raid shelter because there were attacks on Berlin. And he told Stalin that Hitler was a vegetarian and that no meat was available there. This may sound like a side issue, but it led to a decline in the Nazis' reputation in Moscow. They had to go to air raid shelters. They didn't eat meat. strange people. He told Stalin about the limp handshake of Hitler, who seemed to him more like a feminine figure than a determined dictator.
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He made no impression at all on the Soviet side. That's quite interesting. And that's why Stalin was sure that Hitler wouldn't attack the Soviet Union. They wouldn't do that. They couldn't even protect Berlin from air raids. Formally,
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they were still allies. A non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union had existed for a year. Both countries had enriched themselves from the spoils of the German war, and Poland had been divided between them. But Stalin refused to officially ally with Nazi Germany.
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By September, two other nations had entered into a pact with the Third Reich. Here, Japanese Minister of War Tojo Hideki arrives in Berlin. The purpose of the visit from Japan was the signing of the so-called Three Power Pact between Hitler's Germany, Italy and Japan.
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The division of the world was regulated by treaty. Italy would receive the Mediterranean region as its sphere of influence, Japan all of East Asia, and Germany, Europe and the East. With this demonstration of strength, it was believed, especially in Tokyo, that the US could be deterred from entering the war.
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During this period, Japan was always concerned with finding partners and to be accepted as an equal partner. Hitler, who himself had very great territorial aspirations, naturally selected Japan as the ideal partner in Asia from a certain point on.
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But the problem was that these three powers, unlike the Allies, never found a common strategy. Each worked for its own interests, whether in Europe, whether in Africa. the German Empire did something different than Italy and cooperation with Japan never actually took place. The Japanese General Yamashita, who is the leader of a military study commission in Germany, gives the command of the German army, General Marshal von Brauchwitz, as a gift to the Japanese army, a samurai sword.
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Such academic visits, actually tangible military advice, had a tradition. For a good 50 years, the Germans had been instructing the Japanese Empire in matters of war strategy.
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Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany seemed to Japan to be a suitable ally. In addition, Japan was impressed to a certain extent by the fact that Hitler had this idea that we were dividing the world into three large spheres of influence. And these three countries together represented a bulwark, as a bulwark in ideological terms against Bolshevik Russia. the Bolshevik Soviet Union on the one hand, but also as an ideological and political bulwark against the Anglo-Americans, against London and Washington.
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Japan moved ever closer to its powerful German ally. In March 1941, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring received Japanese Foreign Minister Matsuoka at his Karin Hall estate. Hitler hoped to keep the United States out of war in Europe and instead tie it up in a conflict in Asia. Japan was to be encouraged to launch a rapid war of aggression in the Far East.
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Under the rule of Emperor Hirohito, the military was the most powerful institution in Japan. Hirohito supported the imperial claims of his generals. The Japanese army and fleet were removed from any parliamentary control and were directly subordinated. to the emperor.
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Japan's military government was preparing to bring all of East Asia under its control. Since the First World War, the young industrial nation had been striving for dominance in the Asian region.
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In Japan, on the political side and especially on the military side, there was always the view during that period that you were not an equal partner. Although militarily you waged war successfully in the Russo-Japanese War in World War I, after these wars that were waged successfully, militarily successfully, Japan had to concede certain things politically and concede them to the West and concede them to the West's liking.
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Initially, Japan's colonial ambitions were directed against neighboring China. Manchuria, in the north of the country, was rich in raw materials.
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Nippon took advantage of the disunity of the giant empire, which was bleeding to death in the civil war, and occupied the northern province in a coup d'etat. But Japan's hunger for raw materials wasn't satisfied.
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In 1937, Japan provoked another war with China. this time to conquer it completely. A civil war had been ravaging the giant Chinese empire for 10 years. After the rapid conquest of Beijing, Japanese units bombarded Shanghai. But Japan didn't succeed in completely conquering China. Instead, it turned south. In Indochina, Vichy France, which collaborated with the German ally, granted Japan the right of passage, the stationing of troops, and the use of airfields.
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Over the course of a year, Japan brought all of the country's major military bases under its control.
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Meanwhile, hardliner Tojo Hideki gained influence. So much so, that the United States felt compelled to impose an official embargo against the Japanese Empire.
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The United States actually had two main interests in Asia. One was economic interests that they had to represent there. At that time it was clearly understood that one of the coming markets, from a capitalist point of view, would sooner or later be Asia. On the other hand, it was also the case that there were raw materials in Southeast Asia in which the United States also had an interest. Also in terms of security, the U.S.
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had aspirations to continue to have a presence in the Asia-Pacific region.
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One of the most important U.S. naval bases in Asia was in the Philippines. Nevertheless, no one there seemed to believe in a Japanese invasion. About 10,000 American soldiers were stationed there. Their equipment and weapons were mostly outdated, but the U.S. government was gradually turning the archipelago into a fortress.
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The President of the United States still hesitated to enter the war officially. On January 20, 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn in in Washington. He was the first U.S. President. to run for a third term.
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In his address, he made it clear on whose side the U.S. would be on in the future.
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Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere.
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Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose.
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High contest,
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there can be no end, save victory. In a certain sense, the United States had entered the war indirectly. The US had supported its American partners in Europe, that is London, with armaments. Armaments also arrived in China, by the way. Japan's adversary, which of course didn't go unnoticed by Japan, and also played a major role. Japanese policy had moved more and more in the direction of anti-Americanism.
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At the port of Halifax in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, freighters were loaded with American weapons and supplies that the US was providing to Great Britain. In a blazing speech, Churchill had addressed Roosevelt and appealed for America's support.
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Put your confidence in us.
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Give us your faith and your blessing, and under Providence all will be well. We shall not fail or falter, we shall not weaken or tire.
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Neither the sudden shock of battle nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down.
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Give us the tool,
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and we will finish the job.
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German submarines repeatedly succeeded in torpedoing the ships loaded with equipment and weapons.
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But the Royal Navy struck back. Survivors of the sunk battleship Bismarck, once the pride of the German Navy, went ashore in Halifax.
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Great Britain at that time still had the strongest navy in the world. The German navy, which only upgraded in the 1930s, simply couldn't keep up with that. It did have big battleships like the Tirpitz, the Bismarck, but one was sunk very quickly. The other was just lying around in harbors and was also sunk towards the end of the war. So the big German Reich, the German's navy, couldn't keep up with the Royal Navy at all.
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In October 1940, Adolf Hitler traveled by special train to the allied Italy, to Florence.
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Benito Mussolini received the Führer at the train station. Hitler had once admired the fascist leader and taken him as a model for his own political career. Il Duce, who transformed Italy into a fascist dictatorship, was now in turn taking a lesson from his former master student. He too now wanted to expand his empire. Mussolini had two major goals. First, he wanted to make the Mediterranean a Mara Nostrum, that is, our sea,
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like the Roman Empire should be Italian possessions around the Mediterranean. And secondly, he wanted to expand his colonial empire in northeast Africa. Egypt and Sudan together with the existing possessions in Libya and Abyssinia should become a large colonial empire.
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Among the Italian population, such plans met with enthusiastic approval.
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Mussolini, who had not expected war to break out in Europe before 1942, witnessed his allies subdue half of Europe within a year. Il Duce was convinced that Italy could achieve something comparable just as easily.
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Mussolini had great aims, but what he didn't want to admit, only very limited means. He had an army that was not at its peak in terms of training, and his country was not prepared economically or in terms of armaments for a long industrial war. And the problem was, Mussolini didn't lead. Only one campaign, no, he led several campaigns at the same time, and all these campaigns ended in disasters.
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In a gross miscalculation of his own fighting strength, Il Duce first marched Italian troops into the French Alps. After the failure of this invasion, he then ordered Egypt and Greece to be attacked simultaneously. But he lost in Greece, and in return, Greece... took over Italian occupied territory in neighboring Albania. Mussolini now had to ask Hitler for help.
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Italy suffered a heavy defeat in Greece and one-third of the Albanian territory, which was in Italian hands, was now occupied by the Greeks. Now there was a problem for Germany. The Italian ally had to be supported and secondly, there was another problem. At the same time in Yugoslavia, which had been very pro-Axis, there was now a coup. And the new government was pro-allies. And so Hitler decided to intervene in the Balkans with an attack on Yugoslavia and on Greece.
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On April 6th, the Wehrmacht invaded Yugoslavia and Greece simultaneously without a declaration of war. The newsreels had an opportunity to show victorious soldiers.
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The campaign in the Balkans proceeded similarly to all previous campaigns. It was a typical lightning campaign. The Germans managed again within a very short time to break the enemy resistance and to occupy both countries relatively quickly.
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After 11 days, the Yugoslav army surrendered unconditionally. About 350,000 soldiers became German prisoners of war. About half of them were taken to Germany to be used as forced labor. The others awaited a merciless fate under German occupation.
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The commanding general and committed National Socialist Joachim von Kurzfleisch, for example, expected the soldiers to break all resistance ruthlessly. Anyone found resisting or fleeing with a weapon in his hand should be shot immediately. Now began the terror in the occupied territories.
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Shortly after the occupation of both countries, there were uprisings, especially in Serbia, against the German occupiers. And the Germans immediately reacted with unheard of brutality. Their thinking was that the so-called Balkan mentality would only understand the language of violence. And the harder they would crack down now at the beginning, the more they would have peace later. These uprisings were suppressed with the greatest brutality. There were mass shootings of hostages.
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And then there was a kind of graveyard peace in the truest sense of the word in Serbia until the end of the German occupation.
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In Pančevo, a small Serbian town near Belgrade, a column of Yugoslav soldiers marched in captivity. Again and again there were partisan attacks against the Germans. That was also the case here. Two members of the Waffen-SS came under fire. One of them was fatally shot.
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The German occupiers then put 40 arbitrarily selected civilians in front of a so-called drumhead trial, among them a woman and a 15-year-old schoolboy.
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On April 21 and 22, 14 of them were executed at the cemetery wall of Panchebel by a Wehrmacht firing squad. 18 others were hanged in the cemetery. The massacre became a spectacle, filmed and photographed by the soldiers present.
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The war in Greece was also short-lived. After initially fierce resistance, the Greeks had to admit defeat on April 23. Germans and Italians occupied the defeated country.
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In Greece, from the beginning, it was above all about robbery and plunder.
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The war against Greece was more a side aspect of the whole event. And the Germans wanted above all to secure a military occupation. It was also divided up with the other allies, including Italy. There, sheer terror prevailed. And the Greeks also resisted very quickly.
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There was a partisan movement that tried to fight this brutal German rule. And then again the German violence escalated.
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and it became unbounded brutality, as can only be found in Eastern Europe, in Poland, and the Soviet Union. On April 28,
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the sacking of Athens began. The greatest famine in the history of Greece followed. Hitler's aide Heinrich Himmler received authority to deport all the country's Jews. Here, a walk of genocide through the cradle of civilization.
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Himmler on the Acropolis was a symbol of victory for me.
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There are only a few real symbolic places in Europe that everyone knows. The Eiffel Tower or London Bridge. And the Acropolis is undoubtedly one of them. And you see it quite often in newsreels. German soldiers, not somewhere in Greece, but on the Acropolis. Everyone knows that. It was a symbol. Greece was also defeated by the Germans. Of course, people like Himmler didn't let themselves be deprived of these staged events. Especially since the SS-Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler
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was also involved in the occupation of Greece, that is, the central division of the Waffen-SS.
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With propaganda in mind, Adolf Hitler awarded the Knight's Cross to one of the members. By the end of the war, SS troops, with the help of the Wehrmacht, had murdered some 60,000 Greek Jews. Hitler left most of the occupied country to its hapless ally Mussolini.
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This axis, as it was called propagandistically, the Rome-Berlin axis, these two originally equal partners now suddenly became a senior partner and a junior partner. Italy was politically, economically and militarily dependent on Germany for the rest of the war. However, Mussolini's big-man addiction knew no bounds, he was still convinced that Italy had a right to extensive colonial possessions in Africa. As early as 1936, the Duce had announced before an enthusiastic crowd the annexation
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of Abyssinia and the return of the empire to the holy hills of Rome.
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Italian troops had invaded what is now Ethiopia and begun a ruthless war of conquest.
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The Italian expeditionary army was 200,000 men strong, the largest ever to invade the African continent.
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It waged a brutal war in violation of international law, using poison gas on a massive scale.
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But Mussolini's plans for a further enlargement of Italian East Africa failed. The Duce's troops were threatened with catastrophic defeats.
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Hitler promised Mussolini at the end of 1940 to send a tank division to North Africa. This was a purely defensive measure. Hitler wanted to prevent his ally from suffering a serious defeat in the Mediterranean and the British from suddenly being able to threaten Europe from the south. Then, in mid-February 1941, the first German troops arrived in North Africa, under the command of Lieutenant General Erwin Rommel, marking the birth of the German Afrika Korps.
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The troops were there to support the Italians. Their advance on the Kingdom of Egypt, which was allied with the British, had failed. In the meantime, even in eastern Libya, the province of Cyrenaica was in British hands. Now the British threatened to take the capital Tripoli. Rommel did not wait for the orders of his Italian superiors but acted on his own authority.
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Rommel officially received the order to act defensively, that is, to support the Italians so that their colonial empire didn't collapse. However, Rommel quickly decided to launch an offensive on his own initiative and was successful, but at the same time overstretched his supply lines and ran into major problems. And here the island of Malta was crucial. From Malta which was in British hands, the Royal Air Force and also the Royal Navy could massively and
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strategically disrupt the German and Italian convoys to North Africa. The Royal Air Force and also the Royal Navy massively and very sensitively disturb the German and Italian convoys to North Africa. British forces brought in their supplies from Gibraltar via Malta, which lies between Sicily and the coast of North Africa.
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To disrupt the Royal Navy's supply lines on the way from Gibraltar to the Suez Canal, German and Italian air forces repeatedly attacked Malta.
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The tiny archipelago experienced 3,000 air raids in the course of its two-year siege. 14,000 tons of bombs landed around the capital Valletta, but the Maltese held out.
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There were always aims on the German side and especially on the Italian side to take the island of Malta. But in the end, this enterprise was postponed until never-never day. Ultimately, this is one reason why the German and Italian forces in North Africa could never be well supplied.
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But for the time being, Rommel and his Afrika Korps achieved further successes in a hand-to-hand coup. Several times he ignored the waiting orders of the army high command. On April 10, 1941, Kirinika was recaptured and the Germans, surprisingly, captured the British fortress city of Tobruk.
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Rommel was the decisive person for the next two years in North Africa. Officially he was subordinate to the Italians, but very often he waged his own war, invoking the special relationship he had with Hitler.
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He often ignored his own superiors in the Wehrmacht and very often waged a kind of private war down there, but successfully. And that's what saved him from many a situation.
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As long as Hitler's favorite general delivered such spectacular successes, complaints about the disobedient commander fell on... deaf ears in the Berchtesgaden Berghof.
2:17:44
Hitler himself dubbed Rommel the most audacious tank general we have in the German army. Within three weeks the Afrika Korps had advanced some 800 kilometers to the east, all the way to the Egyptian border, and was now threatening the British troops stationed there.
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Rommel, with its insubordination and impetuous war of movement, shaped the image of this war and became a nightmare to the British. And he managed with relatively few means to keep a British superior force at bay.
2:18:23
The Allied troops stationed in Tobruk were initially mostly inexperienced, newly deployed units, including an Australian division. Minefields were laid to reinforce the city's defenses.
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repeatedly failed to capture Tobruk and eventually had the city besieged.
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For the British, preventing the Germans from advancing rapidly into Egypt was an important victory that also boosted morale on the home front. The armaments industry was running at full speed, although the capital of Great Britain was still subject to massive bombing. In the spring of 1941, German bombs landed near Bond Street in London, causing severe devastation. They were intended to weaken the morale of the population, but the hoped-for effect didn't occur. On the contrary.
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The massive casualty toll of German bombing among the civilian population made any propaganda to create an image of the enemy in Britain redundant.
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The air battle for England ultimately lasted from August 1940 to May 1941, and the Germans changed their tactics several times. In the summer of 1940, they attacked airports, then London, then the air armament industry. There was a final heavy attack in May 1941 on London, which caused over 1,000 deaths. And the air war continued only in homeopathic doses. There were still a few attacks, but with hardly any impact. So Britain had finally passed the great test in May of 1941. Unmoved,
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Londoners cleared away the rubble. Legendary U.S. journalist Edward Murrow reported in his program This Is London as an eyewitness of the attitude of the British during the Blitz attacks. There was no bravado, no loud voices, only a quiet acceptance of the situation. To me, those people... were incredibly brave and calm.
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Prime Minister Churchill paid tribute to the defenders of England, saying that never before did so many owe so much to so few.
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The few became the nickname of the Allied pilots.
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However, the British, looking at their cities, did not yet feel as if they were the victors.
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The crucial thing is that in air attacks at least, dictatorships and democracies are not so different from each other. The belief that democracy would fight the good war and dictatorship would fight the bad war, that's true for World War II as a whole, of course. But if we now look closely at the individual forms of war, like air war, you can't see any difference.
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The images were the same after the attacks, whether in England or Germany. Bomb strikes at the Old Fish Market in Hamburg. The neighboring main church of St. Peter's was also hit. An amateur filmed these images in mid-March of 1941. One hundred people died in that bombing of the Hanseatic city. Such recordings were actually forbidden under penalty.
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Berlin was also under increasing attack from the Royal Air Force.
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Secretly shot footage showed the effects of such a British bombing raid on the residential areas of the capital. Again and again, the British formations overcame the German flak positions. Only the cowardice of the German fighter pilots was to blame, claimed their commander-in-chief, Hermann Goering, in order to distract the attention from his own failure.
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Nazi propaganda did not shy away from using the deadly threat to the German civilian population for its own purposes. Sending children from Berlin to the countryside, for example, was unabashedly declared to be a recreational vacation for the youngest.
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Through these land deliveries, children from all walks of life should be protected from the health risks that can arise from lack of sleep during the flight alarms. In addition, mothers who are working in their home countries should be released. After all, you send the children to the countryside where they are safe and the state actually wants to take advantage of that. to be able to indoctrinate the children better in the schools in the countryside. And that doesn't always succeed.
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But that's actually a chance to get a stronger grip. And you manage to do social welfare, and that was also recognized by the Germans, who saw that the state cared, that it was responding quickly. Goebbels was quick to appear in cities, didn't hide, and so one managed to keep up morale to some extent. There was depression, there was dejection, but there was no revolt against the regime.
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The Nazi regime still ensured that the victims of the bombing raids were laid out like martyrs, as here in Neu-Wied on the Rhine. Most Germans still had no idea of the number of victims they would face in the years to come. The Allied bombing war against Nazi Germany had only just begun.
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They fight on the beaches, they fight on the landing grounds, they fight in the fields.
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which will never be rendered.
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The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. We will gain the inevitable triumph,
2:27:07
Sunday, June 22, 1941. German troops crossed the borders of the Soviet Union. The war they had started was an invasion, without a declaration of war.
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The soldiers were in a confident mood. They had been at war in Europe for 22 months, always accompanied by the army. by quick victories. They had conducted the Blitzkrieg extremely successfully so far.
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For the attack on the Soviet Union, 3.5 million Wehrmacht soldiers were ready, divided into three army groups, North, Central and South. Army Group North was to advance on Leningrad, Army Group Center on Moscow, and Army Group South on Kiev, and then on the Caucasus. Thus, all the economic and political centers of the Soviet Union should be taken in a lightning campaign.
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Since 3.45 that Sunday morning, German units had been advancing. Three million German soldiers were moving rapidly east in forced marches.
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Right from the start, the German Wehrmacht took thousands of prisoners of war. There was still a certainty of victory.
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The Wehrmacht succeeded very quickly in the first days in breaking through the Soviet defense lines and destroying the Soviet Air Force while it was still on the ground. And so the Germans, the Wehrmacht, penetrated very quickly in their first weeks to the east.
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However, with every kilometer it penetrated further east, the supply lines became longer and the Soviet resistance became stronger."
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From the start, the civilian population was also targeted by the fighting troops. The German newsreels showed nothing of this in the first days of the war. They were convinced that they could crush Soviet Russia, the colossus with feet of clay, with one blow in the summer of 1941 the wehrmacht was at the zenith of its capabilities it had combat experience it had learned lessons it
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had long training periods it had improved armament and ammunition and the initial experience was we were vastly superior to the red army
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The invasion of the neighboring country was sold to the German population as a preventive war. On the morning of June 22, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in a radio message delivered a proclamation from Adolf Hitler.
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I have therefore decided today to put the fate and the future of the German Reich and our people back in the hands of our soldiers. For Hitler it was always clear that the war against the Soviet Union would come, the great ideological confrontation between National Socialism with Bolshevism. At the same time, in Hitler's world, there were also economic and strategic reasons for attacking the Soviet Union.
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He failed to defeat Great Britain, so he thought, let's first defeat the danger in the East.
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And then afterwards, Hitler wanted to move all his forces to the West, first against Great Britain and then in a big world war against the US.
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The dictator believed that the campaign against the Soviet Union would last about 22 weeks. His generals assumed even less, only 8 to 17 weeks.
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Hitler regarded his opponent, Joseph Stalin, as an opponent to be taken seriously. The Soviet dictator was a clever head, a bloodhound, whose blood regiment of Bolshevism had to be put down as soon as possible.
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Stalin's Red Army was only partially operational after the Great Terror in the mid-1930s. Stalin had assassinated almost the entire military and party leadership to ensure his autocracy.
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Those who rallied around him initially quite rightly assumed that the man's hand did not tremble, that he could handle any crisis. and that he had no qualms about using force against anyone, so that initially the followers voluntarily subordinated themselves to him. In fact, this was a dictator who played the henchman off against each other, who had the means of power in his hands, and controlled the secret service. And he established something like a despotism,
2:32:22
which even the closest members in the leadership circle were afraid of. Ever since the
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October Revolution, Soviet Russia had been regarded as the worst threat to the West. In the meantime, it had become a dictatorship with a personality cult focused entirely on Stalin.
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The Soviet Union at the time, by the way, not only in Germany, was actually something like the evil empire. And so this war, for many, was a war against the archenemy of the West, the civilized world. After a short period of getting used to the fact that now that the Hitler-Stalin pact had ended, the vast majority of Germans absolutely approved of this campaign.
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When Adolf Hitler delivered a speech to a group of officer candidates at the Berlin Sports Palace in early December 1940, he had already been working solidly for weeks on a blueprint for war against the Soviet Union. He had also long since informed his generals of the inevitability of the attack. He also said it was necessary to create living space in the East and at the same time defeat Germany's archenemy. While in Western Europe it was more or less clashes between two armies,
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in the East it was a clash between two ideologies. And not only between two ideologies, but also between two societies. That's how it was interpreted. And in order to make the Soviet regime collapse, The Nazis believed they had to specifically eliminate the Jews and the Communists as proponents of that regime.
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Hitler planned a campaign of extermination. Corresponding orders were formulated in advance. Political officers, for example, assigned to Red Army units, if seized in combat or resistance, are in principle to be finished off immediately with a weapon.
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The court-martial decree also exempted the killing of civilians by Wehrmacht soldiers from punishment. Officers' reactions ranged from outspoken approval to reluctant acceptance.
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However, resistance was comparatively low. As always, of course, there was a material moment. The generals were lured by the fact that they were promised huge latifundia in this vast country. And this was then supposed to destroy doubt. Many of these generals went along with it, aware that they were doing something forbidden. So, from the very beginning, the German generals compromised. went along with the crimes. Colonel General von Reichenau, one of the die-hard Nazi leaders,
2:35:12
even justified and defended it publicly. Field Marshal von Manstein said that a Bolshevik political officer was not a comrade and that one could shoot him without hesitation.
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To enforce Hitler's barbaric concept of war, the Hamburg Reserve Police Battalion 102 was also detached. Their official mission? To secure the rear areas. Their real mission? To assist the SS-Einsatzgruppen in genocide. In occupied Poland and Russia, they shot tens of thousands or deported them to concentration camps.
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Resistance was expected by the Nazi rulers mainly from communists and from Jews.
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And very quickly this order was interpreted as carrying out ethnic cleansing against the Jewish population and the communist intelligentsia.
2:36:14
In Moscow, Joseph Stalin had to face the truth. Adolf Hitler had taken him by surprise. Nazi Germany and the USSR were at war.
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Horrified Soviet citizens learned about the invasion by the Wehrmacht from newspapers. They heard nothing from Stalin for the first few weeks after the invasion. The dictator left it to his deputy, Vyacheslav Molotov, to inform the population about the attack. The numerous warnings of his agents, which Stalin had dismissed as feints and deceptive maneuvers, now turned out, to his astonishment, to be true.
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It deeply shocked Stalin that someone could be so stupid as to open a two-front war. He completely misjudged that. And that's why, interestingly enough, he was much more distrustful of the British and the French than he was of Hitler. Because he saw Hitler as an authoritarian ruler and dictator who would act in exactly the same way as he would have in his place. That's why I think Stalin, for the first time in his life, was really surprised.
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Nevertheless, contrary to rumors, The dictator kept his nerve. Mobilization, however, was slow to get off the ground. The Red Army, which had been bled dry, lacked experienced commanders.
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Stalin was in control from the very first day of the war and he organized the defense. He was, as always, a resolute ruler and by no means panicked or hysterical. That would not have suited the man at all.
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On July 3, Stalin, who as Supreme Commander now called himself Generalissimo, spoke to the Soviet people in a radio address to prepare them for the Great Patriotic War.
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This had a great effect. Not only that most Soviet citizens heard the dictator's voice for the first time, he basically never appeared in public.
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They heard for the first time this man with the heavy Georgian accent, who spoke Russian with mistakes, who addressed his compatriots and immediately used this formula, brothers and sisters. There you see the old fox again, who recognized exactly what he had to do in which situation and what was needed now. and who could unhesitatingly throw all ideological reservations overboard if he could get any advantages from it.
2:39:14
Meanwhile, at Adolf Hitler's headquarters in Obersalzburg in Bavaria, reports were coming in of victory.
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At this point, the German troops had already advanced more than 500 kilometers toward Moscow. The German soldiers did not yet know what kind of war their leader had planned for them and what role... he had assigned to them in this campaign of destruction. Many of them did not see any great danger in their imminent deployment to the front.
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Gerd Bruegelmann, a young lieutenant from Paderborn, received his marching orders then. A year earlier, his only brother had been killed in France. As the last son of his family, he was not assigned to combat duty, but was put in charge of leading a supply train. The soldiers were still in good spirits, heading for a foreign country.
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In Private Müller's war experience, the central thing was the fight, boredom, waiting, the marching, the foreign culture,
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even the cheerful hours spent with comrades, the pride in one's military achievements, in one's successes. All that was in the foreground. The awareness that this was a criminal war, a war of aggression, was of course not there at all. So the war was also an adventure, a journey. The vast majority of Germans had not traveled, had never left Germany, had never left their village before. At the beginning of their advance, the soldiers also received a friendly welcome in some areas,
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especially in the Baltic states, parts of Belarus and in Ukraine, where the population hoped for better times after the end of Stalinist terror. But the joy of liberation was disappointing. Soon, the High Command relieved the soldiers of any duty of responsibility and declared that feeding the impoverished population was a misunderstood humanity.
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In Ukraine, the Germans were welcomed very positively because they were seen as liberators from the Soviet yoke, which was also a foreign rule for the Ukrainian people.
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The almost unimpeded advance allowed German troops to penetrate deep into the interior of the country. Thus, they quickly succeeded in encircling large areas.
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Characteristic of the first phase of Operation Barbarossa were the so-called encirclement battles, that is, German tank forces had surrounded larger bodies of troops of the Red Army in pincer attacks and thus encircled, they were closed off from supplies.
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And so there were huge numbers of prisoners in the first weeks and months of the war.
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In one of the first of these encirclement battles around the Belarusian capital of Minsk, about 325,000 soldiers of the Red Army became German prisoners of war.
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The next objective in the advance of Army groups centered towards Moscow was Smolensk. Here the Wehrmacht encountered fierce resistance. In bitter street camps, our troops enter the city on July 16. For two weeks, the Soviet and British propaganda lied that Smolensk is still in Bolshevik hands. Today, when we look at the German advance in the Soviet Union, we are dazzled by the newsreel pictures. We see the encirclement battles. We see the huge streets full of Soviet prisoners of war.
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We see smiling German soldiers. But the Germans suffered immense losses in the advance. And this Wehrmacht was actually shrinking and shrinking. Because while many Red Army soldiers went into captivity, many also fought to the last bullet.
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Contrary to what the newsreels claim, it actually took two months before the German troops finally decided the battle in their favor.
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The Soviet leadership could not find an effective strategy against the lightning-quick advance of German troops. The huge mistakes made by the Generalissimo often benefited the Wehrmacht. Stalin made the mistake of simply forbidding army leaders to retreat. As a result, they were constantly surrounded and huge army units were destroyed. They surrendered by the 100,000 because they realized that they couldn't use their military skills at all. They had no weapons, no boots, no uniforms.
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Their officers ran away or didn't lead them at all. As a result, the number of prisoners of war increased rapidly. 300,000 Red Army soldiers were trapped in the Smolensk Basin. The Germans mercilessly crammed them into very confined spaces. The The prisoners of war suffered from hunger and thirst. Soon, epidemics such as typhus were rampant in the camps.
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In the end, the Wehrmacht failed to do everything that should have been required for humane accommodation. And this led to the biggest mass death in the German sphere of influence in
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1941. 2.2 million died. And a total of about 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war Perished in German captivity.
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It's believed that 50% or even over 50% of Soviet prisoners of war died in German hands. They were shot, or they starved, or they worked until they dropped.
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Those who were lucky were supplied from surrounding villages. Often, impoverished farmers gave the prisoners their last bit of bread. A German officer noted in his diary, There was nothing to eat,
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not even water. Many died. They were finally given dry macaroni to eat, which they pounced on madly.
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Of all the crimes for which the Wehrmacht was responsible, I think the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war was the greatest crime.
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Most Wehrmacht generals did not feel responsible for the mass deaths in the German camps. Responsibility for the conditions in each prison camp lay with the respective commander. Thus, the negligence was passed on from the upper ranks to the overburdened officers.
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In the camps, people were at the mercy of their guards as to whether they lived or died. Systematically, all those capable of working were registered and publicly stripped. The circumcised among them were immediately identified as Jews and deported or shot. In many camps, the guards behaved like a sadistic master race.
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Beatings and severe abuse were commonplace.
2:46:28
The idea that Germany was a superior power was widespread. The phrase, the world shall be healed by the German essence, had been known for a long time. What was new, however, was this racialization of prejudices, where one spoke of Slavic subhumans and waged a war of extermination. In the summer of 1941, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler visited a camp with Soviet prisoners of war near Minsk. When he witnessed a mass shooting, he lamented the strain that such actions would have on the perpetrators.
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Soon, he would give orders to begin forced gassing and setting up extermination camps. Not only were prisoners of war victims of the task forces, they systematically also killed Jewish civilians.
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These were the extermination squads that followed the troops who had first received vague orders, which eventually… leaned more and more in the direction of shooting all Jews. All men at first, but then also women and children.
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Everywhere in the rear areas, the Wehrmacht supported the Einsatzgruppen as well as the police battalions assigned to them in their killing spree. In addition to Jews, political opponents, Roma and Sinti, others considered unworthy of life and Nazi jargon were also eliminated. The SS troops were not the only ones who brought terror to the country. Wehrmacht soldiers also participated in the atrocities of the German murder squads.
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The army groups that marched into the Soviet Union and the armies, which then always included SS units, which were divisions, that is, parts of this army, and therefore the Wehrmacht fought side by side with these SS units. So the Wehrmacht officers corrupted themselves by making common cause with these people.
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In this war, everything was permitted. The murder of women and children became part of everyday life. Civilization was suspended, horror was unleashed, inhibitions disappeared, ordinary men became mass murderers.
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Where killing was no longer forbidden, but ordered. And where it was morally justified, they said, what you're doing is not bad, you're doing it for a good cause. And where men knew that their friends, families, wives and children could not see what they were doing, they did it. Not everyone did it, but a lot of them, thinking, nobody's going to find out. I don't think the Nazis could have organized these murder excesses at home,
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because then the men would have had to cross much larger thresholds.
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Serious war crimes were also committed by the Germans on the southeastern front.
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In the battle for the Ukrainian capital Kiev, the Red Army planted explosive devices in several buildings before retreating. The explosions killed several hundred members of the armed forces.
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The nationalist Ukrainians had welcomed the Germans as liberators. Now, together with Wehrmacht and SS officers, they demanded retaliation for the Bolshevik attacks.
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then targeted Jewish civilians, especially the elderly, women, and children.
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Under the pretext of evacuation, the Jews were taken out of the city. On September 29 and 30, 1941, an SS-Einsatzgruppe systematically murdered 33,771 people with machine guns at Babi Yar.
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After the massacre, the Wehrmacht secured the area and blew up parts of the ravine to bury the piles of corpses forever. After the bloodbath, Einsatzgruppe C, in a report, explicitly praised the excellent cooperation of the Wehrmacht. A lot of people went along with it in the group because the leader said this is what's going to be done now and you didn't want to let your comrades down so you went along with it
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and because you were in a male hierarchy of the military and you can see this everywhere in wars the moment such military hierarchies are associated with everything being allowed the violence escalates.
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Hitler was the central person without whom such a war in the Soviet Union was not even imaginable. He was the link between ideology, state, military and party. The soldiers saw things differently, in a way that seems crude to us today. They separated ideology and Hitler. Hitler was seen by many as the father of the fatherland, to whom one was also loyal, to whom also sworn oath. And then there was the evil party. Of course, we know today that it's insane to separate the two.
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You can't separate them at all. But to the soldiers, Hitler was seen as a positive figure for an astonishingly long time in the war. This is, of course, an auxiliary construction to also explain why one continued to fight.
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Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had also arrived to see for himself the progress of the campaign in which his troops were also involved. Hitler informed the surprised Duce that the conquest of Moscow was no longer a priority, but Leningrad was. Exactly what Hitler planned to do was communicated to the commanders of Army Group North in the Secret Command document of August 28. The Leningraders had to be destroyed by starving them to death.
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After surrounding the city, any evacuation by the civilian population must be prevented. If necessary, by using weapons. Behind this, of course, was the calculation that a city of millions, like Leningrad, could not have been supplied at all. The Wehrmacht and the Germans did not want that at all. They didn't want to get the civilians on their side. If they had wanted that, they would have fixed it. But they didn't want to.
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And that's why the decision was made to surround the city and starve it out.
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Of course, there have been sieges since ancient times. There's also been starvation in besieged cities since ancient times. But the idea of now starving a city for months and then actually starving the population to death, that's a unique event, at least for modern time.
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On September 8, the siege ring closed around the city and its 3.3 million inhabitants. All supply lines were cut off. Thus began one of the most perfidious crimes of the Wehrmacht. The German Luftwaffe dropped incendiary bombs over the city. Tons of food was burned. Soon, a large part of the population suffered from hunger.
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An unbelievable number of people starved to death, became cannibal. Terrible scenes took place in Leningrad. If you meet older people in Petersburg who had experienced this, they cannot forget it for the rest of their lives. They have never seen a German, for they can't forget how terrible it was and how it changed social relations within weeks. Because people couldn't think of anything else but the next piece of bread.
2:54:40
After the onset of winter, the mass death planned by the army high command began. Many froze to death because they had no fuel left. But the worst was the hunger. According to estimates, one in three Leningraders starved to death during the 900-day siege. More than a million people.
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Stalin cynically exploited them for his regime by not doing much to ensure the survival of these people in the city, because he knew it played into his hands when the Nazis treated the population in this way.
2:55:24
Meanwhile, Army Group Center continued to march on Moscow. The Soviet capital was supposed to have been conquered by August, but by the end of the month, the breakthrough had still not been. been achieved. Nervousness began to spread in the Wehrmacht High Command.
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To relieve the overstretched supply lines, the OKW released whole swaths of land for looting. To prevent this, the Red Army also set fire to many villages. During the course of the winter, the population suffered severe famine and tens of thousands died.
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The life of the enemy didn't count for much. You also got to see how the Red Army waged war, with the huge numbers of casualties they operated, how the Red Army kept attacking their own positions, their own machine gun fire, death defying. This creates an image that the lives of the citizens of the Soviet Union didn't actually count. Those who went home on leave saw their own family as if it was a different world. On the surface, The Edel in the garden at home was undisturbed,
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but the father of the family didn't even take off his Wehrmacht uniform at home. The war was also finding a way into the immediate family circle.
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Even the youngest practiced military drills to please their father.
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The soldiers who came home on leave from the Eastern Front thought that the home they were in was completely surreal. They suddenly came to an area where Easter was celebrated and Christmas. And there were little children singing, and the world was still fine, even though there were bombing raids.
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And they couldn't talk about their experiences in that environment. They couldn't tell their wives about their bodies being torn to pieces, about their brains being blown out, about mass shootings of Jews. That's seen it all.
2:57:23
The frustrated Wehrmacht units became increasingly ruthless, but a lightning victory failed to materialize. Their proven strategy threatened not to work this time. In fact, the motorized units of Heeresgruppe Mitte had only about a third of their inventory left. Winter was approaching. Villages were ruthlessly looted and burned to the ground.
2:57:47
Many peasants hid in the forests. In order to survive, they joined forces with scattered Red Army soldiers and guerrillas to form partisan groups.
2:57:57
Contrary to Soviet propaganda, these motley groups were poorly equipped with few weapons and little ammunition. Nevertheless, they hit the Wehrmacht hard.
2:58:08
The officers of the Wehrmacht and the general staff believed that they could wage a blitzkrieg there, just as they had done in France and other countries in Europe. But they had not thought at all about whether there were actually roads in the Soviet Union. And then they discovered that the Soviet Union did have a road network.
2:58:27
But it was very primitive. There were these so-called great rolling roads. They connected the big cities and went through the Soviet Union, leaving thousands of kilometers of no-man's land behind them. They didn't control that at all. So they drove in with these columns of tanks, but they left behind them areas that they hadn't conquered at all, areas that they just drove through.
2:58:52
Partisan sabotage attacks carried out from these rear areas repeatedly set the Wehrmacht back. The wounded from these attacks could often only be cared for inadequately, as supplies did not reach them in time. Meanwhile, on October 8th, Hitler let the domestic and foreign press know that the Soviet Union had finally been defeated.
2:59:14
In October, the Wehrmacht still achieved one major success. Then the advance came to a standstill. The Wehrmacht is... The Wehrmacht was actually finished after the last big battle of the Bryansk and Vyazma Basin in October of 1941. And the troops said, enough, stop, winter position. Bring supplies forward, bring winter clothing forward. We can't go any further. And it was the army general of Stav, not Hitler, who said, never mind. Even as they knew about the dire situation of the soldiers,
2:59:47
they still had to make one last big effort to take Moscow. We had to make one last effort to take Moscow.
2:59:54
The losses of the German divisions increased daily, but the military leadership didn't develop any alternatives to its failed strategy. The toll of blood paid by the soldiers for the failures of their leaders was high. More and more cemeteries filled the landscapes.
3:00:13
A field chaplain described the mood of his superior after a funeral in the field. The colonel's face has changed in the last few days. He stands silently in front of the long rows of graves.
3:00:26
There lies my old guard. Actually, we belong there too. Then it would be over.
3:00:33
There was a high degree of frustration among the soldiers. Everything took much longer. The weather conditions were getting worse. You stood in the mud. The nutritional conditions were getting bad. There were no longer sufficient... or only very intermittent supplies, and by no means was the war going to be over in two or three months.
3:00:57
In mid-October 1941, the Russian autumn set in, and with it came the rains.
3:01:06
Lieutenant Bruegelmann's supply train was also advancing slower and slower. The so-called Rasputitsa slowed the advance of the Germans with rain and mud. Little by little, All the dirt roads of Eastern Europe turned into an impassable quagmire.
3:01:22
The German advance came to a halt shortly before Moscow, because by then the supply routes were simply overextended too far. And besides, the Germans already had huge losses. By the end of 1941, the Germans had already lost about a million men, dead, wounded or captured. There were losses that the Wehrmacht leadership and Hitler had not planned for.
3:01:48
In Moscow, Stalin knew how to use the time he gained. Thousands of civilians built barricades and tank trenches. Then, the strategic reserves from Siberia arrived and marched from Red Square directly to the front. Meanwhile, reports from German aerial reconnaissance units about massive troop deployments in the Moscow area were dismissed by the German leadership as ghosts. Stalin entrusted the leadership of the life-saving offensive to a hero of the Soviet Union, General Georgy Zhukov.
3:02:23
On the other side of the world, Franklin D. Roosevelt adhered to the principle of good neighborliness and considered any imperialist expansion of his country as unreasonable.
3:02:35
Thus did the U.S. president become the antagonist of the expansionist Axis powers. Roosevelt knew that sooner or later his country would have to intervene in the conflict. But the majority of his countrymen were against entering the war. The main tendency in the United States at that time was to say, we have completely different problems to solve in our own country, especially of an economic nature. We need everything now, but not war. We don't need to enter here. And Roosevelt, too,
3:03:04
had actually said quite clearly that he wanted to put an end to this American imperialist policy.
3:03:16
In particular, the US felt threatened by Japan. The Japanese had continued to arm themselves and had been waging a war against China for years in violation of international law. Finally, the United States suspended all trade relations with Japan and imposed an oil embargo. They responded with a secret plan of attack on a US base in the Pacific.
3:03:37
On the Japanese side, there were definitely military people who felt that they had really been backed into a corner. For these military men, There had to be this attack on Pearl Harbor at all costs, in order to free themselves from this feeling of being backed into a corner. In that sense, Pearl Harbor was clearly liberating strike. Located nearly 3,700 kilometers southwest of the California coast, Pearl Harbor had been home to the U.S. Pacific Fleet since 1940.
3:04:12
Undetected, a Japanese fleet approached the Hawaiian islands. The Kido Butai had covered 6,000 kilometers. It was December 7, 1941, and at 10 minutes to 6, the Japanese aircraft carriers moved into position. Half an hour later, 185 planes took off. It took the attackers an hour and a half to reach their destination.
3:04:40
It was the first time in human history that an attack had been conducted this way, with a total of six aircraft carriers, a combined attack from the sea, but just with units attacking from the air.
3:04:52
but with units that attack from the air. 140 ships, including 8 battleships and 29 destroyers, were anchored in Pearl Harbor at the time. But they were considered obsolete. Some had already been in service during the First World War. Their relocation to the middle of the Pacific was intended to send a message to a belligerent Japan.
3:05:16
This deployment of the fleet to Pearl Harbor was a very clear statement. A very clear signal from the United States that said, we're not going to completely sit idly by and watch what's happening here in Asia and what Japan is doing in Asia, even if we don't directly interfere militarily now. At least we're showing a presence in this way.
3:05:41
At 7.48 a.m., the first Japanese fighter planes attacked, followed by formations of dive bombers and torpedo planes. The message to mission control? Tora, Tora, Tora was the agreed signal that the surprise had succeeded. The Japanese attackers documented their success with a camera as the first bombs hit the Ford Island airfield. Shocked and surprised, the soldiers and sailors came to the realization this is not a drill.
3:06:11
Washington had anticipated that sooner or later there would probably be armed conflict in Asia. However, it had more strongly expected that it would happen somewhere in Southeast Asia. But Japan had not been figured to actually attack the heart of the Anglo-American presence in the Asia-Pacific, that is, the Pearl Harbor naval base, which was armed to the teeth.
3:06:37
More than 2,400 American soldiers died, 19 warships were sunk or damaged and around 200 aircraft were destroyed. US soldiers were forced to watch helplessly as the Japanese reduced their huge naval base to rubble within two hours. Pearl Harbor became the most bitter defeat in American naval history. The next day, President Roosevelt declared war on Japan.
3:07:04
On the Japanese side, there was a misconception, because they had a misconception about the American politicians. They actually thought, Americans, the white people in Washington, they are somehow weak, and if they suffer such a drastic, heavy surprise blow, then they will give in. Then they will enter into negotiations. And that's where they were very wrong. Yesterday, December 7 1941 a date which will live
3:07:40
In infamy,
3:07:43
the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves.
3:08:02
With confidence in our armed forces...
3:08:06
with the unbounding determination of our people.
3:08:12
We will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.
3:08:21
Hitler, too, was surprised by Japan's attack. The dictator kept the promise he had made to his ally in case of war. On December 11th, the Third Reich declared war on the U.S. The European war now became a world war.
3:08:41
The interesting thing about Pearl Harbor is that it was not the US that declared war on the German Reich. Rather, it was actually Hitler who reacted immediately after Pearl Harbor, who immediately arranged for American ships to be sunk, and who declared war on the US. For him, it was actually a welcomed event to create very clear fronts that sent out a very clear message.
3:09:07
On the one hand, Germany stood on the side of Japan against the Anglo-Americans and the Soviet Union, so very clear front lines were created.
3:09:23
The front in the Soviet Union at the time was 50 kilometers from Moscow city limits.
3:09:35
On December 5th, the Red Army struck back. The offensive hit the surprised German troops with full force. Just a day earlier, the General Staff had announced that the Red Army was, at the time, not in a position to attack Army Group Center.
3:09:53
The biggest enemy for the Germans was first of all the Russian geography, the Russian winter. The problem, that a huge army could not be supplied over huge distances. Logistically, it didn't work. The Germans didn't even have winter equipment, because they thought that the war would be over in September of 1941, and the Soviet troops used that to their advantage.
3:10:18
By mid-December, the Red Army had averted the threat of Moscow's encirclement and was gaining ground on its side. With the weather at 40 degrees below zero, only a few German soldiers were equipped with sufficient winter clothing. Two and a half thousand of them died every day.
3:10:36
Moscow, the counter-offensive of the Red Army, what foreign armies east, the German intelligence service wrote on the eve of this offensive. An offensive is not to be expected. The Germans simply could not imagine that the Red Army would do that. They also didn't understand what reserves the Red Army still had. They didn't understand this country either. They had no real knowledge. Even for the intelligence service, Russia remained a foreign country.
3:11:06
And what critical voices that did exist in 1941 were pushed to the side.
3:11:12
Unfazed, on December 18, Adolf Hitler gave the weakened troops the order to fanatically persevere. At the same time, the dictator forbade any retreat. He fired dissenting generals, some of whom beat him to the punch with requests to resign.
3:11:31
On December 19, Hitler finally seized supreme command of the army and relieved the previous commander-in-chief, Walter von Brauchitsch, of his command.
3:11:43
On the home front, an ideal world was created. Those who were wealthy, like the Henkel family of merchants in Hamburg, spent Christmas with their loved ones. The father, Hans, had not yet been called up. Three years later, the family would receive his last letter from the Eastern Front. Hans Henkel would die fighting near Budapest, but the Germans still had no idea of their impending defeat.
3:12:12
On the home front it didn't matter. If you watched newsreels from December 1941, from January 1942, you realized you couldn't actually tell what was going on.
3:12:25
There you were fighting somewhere in a frozen area outside Moscow for villages that you had never heard of.
3:12:32
The situation for the German troops was hopeless. The temperature was around minus 40 degrees. Rifles and guns jammed. Engine oil and gasoline congealed. The arms and legs of the soldiers holding out froze. The German attack on the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, had failed.
3:12:56
This caused a shock effect among the soldiers. Now they saw the weakness of the Red Army. It was all lies. It wasn't true at all. The Red Army was well equipped. There were soldiers who were brought in from the east of Siberia in ski suits. They realized that they were being burned there, that they had to walk around in women's fur coats, and that they were cannon fodder. The aura of the invincibility of the Wehrmacht was gone. And I think most of the soldiers in the Wehrmacht knew
3:13:28
in the winter of 1941 that this was going to go wrong.
3:13:34
Gerd Bruegelmann's hard-hit supply unit had also been stationed outside Moscow since the end of November. Unexpectedly, the lieutenant was ordered back to Paderborn for a new assignment. The journey home took him via Smolensk and Berlin.
3:13:49
He was on the road for a week in a hospital train. Arriving in Paderborn, the horrified officer learned that his entire unit had been destroyed in a battle outside Moscow shortly after his departure.
3:14:04
The Lebensraum in Osten, the living space in the East, had turned into a hostile no-man's land. Hitler's war was sinking into frost, snow, and ice.
3:15:30
The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
3:17:03
On January 13, 1942, a German submarine appeared off the Atlantic coast of the United States. Together with two others, they took up positions near New York City.
3:17:17
The group had just completed two weeks of travel. Within sight of the Manhattan skyline, the boats went on the attack.
3:17:25
The long-range submarines had an easy time of it. US shipping was completely unprepared, assuming that the east coast was beyond the reach of the Germans. Unprotected, the freighters were at the mercy of torpedoes.
3:17:40
The Germans, after all, had declared war on the US on December 11, 1941. And then the question was how to actually reach the US. How could they exert an influence on the US? How could they attack it? The only weapon that Germans had for this were their submarines. And Karl Dönitz, the commander of the submarines, was quite pleased with the opportunity to find new hunting grounds for his submarines. He had rightly assumed that the Americans had peacetime merchant shipping on
3:18:10
their east coast and they were of course very easy to attack with submarines. And so he went five submarines at first, then more and more to the American East Coast and also to the Caribbean, and there hundreds of ships or about 2 million gross tons were sunk in the first half of 1942. This was one of the very great successes of the German Navy. Some go so far as to say that this whole Operation Paukenschlag was a second Pearl Harbor.
3:18:44
Successes like these were most welcome to Nazi propaganda. The newsreels reported extensively on German U-boat heroes.
3:19:11
Vice Admiral Dönitz, deliver the successful commander the Viterkreuz. Of course, Nazi propaganda was always looking for images, for stories, for personalization. We know all this from today's media technology. And in principle, it was no different with Nazi propaganda. What stories can we tell? An infantryman lying in a trench, firing somewhere, that's not a story I can tell. But if I can measure performance, then I can tell stories, then I can award medals. It's like sports.
3:19:47
And that's the case with submariners. How much tonnage did they sink? I can measure military performance. That's why submariners are celebrated as heroes by propaganda. I can sell them well. They're young, they're dynamic, they're fighters. They go for it. So I can generate enthusiasm among the youth, unlike the grain mass of the army and the infantry. And the navy also plays a much bigger role politically through propaganda than it actually plays militarily.
3:20:22
On the other side of the continent, America was suddenly threatened by danger from the deep. On February 23rd, A Japanese submarine appeared off the California coast and shelled a refinery near Santa Barbara. For the first time, the U.S. experienced an attack on its mainland.
3:20:43
Japan's militaristic government was making propagandistic profit from the foolhardy attack. Ever since the Imperial Navy succeeded in striking a devastating blow against the most important U.S. naval base in the Pacific in December, the Japanese military had been prone to excessive hubris, but exaggerated claims were also being made in the United States.
3:21:13
In the American press after Pearl Harbor, there was actually, of course, exaggerations. But there was definitely this idea that, yes, it's possible. that the yellow peril is coming. It was possible that the Japanese could also somehow land on the west coast of America.
3:21:31
And this fear did exist. As far as the Japanese were concerned, there was never any thought of somehow trying to make a serious landing attempt on the American continent.
3:21:45
There were isolated pinpricks on the California coast. That's where the Japanese navy had sent submarines. But it was more to send the message, if we wanted to, we could reach you. And if we wanted to, we could attack you here. But we're not doing it.
3:22:01
It was the same situation with Australia. Although there were also those in the Japanese military who said, the next step must actually be to take Australia. We have taken all of Southeast Asia. It's not enough that we bomb Darwin in the north of Australia. No, we also have to take Australia. because sooner or later Australia represents the most important base for the Americans in the Asia-Pacific region.
3:22:29
Using the Blitzkrieg example of their German ally, Japanese troops had quickly invaded numerous countries in Southeast Asia by December. The Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore were also under their control by January.
3:22:48
as were numerous Pacific islands. Now, the Japanese were preparing to seize other Western European colonies such as Burma and the East Indies. Asia, for the Asians, was their battle cry. But for many Japanese nationalists, it served as a mere pretext for these campaigns of conquest.
3:23:06
Japan's plan was first to wage a very offensive lightning-fast war in Southeast Asia, to conquer as much territory as possible, as quickly as possible, in the Southeast Asia-Pacific region.
3:23:23
Then to hold on to these in a second more defensive phase, then to consolidate, and then to force the Americans and also Great Britain and the West into a negotiated peace if possible on Japanese terms.
3:23:38
The British Crown Colony of Hong Kong fell in early December. Japanese forces outnumbered the empire's colonial troops almost four to one. They quickly gained air superiority over the city from the Pearl River Delta. Soon, the Allied formations had to retreat. Then, Japanese troops occupied the city.
3:24:01
During the so-called Black Christmas, the civilian population endured immeasurable suffering. Arbitrary murders and rapes by the occupiers were the order of the day.
3:24:12
Within four months, Nippon brought all of Southeast Asia, as well as much of the Pacific Ocean, with about 450 million people under its rule. The Japanese Empire had never been larger. On the other side of the world, people were highly pleased with these developments, even though no one in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin had known about Japan's plans in advance. Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Adolf Hitler awarded a medal to the Imperial Ambassador.
3:24:44
General Oshima has done an excellent job in the three-mighty pact, which has now joined Germany, Italy and Japan in the fight for the new order of Europe and the Far Eastern region. Oshima had relatively quickly and relatively well ingratiated himself to Adolf Hitler. As Ursula himself had written and communicated, he also had the feeling that he had quite a good connection to the Nazi regime and to Adolf Hitler himself. Of course, we always have a bit of an idea.
3:25:18
There was a kind of global Axis warfare, that is, the Axis powers together created a master plan on how to conquer the world and had coordinated it perfectly.
3:25:29
It wasn't like that in reality. Even when we think of the invasion of Poland by the Wehrmacht, it is of course clear that the Japanese army looked very closely at what and how the Wehrmacht acted. From the Japanese side, this first blitzkrieg, which was presented here by the Germans, was studied meticulously and examined very closely. The Japanese military attaché obtained corresponding reports there and also had them prepared and transmitted to Tokyo. And the Japanese term for Blitzkrieg,
3:26:01
Dengekiesen, was a literal translation.
3:26:07
In order to defeat the enemy together, the U.S. was portrayed by the Axis powers in a grotesquely distorted manner as a politically unstable and bankrupt country. In actual fact, Roosevelt's New Deal had created an enormous economic boom in the States.
3:26:28
When you see the masses starving to death of the Ruseveld plutocracy, then you understand the fear of the American-Jewish expatriate clique and their political leaders before awakening of these millions. This is how it goes to the small workers and farmers in this free country. In the national-socialist Germany, such conditions are unthinkable. Therefore, the goal of the Jewish capitalists and their Ruseveld is the destruction of Germany.
3:26:56
They hide behind phrases and slogans like freedom, democracy and human culture, which are allegedly all endangered by
3:27:18
Nazi Germany.
3:27:25
One of the crucial questions, after all, is why Hitler declared war on the US on December 11, 1941. And it seemed that there was something about Hitler's perception at that time in December of 1941, because he believed that the US could not sustain a long war, even economically. On the whole, of course, from today's vantage point, one could make the case that Hitler and many others, the German leadership, the German intelligence service and others massively
3:27:54
underestimated the economic power of the United States. There were voices, but only a few, who said that if we go to war with the US, then we can no longer win the war. There were those people. There were also military officers, Fritz Todt for example, as former Minister of Armaments, who was very critical in the fall of 1941. who said, if the US enters the war, then we have no chance there economically. But most of Hitler's advisers massively underestimated this.
3:28:26
The German arms industry was in full swing. Nazi propaganda euphorically hyped the war-related boom as an armaments miracle. The upswing was initiated by Fritz Todt, the Minister of Armaments. However, when Todt became critical of the course of the war, a rift with Hitler ensued. On February 8, 1942, the civil engineer was killed in a plane crash at the Rassenburg airport near the Fuhrer's headquarters, Wulschanz.
3:28:55
Hitler ordered a state funeral and posthumously awarded Todt the highest honor of the National Socialist Reich, the Teutonic Order. A few hours after Todt's death, Adolf Hitler appointed his favorite architect as his successor.
3:29:10
Albert Speer was a gifted manager and above all he had the advantage of having direct access to Hitler. He was able to achieve things organizationally that Fritz Todt had also conceived but also always wanted. had also set on the right path, but only Speer could achieve that.
3:29:33
His relationship with Hitler was a very special one. So he got the recognition, became armaments minister with a spectrum of control that Todt had never dreamed of. And he was capable in organizing armaments. But this armaments miracle that many talked about had not really been a miracle. but was a very normal process of switching from a peacetime economy to a wartime economy.
3:30:00
Albert Speer succeeded in increasing production output in some areas of armaments. He also knew how to market himself and his successes effectively for propaganda purposes. In fact, German armaments lagged far behind the achievements of the Allied armaments manufacturers, a fact that Hitler also studiously ignored.
3:30:22
The most important first measures that Speer took during his first weeks were above all displays of staging and propaganda. So now he had the so-called home front propaganda, which systematically referred to the production miracles and the achievements of the German armaments industry, and which then very soon became intoxicated with its own successes.
3:30:52
The people of the factory gathered in a huge assembly hall, in which a speaker stand was built out of powerful steel and iron blocks.
3:31:01
In view of these supposed successes, even the majority of the traditionally left-wing working class agreed with the regime.
3:31:11
For a long time it was assumed that the workers' movement, especially in the cities where there was a high proportion of workers, actually had a particularly high level of resistance to the Nazis. Obviously, that's not what we think today anymore. The fact is that the Nazi dictatorship was a dictatorship of consent, a consensus dictatorship.
3:31:39
There was certainly resistance. But that was clearly a smaller part of the civilian population. And there was a high level of willingness, especially because many who had actually lived in economically difficult circumstances in the 1920s or at the beginning of the 1930s were subjectively better off and actually benefited from the racist system.
3:32:04
And it was not just through rearmament and through the boosting of arms production, but also overall. At least for a segment of the population, there were better economic conditions, and thereby the approval also rose.
3:32:22
As the war progressed, more and more workers, which Speer needed, were sent to the front. On Hitler's behalf, Fritz Sauckel planned the importation of millions of forced laborers to the Reich for use in the armaments industry and agriculture.
3:32:39
First of all, Volunteers were recruited. Saganica, or abroad, the Polish workers and agricultural laborers were promised land, or that's what German propaganda promised. There was no discussion of endless shifts in dangerous production factories in the armaments industry, but of work in Volkswagen factories, including rations and full pay packets. In truth, they were fed and paid less than German workers. If any of these so-called foreign or eastern workers objected,
3:33:09
They were threatened with imprisonment in a concentration camp.
3:33:21
In the beginning, there was an attempt to find volunteer workers and bring them to Germany. They realized very quickly that this would in no way bring the masses that were needed. In this respect, they very quickly turned to coercive measures, through work obligations, but also through so-called forcible recruitment. That is, people were simply taken off the streets in the occupied areas, out of restaurants, out of cinemas, out of houses, by force.
3:33:56
Children were regarded as useless mouths to feed. Even babies born in Germany to so-called Eastern workers were deliberately left to starve. The Germans subjected up to 11 million people to forced labor. In no other National Socialist crime were so many involved, as victims, perpetrators, or spectators. Speer operated his industries with forced laborers from concentration camps until the end of the war.
3:34:25
For Speer, the forced laborers were war material. That is, it was a matter of getting as many able-bodied people as possible into war production. And indeed, the more the war progressed, and the more difficult, in practical terms, the requirement was to supply this war material, the more brutal the recruiting measures became. The more brutal the recruiting measures became, the more brutal the recruiting measures became.
3:34:51
Forced laborers used in agriculture often came from Poland. They were strictly forbidden to associate with German women. Anyone who did was denounced and, at the least, faced public humiliation.
3:35:15
The whole thing was organized. It was not spontaneous anger that broke out, but these women were usually denounced. And if these women were convicted, it could lead to prison sentences or mostly concentration camp sentences.
3:35:34
And these sentences were usually accompanied by public humiliation, which was clearly intended to really affect the social dignity of the women.
3:35:45
For example, by cutting their hair off completely, putting a sign on them, taking pictures with them, leading them through the whole village.
3:35:56
Sometimes there were also violent attacks. But it was all organized. For example, the BDM, the National Socialist Women's Society, was involved. It was not something that sprang spontaneously from the population.
3:36:14
Until March of 1942, the Hanseatic city of Lübeck had been largely spared the direct effects of the war. Unlike the Reich capital Berlin, no Allied bombs had fallen there yet. The medieval alleys of the old town still stood untouched, despite the nearby submarine shipyard at Travemünde Harbor and its relatively good accessibility for the Royal Air Force flying units.
3:36:41
Up until February 1942, they had been subjected to the so-called area bombing directive. The aim of the attacks were to break the morale of the German civilian population by any means, especially that of the industrial workers. The new commander-in-chief, Arthur Harris, was explicitly told that the targets were to be built-up areas and not, for example, shipyards or aircraft factories. On the starry moonlit night of March 29th, The British dropped their deadly load over Lübeck.
3:37:12
After the area bombardment, Thomas Mann's birthplace was in flames. The exile had no knowledge of the new directive.
3:37:33
The attacks were against the port of Travemünde, the industrial warhead there. But there were fires in the city.
3:37:42
But I think of Coventry and have nothing to say against the teaching that everything has to be paid. 320 people were killed in the firestorm. But contrary to Thomas Mann's suspicions, the attacks were not motivated by a desire for retribution. But we're calculated. The next area bombardment was to be Rostock.
3:38:10
Why Lübeck and Rostock in particular? Both were Hanseatic cities that had an easily combustible inner city core. And they were located by the sea and were therefore easy to find. The interesting thing, Lübeck was also a military target. Submarines were built in Lübeck in the Flander factories. But they didn't attack the Flander factories, they attacked the medieval old town. And it was the same in Rostock and other cities later. The plan was to attack about 50 German cities,
3:38:38
burn them down and kill about 900,000 civilians. This was done to cause chaos in Germany, because the British argument was that no state would exist without its cities. These were administrative centers, economic centers. When the population fled from the cities, When there were no more administrative centers, there would be chaos, and then the Germans would start a revolution, an uprising, like they did in 1918.
3:39:06
But this did not happen. On the contrary, the population showed solidarity with the Nazi regime, which immediately provided aid. The National Socialist People's Welfare Organization provided free accommodation and food.
3:39:23
The fact that this effect did not occur, that the bombing didn't lower the morale of the civilian population so that it could possibly lead to an uprising,
3:39:35
I think that was a great misjudgment on the part of the British army. Because most of the German civilians accepted their situation, because they believed that it was their duty. It was their contribution, what they had to endure in this war.
3:39:57
They compared themselves to soldiers who had to endure the same at the front. And this Volksgemeinschaft understood itself as a community at war, as a wartime society.
3:40:21
U.S. bomber squadrons also flew attacks on Nazi Germany from the United Kingdom. With their flying fortresses from summer 1942 onward, they attacked mainly during the day, primarily industrial targets and infrastructure. A Boeing B-17 is capable of carrying more than 4,000 kilograms of bombs. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill did express reservations about his own strategy, but didn't change it.
3:40:52
Once they started with their bombing directive, they didn't divert from that, because that would have meant questioning what you had done in the years before. So they collected intelligence that confirmed the strategy and left out other intelligence. So the classic case of intelligence failure or politically directed intelligence work, that always confirmed only what they wanted to hear. And so British intelligence services reported... that next fall, next spring, the Germans would collapse.
3:41:22
So this began in February 1942, that the Bomber Command, the attacks almost completely concentrated on attacking the German inner cities and burning them down, attacking especially the neighborhoods where the German industrial workers live, who they wanted to hit and they wanted to kill in order to cause chaos. And in turn to hit the industrial production, in order to end the war with that.
3:41:53
One of the favorite targets of the British bomber squadrons was Cologne. Because of its geographical location, it was relatively easy to reach. Camera crews of the Ministry of Propaganda made films about the heavily hit city center after the so-called thousand bomber raid on the night of May 31st. The face of the cathedral city had been changed overnight. Almost 500 people died, and 45,000 were homes.
3:42:24
That's also what's special about the bombing directive that was issued there in February of 1942, because it changed the target, changed the intent. It wasn't, if we kill civilians, they just die, but civilians then became the main target. And that's what made that directive in February 1942 so special. Meanwhile, at Obersalzburg in the Bavarian Alps, Adolf Hitler and his entourage were safe from such attacks in the Berghof.
3:42:52
Italy's duchy, Benito Mussolini, arrived for a visit at the end of April. For the newsreels, the two dictators demonstrated unity and strength. To regain the lost initiative in the war against the Soviet Union, Hitler had planned a summer offensive. Units of his ally also fought on the Eastern Front.
3:43:20
In the previous year, the Axis attacks had stalled at the fronts of Leningrad, Moscow and Sevastopol. Then, Army Group South, supported by Italian, Romanian and Hungarian units, was to go on the offensive again.
3:43:38
Since October 1941, the 3rd Army, supported by Hungarian troops, had been besieging the Crimean city of Sevastopol.
3:43:51
Only at the end of June 1942, after heavy fighting, did the defeat of the Soviet defenders become apparent. The way to the south was free. Then, the German advance was directed towards the Caucasus. From Kharkov, the troops were to advance in the direction of Baku.
3:44:09
Hitler had long since decided to exploit the Soviet Union along colonial lines, as one memorandum put it. But the circumstances were unfavorable. The bloodied Wehrmacht could no longer operate with three army groups as it had the year before. It was only capable of advancing in a single direction.
3:44:28
When the Germans began their summer offensive in 1942, the target was the Caucasus and the Soviet oil. And this goal made sense, because 90% of Soviet oil was in the Caucasus. If they conquered that, they would have had access to it themselves and most importantly, they would cut off the Soviets from it. There was relatively little oil in the Urals, so that would have been a real armament blow to the Soviet Union. In May,
3:44:54
the Germans had repulsed a Soviet offensive near Kharkov and occupied the city. An officer documented the everyday life of the occupation in the eastern Ukrainian metropolis. The Germans then had an opportunity to systematically put their criminal plans into practice. Numerous inhabitants of the city had already been deported to Germany for forced labor. Then the deportations to the death camps began.
3:45:23
Beginning in June of 1941, with the start of the war against the Soviet Union, they already had in advance the criminal order, that is, those orders that were agreed on between the Reich government, the Nazi government, and the military leadership. So there was already a clear option. And corresponding orders were also issued, that this war would be a special war, a world war, a war of extermination. for which certain regulations of international law,
3:45:55
which were supposed to limit the war and its dynamics of violence, were suspended. And there was a difference between the Wehrmacht advancing forward and an occupation regime in the various sub-areas, which is, after all, a military occupation in the beginning. And then later on it turned into a civil administration, through which also the persecution of political opponents, but also of the Jewish population, actually ran more administratively.
3:46:26
The victory at Kharkov was one of the last successful encirclement battles fought by the Germans.
3:46:34
The forces earmarked for the Soviet spring offensive were annihilated. Some 240,000 Soviet soldiers went into captivity and to a horrible fate.
3:46:48
Hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers died in the Nazi camps. And you can say that these people were systematically killed by hunger. You can't say that that was a result of malnutrition or lack of supplies, but rather that those who were killed by hunger were killed by hunger. prisoners of war were deliberately and intentionally driven to their deaths. Numerous prisoners of war were in Auschwitz and were killed there. And the first experiments of using gas to kill
3:47:16
people were made using Soviet prisoners of war. And word got around in the Red Army. That's why the number of defectors and prisoners of war decreased. Because word got out about how Red Army soldiers were treated in Germany. That's when the chance of survival ended up being greater in Red Army units than in German camps. In the spring of 1942, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels visited one such POW camp. The agitator knew how to use the desperate situation of the Soviet Union,
3:47:47
invaded by the Germans for his perfidious propaganda, and portrayed the defeated as subhumans. He no longer had any great illusions about the course of the war.
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Goebbels was the most realistic of all of them. For him it was pretty clear that the matter was over, that they weren't going to win anymore, but that they had a great chance to implement their murderous program now, because they all had to participate. You could also say that from 1942 on, the regime had no interest in anything else than to implement this great program of extermination. To accomplish this, any means were acceptable. The main executors of the regime's extermination
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plans were Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. Since the beginning of the war, they had already murdered tens of thousands, mainly by shooting.
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That was when the mass crimes were systematized with German thorns.
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The civil servants appointed by the regime to administer the killing met in a villa on Wannsee in January to lay down the justification for it, the so-called Wannsee Protocol, it was recorded how many people one intended to kill, 11 millions. The decision that European Jews should be completely and systematically murdered had been made at that time. And in this respect, it was the task of this institution, within the framework of its competence to act, to implement this.
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And this was practically the translation of this ideological political will into an administrative challenge.
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Also discussed was the question of the deportation of German and Western European youths to the ghettos and to the camps in the East. All that was the subject of this conference.
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SS-Chief Himmler personally saw to the expansion of these camps. The killing factories were to relieve the overcrowded ghettos and camps where epidemics and starvation were rampant. The regime wanted to bring the killing of the undesirables back under its control.
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The pressure came from the ghettos and the camps. The pressure came from those responsible. They could no longer continue to operate this way. This, of course, created a compulsion to act, in their logic at least.
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And from that we now understand that this very search for more efficient killing methods very quickly came to putting this effective killing machinery in motion, with Zyklon B in the gas chambers.
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The name Auschwitz became a worldwide symbol of Nazi terror and genocide. By the end of the war, an estimated 1.5 million people had died in Auschwitz from gas, hunger, and disease.
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Meanwhile, Goebbels exhorted the Germans on the home front, warning anyone who was a thorn in the side of the Nazi dictatorship, be it the Soviet population, Jews, opponents of the regime, or even dissidents. There was hardly any opposition. Fear of Gestapo terror and imprisonment silenced many critics of the war.
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In May of 1942, a propaganda exhibition, The Soviet Paradise, opened in Berlin with a staged mass spectacle. The film, produced especially for the show, mocked the Russian population that had been impoverished by war and destruction.
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that they were now in their hopeless and grueling everyday life recording in a cut-out way what they saw during the break. Not everyone believed the grotesque phrases. Nevertheless, the propaganda of hate was having an effect. One could already see, for example, in letters from the field, that propaganda was often believed by what the letter-writers themselves had already accepted as stereotypical images of the enemy.
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Then, very often, they also believed what the propaganda represented. As far as the Soviet Union was concerned, it must be said that many soldiers who participated in the war, especially during the invasion after June 1941, believed the stereotypes that existed in German propaganda, namely that they were subhuman,
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and that there was a high degree of willingness to reproduce these images.
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There we can also see how the integration into the declared goals of the war of extermination, that we were dealing with a war that from the very beginning aimed not only to win militarily, but to actually radically destroy this enemy. This is our lead. The indisputable attitude of German soldiers, their cunning, their attack spirit, their reliability. These German soldiers are leading the German officers in a exemplary leadership,
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as bearers of the training and the fighting morale of the Waffen. And as a guarantee of our advance, no enemy state can catch up with them anymore. Of the victorious spirit of German soldierhood.
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Meanwhile, in the Pacific, the fortunes of war initially seemed to be on the side of the Japanese. The U.S. base in the Philippines was now the focus of the Japanese Empire.
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Since the turn of the century, the United States had had a naval base in the archipelago. There were numerous bomber squadrons stationed there, but technically obsolete. Some of the weapons technology also dated back to the First World War. The exiled Americans led a colonial-style life in the Philippines and did not seem to expect an attack. until Japanese troops attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. One day after the raid, Japan attacked the Philippines.
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The capital, Manila, had fallen on January 2, 1942. During the occupation, Japanese troops committed horrific atrocities against the civilian population in a city that was almost completely destroyed. The US troops retreated to the Bataan Peninsula. In April, they surrendered. About 60,000 American soldiers became Japanese prisoners of war.
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The
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Japanese military committed a great number of war crimes during World War II, and one of the main victim groups were white Anglo-Americans. as were Australian soldiers, prisoners of war, who were considered inferior by the Japanese soldiers because of racial views.
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The prisoners had to march more than 100 kilometers in the blazing sun. Their destination was a railroad station from which they were transported to a prisoner of war camp.
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On the Japanese side, these soldiers were not provided for at all. There was almost no food, nothing to drink or only insufficient. And in addition, these soldiers were also physically maltreated, were beaten, were chastised.
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Some were also shot, or if someone lay down at the roadside because he could not march on, then he was simply beaten to death on the spot or shot.
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Out of 60,000 soldiers, more than 10,000 certainly died in the Bataan death march. After all, these soldiers all ended up in Japanese captivity, continued to be mistreated in captivity for weeks, months, years. And of those soldiers embarked on the Bataan Death March, only 15,000 returned home when the war ended.
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In April, an aircraft carrier with a squadron of bombers on board set out from the United States for the Pacific. President Roosevelt did everything he could to stop the Japanese advance. A surprise military strike was planned to put the empire in its place.
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It happened in the spring of 1942. The so-called doolittle raids. That was an air raid on Japan's capital Tokyo. It was intended to send a clear message to the Japanese army. You are now in danger. We are now going on the offensive and we are in a position not only to somehow attack a peripheral part of the Japanese Empire, but we are in a position to strike at the heart of Japan,
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to go all the way to the seat of the Japanese Emperor and bomb Tokyo.
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Mobilization against Japan was also taking place on the home front. Racism fomented by the propaganda broke through unchecked. Since Pearl Harbor, All US citizens of Japanese ancestry were considered a security risk. Far away from civilization, the first internment camps were built on American soil. They consisted of barren barracks and were guarded by US soldiers. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans, including people who had American passports,
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were transferred to relocation camps, not only in the United States but also in Canada. And in a way, it was a continuation of an anti-Japanese, anti-Asian policy that had been pursued in the US even before the Second World War.
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That must not be forgotten. This also showed, in a certain respect, this racist way of thinking, which was also definitely present on the part of the Americans.
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In addition, of course, there was a certain idea that that people were saying, you have to lock these people up now, because they could be used by the Japanese side as informers. They could somehow spy around. They could somehow infiltrate American society. They presented a danger.
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120,000 men, women and children were sent to those camps. Enemy Alien was their official title. Those who refused went to prison for years.
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Interestingly enough, in the relocation camps, Japanese-Americans really fought for recognition by saying, we want to go to war on the American side too. For a long time, the American side did not allow this. Roosevelt had no interest in it for a long time.
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In 1944, the internments were declared unconstitutional. The victims, however, had to wait almost 50 years for an apology. Midway Island in the Central Pacific was home to the farthest western outpost of the United States.
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The U.S. Navy Air Base was located right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean between Japan and California.
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The six-square-kilometer atoll consisted mainly of three runways. To wage war across the Pacific against Japan, aircraft carriers and their bomber squadrons played the most important role. Each existing airfield represented an important strategic advantage. In the spring of 1942, American forces were increasingly trying to go on the offensive in the Asia-Pacific region, to now take the initiative to take the scepter, so to say. militarily out of Japan's hands. And the Japanese,
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on the other hand, were toying with the idea of not only further consolidating the conquered territories there, but possibly making up for the missed landing in Hawaii after all.
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Unlike the attack on Pearl Harbor, this time the Americans were prepared. On the morning of June 4th, Japanese fighter squadrons attacked Midway. They bombarded the two islands for 20 minutes.
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But the Americans were expecting the Japanese fleet. They had cracked the Japanese radio codes and thus identified the target of the attack in advance. The commanders had assembled as many aircraft carriers as possible at midway.
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At the Battle of Midway, the Japanese Navy lost four of six aircraft carriers.
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You have to remember that the American war effort had a lot more battleships and many more aircraft carriers in the pipeline compared to Japan. Japan couldn't keep up in any way with their U.S. armor-wise. And that's why the Battle of Midway represented a turning point in the Pacific War.
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The Japanese suffered heavy losses. More than 3,000 Japanese soldiers died in that battle.
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There was also the aspect of not only aircraft carriers being lost in the Battle of Midway, perhaps more importantly for the Japanese Empire. The very well-trained Japanese pilots, who had war experience, had also been on the attack on Pearl Harbor. Many of those pilots were killed there.
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The Battle of Midway was a successful payback for Pearl Harbor. The Japanese advance had been halted. Nevertheless, it was clear that the soldiers still had a long, blood-soaked road ahead of them to Tokyo. At that point, however, no one suspected the final extent to which the slaughter would go. The dying in the Pacific would continue for three more years and cost the lives of many. of tens of thousands of GIs.
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United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the empire of Japan.
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In the early summer of 1942, the Wehrmacht launched a new offensive in the Soviet Union. From Kharkov in Ukraine, a German assault force began its advance eastward. As in the year before, the troops advanced deep into the country, but the appearance of rapid success was deceptive.
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The width of the front line on which the units had to operate increased two and a half times, with troop strength decreasing daily.
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Pal Blau, the operation's codename, demanded the utmost from the soldiers. They had to advance as far as the Caucasian oil fields on the Caspian Sea and cross the Don River in the process.
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In 1941, the first major campaign had just failed. It had not succeeded strategically. It had not achieved its operational goals. And now suddenly something happened that Hitler had not reckoned with, that he certainly didn't want. The war had not only become a world war, but it was dragging on. They knew they had to plan for years now. It was not enough to say the war will last until October 1941. Suddenly, it was unforeseeable how long the war would last,
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and that's why it became a matter of economic areas, of strategic resources which Hitler believed you had to have in order to be able to continue the war for a longer period of time.
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The initial weak resistance of the Red Army caused the commander-in-chief to make a fatal decision to the horror of his generals. Hitler split the already strained army group south into two parts.
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While Army Group A continued to advance toward the Caucasus, Army Group B was to secure the northern flank along the Volga.
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Hitler believed, however, that once the offensive was underway, the Russians would be defeated. They would run away and Russia would collapse. And so he split the direction of the attacks. And now it included Stalingrad and the Caucasus as targets. Army Group South was split up and that massively... overextended the German forces. That was an operational error of the First Order on the part of Hitler.
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Although all the generals predicted a disaster for him, the dictator insisted on the need for the operation. In August, he met a high-ranking visitor at his headquarters.
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Hitler wanted to persuade his ally, Tsar Boris of Bulgaria, to enter the war against the Soviet Union. The Fuhrer urgently needed support for his latest plan.
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The most important goal of the war was no longer the conquest of living space, but oil. If I don't get the oil from Maikop and Grozny, said the dictator, then I will have to liquidate this war. But the Tsar refused. The Bulgarians traditionally had a very close relationship with Russia. There was the religious connection, there was the cultural connection, and that's why Tsar Boris III said he would take part in the German war, but not against the Soviet Union. Also at that time the Bulgarians
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were an important occupying power in Yugoslavia. They also sent troops there, they fought there, they also fought in Greece, but they were the only ally not fighting against the Soviet Union.
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Hitler vastly underestimated the Red Army's striking power. He assumed that the enemy had largely used up the mass of his reserves in the first winter of the war. The Russians, said the dictator, were at the end of their strength. But the opposite was the case.
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Georgy Zhukov, a competent strategist, became Stalin's deputy commander-in-chief in August.
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The Red Army was now also training partisan units. They were supposed to sabotage the invading Germans behind the front. Thanks to Allied arms deliveries, the quality of the equipment, as well as the training of the soldiers, constantly improved. The fighting strength of the Soviet units increased.
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It was evident for the first time in Stalingrad.
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Stalingrad was of enormous geostrategic importance. It was located on the Volga, and the Volga was the lifeline of the Soviet Union. The oil came from the Caucasus, had been transported across the Caspian Sea to the center of the Soviet Union via the Volga. At the time, Stalingrad itself was a city of heavy industry and important weapons factories. That's why Stalingrad came into the operation planning. In the first drafts of Operation Blue it said, you just have to eliminate Stalingrad,
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somehow stop the traffic of the Volga. Eliminate it. This was actually achieved in August 1942, when they reached the Volga just north of Stalingrad. And then it became more and more important. It had a symbolic value. It was simply Stalin City. And then the meaning actually changed. It was no longer about an economic geostrategic meaning, but about conquering the city as a symbolic political act.
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Because they had not conquered other symbolic cities, they had not conquered Leningrad, they had not conquered Moscow, so now, so to speak, this symbol of victory over Stalin with the conquest of his city had to happen.
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Hitler pulled together all his remaining forces to achieve this goal.
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In the meantime, German tanks were running out of fuel in their hunt for oil in the steppe region of the Don. Smaller units had reached the oil wells of Maikop, but not enough for the urgently needed supplies. Frustration often resulted in outbreaks of violence. On their way, the troops left behind a trail of devastation. In this modern war, more civilians died than soldiers. This is... Soldiers had endured wading in the blood of the frontline for many years. And the special phenomenon was,
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we talk a lot about post-traumatic stress disorders nowadays with the missions abroad, of course, an incredible number of soldiers of the Wehrmacht had post-traumatic stress disorders without this finding.
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But most of them had obviously developed incredible resilience. The actual thing that needed to be explained was not that people were traumatized, traumatized in a medical sense, they were traumatized soldiers. They were in the minority. The majority built resilience and were able to live with dying, killing and fighting, at least to the point where they could live a reasonably normal life again afterwards.
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follows victory, assuming that the end of the war is in sight. The people don't care how that is achieved. The point of cabaret evenings, Wehrmacht film screenings in particular, was to give soldiers opportunities to stop thinking about the war, to dream about a different future and to think about the time before the war again.
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In fact, since the beginning of the campaign against the Soviet Union, every third German soldier had been reported wounded, missing, or dead. Unmoved by this, the Nazi leadership in Munich staged a parade of troops on a grand scale. The regime knew how to stir up public opinion. Nazi Germany was still only receiving reports of success from the front. Being possibly defeated by the Bolshevik enemy seemed unthinkable. People were confident of victory.
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On the one hand, morale in Nazi Germany was high for a long time because people were still relatively well off. On the other hand, there was definitely great ideological fervor in the population. People believed in the final victory. They believed in the Führer. They believed in the goals of the war. A certain well-being plus a belief in the goals kept the population united for a very long time. Plus, any kind of resistance was brutally punished, suppressed. There was no free media,
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no critical reporting, so it was difficult to form an opinion about what the real situation was. Perhaps one was aware of one's immediate surroundings, and even the news coming from the field was all censored. There was definitely great ignorance among the population about how bad things really were.
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Hitler had given the order to Colonel General Friedrich Paulus to conquer Stalingrad. The 6th Army was advancing on the city. Italians, Romanians and Hungarians had to secure the flanks.
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On the way to the Volga, they soon experienced acute supply shortages. The condition of many of the divisions were already critical and visibly deteriorating.
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More than one million Wehrmacht soldiers had already been killed. already been reported killed wounded or missing in action exhaustion was spreading the march of more than a thousand kilometers had left the men at the edge of their endurance they had no idea what lay ahead of them research has shown that the germans were already completely weakened when they faced stalingrad that they were at the end
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of their tether that the units had already been bled dry that they had supply problems they had started to starve even before the city was closed in, while the Soviet Union was able to deploy massive reserves there and the Foreign Army's East Department completely misjudged that." On August 23, 1942, Luftflotte 4, Air Force 4 under General Oberst von Richthofen, began bombing the city. 600 bombers dropped explosive and incendiary bombs for days in 1,600 sorties. 40,000 civilians died.
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All that remained of Stalingrad was a field of rubble. On September 3rd, the first German units reached the outer ring of defense.
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And then the Red Army dragged the Germans into a house-to-house battle that involved extremely heavy losses. And now, on top of that, the Red Army was fighting a battle at no matter what the cost. The fact that they outnumbered the Germans, that they constantly counterattacked, had huge losses and even though the Germans were outnumbered, they managed to capture the city. And although the attackers were superior, the Toll in Blood was immense. For Stalin, it was also about symbolism.
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My city must not be captured. To put it bluntly, Stalin was smothering the German advance in the blood of his own soldiers.
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In accordance with Stalin's orders of don't take a step back, Red Army soldiers who were accused of lacking combat readiness were put in front of a firing squad.
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Stalin expressly forbade the evacuation of civilians from the city.
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The Soviet Union would have had to pay a much smaller toll in blood, had it not been for the decision made by this dictator. Until 1942, all of his decisions were wrong. He forbid soldiers to retreat. He ordered units that had no ammunition at all and could not continue fighting to continue fighting. He had had dozens of generals shot for failure. He basically ruled everywhere with fear and terror. and believed that a frontal assault was the only way to win a war.
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Not to mention that he was influenced by very archaic ideas of honor and masculinity.
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All of this made no military sense at all, and he only listened to his generals now and then after the Battle of Stalingrad. The idea that people today associate Stalin as the dictator who was the great strategist of the Second World War was not a problem at all. is completely wrong. People associate his name with victory in World War II, but without him, there would have been a greater chance of ending this war sooner.
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Stalin ordered the 62nd Army to defend the city unconditionally. 200,000 civilians had to build defenses and barricades in work columns. Nevertheless, the Germans succeeded in pushing the Russians back to the banks of the Volga. Soon, they had conquered about 90% of the city. In the course of the battle, half a million Soviet soldiers died in a hail of bullets. The NKVD executed another 13,500 Red Army soldiers for alleged desertion.
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What Starling was displaying there was complete contempt for his own people, and the generals as well. Maybe not all of them, but many generals really had no regard for casualties at all. It was only crucial that in the end someone was left holding the flag high, and that this could be counted as a victory. It's pretty dramatic what happened there, how people were sometimes sent into the fire and were burned. The Germans noted with shaking heads in their field reports,
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that at points where there were already masses of dead or destroyed tanks, even there the generals sent their troops into the fire again and again. So you have to say that with many Soviet military leaders, there was a complete contempt for the life of their own soldiers.
4:20:02
At Hitler's refuge at Obersalzburg in the summer of 1942, reports of successes from North Africa were also coming in.
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At the Berghof, the dictator welcomed his ally, Benito Mussolini. A year earlier, the latter's disastrous conduct of the war had prompted Hitler to send German troop units to North Africa. After alternating offensives on both sides, the operations of the Axis powers against the Allies were extremely successful. The goal of Operation Tisius was the conquest of the Libyan fortress of Tobruk, an important port in the Mediterranean.
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Hitler's favorite general, Erwin Rommel, had been able to achieve surprising success time and again since the beginning of the North African campaign. The vast desert plains enabled his armored troops to conduct long-range operations in a fast-moving war. And then, Rommel set out to conquer Egypt.
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In May of 1942, Rommel's tank army was... properly supplied for the first time. Sufficient supplies had arrived via the Mediterranean, and Rommel decided to launch a major offensive. He bypassed the British positions at Gazala, took Tobruk by storm, something he had not been able to do a year earlier, and advanced across the Egyptian border to El Alamein, 80 kilometers from Alexandria.
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The deep-water port of Tobruk secured supplies for the German troops across Libya. The victory had cost the Afrika Korps heavy losses. Its inventory of tanks was severely depleted. Next, Hitler wanted the Wehrmacht units to occupy the Suez Canal.
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Rommel's top commander was already planning to advance from there further into the Near East and India to gain access to the British colonies.
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The whole position of Britain in the Middle East actually hinged on the defence of Cairo and the important port of Alexandria. And surprisingly Rommel had just managed to conquer Tobruk in the summer of 1942 and then very surprisingly continued to invade Egypt. And then the big question was, would he in a final effort manage to get to Cairo as well?
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Just one day after winning the Battle of Tobruk on June 21st, Rommel was promoted to Field Marshal General. At the age of 50, he became the youngest to hold this rank.
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On the airfield of the Führerhauptquartier, General Oberst Rommel is coming from Africa.
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The newsreel propaganda knew how to seize the moment.
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The winner of North Africa spoke on the invitation of Prime Minister Dr Goebbels to representatives of the domestic and foreign press about the events on the North African battlefield. The Marshal explained, among other things, Thanks to the bravery of our soldiers, we have finished in a hard ring with the English, although our military force has often undergone it in numbers.
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There were fierce battles in the Rasmus Dau, especially in May, which were almost comparable to the battles of Verdun.
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But the German soldier and his Italian comrades survived these difficult times. They tried to repel the fortress in Turburg, but they were defeated.
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Marshal Rommel reports to the Führer and receives the Marshalstab from his hand.
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The British set up defensive positions at El Alamein, and that was very well chosen because to the south was the Qatara depression, where the Germans couldn't deploy their armored forces. Thus, in early July, the British succeeded in thwarting Rommel's breakthrough attempt at the First Battle of El Alamein.
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After the rapid advance, the tank army's supplies and fuel were largely depleted, and the supply lines were stretched to the breaking point. and the soldiers were exhausted. Rommel knew that he had to be able to penetrate the Allied defenses in one swift thrust and prevent retreat.
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At the end of August, Rommel decided to attack one last time in order to perhaps reach Alexandria, the Nile and the Suez. He attacked, but after 48 hours his offensive had more or less failed. The British had managed to bring in enough reinforcements.
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In the meantime, their air force had gained supremacy over the German air force, and so Rommel then had to retreat once again to his initial position.
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At the beginning of November, the Field Marshal had to admit that he had lost the second battle for El Alamein. When he learned of Rommel's order to retreat, Hitler was beside himself. You can show your troops only one way, either victory or death was the Fuhrer's radio message. but the Field Marshal had the radio traffic cut off during the retreat. A warrant for Rommel's arrest was not enforced. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of German and Italian soldiers
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were taken prisoner of war by the Allies.
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To mark the victory, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill arrived for a troop visit at the British Eighth Army and was celebrated.
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El Alamein was the first great victory for the British. They had really beaten Rommel decisively this time. It was not victory in North Africa, but Rommel was now forced to retreat all the way to Tunisia.
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It was also the last battle fought by the Commonwealth alone against the German Empire. In the future, Britain would fight battles together with their US ally.
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The battle for the Solomon Islands and for the main island of Guadalcanal represented a very important building block in American strategy, the so-called strategy of island hopping. The idea was to approach the Japanese mainland island by island from the south.
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For the first time, US forces went on the offensive against Japan. They had prepared for months to capture the enemy strongholds in the Pacific.
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The Japanese and the Japanese military were, of course, aware of that, and that's why Guadalcanal was also heavily contested. It was very clear to the Japanese that this was a very important building block for the American strategy of island hopping. and of course also for American strategy when it came to securing Pearl Harbor and Hawaii.
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The US Marines accomplished what was previously thought impossible, crossing onto the beach from their ships under fire from coastal batteries. After landing on August 7th, they initially encountered little resistance, but the Japanese would not admit defeat. For half a year, they continued to launch new offensives. The Battle of Guadalcanal went down in US military history as one of the longest and most bitter.
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There was the battle of Guadalcanal which had been fought for months in the countryside which was very bloody and very racist. Hardly any prisoners were taken by either side. It was a very drastic battle that went on in the Solomon Islands.
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Marines showed their trophies as a sign of victory. The Americans lost nearly 1,500 GIs in ground fighting, the Japanese nearly 15,000. The victory on Guadalcanal secured for U.S. forces an important launching point for future operations.
4:29:10
On the other side of the world, the Soviet allies were getting ready for their decisive offensive. Stalingrad was to be that decisive place.
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More than 200,000 soldiers of the German Wehrmacht and its allies were entrenched in the ruins of the city on the Volga. Reports from reconnaissance planes of heavy Soviet troop concentrations on the opposite bank of the Volga were ignored by the Supreme Army Command. The 6th Army waged a hopeless battle over a wasteland of rubble.
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The Wehrmacht's war in the Soviet Union was after all a war of movement, a war in huge spaces, a war in which tank formations surrounded each other, a war that actually did not take place in build-up zones at all, that did not take place in cities at all. The Germans had no rules for fighting in cities. You didn't fight in cities. There were actually very few examples before Stalingrad where the Wehrmacht fought in cities. Now the units were coming into the city, an industrial city,
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destroyed by German air raids. They weren't prepared for that and it was very bloody. They should have been called off but Hitler persevered and so battalion after battalion was wasted there.
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The interesting thing about that and this is overlooked, is that the defenders were outnumbered. Usually the attacker has the upper hand.
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But here, in the fighting in the city of Stalingrad, around the train station, around the tractor factory, the Germans were outnumbered. And yet they managed to capture Stalingrad. That showed that craftsmanship, the art of war, the German divisions that were deployed there, they had mastered their craft. But the number of casualties was immense. And of course it was operational nonsense to fight for the last mound of rubble in Stalingrad.
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Rat war is what the soldiers called fighting in the houses. The Soviet defenders turned every foxhole, every ruined house, every intersection into a fortress from which an unexpected attack could be made. Snipers deliberately executed German soldiers by ambush. The city on the Volga had to be held at all costs.
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If Stalingrad had fallen, the front line would have been along the Volga. And that would have been a preliminary decision to extend the German Empire to the Volga and to have access to the Caucasus, and thus to the Middle Eastern countries, which were potentially sympathetic to Germany, such as Iran, for example. On the other hand, that was a prestigious city. It was clear to Stalin that the city that bore his name must not fall. And that's why the Red Army's draconian and cruel
4:32:09
measures were particularly extensive in Stalingrad, because of its importance. Here, too, one could have said that the Red Army could have taken the city from the beginning. They could have retreated. They would not have had to defend house after house with an unbelievable number of casualties. that exceeded several times the German casualties and where a Red Army soldier had a few days chance of surviving.
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At the beginning of November, the Wehrmacht had still not succeeded in breaking the Soviet resistance. The Red Army only held about 10% of the city. The Foreign Army's East Department reported that the Soviet Union had no reserves left. Hitler ordered the breakthrough with shock troops. The Führer ignored the concerns of his general staff.
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Hitler would not accept turning back. No, we must somehow save ourselves from the situation. No peace agreements. Diplomacy had not been used in this war for a long time. It was either hold, pulled, or forward. That was what the Führer, who was also the military commander-in-chief, wanted.
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This was an attitude that he extended to his own people, his own people, his own soldiers. He didn't care how many German soldiers fell or were wounded. The main thing was that the oil fields of the Caucasus and the Crimea would be captured or held. That was the most important thing. And those who did not cooperate had to bear the consequences. In Adolf Hitler's mind, this relentlessness was not only directed against external enemies, but also against his own people. If that was the case,
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then the German Empire, German society, would perish with him.
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Hitler brushed aside General Paulus' warning of a major Soviet defensive. On November 8, he announced the imminent victory at the Löwenbräu in Munich.
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He wanted to come to Volga, to a certain place, to a certain city, because there is a very important point there. He wanted to take him. And you know, we are modest. We have him, because there are still a few very small places left. Now the others say, why don't you fight? Because I don't want to make a second Werder, but because I prefer to do it with very small clashes.
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On November 19th, the Red Army struck back. Four days after it started, Operation Uranus closed the pocket around Stalingrad. The German troops were doomed.
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As early as June, Churchill and Roosevelt met in Washington for a planning conference. The British and the Americans promised Stalin help in the fight against the Wehrmacht. The opening of a second front in Europe was intended to relieve the Soviets.
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At this point, Churchill and Roosevelt made important strategic decisions, namely they said, opening of the second front, they wouldn't do it in 1943. They would not land in France in 1943, that was always Stalin's hope. Instead, they would first stabilize the Mediterranean region, and there, with the fall of Tobruk, it was really burning for Churchill. And therefore, one said, one will land with the available means in North Africa, Operation Torch. that is in Algeria and Morocco,
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in order to stab Rommel in the back and to stabilize the Mediterranean area. And at the same time, one had to then try to support the Soviet Union to make it materially stronger, because they would not land in 1943 in France, that would only come in 1944. The Red Army was generously supported with weapons and equipment. The Soviet Union and the Western Allies were now officially allies. The distrust was always there, of course, this capitalism. This unequal alliance would certainly not have
4:36:23
come together if there had not been a common enemy. And that's what the National Socialists were hoping for right up to the end, saying that this unequal coalition couldn't last long. It's bound to break up at some point. But what they underestimated was that a common enemy held this unequal coalition together until the enemy was at last gone.
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Mobilizing against this enemy was also a subject for the film industry, especially in the United States.
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To convince the American public of the need to intervene in the war in Europe, the U.S. Army commissioned a series of propaganda films. From 1942 to 45, director Frank Capra, who had won multiple Oscars, made seven films entitled Why We Fight. Designed to be shown to American GIs, the series were eventually shown in public cinemas.
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Prelude to War or Nazi's Attack were the names of the works that earned Capra another Oscar in 1943 for Best Documentary. They were intended to convince the American nation of the ruthlessness of the enemy, according to the commentary.
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You don't like it, you don't eat.
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Or you disappear into a concentration camp.
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Or you get this.
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And this is the man who gives it to you.
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In the United States, the problem was to motivate war against the Germans, who many Americans liked. In contrast to propaganda against Japan, it wasn't possible to fall back on existing racial prejudices. This problem was solved by differentiating between Germans and Nazis. But the longer the war went on, the less willing people were to differentiate between Germans and Nazis, and propaganda messages had to be communicated in a catchy way, which was not conductive to differentiation.
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To defeat Nazi Germany, the Americans and the British prepared to land in North Africa and embarked from North America and Britain for the crossing to the Mediterranean. The GIs had no idea what lay ahead of them. For most, the journey to war began as an adventure. Many had never been away from home. They had no combat experience whatsoever.
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Operation Torch began on November 8, 1942. The plan called for the simultaneous landing of American and British troops around the key ports of Morocco and Algeria, Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers. Protected by banks of fog dispersed by fighter units, the soldiers approached the coast in assault boats. One platoon, 36 men, fit into each boat. The boats raced ahead at a speed of nine knots. The new technique of the amphibious landing, which the Americans had used successfully for the first time,
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in the Pacific War proved to be extremely effective.
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When the Allies landed in North Africa in Operation Torch, Hitler didn't decide to withdraw from North Africa, but sent reinforcements to Tunis. And so the fighting in North Africa continued for another six months. However, more than 250,000 German and Italian soldiers were taken prisoner in the process.
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For these men, The war was over. The relief can be seen on the faces of the Italian soldiers. The disastrous course of the war in North Africa contributed significantly to the decline in power of their duché Mussolini in the coming year.
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On November 10, U.S. troops surrounded Casablanca, Morocco, which was held by forces of the pro-Hitler French government. Since Vichy France had refused to enter the war on the side of Nazi Germany, the Americans had hoped to meet no significant resistance. In fact, the colonial troops surrendered on the same day. There was no fierce battle like the one that took place in Stalingrad.
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In North Africa, people were dying by the thousands. So the idea of the chivalrous war perhaps half the truth. What we can say is, this was not an ideological war, the murder of prisoners, which was… commonplace in the Soviet Union. That didn't happen. The mass murder of civilians, partisan warfare, all of this did not exist in North Africa. Of course, there were civilians in North Africa. There was also forced labor. Libya was, after all, an Italian colony.
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There were even Libyan Jews who were taken to the mainland and killed there. But the character of the war in North Africa was ultimately a completely different one. The scale was completely different. So, if you look at World War II as a total war, we find relatively few traces of it in
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North Africa.
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Rommel's Afrika Korps had to withdraw all the way to Tunisia. Now, the Allies threatened to stab him in the back. In Oran, the defenders had surrendered on November 9th. In Algiers, members of the resistance... simultaneously staged a coup against the military of the Vichy regime, which was allied with Nazi Germany. Field Marshal Rommel's troops were now coming under pressure. Nevertheless, German propaganda continued to portray him as a glorious commander,
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probably because the Desert Fox had been able to turn seemingly hopeless situations into surprising victories on several occasions. North Africa was probably the theater of war where it went back and forth the most. There were several German offensives, there were several British offensives. The game ball there was always the so-called Czernaica. It always depended on how far the respective side could supply its troops. That is, if one side advanced further,
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it went further and further away from its supply lines, and the other, which retreated, got closer to its supply lines. And that's how the whole thing came together like a rubber band. It went back and forth all the time.
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The British Eighth Army, commanded by Bernard Montgomery, advanced from the east, and the newly arrived U.S. forces, commanded by Dwight D. Eisenhower, advanced from the west. The German troops were entangled in retreating battles and faced a double superiority.
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To escape total annihilation, the Germans had to retreat further and further.
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German troops and their allies recorded about 250,000 dead, wounded, and prisoners at the end of this battle.
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Meanwhile, a secret conference took place in Casablanca, Morocco, on January 14th. U.S. President Roosevelt arrived and inspected an honor formation of the American armed forces. Afterwards, he met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and together they set the invasion of Italy as the war's next objective. To end the war, they demanded no less than the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers. Stalin agreed with this demand.
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At the Casablanca Conference in 1943, the Allies had declared, there could be nothing other than unconditional surrender. In other words, it was clear to everyone, there was only total defeat or victory. There couldn't be anything in between. The war could only end with Germany's unconditional surrender and occupation. So now, you have to put yourself in the head of a Prussian officer. It was inconceivable that someone would surrender without the last bullet having been shot.
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And there was no way out. And Hitler exploited this in a perfidious way. These Prussian notions of honor and rank were exploited to get these people to keep fighting. It may have been an error on the part of the Allies, but they had learned the lesson from the First World War. If this must not happen again, then there must be no way out of it. But on the other hand, hopelessness is always something that drives all dictators all over the world to the extreme.
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While Nazi propaganda denounced Allied policy as a war of extermination against Germany, German troops in North Africa lost battle after battle in the spring of 1943. The defeated enemies were defeated by the German army. were interned in prison camps for the rest of the war in accordance with the Geneva Convention. The British and Americans were now able to decode almost all German radio transmissions and were therefore well informed about Axis plans.
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The German defeat in North Africa was only a matter of time.
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I'm sorry, but I'm not sure if you're ready to go. I'm ready. I'm ready to go. No! I'm not going to go back! I'm not going to go back!
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We will defend our lives, whatever they cost, maybe. We will fight on the beaches. We will fight on the landing grounds. We will fight in the fields and in the fields. We will fight in the hills. We will never surrender. May I ask you to wait a minute, Mr. President? Mr. President, you may leave. We're not going to fight at night.
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The
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United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. We will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.
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I'm sorry.
4:48:00
Now, at the end of this war,
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I think around the time it was the winter, and they were going to bomb everybody else, and nobody was going to bomb them.
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I think that the people who are speaking today, they are talking about the global thing, and they are talking about the people who are sitting in the audience.
4:48:50
January 10, 1942. In the Wolf's Lair near Rastenburg in East Prussia, Adolf Hitler welcomed Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu. The troops of the Allied powers faced the Red Army on the Eastern Front and had fought together. on the Volga river that winter.
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The pictures of January 1943 were set against the background of the catastrophe at Stalingrad. Two Romanian armies had been sent to the Eastern Front at Hitler's request. In 1941, early 1942, they asked the Romanians, now do a little bit more, and those things were gone now. There were huge losses. And Stalingrad had quite a big political effect. Hitler, of course, had to try to keep his allies fighting, of whom Romania was actually the most important,
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because the Romanians had the most soldiers on the Eastern Front.
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The meeting of the Fuhrer and the Romanian leader served another purpose. At a time of imminent defeat at Stalingrad, it was necessary to demonstrate confidence publicly.
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It had a very great effect in showing the German people that we still had allies. Because the anti-Hitler coalition was growing bigger and bigger, and more and more Germans were asking themselves how they were supposed to manage against this huge coalition, which by now spanned half the world. However, for the soldiers of the Axis powers in Stalingrad, there was no justification for the display of optimism. The battle for the industrial and armament center had been raging since August of 1942.
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After heavy bombardment by the Luftwaffe, German units advanced into the city. Despite initial successes, however, the offensive came to a halt.
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The Wehrmacht war in the Soviet Union was, after all, a war of movement, a war in huge spaces, a war that actually didn't take place in cities at all.
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The Germans had no regulations at all for fighting in cities. And now these units come into this city, an industrial city destroyed by German air raids, and they were not prepared for that. It was very bloody. It should have been stopped, but Hitler persevered. And so battalion after battalion was wasted there.
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The 6th Army was receiving fewer and fewer supplies and was slowly bleeding to death in the ruins of the city. By mid-October, its commander-in-chief, Colonel General Frederick Paulus, had only about 25,000 combatants left out of a quarter of a million soldiers, and they faced an enemy fighting fanatically.
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What happened there was pretty dramatic, how people were really sent into the fire and burned up. Even the Germans noted in their reports, shaking their heads, at points there were already masses of dead or destroyed tanks. Even then the generals sent their troops into the fire again and again.
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It has to be said, with many Soviet military leaders, there was a complete contempt for the life of their own soldiers.
4:52:00
Hitler had estimated just eight days for the so-called Operation Heron, the capture of Stalingrad. An insane miscalculation, because even after weeks of fighting, the city could not be completely taken. The Red Army brought in reserves from the east and repeatedly threw fresh forces into the battle. In mid-November, the Soviets launched a counter-offensive called Operation Uranus. It succeeded in encircling the Axis soldiers. Here, we see propaganda film intended to show the
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moment when the circle around Stalingrad closed.
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And while an army was headed for downfall on the Volga, Some 3000 kilometers to the west there were celebrations. January 12, 1943, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring had invited guests to his Karrenhall estate in Brandenburg to celebrate his 50th birthday.
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Göring was the most decorated German soldier of the Second World War, which many were not aware of, because the Grand Cross, which he received in July 1940, was above the Knight's Cross and was awarded only to him. And he also had a rank, the Reichsmarschall, which was above Feldmarschall, which actually didn't exist. And that's interesting and important in that sense, because the order and the rank made it clear what Göring was. He was the number two man in the country,
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the designated successor to Hitler.
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The birthday boy had pompously announced that his air force would supply the trapped troops in Stalingrad with ammunition and food, even though… he must have been aware of the hopelessness of that undertaking.
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He despaired and he then tried to score points with Hitler again by saying, yes, I'm supplying the 6th Army in Stalingrad, and that didn't work. So he got hit on the head, and he didn't see any way to stop it. So we have records of his meetings with his staff, and he understood what was at stake. He knew how difficult the situation was, but then he always said that in the end, I have to go to Hitler now and I have to sell it to him. Give me better news.
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And it went so far that people put in writing how difficult the situation was. And he tore up that document.
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While Göring was feeling sorry for himself, the trapped soldiers received only pathetic slogans of perseverance instead of the hoped-for rations by air. A speech by the Air Force chief
4:55:05
The situation in the surrounded city continued to deteriorate. Cold, epidemics, and hunger took their toll. At the beginning of January, the daily ration for a soldier in the Stalingrad cauldron was barely 50 grams of bread, no more than a slice. A German soldier noted, The truth is the knowledge of the hardest struggle in a hopeless situation. Misery, hunger, cold, renunciation, doubt, despair, and horrific death. That's all I'll say about it.
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Despite the increasingly hopeless situation, surrender was out of the question for Hitler. Defiantly, he ordered the city to be held at all costs. At the end of January, he appointed Friedrich Paulus, commander-in-chief of the 6th Army, as field marshal. The hope was that an officer of such rank would choose suicide rather than surrender.
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Friedrich Paulus was disillusioned by the fact that all attempts of his to get his permission from Hitler to surrender at Stalingrad in order to save lives was rejected by Hitler. And at that moment he actually felt betrayed and abandoned. And for this dictator to still take a bullet in the head, that's where he said, no, doing that would mean I would take the responsibility. And the responsibility for the death and failure in Stalingrad is not mine, but Hitler's.
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And he simply didn't want to take the responsibility. He didn't want to take the responsibility for this defeat, to wear that hat.
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On January 31st, Friedrich Paulus, the highest ranking German officer up to that time, went into Soviet captivity. A few days later, the last Axis units in the city surrendered. After more than five months, the Battle of Stalingrad
4:57:17
The battle for Stalingrad is over. The 6th Army is loyal to its flag, under the exemplary leadership of General Marshal Paulus, who overcame the enemy and the misfortune of the relationship.
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First of all, there was shock. It was only written down in the diaries or in the secret morale reports that the people were shocked. They couldn't imagine it. An entire army had perished, sacrificed.
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Those days defeats were associated with symbols,
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with the surrender of armies, with the surrender of countries.
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And the defeat of Moscow was not connected with the surrender of any army, with any symbolic act. The Germans were repulsed and they lost 200,000 soldiers.
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But this didn't appear in any statistics. Stalingrad was the first symbolic place where the Wehrmacht suffered a defeat. It couldn't be hidden.
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The Battle of Moscow could be retouched a little. Stalingrad couldn't.
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About half of the trapped soldiers died during the battle. Only a few tens of thousands were lucky enough to be flown out. In February, the remaining 100,000 men were dragged into captivity. Of that amount, only about 6% survived and returned to Germany years later.
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On the German side, of course, the blame for the defeat at Stalingrad was aimed primarily on the Allies. But, of course, it was wrong to shift the blame onto the Allies, which Hitler did. That's why he said in the summer of 1943 that he wanted to carry out the summer offensive only with German troops, so that something like Stalingrad wouldn't happen again. But, of course, Critical mistakes were also made on the German side, and even without the Allies,
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the outcome certainly would not have been different.
4:59:25
The mood in Germany was devastating. In mid-February, Josef Goebbels addressed a select audience in Berlin's Sportpalast. His speech was broadcast on the radio.
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It does not want the total war, the English say, but the cancellation. Goebbels' speech in the Sports Palace was definitely a key event,
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because at a critical moment he tried to finally commit the masses to total war.
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Total war also meant radical comprehensive social mobilization of all people. all available resources. The
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Minister of Propaganda asked ten rhetorical questions which were ecstatically received.
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The interesting thing is, however, that
5:01:03
The interesting thing, however, was that he actually spoke in a style that would have been more appropriate, let's say, in the spring of 1945 or even the fall of 44, because living conditions for Germans in February of 43 weren't so bad at first. It was before the Allied air offensive on the Ruhr or on Hamburg.
5:01:28
Yes, there was bombing, but the really bad stuff was yet to come. The Frans were far away in Russia. Germany dominated France. German soldiers were also in Tunisia. The, let's say, average Berliner who was listening was certainly in a different mood in February 1943. And Goebbels, of course, knew what was coming and had more information. So in that respect... It was a speech that was actually much too radical for the atmosphere that prevailed in Berlin at that time.
5:02:01
A few months earlier, the German public was still used to hearing success stories. The Wehrmacht had advanced as far as the Caucasus. Silver Saddle! Go, go! Go, go! Stop! On the count of three! One, two, three, four!
5:02:33
This is becoming more and more of a Bolshevist encirclement assault squad. Fine thought out. Guns towards the wall. The biggest distance. Faster, faster! Now they are filming.
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The German advance, however, soon only succeeded on celluloid. The vast gains of territory in the Caucasus, initially aided by Soviet retreats, resulted in significant supply problems of fuel and ammunition. The overstretched supply routes contributed to the Wehrmacht having to withdraw from the mountain range between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea from the turn of the year 1942 to 1943. Therefore, when Alarm at the Pass was finished, Goebbels refused to release the film to theaters.
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In other areas of the Eastern Front, the situation continued to deteriorate for the Wehrmacht and its allies. After the victory at Stalingrad in early 1943, the Red Army tried to use this momentum for themselves.
5:03:48
In the southern section of the Eastern Front, the Red Army launched two major offensives, Offensive Stern and Offensive Sprung. Initially with Offensive Sprung and then also with Stern, Stalin tried to cut off the entire southern wing of the German Eastern Front and liberate Crimea and destroy all of the German forces in the south of the Eastern Front and advance to Dnieper. In many places, the Wehrmacht had no choice but to retreat.
5:04:17
Here was the official language of the situation in the propaganda, a lesson in whitewashing. Kharkov was also targeted by the Red Army. The city had been under German control since October of 1941. Idyllic images of the occupation belie the reality. For example, most of the Jewish population had been murdered. In mid-February 1943, the Red Army recaptured the city, but the Wehrmacht did not admit defeat.
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Then the Germans managed to bring in reserves and recaptured Kharkov in a counter-offensive in March of 43, and then managed to roughly recapture their initial starting position from the summer of 42. But those were very critical days, when it wasn't clear whether the Germans would even succeed in stopping the Soviets again, or was that now a Napoleonic catastrophe. Napoleon, who retreated from Moscow once, also no longer found a way to stop.
5:05:29
but at some point that then degenerated into a retreat. And that danger certainly existed in February of 1943. And the Germans could have stopped that with a counter-offensive. They could stabilize the front line and then thus conclude these winter battles.
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The success at Kharkov temporarily belied the balance of power in the southern section of the Eastern Front, and German soldiers were all too willing to be blinded.
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The morale of the soldiers was stabilized once again because the soldiers said to themselves, well, we're still superior. We're tactically superior to the Soviets. We're actually also superior in terms of weapons, and the Führer knows what he's doing. And they were still optimistic. The morale reports also said that even in the spring, the soldiers who rode from the front line or came on leave from the front line were actually more optimistic than the public.
5:06:21
They also reassured the people and said, no, we're superior. In the capital of the Reich, The long-awaited success on the Eastern Front was exploited to great public effect. Adolf Hitler appeared on Heroes Memorial Day in front of the Zeughaus on Unter den Linden along with representatives of the Luftwaffe, the Army, and the Navy Hermann Göring, Wilhelm Keitel, Karl Dönitz, as well as Heinrich Himmler. The holiday had been specifically postponed so that the Fuhrer could
5:06:51
announce the recapture of the then fourth largest city in the Soviet Union.
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but as unbreakable heroes and pioneers of a better age, who will live in our ranks for eternity.
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And we know that from the moot reports of the security service that moviegoers were terribly disappointed because, while it was shown in the newsreel, no original recordings were played of Hitler or how his voice sounded. At the time, there really clung to it. How does the Führer look? They also watched his face closely in the newsreels. Is he positive? What is he saying? How does he say it? And then the newsreel announcer only summarized what Hitler said.
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And they were all terribly disappointed. And Goebbels tried for months to persuade Hitler to give a public speech again, to finally give the people hope again. Hitler didn't want that at all. He always said, first we need victories again. In that situation, he didn't want to do that.
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Further disappointments were to follow. For example, in the North African theater. Since February of 1941, German units have been fighting there alongside the Italians.
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For a long time, Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps had been a source of success. The tank general had previously made a name for himself in the Western campaign against France and was now presented by Nazi propaganda as a brilliant army commander. The image of the strategically skilled Desert Fox was very popular throughout the Reich.
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Marshal Rommel has made the decision to attack the 8th British Army. As always, he is directly with the fighting troops. Günther Hallm is only 19 years old. As a right-hand man of a PAK, he shot 7 British tanks under the most difficult circumstances. Whoever is such a man, will always be such a man. At any opportunity. Of course, I expect that from you. You're welcome.
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But ever since the Allies landed massive forces in North Africa at the end of 1942 in what was called Operation Torch, which opened a second front in the rear of the Afrika Korps, the troops of the Axis powers were increasingly on the defensive. At first, Berlin did not recognize the signs of the times.
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Hitler forbade withdrawing troops from Tunisia. On the contrary, he continued to pump more troops in there. That was typical of Hitler. There is this Nazi will to preserve, defending at all costs, to the last grenade.
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Despite the increasingly hopeless military situation, the Afrika Korps put up fierce resistance. Here are pictures taken by US frontline cameramen of tough fighting near Tunis.
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Personnel consequences on the German side came only later.
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Rommel was in North Africa until the beginning of March 1943 and was then recalled because defeat was clear and the regime didn't want to see one of the most popular generals go into captivity. And besides, they still needed him for propaganda in the further course of the war.
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The Allies
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now had four times as many tanks in North Africa as the Axis powers and had air supremacy.
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In mid-May 1943, the German-Italian units under Rommel's successor, Colonel-General von Arnim, formed Army Group Africa and surrendered near Tunis.
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That then ended in a military catastrophe compared by some to the magnitude of the defeat at Stalingrad. 250,000 German and Italian soldiers went into captivity.
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Militarily, the defeat in Tunis was the second very serious defeat for the German Reich after Stalingrad.
5:11:26
It became clear that it had lost the initiative on several fronts and their important ally Italy was on the verge of collapse. Thus, another of Hitler's military ventures came to an abrupt end. In addition to hundreds of thousands of soldiers going into captivity, there were at least 30,000 casualties on the side of the Axis powers.
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May 20th, the Allies celebrated their victory with a military parade in Tunis. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Allied Commander-in-Chief during Operation Torch and later the U.S. President, attended the triumphal procession. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill later wrote in his memoirs, No one could doubt the greatness of the victory won in Tunisia. Africa has been cleansed of the enemy. A continent has been liberated.
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Increased efforts in the German armaments industry helped compensate for the growing military superiority of the Allies. Albert Speer had been responsible for armaments manufacturing since February of 1944, had reorganized it. In addition to weapons, Speer, who was equally popular with the Fuhrer and the people, was primarily concerned with his image.
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Albert Speer, one can say, was first and foremost a man of staging and propaganda, not the least of which was the staging of himself. So we first had a so-called home front propaganda, which systematically referred to the production wonders and the achievements of the German armaments industry, and which then very soon also became intoxicated with its own successes. in significantly increasing output in certain armament sectors.
5:13:35
The increases were due to the systematic importation of foreign workers to the Reich, which was further accelerated under Speer. Thus, men and women from the occupied territories toiled in German factories for the insane idea of final victory. Hundreds of thousands suffered from malnutrition and mistreatment or worked themselves to death.
5:14:02
Forced labourers were quite central to the German armaments industry and for this war machine in general. Just imagine that in 1944 there were 7.6 million forced labourers in the German Reich, and they kept the armaments industry and industrial war production going. This meant that the use of forced labourers was a central element of the National Socialist War ideology and war economy.
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They were becoming increasingly important. and were being brought into the Reich at ever greater expense, because they were a substitute, a cheap substitute for the conscripted Germans who were in the Wehrmacht.
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Forced labour was on the whole a program that was changing quite dramatically. In the overall tendency one could say that with the way in which warfare had become more radicalized and how the military tactical situation had also deteriorated and became more acute, that to the same extent the ruthlessness with which forced labourers had been treated became more and more acute.
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but also displayed particular creativity when it came to presenting his production figures.
5:15:25
It's also important to emphasize that Albert Speer always argued with growth rates that were indeed immense.
5:15:38
But he liked to refer to certain base dates when production was particularly low. and that these rates of increase were particularly impressive. And he really avoided ever stating absolute production figures and possibly relating them to the production process potential of their opponents.
5:16:00
Of course, the German economy didn't come close to what the Americans in particular and also what the Soviets produced. Even if it was possible to increase the economy enormously, this was helped strongly by the assembly line procedure. On the German side, there was only one factory making tanks, the Nibelungen factory, which worked with an assembly line method. For the Americans, this was standard and the Germans simply couldn't match it. This fact was neglected in Nazi propaganda. Instead,
5:16:31
they emphasized the alleged superiority of their own weapons. In the summer of 1943, Albert Schwer and Joseph Goebbels attended a staged tank race, the result of which was probably already set before the start.
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In the middle of the American tank
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Over a steep concrete obstacle The American tank does not force it and confirms again the statements of our opponents that have been made over and over again in recent times
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Everyone was aware that the forces were not enough for a large-scale offensive as in 1941 and 1942. But there was a frontal advance around the city of Kursk. So we could start an offensive, gain ground and demonstrate that you could still attack and keep the initiative. About 120 kilometers of the frontal advance around the city of Kursk protruded into the German lines. It was to be straightened as part of an offensive that was given the code name Citadel. Operational Order No.
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6 from April of 1943 stated, Every leader, every man must be imbued with the decisive importance of this attack. The victory at Kursk must act as a beacon to the world. About 900,000 men were pulled together for this on the German side. They were opposed by at least 1.4 million Red Army troops, and they were prepared for the attack. when the German attack started in early July.
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Within this frontal arc, the Red Army had created a defense system with a total of six defense belts and these defense lines which were riddled with anti-tank trenches with mines. Hundreds of thousands of mines were laid and thousands of kilometers of trenches were dug with anti-tank bases and so on. It was actually a very difficult system to penetrate.
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In the coming days, the largest tank battle of the Second World War unfolded at Kursk. The shortcomings of the German armaments industry under Albert Speer quickly became apparent.
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At the time the Germans had an enormous number of tanks, but they had no spare parts. It would have been better, if you will, to actually produce three tanks and produce three tanks as spare parts. But Speer preferred to produce five tanks and only one as a spare. And by the first day of the attack of Operation Citadel, One heavy tank division with Tigers had so many failures due to mines, but no spare parts. Right on first day it wasn't possible to repair all tanks.
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And that was a consequence of Speer's policy. Always to impress only with production figures, but nothing behind it in resources. Where one could say, we have enough spare parts, enough mechanics, alright, we're covered. Even if we have failures, we can balance it out.
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The tank units were dismantled, saw through and made ready for battle. Panzer Regiment 2 noted, we had to take these cripples into action with, of course, quite clearly expected results. Propaganda studiously concealed such experiences.
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In the battle of the front arc, the Wehrmacht faced an almost inexhaustible reservoir of Soviet units. After initial moderate gains in space, the large-scale offensive came to a halt.
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After about two weeks at the latest, the German offensive was over and the Soviet side was on the counter-offensive. And then, the second phase of the Battle of Kursk was at least from the German point of view purely characterized by heavy defensive fighting, that you try to hold the front arc of oral as long as possible, at least to cover the retreat.
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In mid-August, the Red Army recaptured Kharkov for the second time that year. The fighting that went down in history as the Battle of Kursk thus came to an end, with immense losses on both sides.
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During the 50-day Kursk battle, the Red Army lost about 7,000 tanks. That means broken, burned out, exploded. About 7,000 tanks. The Wehrmacht had about 1,200 tanks, and so you have a loss ratio of 1 to 6. With airplanes, the loss ratio was about 1 to 5. On the German side, you had a total of 650 destroyed aircraft. On the Soviet side, at least 3,000. But the most difficult thing, however, was to determine the personnel losses. On the German side, they were about 200,000 men. On the Soviet side,
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at least 1.2 million. As a result of the tank battle of Kursk, it became clear, no matter what they did, no matter how many Soviet tanks they shot down, no matter how many soldiers they captured or died in the Red Army, they couldn't win this militarily.
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And this raised the question, What were the Germans supposed to do? They couldn't really do anything anymore, because they couldn't destroy more than 6,000 tanks in a few weeks. Any other army would have had its back broken. Not so the Red Army. And so it became clear in Operation Citadel that the Germans could do whatever they wanted. This had become a material war, which the Germans couldn't win.
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Operation Citadel was the last major German offensive on the Eastern Front. From then on, more and more, the Red Army took the initiative. On the 26th of August, a few days after the end of the Battle of Kursk, it launched a new offensive. The High Command of the Wehrmacht, meanwhile, had been faced with new developments in another theater of war for several weeks.
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On July 10th 1943 the Allies landed in Sicily. At that very moment Operation Citadel was about a week old and at that moment Hitler actually lost his nerve a bit. He then contributed to the attack being stopped a few days later and he wanted to move his Waffen-SS divisions all away from the Eastern Front.
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In the end only one Waffen-SS division, the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, was moved to Northern Italy. But of course Hitler was not the only one. It showed the interaction of the individual theaters of war. It was a continental war that the Germans faced there. Different fronts, France, the Mediterranean, the Soviet Union. And they were interconnected and interlocked with each other. And the Allies had the upper hand in mid-43.
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They had the initiative and they could determine where to attack.
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For the landing, the Allies had pulled together over 100,000 troops, including soldiers from the 1st U.S. Infantry Division, the Big Red One. The tradition-rich unit had previously fought in North Africa and was now helping bring Sicily under Allied control in about a week. Everywhere, Americans, Canadians, and British were encountering the legacies of fascist rule. Destroyed war equipment was repurposed by local youth in the blink of an eye.
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The fall of Sicily caused consternation in war-weary Italy, which quickly turned into revolutionary sentiment and led to personnel consequences.
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Mussolini was deposed by the Fascist Grand Council on July 25, 1941. There was also the King Victor Emmanuel III, and so Mussolini was no longer the Duce.
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Pietro Badoglio became the new Prime Minister. Officially, the General emphasized that he wanted to continue fighting alongside the Third Reich, but Italy and the Western powers were unofficially approaching each other. Secret peace negotiations were opened. During the fight for Sicily, about 4,600 Wehrmacht soldiers were killed. over 13,000 were injured.
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Those who could not be cared for locally were transferred home. Clinics for the treatment and rehabilitation of the wounded were set up throughout the Reich, like here in Bielefeld in Westphalia. A doctor filmed the progress of his patients. At the moment when more and more fatally wounded people streamed back from the front, it became clear to everyone that this would not have a good ending. Of course, the propaganda in the Reich tried to glorify that. to explain.
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Television was still in its infancy, but it was used for propaganda. For example, many clinics had TV sets where the wounded could see their fellow sufferers. Prosinn und Wille meistern das Schicksal. Das ist die Losung unserer Schwerkriegsbeschädigten.
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Für ihre Zukunft wird gesorgt und neben der selbstverständlichen rein körperlichen Heilung Through a surgery that is
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a
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B.D. Wiesel Whether the camera accompanied war-disabled people on an obstacle course or at a dance class, the motto was always, everything's not so bad.
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I learned it first as an amputee. You have both legs amputated. Yes. But it still makes me happy. Yes, life is beautiful. The staged images seem cynical from today's perspective, but in the cold logic of the regime, the images made sense.
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The cleverness of the Nazi propaganda was that they showed that they didn't say, didn't pretend that no one was killed. They also didn't pretend that there were no wounded. No, there were. You could see them in the streets. They were openly shown. But they were also made into heroes. They had sacrificed themselves. They had also paid their price. And we also recognize that. Society recognizes that. That's why we also showed them in the newsreel.
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as well as invalid soldiers in a convalescent home and so on. And with that, Nazi propaganda created a piece of honesty. If you didn't show that, if you only made beautiful pictures of healthy soldiers, then it would have become untrustworthy. Because everybody saw them on the street, the limping people. And propaganda must always, in order to be effective, contain a piece of truth.
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On the 8th of September, the previously negotiated ceasefire between Italy on one side and the US and Britain on the other became public knowledge.
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The armistice with Italy has been concluded.
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It is a great victory for the United Nations,
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but it was also a great victory for the Italian people.
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After years of war and suffering and degradation... The Italian people are at last coming to the day of liberation from their real enemies, the Nazis. American and British troops began landing on the Italian mainland in early September near Salerno. In Berlin, preparations had been made for this eventuality. Fall Axis was the code name of the operation, which now responded to the Allied landing operation.
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And the Germans made many mistakes, but one thing they could do was to react quickly to new situations.
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They initiated Operation Axis and managed to disarm hundreds of thousands of Italian soldiers and relatively quickly confronted the advancing Allies.
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The Allies had to fight their way north with great difficulty. Only months later was a US cameraman able to shoot this footage in the Campania region. In the meantime, the other side achieved a brief success. Since his deposition, Benito Mussolini had been held prisoner in a hotel in Abruzzo.
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The Germans learned about it and the idea now on the German side was to free Mussolini. There was a command operation. German command landed near the mountain hotel and the interesting thing was Why didn't the guards actually just shoot Mussolini? Why didn't they fight the German paratroopers? Today, we know that the official Italian government said, well, then let the Germans have Mussolini and quite deliberately gave the order not to shoot.
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We will defend our house, whatever the cost may be.
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We will fight on the beaches, we will fight on the landing grounds, we will fight in the fields, and in the streets, we will fight in the hills. We will never surrender.
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The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the empire of Japan. We will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.
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Dresden, June 1943. Codden Clipkin and Henry Ruppe exchanged wedding vows, meticulously documented on 35mm color film. It was a piece of idyll. almost four years after Adolf Hitler had plunged the world into war. The effects of the war were still barely felt in the city, which was not within range of Allied bomber raids, a situation that would not last forever. Ever since the British Air Ministry had issued the Area Bombing Directive in February of 1942,
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the number of air raids on German cities had increased significantly. The suffering of civilians in particular was growing.
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It was the British who, more than any other air power, developed a system for destroying a city with an air strike. And the British developed a method which they refined in
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1943. The proportion of incendiary bombs, for example, was much higher than in the German attacks. And so was the tactic of using air mines, how that was coordinated and how they used radio control methods. marked the bombers that guided the others. That was a completely new procedure. It was now no longer if we kill civilians, we kill civilians. But the civilians became the main target.
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One area of focus for the attacks was the Ruhr region with its heavy industry. The images of destruction were the same from city to city. Among other cities in the rural area, Dortmund also became a target. On the night of May 24th alone, 2,200 tons of incendiary and demolition bombs fell on the city. The Nazi leadership responded with a large-scale propaganda event.
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The venue for the production, the Westfalenhalle, filled with over 15,000 spectators.
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Empty slogans of perseverance for the population of the Ruhr region, which had been shaken by the air war.
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Mr Goebbels said in his speech, among other things, I know that you are exposed to a serious terror here. The suffering that you are forced to endure through the enemy air war is torturing and embarrassing. We must not lose sight of the overall problem of this war due to the burdens of the day. In no moment of this gigantic battle we must forget that it is about being or not being of our people and thus every single German. If you want to love your own people from the bottom of your heart,
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Then one must be able to hate one's enemies from the bottom of one's soul. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.
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Thank you very much. I am convinced that in this war, like in all wars, the one who will win, who will have the strongest nerves, the most power, and the bravest and most brilliant leadership, will not be our enemy, but you.
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The Battle of the Ruhr, which was a Royal Air Force offensive, raged between March and July of 1943, during which almost all major German cities on the Rhine and Ruhr were bombed and thousands of people were killed. The regime tried to alleviate the plight of the victims.
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One of the clever responses to the chaos caused by such carpet bombing was that certain consumer goods were kept in railroad cars until they were needed,
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some of which were also parked in tunnels, and then they would be available at relatively short notice. The women's sector distributes butter bread for the bombed victims. Eggs! Cigarettes, fruit, everything is planned. The aid organizations must do the necessary work. If you were cynical, you'd say that Nazi propaganda and goebbels used the bombings as an opportunity. An opportunity to expand the people's sense of community, the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft. Because they understood, great need,
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great suffering, we have to help. And who helped? The Nazi state. In the face of massive destruction and high casualty figures, pessimism and resentment spread. However, open criticism of the situation was not tolerated under the Nazi dictatorship.
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In the language of the National Socialists, there was a separation between morale and attitude, and the morale could easily crumble at one point or another. The regime also acknowledged that. or that there was mourning over losses or worries and hardships after bombing raids. But at the same time, the decisive element was the attitude in the language of Nazi propaganda, and the attitude from the regime's point of view seemed to be quite stable for a long time. In midsummer 1943,
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Hamburg became the focus of Allied bombers. Before the outbreak of the Second World War, around 1.7 million people lived in the Hanseatic city. Warships were also built there, which provided work for tens of thousands of people. That is why, since 1940, the Hanseatic city had repeatedly been the target of air raids.
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In late July, the Allies launched Operation Gomorrah, named after the mythical city that, according to the Bible, was buried under a rain of fire and brimstone.
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Operation Gomorrah was a terrifying, horrific special event in the air war. The British managed to knock out the German defense by building German radars with strips of aluminium foil, thus eliminating the German night fighter force. Therefore, these bombers could fly over the city relatively undisturbed. Hamburg was easy to get to. Hamburg was easy to find. They also had radar devices that could find and hit the city with relative precision.
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Hamburg was attacked in several waves. The most devastating occurred on the night of July 27th. More than 100,000 explosive and incendiary bombs fell on the city, which quickly went up in flames. The hot midsummer weather that prevailed during those days bolstered the spread of the fires.
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They attacked certain districts east of the Alster. which were densely built up and the british managed to set off a firestorm in this densely built up area and it was this firestorm that was destructive and deadly because the attack was long over the fire developed such power a hurricane-like force and it couldn't be extinguished and so hamburg burned for days and even the hamburg fire department and the hamburg civil defense
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were not immune to the bombing and that's why the civilian casualty figures were so immensely high
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The firestorm raged for over five hours in eastern Hamburg. Many streets in the city center also fell victim to the bombardment. By the end of Operation Gomorrah, a total of around 35,000 people had been killed.
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They suffocated in air raid shelters, burned to death in the streets, or were killed by falling debris. Over 100,000 residents were injured. In Berlin, The situation there was noted with concern.
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The effect on people like Albert Speer or Goebbels was considerable. And they thought, what if this is going to happen to us more often now? A firestorm of this magnitude, so many dead. For God's sake, what will the German population do then? Can we then hold out against a war? But not every city was built like Hamburg. You also had to realize that it's relatively hard to kill 40,000 people in a city. It did work in Hamburg. Ultimately, the effect on morale, on the ability to wage war,
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remained limited. At least half of Hamburg's apartments were destroyed, a contemporary witness wrote. From the Wandsbeck-Marienthal train station to the main train station, not one house is left. You are now completely homeless because it will take a hundred years to rebuild. Those who didn't flee to the countryside had to come to terms with the danger of further attacks. The propaganda invoked the concept of Volksgemeinschaft, in which everyone pitches in.
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This newsreel from the fall of 1943 shows boys and girls helping to clear up bomb damage.
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A list of the most distinguished young and girls of Hamburg in the capital of the Reich. The visit of the Freie Sportfeld is led by knight-carrier Müller, who himself won many victories as a record runner. The young
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Hitler, Werner Kahl, carrier of the war-rewarded cross with swords. The young Hitler, Kurt Pörschke, 12 years old, the youngest carrier of a war medal, saved eight children from the death of flames. The maidservant Margarete Zettel, barred all children from a burning orphanage until the flames had captured her dress. Inge Voss saved two people from the attack night from completely destroyed houses despite the falling ceiling.
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The leader with the Iron Cross of the second class drew the bravest of the young. In the most difficult hours they proved that they know how to behave like soldiers.
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Since the beginning of their movement, the Nazis had attached special importance to children. After seizing power, they forced their influence on the younger generation.
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When they attended kindergarten, they were looked after by teachers who had received National Socialist and ideological training. When they went to school, the only teachers were ones who had a positive attitude toward National Socialism. Their free time was organized by National Socialist organizations. Therefore, both the National Socialist insignia and the Hitler salute were part of their normal everyday life.
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The youth organization Hitler Youth was founded as early as the mid-1920s. The National Socialists pursued clear goals.
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For the National Socialists, this had a double meaning. First, the National Socialists saw themselves as a form of youth movement. So that means as an organization that mobilized the youth compared to the established parties, to the bureaucracy.
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And secondly, and this played a central role in the founding of the Hitler Youth, was the access to youth.
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The possibility of systematic ideologization, uniforming and militarization of those for whom this Third Reich, in its self-image at least, was now competing.
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As in all areas of Nazi society, soldiering was glorified in the Hitler Youth. At the Reich Party Congresses in Nuremberg, Hitler Youth Delegations quickly became a permanent fixture. At the so-called Party Congress of Freedom in September of 1935, Adolf Hitler addressed the young people in attendance and outlined his ideals for the next generation.
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In our eyes, the German youth must come to us, be bright and free, lead like dogs, hold like lions, and fight like a group of dogs.
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Baldur von Schirach, pictured here to the right of Hitler, was supposed to be part of that. The German language and literature student was appointed the first Reich youth leader by the dictator. In 1940, He was replaced by his previous deputy, Artur Axmann. In a way, Baltur von Schirach and Axmann were the prototypes of the youth political functionaries of the Third Reich.
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They were also well-educated, academically educated functionaries who entered the Nazi movement relatively early on and who shaped the Hitler Youth. And they did so in a very special way, namely, they turned the Hitler Youth, which was initially only a party organization, into a state youth organization.
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And this process was part of this ideologization of youth in the Third Reich.
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Uniforms of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, or League of German Girls, and the Hitler Youth soon became part of everyday life in the cities of the Reich, as seen here during a march in Offenburg-Baden. Young people learned to march in step at an early age and were socialized in a military way.
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The Hitler Youth was characterized first by the idea of the Führer, by being a leader, by youth leads youth as a guiding principle. Secondly, it was characterized by a concept of loyalty and morality. Loyalty to the Führer and the National Socialist morality linked to very specific conditions. to racism as an essential principle and thirdly it meant militarization for the regime young people were first and foremost one thing military recruits a film shows the seemingly self-evident
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development from hitler youth to wehrmacht soldier here for the hitler
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In the youth organization, there were specializations for careers in the army. In the naval Hitler Youth, preparation for a career in the naval forces took place.
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EINSTEIGEN ZUM KUTTERRENNEN EINSTEIGEN ZUM KUTTERRENNEN MIT LETZTER KRAFT DEM ZIELE ENTGEGEN
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Six Reichseesportschuls were established in which the next generation was trained. An integral part of the education was also the use of military auxiliary activities.
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Contrary to what these pictures suggest, the period of great successes for German submarines by 1943 was over. The cracking of the Enigma code and the increasing air supremacy of the Allies in the North Atlantic put a heavy strain on that military branch. Any encouragement, however small, was welcome.
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And now the surprise for the boys. Grand Admiral Dönitz welcomes them with the Reichsjugendführer Axmann on the sailing school ship Forstwessel.
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With my submarine drivers you can tear the devil's beard off, says the Grand Admiral to the boys.
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To his question, what do you want to become? The answer comes from... You, Lord Farah, Great Admiral! And you? In tune... You, Lord Farah, Great Admiral!
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National socialism as a total dictatorship needed the cooperation of all parts of the population, the convinced cooperation. And therefore it was very important to indoctrinate the children in line with the regime in order to subdue any resistance or criticism of the state. Because it was clear that the system was designed for expansion, that meant that you needed soldiers. You needed a population that was loyal to the regime and willing
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to carry the ideas of National Socialism out into the world.
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In order to realize its dream of a thousand-year Reich, the regime also needed a future leadership elite.
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They were to be trained in National Socialist fortresses.
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From the poor landscape of the Eifel, the Ordensburg Vogelsang stood. The mighty wall of the high-strung towers The buildings and farms and the monumental plastics are an expression of a strong new spirit. There were only three of these Nazi cadres' training centers in the Reich. Vogelsang in the Eifel, Sonthofen in the Allgäu and Chrissensee in Pomerania.
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In practice, the students who went there and the curriculum that was taught there was, of course, centrally influenced by the National Socialist world of ideas. and that subjects such as racial studies and things like that were specifically added to the curriculum in order to finish high school. And military training, that is, the physicality of the education, played a central role.
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According to Robert Lay, head of the German labor front, who had created the schools, living tools of the Fuhrer were to be created in these training centers.
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Adolf Hitler-Schüler, die während des Krieges auf der Burg erzogen werden, wohnen dem Festakt bei.
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Der weitaus größte Teil der Ordensjunker steht heute an der Front.
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Dr. Lay übergibt dem neuen Burgkommandanten die Fahne der Burg.
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After their training, many of the kids were among the regime's most fanatical supporters and participated in war crimes in the East. There, The situation for the Wehrmacht deteriorated steadily. After the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, the Red Army launched another offensive on a broad section of the front. Between the Black Sea in the south and Wittepst in the north, it took place in August of the same year.
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The increasing Soviet superiority made it difficult for German soldiers not to lose faith in the final victory.
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It's actually holding on to hope. You ask yourself, how could they hold out for so long? Although it was actually clear after the Battle of Kursk and after these retreats, that this couldn't be done militarily. One wonders, of course, how they were able to go on for so long, how they were able to motivate the soldiers to fight. And you shouldn't underestimate the hope factor. On the one hand, there was always the hope that the Führer was a genius, that the Führer was still going to do it,
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that the Führer was going to pull something out of the air, some miracle weapon, or that he still had some reserves. In September, in the central and southern sections of the Eastern Front, the Wehrmacht had to withdraw further to the western bank of the Dnieper. The campaign continued to result in enormous losses. On an average day of war, six times as many German soldiers died in Russia as in the West.
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Above all, it was the loss of personnel that was so painful. There was less and less infantry. As a result, victories were no longer possible. Take 1941, the great victories were largely won by the infantry, less by the tanks. And that was completely missing now. And the East Army was bleeding to death. They were only getting half as many replacements. In early November, the Red Army liberated Kiev. Since the autumn of 1941, the city, like all of Ukraine, had been under German rule.
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The appointed Reich Kommissar Erich Koch wrote, The goal of our work must be that the Ukrainians work for Germany. Ukraine has to supply what Germany lacks. This task must be carried out regardless of casualties. In Kiev alone, 150,000 prisoners of war and civilians were murdered.
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A Red Army dog squadron on its way to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The animals can detect explosives, injured or dead people, and were supposed to help secure the complex. after the city was taken. Soviet propaganda units were also filming. Signs of the German occupiers, silent witnesses of the racist policies of domination. Cafes, stores and theaters were forbidden to Ukrainians and Russians. The attitude of the Germans in the Reichskommissariat is determined by the
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view that we are dealing with a people who are inferior in every respect. Reichskommissar Koch had noted, by autumn of 1943, the madness about the master race in Kiev was over.
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A few weeks later, the Red Army achieved a prestigious victory in the northern section of the front. Leningrad had been under siege by the Wehrmacht since September of 1941. A deliberate decision was made not to take the city. Instead, Hitler ordered it to be cut off and then left to its own devices. At least one million people died during the blockade. The majority of the victims starved to death.
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Leningrad was actually like a magnifying glass for the radicality and totality of this war. Because on the one hand, for the Germans, cities had always been besieged. Since ancient times, there had always been famines in besieged cities. That's nothing new. But the new aspect was to not accept the surrender of a city at all. That was the plan. And also to raze the city to the ground. But it was the same thing on the Soviet side. No matter how many people died,
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the main thing was to hold Leningrad and to continue to produce weapons and do everything to supply the front line. The conditions were terrible, the party cadres took care of themselves, and it was the ordinary people who had to suffer massively here. In January 1944,
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the Soviets launched an offensive to finally liberate Leningrad. The attackers met weakened defenders because Army Group North had to face a dramatic situation on other sections of the front and had to give up units. On January 27, the former Russian capital was liberated. The 18th German Army under Colonel General Lindemann withdrew towards the Baltic states.
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In the Kremlin, it wasn't just stories of military successes by the Red Army that could be enjoyed in those months.
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By the autumn of 1943, the Soviets had achieved an important success on the propaganda front just outside Moscow. The focus was on a number of prominent German prisoners of war.
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After the victory at Stalingrad, it was clear to the Soviets, especially after the victory at Kursk, that they would win the war. But the big question was, at what cost? The losses were still enormous. And then there arose the consideration, well, what else could we do to somehow end the war faster? Perhaps we can also supply pressure to the Allies, the Western Allies. So they will finally open a second front.
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Then they had the idea, we still have 22 generals captured in Stalingrad. That would be super if we could use them now to use their indignation at Hitler, their feeling of being betrayed. to threaten with a German opposition government, to threaten the Allies, to say, maybe we can come to an agreement with the Germans, if we already have an opposition government, which is even supported by the conservative military.
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Walter von Seydlitz-Kurzbach became president of the BDO. The general of the artillery called for resistance against the Hitler dictatorship.
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...fight side by side with the people to remove Hitler and his regime and to keep Germany from chaos and collapse. We would lose our duty as German men if we would hold the faith for Germany's misfortune. Long live the free,
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independent and peaceful Germany!
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Of course, that appeal was not seen in the German Reich. Here, the propaganda concentrated on its own success stories. A favorite topic remained the development of new weapons to help compensate for the increasing losses of men and material. Adolf Hitler attended a demonstration of the so-called Railwolf. The device was designed to render tracks unusable for the enemy, thus limiting their mobility.
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Hitler had a soft spot for this sort of stuff.
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He was technically approachable and saw himself as an architect. He drew bunker plans and so on. And the great designers knew that and of course they also wanted to sell their weapons.
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So if you could get direct access to Hitler and convince him that you have designed a great weapon, you could then sell him your product, bypassing the hierarchy, so to speak.
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And someone who understood this brilliantly was Werner von Braun.
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Werner von Braun worked on the development of new types of rockets at the Army's research institute on Usedom. The focus of his research was to find out what the new type of rocket was. was the development of the liquid-fueled V-2 rocket. After the rocket's reliable flight capability was achieved, it was fitted with 1,000-kilogram explosive devices and renamed Vengeance Weapon 2. By the end of the war, over 3,000 of these V-2s were fired at England, Belgium, and France.
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The B-2 was actually a technically very modern device that kicked off the development of the moon rocket.
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But it was actually wonderful for the Allies that the Germans built it, because it was so incredibly expensive and so incredibly complex.
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If the Germans had built conventional weapons, airplanes, tanks, could they have done much more things with those? And to what effect? A military effect?
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A few thousand civilians were killed by them in Antwerp, in London and other cities, but the military effect was, of course, almost zero.
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Meanwhile, Nazi political celebrities never got tired of praising the wonder weapon, V2. By the end of June 1943, Heinrich Himmler saw a demonstration of the rocket in Peenemünde. The test was a sobering experience. And so the SS Reichsführer quickly turned his attention to other topics. A few weeks later, he gave a particularly explosive speech at the town hall in Posen, which had been preserved as an audio document. It is one of the few sources in which a prominent Nazi politician
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spoke openly about the mass murder of the Jewish population of Europe.
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It should be broken out between us, and yet we will never talk about it in public. I mean the Jewish evacuation,
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the extermination of the Jewish people. It belongs to the things that are easily eliminated. The Jewish people will be exterminated for that. We are fighting for every party member. That's what's in our program. We are fighting for youth, for eradication, for equality. Most of you will know what it means to be with 100 people. To be with 500 or 1000 people. And to have survived through that. And in doing so...
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In the meantime, railroad wagons full of people were rolling from all over Europe to the extermination camps in the east. As part of Operation Reinhardt, which had been launched some 15 months earlier, the National Socialists had by the fall of 1943 murdered more than two million Jews and Roma. Any attempt to resist, such as the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto in the spring of that year, was put down with extreme violence. The inhuman murder machinery of the National Socialists was in full swing.
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Meanwhile, in the Pacific, the World War raged on. After winning the Battle of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, U.S. troops reached the Gilbert Islands in November.
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The archipelago was to be captured as part of the so-called Operation Galvanic. To accomplish this, more than 25,000 men of the U.S. Marine Corps were ready. The Gilberts were only an interim target for the American Navy.
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They wanted to go from island to island, from the south to get closer to the Japanese mother islands. They wanted to get close enough to the Japanese mother islands so that they could use the air force against major Japanese cities and armament factories. At 5 o'clock in the morning on November 20, the attack on Tarawa, the main atoll of the Gilberts, started. The fighting troops were accompanied by war correspondents who produced impressive
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images of the fighting that later formed the basis for the propaganda film With the Marines at Tarawa. The landing GIs met stubborn resistance from the Japanese defenders.
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Isn't knocking those Japs out of their positions? They're hidden in trees behind rebetments, buried pillboxes, bombproofs, bunkers. This bunker is giving us plenty of trouble.
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We have orders to clean it up.
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This is what we found on the other side.
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Many of the Japanese soldiers would rather die than surrender to the enemy, and so every meter was fought for. Only after days of fighting did the Americans win the battle, but it was an expensive victory.
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This is the price we have to pay for a war we didn't want.
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Over there will be more dead on other battles. Around 1,000 GIs were killed capturing the Atoll, which is only a few square kilometers in size. Countless more bloody battles lay ahead for the U.S. troops before they defeated Hitler's fanatically fighting ally, Japan.
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Meanwhile, on the European continent, the Third Reich prepared for the Allied landing, which was expected sooner or later on the northern French coast. Troops and material were moved westward on a large scale. In addition, Hitler sent one of his most outstanding generals to the area. Erwin Rommel, who had achieved fame in North Africa as the Desert Fox, took up his command in France at the end of 1943 and reported directly to the Führer.
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Rommel arrived in the West at the end of 1943 with orders to improve the defensive position there. And Rommel also succeeded carrying out a large construction program to really strengthen the so-called Atlantic Wall, with bunkers, buildings, with minefields, with the so-called Rommel asparagus logs, against airborne troops. Troops, numerous divisions of the German Wehrmacht, with hundreds of thousands of combat-tripped soldiers, are ready at the Western Defense Front of Europe.
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They are equipped with the most modern weapons. An infantry company returns from the exercise. Lighting against night landing attempts. General Field Marshal Rommel sets the sighting of the fortifications. probably chosen because he was one of the most popular German army commanders, who for a long time willingly placed himself in the services of Nazi propaganda. Here, the then 52-year-old let himself be filmed addressing his soldiers.
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and not to break our heads for a second.
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Whether or not it works, it will definitely work. couldn't do anything about that. On the day of the landing, he was on home leave. In southern Europe, the Allies were already on the continent by the fall of 1943. Anglo-American troops had been on the Italian mainland since September. Their goal? The conquest of Rome.
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The Wehrmacht, which had triggered the so-called Axis case and occupied the country after the loss of its Italian ally, withdrew to a defensive line about 100 kilometers south of the Italian capital. At this so-called Gustav Line, the Allied advance initially came to a standstill.
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The Wehrmacht lost the ability to attack in 1943 and all counter-attacks during the Allied landings, such as at Salerno in September 1943 failed. But what they could still do was defend. And defensive measures are actually tactically easier to conduct than offensive measures. That's why the Wehrmacht, even with their thinned out units after all, there were heavy losses, still managed to behave tactically well on the defensive. And they had combat experience.
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They had been in this war for a long time. And so they managed to hold the front line here for a long time through this combination of factors, including the inexperience of the Allies and the inability of the Allies to adjust tactically to the German way of fighting.
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Monte Cassino lies on the Gustav Line, a mountain with an ancient Benedictine abbey on top. From there, access to the valley of the Liri River could be controlled, through which an advance all the way to Rome was easily possible. The Allies were therefore pushing for its capture.
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Monte Cassino is very difficult terrain. It's not that very high, about 500 meters high, but it's a steep... terrain, mountainous terrain. You can't operate there very much with tanks and the like. And the Germans were clinging to the mountains with everything they had, with very experienced troops who knew how to fight in mountainous terrain, even in the town of Cassino. They were very experienced troops, whose division general used to be a tactics instructor,
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and who knew how to wage war in this terrain.
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In January 1944, the battle for the mountain began. Numerous cultural treasures were in the abbey and were also at risk.
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The German newsreel reported, To protect these indispensable treasures from the British-American artisans, they were transferred from the German Wehrmacht to the English Guards in Rome.
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So far, the Wehrmacht had been more prominent in this war for the theft of cultural treasures than for their protection.
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Ein Vertreter des Vatikan empfängt von einem deutschen Offizier das Verzeichnis der aus dem Kloster geworgenen Stücke.
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Historical books, paintings, writings and building plans found temporary shelter in the former mausoleum of the Roman Emperor Hadrian.
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Kostbare handgeschriebene Urkunden werden von deutschen Soldaten in die Engelsburg getragen.
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In mid-February, the US Air Force bombed Monte Cassino. The abbey on the mountain was largely destroyed and at least 250 civilians were killed. As a result, the ruins provided the German units with ideal conditions for defense. A bloody battle broke out that lasted for months.
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In this battle, thousands upon thousands of soldiers on both sides died. But both military leaders were of course willing to pay that price. Because what would have been the alternative? The Allies would have had to say, okay, we'll agree to a draw. I don't think that would have happened. You had to win the war.
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And if you then lose a few thousands of people, then that's the way it is. And for the Germans, after all, there was no alternative. Because the question was, if they withdrew, where was a better defensive position?
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It was not until mid-May that Allied units succeeded in taking Monte Cassino. More than 50,000 of their soldiers had previously been killed or wounded. The Wehrmacht estimated the losses on the German side at 20,000 men. The road to Rome was clear. On 4 June
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1944, GIs of the US Fifth Army entered the Italian capital without a fight. Rome had previously been declared a free city, but the war in Italy was far from over. Fierce fighting followed in central and northern Italy that would last until the spring of 1945.
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We will defend our artists, whatever they shall may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields. and in the streets. We will fight in the hills. We will never surrender.
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The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. We will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.
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And we, the most total and radical, could ever imagine.
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The Nazis entered this war and they were rather childish to reason that they were going to bomb everybody else.
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In the spring of 1944, Germany was firmly in the grip of war. The Allies had long since gained air supremacy over the Third Reich. German cities were hit by bombing raids almost daily. Apocalypse was normal. The war had arrived on the home front, and its catastrophic course could no longer be concealed.
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The bombing of cities like Cologne, Bremen, Hamburg and Berlin was part of everyday life of a significant part of the German population. The war was quite close at hand in and around the Reich, especially since we're talking about massive losses on the part of the German civilian population as well as the massive losses in the Wehrmacht. That means that from the regime's point of view, the war was not going at all as they imagined.
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Nevertheless, maintaining the morale of the people was the job of the home-front dictator Joseph Goebbels. In his function as Gauleiter of Berlin, he personally took charge of the fate of the bombed-out citizens. Perseverance was the motto.
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The mood could certainly crumble in one place or another. The regime could cede at that. or that there was sadness about losses or worries and hardships after bombing raids. But at the same time, the decisive factor was the people's attitude in the language of Nazi propaganda. And the attitude seemed to be quite stable for a long time from the regime's point of view.
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The Germans reacted differently to the tense situation, with fanatical defiance, with equanimity or even fatalistic resignation. Above all, Faith in Adolf Hitler helped many to persevere. The culture of the Führer was very important because the Führer, despite all the disputes that existed in the system, including the conflicting interests of internal groups and organizations, The Führer was always seen as a figure of identification,
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as the one who held everything together and brought it all together, and really also as a kind of luminous figure. If one assumed that National Socialism was an atheistic regime, then the Führer took on a quasi-godlike character.
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Despite major failures in the second half of the war, which more and more couldn't be denied, The Hitler cult nevertheless remained intact to a large degree because Hitler was the central figure to whom people had already been orienting themselves for years and there had been no alternative for a long time.
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The dictator hadn't been seen in Berlin for quite some time.
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On the occasion of his 55th birthday, Hitler's most loyal supporter, Joseph Goebbels, organized a propaganda event in the capital in his absence. on April 20 to demonstrate the loyalty of the Volksgemeinschaft. A parade was held on Unter den Linden for the Fuhrer as well as for the National Socialist Newsreel.
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The Prime Minister, Dr. Goebbels, speaks. If we spend a whole year with our fleiss...
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and to our courage to confess to the work of the Führer, then we want to say to him on his birthday, words that come from the depths of our hearts, to his person. We want to wish him health and strength, and above all a blessed hand.
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He should know at any time that he can rely on his people. Even in this fight for life and death, he is and remains what he has always been to us. Our Hitler.
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You also had to demonstrate a touch of normality in 1944, since everyone knew that April 20th was an important date. Hitler somehow had to show himself. He rarely spoke, he rarely appeared in public. So they had to stage something, Goebbels' speech in the Schlüterhof at the concert of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and so on. That was the minimum program put together to show that Hitler was still there and he was still alive.
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Instead of building more and more fighter planes for defensive battles against the Allies, Hitler ordered the production of mainly bombers. Weapons designed to impede the Allied advance also met with the Fuhrer's approval, such as this device for destroying railroad tracks. Hitler didn't comment publicly. on the devastation of the air war.
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He left it to Goebbels, all this propaganda work, and withdrew more and more from the public eye. Officially, of course, this was with work overload. Hitler was, as it was already described in the propaganda, day and night for Germany's victory and Germany's fate, and therefore he had no time to make speeches. But of course, it was also connected with this loss of prestige that he then withdrew from public life. And thus this myth of course continued to have an impact.
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For most of the year, Hitler retreated to Berghof in the Bergesgaden Alps. The dictator, who had always been confident of his effect on the masses, gave only three radio speeches in 1944 and made no public appearances.
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Goebbels tried for months to persuade Hitler to give a speech in public to give the people hope again. And Hitler didn't want to.
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He always said, first we need victories again. So, as things were, he didn't want to do that.
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In view of the lack of success on all fronts, the dictator increasingly doubted his general's willingness to persevere. Hitler didn't tolerate criticism of his decisions. No one. and his entourage dared to point out to the Commander-in-Chief the hopelessness of the situation. On the contrary,
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There was this famous scene at Obersalzberg, where Hitler gathered his generals and shouted at them, and I expect the generals to stand around me with their sabers drawn to defend me till the end. Then Field Marshal von Manstein stood up and said, Yes, my Führer, that's exactly how it will be.
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Meanwhile, in the capital, which had been hit by numerous Allied bombing raids, the air raid alarms blared more and more often. and not just at night. Since March of 1944, US bombers had also been conducting daytime air raids on Berlin.
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More than half a million civilians would fall victim to the bombing. Joseph Goebbels held the fort for his Fuhrer in the capital of the Reich. The Minister of Propaganda used every opportunity as a stage for the newsreel. Mr. Goebbels, the area of particularly severe fighters against criminal bomb terror, your remarks.
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In his capacity as the Gauleiter of Berlin, Goebbels was close to the people. Nazi propaganda unscrupulously presented the Berliners as steadfast heroes of the air war.
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Berlin cannot be shaken by the British-American air gangsters and blockheads. Goebbels simply had the spirit.
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Goebbels just had a built-in instinct to give the people what they wanted. Of course, because he had a large news network that he could pick from, where fluctuations and reversals were also perceived, registered, passed on, and then reacted to.
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The Germans were to be kept happy until the bitter end. The Minister of Propaganda had vaudeville and cinema performances move from bombed-out venues to buildings that were still intact. Entertainment during total war.
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The newsreels did not show the true face of war. Amateur footage of a funeral for bombing victims in Nordenham near Bremerhaven revealed the grief and despair of the people. Despite the horror and fear, Germans had to go on with their daily lives day after day.
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The talent, especially for women in the war, was very high. Most of the men were at the front, or dead or missing. Life was hard every day.
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Imagine that you had to work 10 hours in a factory, then come home, take care of the children, do homework. Then there were air raids at night. You couldn't sleep. You're afraid. The children are afraid. And the next day it starts all over again. And the whole thing is fraught with a lot of uncertainty as to whether everyone would even survive.
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The Allies were already preparing for the next blow against the Third Reich. The invasion? on the coast of northern France.
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The onslaught was to be stopped by the so-called Atlantic Wall, a chain of defensive positions on the Channel Coast.
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The hero of the failed African campaign, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, was responsible for protecting the Reich's borders on the Atlantic. He was responsible for the expansion of the fortifications and making them impregnable.
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However, this Atlantic wall wasn't finished yet. It was a wall with big gaps. You can't think of it as a wall that was more or less like a string of pearls with several points loosely connected.
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Here's where the focus of the combatants were, the coastline between Calais and Normandy. The Germans weren't sure exactly where the landings would take place.
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The expansion of the defensive facilities faltered. due to the disastrous war situation, which meant that supplies weren't coming in. Rommel recognized the hopelessness of the venture and put all his eggs in one basket.
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It was clear to the Germans where the Allies would land. They would either come in at the Pas-de-Calais or in Normandy. In the end, the Germans, and especially Rommel, chose the Pas-de-Calais, and that was the wrong choice. In England, meanwhile, the Allies... preparations were in full swing. The decision of where to land had already been decided. A different location than what the Germans expected. Normandy was chosen because Pas-de-Calais, which would allow a shorter channel crossing,
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was relatively well fortified by the Germans and Normandy had the great advantage of being conveniently located. One could approach from all directions.
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The whole of southern England resembled a huge army camp. The Allies prepared for the invasion with elaborate maneuvers. In the meantime, their intelligence services launched deliberate deceptive maneuvers to mislead the Germans. Fictitious units were set up. and dummy tanks and aircraft were used to make the Wehrmacht believe that a channel crossing would take place at Calais.
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Germany first was Winston Churchill's motto. The only thing the British couldn't agree on with the commander-in-chief of the Americans, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was the timing of the landing on the continent.
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That's a question of when. And that was a big point of contention between the Americans and the British. The British didn't really want to do it at all. Ultimately, the British wanted to defend their empire and wanted to secure the Mediterranean. The Americans said, what on earth are we doing in the Mediterranean? And then ultimately got their way. But there was a struggle over the crucial question, when would they have enough landing craft?
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And while a material battle of gigantic proportions was being prepared on the Atlantic, There was a festive mood in Obersalzburg. Eva Braun's younger sister Gretel married SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Fegelein on June 3, 1944. The Führer was also present at the reception at the Berghof near Berchtesgaden. The celebrations among Hitler's closest friends lasted three days. No one here seemed to be thinking about a possible defeat.
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Hitler was convinced that he could turn back the Allies in France.
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Hitler's strategy was as follows. We can lose ground in the east, and that wouldn't threaten our Reich. But in the west, if the western allies land there, they could immediately advance into the Ruhr and thus capture the heart of our industry. Therefore, Hitler ordered reinforcements to be sent to the west in the future.
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But by the 4th of June, the Germans had lost the capital of their most important ally, the Wehrmacht. had been unable to hold Rome and had declared it an open city. The Allies now marched in, in triumph, and the Romans enthusiastically celebrated their liberation.
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Enraged, they stormed the Palazzo Venezia, the former seat of government of their Duce Benito Mussolini.
6:32:10
Fascism has never been as strongly entrenched in Italy as National Socialism was in Germany. Mussolini had been deposed by the Fascist Grand Council. It was of course inconceivable that somehow a National Socialist Grand Council would depose Hitler. And in Italy at least part of the population saw the state as corrupt and didn't see why they should fight for this fascist state. Of course there were a few, but not as many as in Germany. And actually in Italy,
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war fatigue was much greater than in Germany and it was clear, it was over.
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German soldiers were taken prisoner. The Wehrmacht was able to delay the advance of US troops in southern Italy for half a year. However, they had nothing to go against the Allied superiority in men and material. The German military leadership drew no conclusions from the defeat for its future strategy.
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And so now you could say that the fall of Rome didn't really matter, but the big question was, how were they actually going to stop the Allied advance? Did they have any means at all to ever become offensive again? They didn't really have that.
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And they didn't really learn from it. The real problem that actually existed was that the Allies landed in Salerno in September of 43 and in Anzio near Rome in January 44. And both landing operations were a bit of a prelude, very similar to the procedure to the later landing in Normandy, which was bigger, of course, but in similar principle. And the Germans found they couldn't stop the Allies. It was really a principle of hope, but the prelude, as to how D-Day would play out,
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had already been experienced on a smaller scale in Italy. And both battles were lost.
6:34:04
In England, the Allied commander-in-chief, General Eisenhower, was planning the final details of the invasion. It was important to determine the right time. The landing had already been postponed several times due to bad weather conditions.
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The man with the final say was Eisenhower. He was the commander-in-chief. There was a structure. The British and the Americans had divided the world into theaters of war and Eisenhower gave the orders. But of course he... He also had to coordinate with the British, but he had the final word. And the weather, after all, gets bad in early June.
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So bad that the Germans didn't think they could land at all. And then, for example, Rommel went to see his wife for her birthday. And that's when Eisenhower gave the green light.
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On June 3, 1944, the first Allied troops boarded ships. More than one and a half million U.S. soldiers were standing by for Operation Overlord. They were joined by nearly 20 divisions of British, Canadians, Poles, and Free French. The German troops couldn't grasp the scale of the attack until it had already begun. The Normandy landings were indeed one of the very great failures. of german intelligence it was a complete surprise that the largest armada in the history of the world suddenly
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appeared dawn off the coast of normandy like a rabbit coming out of a top hat who said oops here i am there was no round table of intelligence services in germany who said so what have we heard from which sources and what is now the most probable this thing but rather the air force did its own thing the navy did its own thing It was a complete muddle. And that, of course, meant in principle that a surprise could succeed.
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It all began in the early morning hours of June 6, 1944. D-Day. Decision day.
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The Allies had assembled an armada the likes of which the world had never seen. Over 5,000 ships, including 4,000 landing craft and over 1,000 battleships, cruisers of various kinds. And so on the first day alone, this armada put about 130,000 men ashore.
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The soldiers were preparing to land on nearly 100 kilometers of beach. The battle would be won or lost within 24 hours. There was no plan B. If the Allied troops failed, there would be no second chance. There was no turning back.
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The Allied landings were meticulously planned. First, Allied naval artillery was to open fire on the German positions. Shortly thereafter, squadrons of Allied bombers would continue to bomb the German positions. And only shortly thereafter would the landing flees start to come in and quickly overcome the bunkers and move inland. But from the start, heavy seas... hampered the operation. Ships drifted for miles, landing craft capsized,
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soldiers drowned with their heavy equipment in the freezing waters.
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The soldiers knew that they would have to land at low tide and run for more than 800 meters with no cover and that this was probably not going to be a walk in the park. Some of them had experienced similar landing operations in Italy. But the hope was always that the Allied fire would be so strong that they would get through it all right. But a lot of bomber squadrons had missed the German positions. There was little cover. The soldiers had to run directly into German fire with their eyes open.
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Allied casualties on the various beaches varied widely, ranging from a few hundred, for example, at Salt Beach or Utah Beach, to three to four thousand at Omaha Beach. The famous bloody Omar. However, despite all these losses, they were not as high as Allied planners had originally planned on. They had expected to suffer up to 10,000 casualties on the first day of landing alone.
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Whoever gained the upper hand on this longest day held the key to occupied Europe.
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The day is legendary in American, British and Canadian society. It is one of the greatest amphibious landings of World War
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II. It's the great battle that signified the beginning of the liberation of Western Europe.
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For the British, it was the last great military victory for their army in a conventional war.
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If you compare it to other battles in world history, the Battle of the Somme or Stalingrad or whatever, June the 6th, 1944, was not a particularly bloody day. And it's so hyped up, particularly in American history, so it has a lot of historical significance. But it wasn't because of the casualty. There were other days in the Battle of Normandy that were bloodier for the soldiers.
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On June 6th, the Allies also dropped troops on the continent. During the night, about 20,000 men landed behind the front lines. They too had to struggle with considerable difficulties.
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On D-Day, the Allies landed not only from the sea, but they also used paratroopers and cargo gliders in the rear to occupy areas from the rear and prevent the Germans from getting reinforcements to the landing points.
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American losses were quite high because the Germans had dammed up the rivers there, because they had also built obstacles against cargo gliders in which the material, some of the material was transported, some parachuted, some landed in gliders. And it was quite a considerable fighting force which also ensured that the Americans could advance inland from the beach relatively quickly. And that also prevented the first German counterattacks.
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In the morning, they fought their way to their units. Inland, the Allied troops suffered unexpectedly high losses.
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Allied planning prior to the landing was totally focused on the amphibious landing itself. The planners weren't really aware of what happened next, and contrary to expectations, the Germans put up dogged resistance. especially in the hatch rows of Normandy in the so-called Boccage. There were major battles in a very small area where the Allies' advance was bloody, moving from field to field, and sometimes these fields were no larger than 100 by 100 meters.
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And there were also American reports that refer events there to a jungle war, which reminded some of the war in the Pacific.
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There were six weeks of heavy fighting in Normandy, very similar to French warfare in the First World War. In terms of casualties, the battle was similar to that of Verdun. And for many participants, this battle was one of the most formative of their lives.
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And you can also glean that from German files how officers, high-ranking officers, who experienced this, experienced this battle, and how thousands... Tens of thousands of Germans died there. And by the way, the Allies had similar luck. But then they realized that they were no match against Allied superiority and how that changed their view of the war.
6:42:36
Commander-in-Chief Rommel tried to convince Hitler that the situation was hopeless. He stubbornly insisted on them holding the front. But the Allies' fighting strength and air superiority were overwhelming. German counter-offensives came to nothing.
6:42:55
For these Germans, the war was over. Going into captivity was easier for them than for their comrades on the Eastern Front.
6:43:06
If you look at German casualty figures at the end of the Battle of Normandy, 400,000 soldiers died, were wounded or became Allied prisoners of war. At the same time, there were about 600,000 German casualties on the Eastern Front. The big difference, however, is that German lots in the West were largely due to captivity. It was clear to German soldiers that as a prisoner of war of the Allies, you were likely to be treated somewhat in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.
6:43:36
And so it was much easier for a German soldier on the Western Front to throw up his hands and stop fighting than it was on the Eastern
6:43:46
Front.
6:43:47
In the Soviet Union, Stalin also took the initiative. Operation Bagration began on June 22, 1944.
6:44:01
On the third anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Red Army struck back.
6:44:08
Now that the Allies had finally opened the long-awaited Second Front in the West, Soviet troops launched a devastating strike against the Wehrmacht.
6:44:21
The Soviet offensive against Army Group Center in the summer of 1944 was underrated for a long time. It was overshadowed by the Second Front, the Allied invasion of Normandy. But it was actually the greatest military catastrophe that the German Reich had to endure. Within a few weeks this Red Army succeeded in crushing the entire Army Group Center.
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The Germans are hopelessly understaffed. The Germans were hopelessly outnumbered. 2.5 million Soviet soldiers against 1 million Germans. The line of the front was very awkward for the Germans. There was a huge front area sticking out. The rear was partly or to a large extent already in the hands of the Soviet partisans. German reconnaissance of the enemy drew completely wrong conclusions and believed that the main attack would take place much further south. And finally,
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Hitler was also against any sort of mobile warfare.
6:45:20
The dictator had long since tied his personal fate, as well as that of the entire country, to the ground. to the outcome of the war and forbade any retreat. He didn't have a convincing strategy.
6:45:35
There was always the hope that the Führer was a genius, that the Führer would still do something, that the Führer would pull something out of his back pocket, some miracle weapon, or that he still had some reserve. You just had to hold out long enough. That was actually the propaganda slogan.
6:45:52
In the morning mist, German grenadiers advance to attack a Soviet bridgehead. Over the roads of Fuhrland, the pursuit with men and tanks rolling, which resist the Soviet assault.
6:46:13
Just like the Anglo-Americans, the Soviets also suffer daily high tank losses.
6:46:36
The Panzerfaust has also been greatly defended in the east. Grenadiers and assault rifles are waiting for an enemy Panzerstoß. The first T-34s are advancing and being shot down.
6:47:01
Stalin also knew how to use propaganda and presented himself as the savior of the Soviet Empire. Two days before the offensive, he had his submissive comrades award him the Medal for the Defense of Moscow. However, the dictator left the planning of Operation Bagration to his generals.
6:47:25
Stalin, like Hitler, was a military control freak. But he was, one doesn't really know because the files haven't been released yet, he seems to have held back more than his German counterparts.
6:47:40
The Red Army had learned from its failed offensives and attacked with a significantly superior force on a front that was 1,100 kilometers long. The Soviets managed to break through and advance. to 600 kilometers to the west.
6:47:58
Army Group Center was crushed. The defeated troops now became part of a perfidious propaganda show. On July 17, 1944, Stalin paraded 55,000 defeated Wehrmacht soldiers through Moscow's streets.
6:48:17
Stalin very cleverly combined this demonstration with a message to the people. The Wehrmacht is not a invincible. The Wehrmacht consists to a large extent of old men. The time of the young worldly warriors was over. It was important for him to show his citizens what the people who had invaded their country looked like. And of course, it was a deliberate act of humiliation, which was, of course, forbidden under the laws of war. According to the Geneva Convention,
6:48:45
prisoners of war may not be lined up or paraded.
6:48:50
They were given castor oil beforehand so they couldn't contain themselves and after the soldiers had marched through, Moscow's street cleaning vehicles cleaned up after them. That was a cynical and nasty spectacle. They wanted to show the master race were just poor wretches. And that worked quite well. You saw fat generals who corresponded exactly to this image of the fat over fat general. And you saw emaciated soldiers who were often much older,
6:49:15
the last troops that Hitler had left marching through the streets. It didn't trigger the effect on the people that it was supposed to. The police didn't have to keep the citizens of Moscow from attacking the Wehrmacht soldiers. Instead, they simply stood silently at the side of the road. They actually felt sorry for these soldiers because they saw in them their own soldiers. Nevertheless, it was important to Stalin and his people to demonstrate precisely that.
6:49:44
They had come as the master race and now they showed the people. This is what they look like.
6:49:51
Three days earlier, Adolf Hitler had traveled to his headquarters in Rastenburg, East Prussia. Many of the buildings in the complex had been covered with bunkers to protect them from air attacks, but the Nazi leadership was not prepared for an attack from within.
6:50:13
On July 20, 1944, a bomb exploded during a meeting with the Fuhrer. It had been smuggled into the barracks by Klaus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. He had gathered a circle of conspirators around him. They were convinced that the bomb had been planted in the barracks. that Hitler had to die in order to save Germany from ruin. On the one hand, he recognized the criminal character of this war and that this war was lost and that more and more people would die. There could no longer be a victory.
6:50:41
And therefore it had to be stopped. The problem for Stauffenberg was how to get to Hitler. He was just a small fly in the high command of the army in the Bendlerbach. He couldn't just walk into the Führer's headquarters and say, I would like an appointment with the Führer and give him an explosive. The problem was that very few conspirators had access, but he finally got access when he became the Chief of Staff of the Army Reserve on July 1, 1944. That gave him the right to attend briefings,
6:51:10
and that then put him in a dual role, being the head of the coup and also the one to plant the bomb.
6:51:19
The destroyed barracks meeting room bears witness to the force of the explosion.
6:51:26
But Adolf Hitler survived the assassination attempt and later that same afternoon, just three hours after the attack, welcomed Benito Mussolini at Wolf's Lair train station. Together, they visited the destroyed barracks. That night, in a mobile radio van he had brought in specially for the purpose, Hitler delivered a radio address. He presented himself in his tried and tested manner as the leader chosen by fate.
6:52:09
Then the machinery of the Third Reich began to unearth this conspiracy. And there are hundreds of people, 800, 900, who are also executed. And anyone who had a connection with the 20th of July then died. If someone comes into contact with the 20th July, he is dead.
6:52:28
Most are subjected to a show trial before the people's court. This film footage, shot on Hitler's orders, was never shown. Even Nazi propaganda found the grating roar of presiding judge Roland Freisler unsuitable for publicity. ...
6:52:56
Many of the conspirators retained their dignity, although the verdicts were a foregone conclusion. Death by hanging. They were executed in Plitzensee prison with wire nooses hung on meat hooks and filmed for Hitler. The terror of Nazi rule reached one of its cruel climaxes.
6:53:16
The crime was decisive for... The assassination was actually a decisive moment because afterwards the Nazi system had a much tighter grip on society. After July of 1944 all checks to the system had gone. And now there was no buffer at all between them. Anyone who stuck their head up now lost it and now the system could really take action. and had stuck a tight grip on German society, that they were able to divide the society and drag it down with them.
6:53:58
In the course of their offensive, Soviet troops reached Lublin on July 24. Here, they stumbled upon the remains of a monstrous crime.
6:54:07
As the Red Army advanced toward Lublin, Soviet soldiers also liberated the Majdanek death camp. And Majdanek was actually the first real death camp that the Allies liberated.
6:54:21
In view of the rapid advance of the Red Army, SS troops had hastily tried to cover up their misdeeds just a day before and ordered the camp to be closed. However, they weren't able to destroy the gas chambers. As early as August, the first journalists visited Majdanek and published photos and reports. Tens of thousands were murdered in this camp.
6:54:45
Here, for the first time, the full extent of the genocide made possible by this criminal war was revealed.
6:54:58
Majdanek was by no means the largest and most important extermination camp. But for the first time, the Allies had an idea of what had transpired and they had issued a communiqué. It was then translated into five languages.
6:55:16
And the effect cannot be imagined strongly enough. Because of course, all war propaganda tends to be exaggerated. But the Allies were suddenly confronted with a reality that actually completely confirmed these exaggerations. And that of course was a completely different dimension. And then there was also the practical attempt to preserve it as a place of remembrance, even during the war. And in the months that followed, things continued. And I think it was Thomas Mann who wrote,
6:55:46
this secret is about to be revealed and the disgrace of Germany will lie before the eyes of the world.
6:55:56
While the war was still in full swing, a memorial service for the victims of the death camp was held on August 6 and was reported worldwide.
6:56:09
I think the liberation of the concentration camps had a very decisive impact on how the Germans were viewed. For the Americans, the war was a conventional war against another military power, fought more or less according to the rules of the Geneva Convention. Eisenhower couldn't have imagined what was happening in those camps. The first camp Eisenhower saw shocked him in such a way that after that, the Wehrmacht was no longer a subject worthy of discussion for him.
6:56:42
He also refused to receive any German general. After they had seen that, they had a completely different view of the Wehrmacht, because they saw, they defended it. They had camps like that in the hinterland, and they knew it, and they defended this regime.
6:57:01
The victors forced the German soldiers to see the horror with their own eyes. Even if not all of them were direct perpetrators, blind obedience often led to inconceivable crimes. And yet… No one made another attempt, like the conspirators on July 20th, to overthrow the criminal regime in order to end the Nazi terror.
6:57:30
On the Western Front, Allied troops struggled for weeks to break out of the Normandy beachhead. They wanted to advance toward the Seine as soon as possible.
6:57:44
The Germans put up stubborn resistance. For weeks they engaged in heavy fighting with the Allies. By the end of July, the Wehrmacht had suffered almost 115,000 dead and wounded. Plus, more than 40,000 were made prisoners. Supplies also failed to arrive. Finally, the German frontline collapsed.
6:58:12
It took eight weeks for the Allies to finally break through. That's because the Allies, using their artillery and air power, inflicted heavy losses on the Germans, until the Germans simply didn't have the ability to reinforce their front lines. And so the breakthrough occurred on July 25th.
6:58:31
U.S. troops reached the suburbs of Paris, where the liberators were greeted enthusiastically. The fight for France's freedom seemed to be over. The Allies had landed in Provence as well.
6:58:46
But Hitler, enraged, ordered his generals to raise the French capital to the ground before they retreated.
6:58:55
Hitler's idea was that Paris had to burn and that his general there, General Koltitz, should destroy Paris. Paris should be destroyed. General von Koltitz was told by the American general, I think it may have been Eisenhower, that if you destroy the city of Paris, you will be held responsible after the war.
6:59:17
The warning was that he would be treated as a war criminal if he dared to carry out the destruction order. In fact, on the day of the liberation of Paris, there were still sporadic exchanges of fire between US troops and German soldiers. It's possible. that those were only mock battles with which Koltitz wanted to cover up his refusal to obey Hitler's orders.
6:59:41
Koltitz was maneuvering, he was in charge, and he maneuvered back and forth until he actually no longer had the means. He used his leeway in such a way that at some point he no longer had the means or lacked the necessary explosives to reduce Paris to rubble.
6:59:59
On the afternoon of July 25th, Coltitz officially handed the city over to French forces under the command of Major General Leclerc. « Enfin on respire » was the cry those days. At last, we can breathe a sigh of relief. All of Paris was in the streets. The Germans had been defeated.
7:00:19
The summer of 1944 meant three heavy defeats for the Germans. First in the west, occupied France was lost. In the east... Army Group Center was crushed and in the south, Rome was lost and the Germans had to retreat to northern Italy. Nevertheless, that didn't mean that the war was over. There were several reasons for that.
7:00:40
One of them was that the Germans were not thrown back on their borders and that created a special motivation for many soldiers. Now they were fighting for their homeland, for their own farm, for their own house. For these soldiers, The war was over. Many were relieved to have finally escaped the hopeless struggle,
7:01:03
but many were also driven by fear. Soon, the Allies would be at the borders of the Third Reich. They would not be able to save their country from the ravages of impending doom.
7:01:56
We should defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We should fight on the beaches, we should fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.
7:02:28
The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. We will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.
7:03:13
Nazis will turn to the House of Force, and it's gonna be... The Nazis entered this war, and they were rather childish believing that they were going to bomb everybody else, and nobody was going to bomb them.
7:04:01
In the summer of 1944, the United States Pacific Fleet was headed for the Mariana Islands.
7:04:12
U.S. forces reached Saipan on June 15. After a hard-fought amphibious landing on the tropical beaches, the Marines advanced inland, waging protracted battles kilometer after kilometer because the defenders had fortified the island extremely well.
7:04:31
In 1944, Pacific Islands like the Mariana Islands were bitterly contested and fiercely fought over because Japanese officers were ordered to halt the Mariana Islands to the last man and to the last bullet.
7:04:51
Because it was quite clear to the Japanese military leadership that from the Mariana, American bombers would be able to reach the Japanese mother islands and would be able to bomb Tokyo as well.
7:05:10
During the war against Japan, US forces combined two thrusts.
7:05:15
One was via New Guinea and the Philippines, the other via the Central Pacific.
7:05:22
The decisive thrust of the war was in the Central Pacific because the Central Pacific divides the Japanese sphere of power into a northern and southern half, and because from the Central Pacific, from the Marianas, American B-29s could bomb Japan.
7:05:40
The images of the bloody amphibious landings were similar to those taken a few days earlier in Europe. The Normandy invasion began on June 6, 1944, on the beaches of France. Here, as there, the Allies threw incredible quantities of men and material into battle, but that's where the parallels between the two theaters of war ended.
7:06:09
It was really a global war, which also had very different reasons, a different course, but each with its own logic. The Pacific War was not just an offshoot of Europe, it had its own value, a war of its own logic. And then there was this parallelism. It was quite remarkable what was achieved logistically.
7:06:34
12,000 defenders had entrenched themselves on Saipan. After the Japanese fleet was crushed in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, they were cut off from all supplies. The Japanese soldiers were hiding in the jungle and in extensive cave systems.
7:06:56
Japanese war propaganda quite strongly fueled the will on the part of Japanese soldiers to really fight to the death. to hold on to these small and seemingly insignificant islands.
7:07:13
The Japanese demanded the utmost from their opponents. In accordance with the Bushido code, they didn't give an inch. To force the defenders out of their cave systems, the American soldiers perfected their flamethrower tactics.
7:07:28
They attacked the caves in groups, supported by artillery and machine guns. Japanese who rushed out of their caves on fire were gunned down by the GIs. The slaughter lasted three weeks.
7:07:44
Japanese soldiers rarely surrendered. Instead, they preferred to throw themselves to their deaths. The Marines' prisoners were almost exclusively Korean forced laborers.
7:07:56
And then they entered an area with the Japanese civilian population for the first time. Before that, you were only in the outposts. In Saipan, the Japanese had massive casualties. They performed these banzai attacks, where they were being mowed down by the hundreds and thousands. And it was compounded by the fact that whether voluntarily or force, probably more by force, the Japanese civilian population was also jumping off cliffs.
7:08:31
to their death. This led the Americans to wonder what if even the Japanese civilian population wouldn't surrender, how was the war going to end? We were to have them kill every Japanese person one by one and we might be able to do that. But that also meant there could be enormous casualties on our side.
7:08:49
By the end of the Battle of Saipan, some 26,000 Japanese army soldiers and about 3,500 US Marines had lost their lives.
7:09:01
Meanwhile, in Moscow, Joseph Stalin was making plans for the further course of his offensive against the Third Reich. The Red Army had been advancing successfully since June 22, 1944, which was the third anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
7:09:22
Within five weeks they had advanced as far as Poland. As Soviet troops approached Warsaw, Stalin seized the opportunity to extend his claim to rule Poland.
7:09:35
While the Red Army advanced to the Vistula, the Polish underground resistance finally tried to strike against the Germans. The Polish Home Army had set itself the goal of liberating the country and saw the time had come to act.
7:09:53
The Poles were of course massively anti-German, anti-Nazi, but probably anti-Soviet to a similar degree.
7:10:02
The question now was, it's of no use to us if we get rid of German rule and then come under Soviet rule. And that's why they thought, if we liberate Warsaw, liberate our capital on our own before the Soviets arrive, That would give us political weight in shaping post-war Poland. On August 1, 1944,
7:10:27
the Polish Home Army, the Armia Krajowa, dared to revolt in Warsaw. 45,000 men were ready, but many of them were inadequately armed or not armed at all. The insurgents completely lacked any sort of heavy weaponry. The German Wehrmacht brutally... put down the uprising. As always, the Germans reacted extremely quickly in such situations. They brought in troops from everywhere and fought that uprising with the most brutal force. And the Armia Krajowa couldn't do anything but try
7:10:59
to go down heroically and fight against the Germans. And it was clear relatively quickly by the first days of August that they didn't stand a chance against these Germans who were bringing in troops on a massive scale.
7:11:12
The last resistance of the West in Warsaw has finally collapsed under the air of the German forces. The fighter planes are destroying a block of houses that is one of the strongest resistance in the Baltic. An inferno broke out over Warsaw.
7:11:34
The Germans were using this to actually wipe out this Warsaw. That's why they were fighting not only militarily against the Polish Home Army, but especially in those first days of August, the concept was to put down this uprising with brutal force in order to punish the Polish civilian population at the same time. So there were hundreds of thousands of dead in that struggle. It was a zenith of violence, a zenith of terror that... Poland was experiencing there from the Germans.
7:12:05
Stalin did nothing to save Warsaw. He planned to secure his power in Poland by means of a puppet government. Stalin ordered the Red Army to wait until the Germans had finished the job.
7:12:21
It was clear to him that after the war there would be no independent nationalist Poland, because he knew that the Polish nationalists were the worst enemies of the Bolsheviks. and he didn't want to see anyone from this force in the Polish government. And therefore he quite cynically let the Germans do the bloody work, which he then didn't have to do. And the Red Army only marched into Warsaw when that fight was over.
7:12:48
SS Chief Himmler ordered all inhabitants of Warsaw to be killed and the city razed to the ground. The slaughter lasted 63 days. No one knows the exact number of victims. Among Polish civilians alone, the figures vary between 150 and 225,000 dead.
7:13:07
The West played along with Stalin's game. In October of 1944, Winston Churchill traveled to Moscow. Together with Stalin, the British Prime Minister drafted a plan for the division of Eastern Europe after the war.
7:13:24
Famously infamous was the so-called note on which was noted in handwriting into which spheres of influence the eastern territories of Europe should fall. The Baltic states and Poland were to be completely under the influence of the Soviet Union. Romania, to a large extent, to the Soviet Union. Bulgaria likewise. Yugoslavia, 50% to the Soviet Union and 50% under Western influence. It is rumored that Churchill wrote the note and Stalin checked off each point noted on it.
7:13:56
The note has generally been regarded as a rather cynical expression of great power behavior that decided the post-war fate over the heads of millions of people.
7:14:11
On their retreat, the Wehrmacht left behind Scorched Earth, the order which officially read loosening, clearing, paralysis and destruction from the Soviet Union. resulted in the Germans devastating entire areas. Supplies were destroyed, machinery destroyed, towns and villages burned down, people deported. The marauding soldiers soon became almost unstoppable.
7:14:35
What actually happened then was basically an unprecedented program of destruction. Everything of value was destroyed. There was, just to give you one example, this infamous rail wolf that ripped up all the rail ties. Dams were being blown up. There was a really huge plain that a lot of times the only thing left standing were chimneys. Villages of chimneys made of bricks. And those chimneys were still sticking up in the air and everything else was just flattened.
7:15:35
was supposed to turn the tide and, at Adolf Hitler's behest, wipe out cities in Great Britain.
7:15:43
Technically, the V2 was actually a very modern device, which initiated the development of the Moon rocket. But it was wonderful for the Allies that the Germans built it, because it was so infinitely expensive and so infinitely complex.
7:15:59
If the Germans had built conventional weapons, airplanes, tanks, They could have done much more damage with it. The effect militarily was almost zero. They killed a few thousand civilians, but that was it. On September 8, 1944,
7:16:18
the first launch was successful. By the end of the war, 1,400 V-2 rockets had been fired, mainly from mobile launch pads in Holland. The V-2 was so fast that British anti-aircraft systems failed. Without warning, the rockets hit residential neighborhoods, whose residents couldn't get to safety in time. In London, thousands died. Another prestige object of the Nazis was the newly developed Me 262 jet fighter, which was produced at enormous cost in terms of material. The aircraft,
7:16:50
which could reach speeds of up to 900 km per hour, was intended to put an end to Allied air supremacy. However, the first jets weren't ready for operation. until November of 1944. Due to the lack of fuel, the fighters could only rarely take off. In the end, the Me 262 was unable to break the superiority of the enemy air force. The Messerschmitt 262 was a revolutionary aircraft, clearly ahead of its time. But no airplane decides a war. When we examine air warfare,
7:17:23
we find time and again that technology is not actually decisive. That depends on tactics. and above all on numbers and of course the maximum 200 jet fighters would not have any significant effect at all on the contrary they shot down some bombers but lost just as many of their own fighters so that fizzled out and was mainly a means of propaganda the germans had tactical weapons so they were almost always superior to their opponents the
7:17:53
germans undoubtedly had the best tanks and according to allied statements the germans had excellent infantry weapons the mg-42 the assault rifle 44 the germans really made superior tactical weapons but the strategic weapons strategic bombers or something like that in all these things the germans were inferior because they neglected the battle for the japanese occupied philippines had been raging in the gulf of late since october of 1944
7:18:20
island by island u.s troops had pushed japan's soldiers back across the pacific the largest naval battle and history ended in favor of the Americans.
7:18:31
Ever since he retreated from the Japanese with his troops in December of 1941, US General Douglas MacArthur had declared that the recapture of the Philippines was a personal matter.
7:18:46
Douglas MacArthur was a man who came from a very traditional military family and for family reasons he also felt very connected to the Philippines. His father, for example, had also already served in the Philippines. His failure to hold and defend the Philippines was a very great shock for him. He made a promise when he left the Philippines, and he wanted to keep that promise. At the time, he said, I'll be back, very much like the Terminator, I'll be back. That's what it was all about for him.
7:19:17
And for him, the reconquest of the Philippines was above all symbolic, a personal symbolic value.
7:19:35
During the Battle of Leyte, Japanese suicide squads known as kamikaze planes were used for the first time.
7:19:53
Japanese pilots deliberately flew their aircraft into American warships.
7:20:11
While the phenomenon did not decisively weaken U.S. forces during those war years, it exposed soldiers and sailors to extraordinary nervous strain.
7:20:26
On the western border of the Third Reich, the so-called West Wall was unable to stop the Allied forces. The troops' goal was the Rhine.
7:20:38
During their advance, however, the US soldiers encountered unexpectedly strong resistance. In the forests near Aachen, they engaged in fierce battles with German Wehrmacht units. Supplies which had to be brought in from southern France and Normandy also came to a standstill.
7:20:59
They could take some German villages, but there they were stuck, because they ran out of gas. That's where the priorities were misplaced, and the Germans could reorganize themselves.
7:21:09
But the Germans were not as well prepared as the newsreel would have you believe.
7:21:25
German reserves are marching in. With all weapons equipped, take your positions.
7:21:31
Although the war was clearly lost by the summer of 1944 at the latest, the Wehrmacht continued to fight. They didn't want to endure another 1918, no defeat, where it could be said that we surrendered too soon.
7:21:44
What the soldiers had in mind this time was that it was better to surrender five minutes after 12 than five minutes before 12. All of this, of course, with horrendous losses, which far exceeded anything we had seen before.
7:22:02
On October 12th, US troops attacked Aachen. Four days later, they closed the ring around the city.
7:22:10
Hitler demanded that the imperial city was to be defended to the last drop of blood. About 3,000 men followed his orders, among them numerous SS men and volunteers from the Hitler Youth. They initiated a house-to-house battle with heavy losses. On October 21st, the German commander finally surrendered officially. Anyone who wanted to surrender before then, despite the hopeless situation, had to expect to be fanatically persecuted.
7:22:37
Anyone who hung a white cloth out of the window and wanted to surrender, Aachen was one of the first cities to be liberated, was then considered a defeatist or could be murdered.
7:22:54
The
7:22:56
SS also now turned on its own population.
7:22:59
The desertion of soldiers was pursued more intensely than before. So order collapsed on the one hand in the Reich, and violence struck back at the Germans from the outside. But the Nazis, so to speak, beat their fellow Germans to persevere.
7:23:16
These men have fought the enemy fifty times in close combat. Now you will receive the Golden Close Combat Flag from the Führer.
7:23:32
Fifty times they saw the white in the eyes of the enemy and forced him with the blank weapon. Who wants to say with words what that means?
7:23:57
In Berlin, Joseph Goebbels mobilized the remnants of the German population for a march to destruction. The staging of the so-called Volkssturm was intended to demonstrate the invincibility of the Reich.
7:24:43
The Volkssturm was the very last contingent, and everyone, at least that was the idea, all 16 to 60-year-olds were mobilized, mostly equipped with looted weapons or not at all. But as the war progressed, however, these Volkssturm battalions were increasingly deployed to the front line. And that deployment was, of course, completely pointless.
7:25:09
The war in the air also took on new dimensions. No longer were only large cities bombed, but medium-sized cities with industrial sites as well. To defend themselves, the Germans were forced to withdraw their air forces from other fronts. Although militarily effective, the usefulness of the devastating air war is still being disputed to this day.
7:25:35
In my opinion, it shortened the war considerably, because the Germans were forced to invest the majority of their armament resources into the air war to protect the Reich. They actually hoped to achieve two goals with the bombings, namely to break the morale of the general population, but that didn't succeed, and to paralyze arms production, which basically succeeded only very late, and as we know, not as much through the direct... destruction of the production facilities,
7:26:06
but the more effective thing was the destruction of the logistics system, that is, the infrastructure, the railroad facilities. That's what brought production to a standstill.
7:26:22
A destroyed production hall of Daimler works. During the war, the company had mostly built trucks and aircraft engines. However, as before, not only industrial sites, but also civilian targets were bombed, which by the fall of 1944 seemed at least questionable from a moral point of view.
7:26:43
One could argue that the war was actually decided in September of 1944. It was just a matter of time. Yes, that's right. But the war had yet to be won, and the British and Americans weren't on the Rhine yet, and they had a lot of respect for the Rhine and a lot of respect for the Germans. And the question was, of course we're going to win the war, but at what price? And when will this shitty war finally be over? Because there was war fatigue, and to end the war, we had to hit it hard.
7:27:16
The British in particular bombed civilian targets in the Reich. Bombs were loaded on bases in England almost daily. These included 4,000-pound blockbusters that would detonate while still in the air, covering as many house roofs as possible and paving the way for incendiary bombs.
7:27:36
Because the British still had the idea that if they kept burning down the inner cities, then the Germans would somehow give up and the British further wars, further advances, further fighting on land. And that then led to the fact that the British were particularly successful in destroying cities. And those incendiary attacks that they flew also took a particularly large number of human lives. It was certainly the most radical form of warfare against the German civilian population.
7:28:07
About 600,000 German civilians fell victim to the Allied bombing war. In light of such numbers, it was difficult to understand why the Germans continued to support the criminal Nazi regime.
7:28:26
Towards the end, fear really prevailed more and more, as you hear from personal testimonies. We had to win the war because with what we had done, if we lose, we don't even want to imagine what they will do to us. That created a great will to persevere, even after the sometimes terrible bombardments by the Allies, which were aimed at breaking the will of the population to persevere. That simply didn't happen because this total dictatorship of National Socialism still
7:28:55
worked so well in capturing large parts of the population that the distribution of goods, of services... still reached the people.
7:29:05
The Nazi regime not only had to ensure the survival of the population, but it also had to maintain the production of armaments which was necessary for the war. In order to escape the increasingly precise attacks by the British and Americans, production facilities were moved underground throughout the Reich.
7:29:29
One response to the air war was to say we're now moving what we consider to be the most important and central production areas to bomb-proof underground production facilities.
7:29:45
The factories were put in mines, tunnels and underground galleries.
7:29:50
The intention of the enemies to destroy the German armament through planned and massed bomb-throwing
7:29:59
is failed. In time and with German thoroughness, war-definitioned productions were buried under the ground.
7:30:26
That was a big program that was set up there, which again entailed a change in the character of forced labor, because concentration camp inmates were systematically used in those underground relocation projects, and that was where the most deadly working conditions for forced laborers prevailed.
7:30:46
When U.S. troops reached the Mittelwerk manufacturing plant in the Harz Mountains in April of 1945, They found the remains of one of these terrible factories. Prisoners from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp had to build the engines for the V2 here. The labor camp only operated for 18 months. But the inhumane conditions cost the lives of 20,000 people. All the GIs found were a few completely exhausted prisoners.
7:31:15
There, above all, Jewish concentration camp prisoners, or concentration camp prisoners in general, were used because it was very dangerous. The work was very dangerous, but it was also detrimental to their health. And it was the kind of work that was expected from those in whose survival they had no interest in anyway, and where the term extermination through labor absolutely summed up the situation.
7:32:06
The Minister of Armaments who was responsible for using the now 7 million forced laborers was Albert Speer.
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He would visit the deployment area of the latest Wehrmacht offensive. He wanted to follow the battle personally. Adolf Hitler planned to overrun the Allies in the Ardennes. All reserves, still available, were mobilized for this purpose.
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The decision was to be made in the hilly forests of the Ardennes. The Nazi leadership concentrated hundreds of thousands of Wehrmacht soldiers in the border area between the German Reich, Belgium and France.
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The Ardennes offensive was Hitler's attempt to turn the war once again, to give it a military twist. He really believed the Western Allies were at the weakest point in this opposing alliance.
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And if you beat them, so to speak, as you did in 1940, then possibly the whole Western Front would collapse, the Western Allies would withdraw, and then only the Soviet Union would be left. And then, so to speak, the German war machine could focus its full power once again on the Eastern Front.
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The US forces had been trying to advance toward the Rhine for weeks in the Hötgen forest between Aachen and Dürren. they had unexpectedly suffered heavy losses.
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On December 16, 1944, the Wehrmacht offensive Operation Autumn Fog began. At half past five in the morning, the German artillery opened fire. Twenty divisions were ready to attack.
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The Allies were taken completely by surprise by the German offensive. They hadn't expected the Germans to be able to pull together so many tanks and troops. But unlike in 1940, now there were Allied troops in the Ardennes. In 1940, no one was there, and they just marched through. Now there were troops there, and they were fighting too. If we do not succeed, Adolf Hitler declared at a briefing, I don't see any chance of a favorable outcome to this war, but we will get through.
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The deluded dictator still failed to recognize the sheer superiority of his opponents.
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But for the U.S. troops, the offensive was much harder to repel than expected. In the battle that is now known in U.S. military history as the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans inflicted heavy casualties on them.
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For the Americans, the Battle of the Bulge was a very significant experience, because American troops for the first time actually experienced what land warfare had meant in Europe during the previous wars.
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Wars under terrible weather conditions and wars in difficult terrain. And of course, these are all the reasons that contributed to this myth. It was also the bloodiest land battle fought by the US Army during World War II. About 19,000 soldiers were killed during that period.
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At first, the Germans had the element of surprise on their side. Entire units with thousands of soldiers fell into their hands, as the newsreel reported triumphantly.
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Pre-existing German columns, combat vehicles, a train, a cross on one side and three columns of marching white and black Americans on the other side.
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With racist condescension, Nazi propaganda tried to cover up the hopelessness of the Wehrmacht's military situation. The plan to crush the Allies no longer had much to do with reality.
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The idea that this plan was based on was that you had to get your fuel from the American depots. And that was of course a plan that was based on so many intangibles that the German divisions, there were a lot of SS divisions involved, so it was really again what the Reich was somehow able to scrape together, including weapons. The Germans then managed to advance about 100 kilometers into Belgian territory.
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The element of surprise fizzled out very quickly. You also couldn't use an initial shock to advance quickly enough to create reality. And in certain parts of the front, the attack failed completely. It all went completely wrong, especially with the Waffen-SS. And then there's also the fact that anyone who had ever been to the Ardennes could see for himself that it wasn't the ideal area. for a 60-ton tank.
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The army that marched through there in 1940 marched through with light tanks, with light trucks, and now the army of 1944 was marching through there which was equipped completely differently and which wasn't suitable for these mountain roads.
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The Allies reacted quickly and were therefore able to hold their key positions. Reserves and supplies arrived quickly. Even the bad weather couldn't save the Wehrmacht. Its units suffered massive losses. After two weeks, the Germans found themselves on the defensive.
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Then the Americans counterattacked. And by the end of January, basically everything was back to the way it was at the beginning. The German-American front was restored.
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During Christmas week 1944, the Allies seized the military initiative again. In the evacuated town of Eschweiler, American GIs celebrated Christmas, the last one of this war. In a few weeks, the German offensive would collapse.
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On the home front, the Germans also celebrated the holidays, which was staged for the newsreel in line with propaganda. At the same time, their fathers, brothers and sons were facing Soviet superiority in Hungary. On December 25, the ring around German troops in Budapest closed.
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The Red Army set out to conquer Hungary's capital. Germany's former allies were now to be liberated. As early as the spring of 1944, the alliance between Hungary and the Third Reich had become fragile.
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Hungary had been an ally of Nazi Germany since 1941. When the military defeat of Nazi Germany became apparent, Hungary launched its first attempts to reorient itself and established contact with the Allies.
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Hitler then immediately summoned the Reich Regent Miklos Horthy to Berlin for a report. While the dictator was pressuring him with one of his tantrums, German troops marched into Hungary. When Horthy returned, the country was occupied. The Nazis began deporting the Jewish population to Auschwitz.
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Starting on March 19, 1944, German troops entered Hungary completely unexpectedly and without a fight took power there.
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Of course, the old Hungarian government was still there. The Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy was still there. But he didn't really have that much to say anymore. All the power was in the hands of the German representatives.
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There was a Reich Plenipotentiary, that's what he called himself, and there was also, of course, a so-called Special Task Force that was set up specifically to deal with the Jews.
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The bad thing was, after all, that the Germans already had a lot of experience in murder. This special task force under Eichmann initially began to empty the country, and by the summer of 1944 they deported about 430,000 people to Auschwitz. There it was. Two-thirds went immediately to the gas chamber, and one-third remained. They did forced labour. and most of them still died there. So it was a terrible situation. And of course it was one of the last brutal highlights of the Holocaust.
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It was also referred to as the final chapter.
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In January of 1945, the Red Army, under the command of Marshal Ivan Konev, advanced towards Breslau and Krakow without encountering any significant resistance.
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In the face of imminent defeat, the German occupiers began to cover up their crimes with murderous thoroughness. This was also the case at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex.
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As the Soviet army approached, the SS cleared most of the camps, and the detainees went on so-called death marches. Attempts were made to bring them on foot to the Altreich in order to cover their tracks.
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However, most of the people who were sent on these marches were no longer physically able, so the marches basically meant death marches. because a large proportion of those who were sent on those marches simply perished.
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Heinrich Himmler was responsible for the evacuation of the concentration camps. The SS-Reichsführer instructed his troops to systematically destroy all evidence of the regime's mass murders before it fell into Allied hands.
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There was this infamous Sonderkommando 1005. They started digging all these mass graves in 1943 and burning the dead. And that's what they did in the middle of the whole extermination program. That's what they did in Auschwitz with a certain amount of success. Files were destroyed, the crematoria were dismantled, the gas chambers were blown up.
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When the first units of the Red Army reached the concentration camp on January 27, 1945, most of the barracks were empty. The soldiers found only a few prisoners left who could bear witness to the horrors that took place there.
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I think there were six to seven thousand prisoners that the Red Army found there, completely exhausted. Of course, they tried to help those people immediately. But it's also a well-known phenomenon among people who have been starved very badly that they actually die the moment they get something to eat. And that's exactly what happened there. And another 20% of those people died in the following weeks.
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The Liberated also spoke of the gas chambers where up to 10,000 people were murdered every day.
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What was new about Auschwitz was the dimension of the whole thing. That is, it is now assumed that about 1.3 million people were killed there. And that was new. And of course, it had a corresponding effect. Anyone who has been to Auschwitz knows that much more has been preserved than the perpetrators would have liked. The glasses, the hair, the suitcases, everything is still there. And that actually left no doubt as to what actually happened there.
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Talk of a relapse into barbarism is nonsense. I believe the opposite is the case. Modern states have many more possibilities to move people away. Sophisticated transportation systems, railroad cars that quickly be used to move hundreds of thousands of people,
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airplanes and bombs that completely wipe out cities in a few days. The technical possibilities of the modern state are so great that if a dictator makes use of them, he can quickly implement very large killing programs. Modernity has not only increased the possibilities, it has introduced the division of labor, in which everyone is a small cog in the wheel and can say, yes, I signed some files, I put together the trains, but I didn't do it myself. That has a relieving effect.
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It's a process of civilization that paradoxically made it possible for this monstrous murder program to be born.
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Some children survived the horror. They willingly showed the tattoos on their arms that identified them as victims of the National Socialist racial fanaticism. They, too, will describe the unimaginable, which at first many Germans refused to believe. But the genocide of six million Jews is a bitter truth.
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The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
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so help us God.
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Early 1945 in Courland on the Baltic Sea. For several months, Army Group North of the Wehrmacht had been surrounded on the peninsula by the Red Army. The immense losses of men and material over the past years of the war had shattered the once feared army of Nazi Germany. Amateur photographs captured the sorry state. of the trapped units.
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Nazi propaganda, on the other hand, still clung to the myth of military strength. The newsreel shows the commissioning of so-called Volksgrenadiere in the homeland.
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Volkssturmmen, youths and stragglers formed the personnel of the newly formed units. What was particularly perfidious, even in a hopeless military situation, the men swore an oath to the Führer.
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The idea was not to give up and the concept of self-sacrifice was a very strong and important one.
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That's why Hitler thought the war navy was so great, because they went down with man and mouse. He thought that was great. That was the way to do it. On January 12, 1945, the Red Army launched a major offensive into East Prussia. At 4.45, the sky suddenly turned bright as day as up to 300 Soviet guns per kilometer of front opened fire on the German positions. Red Army cameramen filmed apocalyptic scenes behind the Wehrmacht's defensive lines along a broad front after it quickly collapsed.
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In previous years, the Wehrmacht had waged a campaign of extermination in the Soviet Union against the racially inferior population. This was according to the ideology of the National Socialists. Now the theater of war had shifted east to the territory of the German Reich, and with the Red Army soldiers came fear of revenge in many places.
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People were simply afraid. They were told that the subhumans of the Red Army were coming. They also knew what sort of atrocities had been committed before in the Soviet Union.
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So it was a mixture of prejudices and a real fear of Red Army brutality.
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And people recognized what crimes Nazi Germany had committed.
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And they knew people would want to take revenge.
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In view of these prospects, many of the approximately two and a half million people who lived in East Prussia at the time wanted to leave their homeland and move to the West. as quickly as possible and flee to the West. But there was a problem. The Nazis forbade escape for a long time.
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They wanted the positions to be held and thus to be able to counter the Red Army, which contributed to the fact that the escape then took place so abruptly.
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People left at the last minute with makeshift luggage. and were often wiped out in the course of the war.
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Who was fleeing on these journeys? Mothers with children and old men, which meant, as always in war, it hit the weakest, who had to fend for themselves and who were held responsible for the failure of an entire nation, as well as a lack of evacuation plans.
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Because the land route to the west was largely cut off by the Soviets, many people fled across the frozen lake. But further dangers lay in these coastal waters. The provisional destination for many was the Baltic Sea coast near Gdansk.
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People hoped to continue their escape from there by ship because the ports in the region were still under German control. Gottenhafen was one of them. It was there, on the 30th of January 1945, that thousands of people boarded the Wilhelm Gustloff. The ship had previously enjoyed nationwide fame.
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Adolf Hitler had personally traveled to Hamburg in May of 1937 for its launching.
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For years the ship had served as a cruise ship for the Nazi organization. Kraft durch Freude, strength through joy. party comrades relaxed on its decks during cruises through the mediterranean and north sea now the ship was supposed to help bring refugees and soldiers to the west it was overloaded with thousands of people on board when it set sail because of the heavy weight the captain selected a course through deep water this led the ship far out
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into the baltic sea where the soviet navy also cruised at around 9 pm the ship the wilhelm goslov which was named after a leader of the National Socialist Party who was murdered in 1936, was discovered and torpedoed by a Soviet submarine. It sank in the icy waters. At least 9,300 people died in the disaster.
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It wasn't a war crime in legal terms because the Gustloff was sailing dark in hostile seas, was armed, and there were soldiers on board. So in a way, according to the laws of war, it was legal to attack the Gustloff.
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Whether it was legitimate is another question, and everybody has to answer that question for themselves.
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On the other side of the world, too, the war raged on unabated. U.S. naval units were cruising off the Japanese island of Iwo Jima. about a thousand kilometers south of Tokyo. In mid-February of 1945, battleships opened fire on the island, which is only 21 square kilometers in size, but was strategically important. U.S. bombers took off from the Mariana Islands and provided air support for the operation.
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The volcanic island of Iwo Jima was an important location because there were airfields and because it was useful as an emergency landing site for bombers. So it became a strategic asset.
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And that's why Iwo Jima came into focus.
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Shortly before 9 o'clock in the morning, war correspondents from the U.S. Government Office of War Information filmed tens of thousands of U.S. Marines as they landed on the island three days after the attack began. This footage of the fierce fighting around the so-called Sulphur Island later formed the basis of the documentary film To the Shores of Iwo Jima.
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Right down on our throats.
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In addition to the cameramen, there were also photographers among the war correspondents. A few days after the start of the landing operation, one of them captured U.S. Marines raising the U.S. flag on the summit of the extinct volcano Mount Suribachi. Although it was only a reenactment of a previous raising of the stars and stripes, the photo has gone down in history.
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World War II was a war of images. Yes, out of millions of photos we have five or six photos that we all know.
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And the flag raising on Iwo Jima, the reenactment, symbolized the victory of the Americans in the Pacific.
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But it would be several months before American victory in the Pacific was achieved. The fighting around Iwo Jima alone raged on for weeks after the photograph was taken on the volcano's summit. The Japanese defenders pursued bloody tactics.
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The commander was fully aware that he wouldn't be able to defend the island. The goal was to inflict as many casualties on the Americans as possible, so that the war would become unpopular and that the war would then be stopped. That didn't succeed. But nevertheless, the number of dead was immense.
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More than 6,800 marines died before the island was completely taken. Added to this, there were nearly 20,000 wounded. On the Japanese side, a large part of the approximately 20,000 defenders lost their lives. Only 216 surrendered to the enemy.
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Overall, the Americans were very surprised by the Japanese willingness to make sacrifices, which were shown in the operations of the defense of Iwo Jima. No one actually believed that the Japanese would really fight so rigorously to the last man, and that played a very big part in the Americans changing their mind, because at some point they said, we're going to have to end the war differently.
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Japanese troops were not just vehemently resisting the threat of defeat on Iwo Jima. Since October of 1944, their commanders in the Pacific had been using a new approach, kamikazes. Pilots swooped down on enemy warships in their planes, risking their own deaths.
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Vice Admiral Takajiro Onishi, commander of the Japanese Naval Air Forces, had developed the idea.
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That was of course a complete shock for the Americans.
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They hadn't expected it. It was a completely new form of warfare. They hadn't expected that willingness to make sacrifices. The squadrons of suicide pilots had names like Morning Sun and Mountain Cherry Blossom. It was not difficult to recruit fanatical new blood. However, if you look at it in terms of results, it wasn't very efficient. A lot of planes were shot down by US defenses,
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and even the ones that did get through had little effect. It was more of an element of shock.
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Images like these contributed to this. This footage from January 21, 1945 documented the aftermath of a kamikaze attack on the USS Ticonderoga near the Formosa Strait. Although the aircraft carrier was not sunk in the attack, more than 100 men aboard the ship were killed, further increasing the toll of American troops in the Pacific.
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Almost two weeks later, the big three of the anti-Hitler coalition met at the Soviet seaside resort of Yalta.
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For years, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States had been united against Nazi Germany. Now, the war in Europe seemed to be decided in their favor. Its end was just a matter of time. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt made plans for the future and fleshed out the agreements of a post-war order that they had agreed on at the Tehran summit about a year earlier.
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The big three gathered at Yalta and now the issue of the westward shift of Poland was decided and it was clear that there would be occupation zones and there was also discussions about what would happen in the Pacific.
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So far, the Soviet Union had not taken part in the fighting against Japan. The US President, who was in poor health, wanted to change this in order to end the war in the Pacific quickly and to avoid further heavy losses.
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There, Roosevelt approached Stalin and negotiated with him and said we need you in the Pacific. And he got a promise from Stalin that the Red Army would attack in Europe three months after the end of the war,
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which they did to the day.
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In return, the Western Allies pledged to further expand their support for the Red Army by bombing the German Reich. Two days after the end of the summit, Dresden became the focus of their air force.
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Around 800 British Lancaster bombers took off on the 13th of February 1945 to attack the then seventh largest city in Germany, which had previously been largely spared from airstrikes.
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In this situation, Churchill said, give me something to show Stalin that we support the Soviets.
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The idea then became, if we flew airstrikes to the rear of the Soviet front, and cause chaos there, that would somehow help the Red Army.
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The British planes reached Dresden shortly before half past ten in the evening. An automatic camera shot footage from the air of how the explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped. The attack was not about hitting exact targets. The city was to be extensively destroyed. Within 15 minutes, three-quarters of the city center was in flames.
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The fact that Dresden was such a devastating attack was also due to the circumstances. Dresden had no anti-aircraft defenses. The anti-aircraft guns had been moved to the eastern front, and some of the night fighters were not allowed to take off. It was a clear night, and the British were able to come in relatively low. So it was a textbook attack.
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A few hours later, on Valentine's Day 1945, American bombers attacked Dresden again in daylight. A U.S. newsreel described the event.
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The veteran 1st Division of the 8th Air Force today carried its 200,000 ton of bombs to help and ally. Now they hit Dresden hardest of all. A total of four waves of attacks hit the important transport hub on the Elbe.
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The blitz here, blasting away for the Russians now 45 miles away, links the two-front allied drive from east and west on Berlin.
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The consequences of the Anglo-American airstrikes were devastating. It was estimated that up to 25,000 people fell victim to the bombs. I never believed, said an official at the Dresden Missing Persons Center who described his impressions, that death could approach people in such different forms, burned, charred. dismembered, apparently sleeping peacefully, contorted in pain, completely cramped, clothed, naked, and as a pitiful heap of ashes, and above it all,
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the acrid smoke and the unbearable smell of decay. Images taken months after the attacks gave an idea of the scale of the disaster.
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Meanwhile, on the western front, the Wehrmacht was falling further into a defensive mode. In the fall of the previous year, the Allies had liberated Aachen, the first major German city. In December of 1944, a surprising German offensive in the Ardennes initially led to a slowdown of the Anglo-American advance. Only after the complete defeat of the German counterattack in January 1945 could U.S. forces fully concentrate on the advance eastward again. They encountered fierce resistance at Jülich,
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a German newsreel.
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The German defenders had blown up the Ruhr Dam. As a result, the level of the river at Jülich had also risen noticeably. Only after the floodwaters had receded were U.S. units able to cross the Ruhr and move into the city center on February 23.
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There, the GIs were greeted with a shocking picture. Jülich no longer existed. For months, the town had been under fire. Countless artillery shells and aerial bombs had landed on it. The last remaining inhabitants of Jülich had already been evacuated in December of the previous year. What remained was a field of ruins in which the German defenders barricaded themselves and engaged the Americans in a battle for mountains of rubble that was as fierce as it was futile.
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In early March, the Commander-in-Chief of the US forces in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, arrived in the conquered city and visited Jülich Citadel. For a long time, the structure had been considered impregnable. No enemy soldier had entered it since the Napoleonic Wars. Eisenhower's propaganda photographs from the citadel were intended to convey confidence and make it clear that there was no doubt that the entire German Reich would be conquered just like the centuries-old fortress.
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Meanwhile, in the east, the Red Army continued its advance unabated. In addition to East Prussia in the north, it also advanced further south in Silesia towards what was then the territory of the German Reich and advanced rapidly. The region was of great strategic importance because of its numerous industrial plants. Our tanks have crushed everything, wrote a Red Army soldier in his diary on January 23rd. Their tracks flattened wagons. horses and everything else that was on the road.
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The reasons for the success lay in the Red Army's numerical superiority in men and material and in serious tactical errors on Hitler's part. In November of 1943 Hitler focused his emphasis on the West. In 1944 it went all wrong,
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but he still had the feeling that he had to fight the West Allies. who had pushed back the Germans from their new territories.
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And that at a time when the Red Army launched their greatest attack on the Neitzel River.
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By doing so,
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he made himself Stalin's best alliance partner.
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In recent years, many Germans had fled from the bombing raids of the Western Allies to Silesia, which had long been spared the air war. With the advance of the Soviets, they now found themselves in the middle of the war. Similar to East Prussia, many people there had only one goal, to flee from the Red Army.
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The revenge will be terrible. Because what we did in the course of the Eastern campaign, especially against Soviet civilians, what crimes we committed, that will come back to us as revenge. The fears often proved to be justified. Many Red Army soldiers then actually took revenge for the crimes that the Wehrmacht and SS had previously been guilty of.
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What we had there was an escalation of violence against German civilians through the shooting of civilians and of women and children,
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the abduction of German civilians and the mass rape of women.
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The sexual violence against German women can be explained in several ways.
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First, it is said that a woman's body is symbolic of the nation. Thus, a desecration of the woman stands for a desecration and dishonor of the enemy. Thus, at the same time, a desecration or dishonor of the entire nation.
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picked up on these desecrations and thus continued to stir up fear and hatred among the population.
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In these places, which have been conquered by German troops, every house is marked by the horrors of Bolshevist Zolderbevka. The bestialities are too incredible to be shown to the camera. Terrible horror still stands in the faces of these German women.
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They report the days of nameless terror, in which they were mercilessly dispatched the tortured horde.
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Despite the militarily hopeless situation, leading National Socialists continued to say that capitulation was a no-go. Instead, they continued to cling to strategically outdated concepts to stop the Red Army.
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The question for the Germans was, how can we stop this avalanche of a Red Army? And one concept that was developed as early as 1944 on the Eastern Front was to introduce fixed sites that were then later declared fortresses, which were located at traffic junctions, and that you defended these points, and so you had breakwaters on which the ways of the Red Army attack breaks.
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One of these breakwaters was to be Breslau in Lower Silesia, which was declared a fortress by Hitler.
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On January 20, Karl Hanke, the Gauleiter of Lower Silesia, ordered the civilian population to leave the city. However, due to a lack of organization and fear of the dangers of fleeing, 200,000 people stayed in Breslau. The militarily inexperienced population was to defend the city together with units of Volkssturm, Wehrmacht and SS. Those who refused were shot.
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This led to absurd measures. They created taxiways in the city. They tried to defend the city in house-to-house fighting, which drove up the death toll among the civilian population to an exorbitant degree.
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While Breslau was still under siege, the Red Army advanced to the Oder on other sections of the front. Some 370 kilometers downstream, it had built bridgeheads on the west bank near Küstrin. Nevertheless, the Nazi leadership remained unimpressed. In the middle of the month, Goebbels wrote in his diary, As far as the East is concerned, the Führer is no longer too concerned. He has the impression that we are slowly regaining solid fronts.
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An idiosyncratic reading of events which was picked up by war correspondents. A bizarre interview took place on the Oder. Even though it was never shown in the cinemas, it illustrated the absurdity of Nazi propaganda.
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Hey guys, you've built a nice villa here, haven't you? Yes, we have. It's a thing. Where are you from? I'm from Berlin-Schottenburg. Berlin-Schottenburg? Do you think your wife is here? No, at the moment she's still in doubt. She just left. She's in Lübeck. She doesn't have to lie to us. Well, let's see if she's still here. She's not here. You're not sure? The one is still fine. And the other one is leaving you alone here, right? We'll see. Yes, now he's more nervous than we are.
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While the Red Army had conquered large parts of Silesia and Pomerania in the east, the Americans, British, and Canadians had made rather slow progress in the west. Their next major objective was the Rhine. U.S. forces had been fighting their way towards Cologne since the end of February.
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So the Rhine was now the big natural border in the West. That's why the fighting on the way to the Rhine was still relatively heavy, with relatively heavy losses. February 1945 was one of the most deadly months for the US Army. On March 5th, American units reached the suburbs of the Cathedral City. The 3rd US Armored Division moved in through the districts of Bocklemünd and Vogelsang. The ordinary citizen of Cologne has nothing to fear from Allied troops, red leaflets.
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that had previously been dropped over the city.
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A day later, the GIs fought their way into the city center and witnessed a young woman who was apparently caught between the lines in her vehicle on Christophstrasse. Though seriously injured, she could be saved.
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A few hundred meters away, the Americans encountered a last German pocket of resistance near Domplatz. A Panther tank blocked the way to the Rhine, but even it couldn't stop the offensive for long. With one well-aimed hit, it was taken out. Only three of the five-man crew could save themselves from the burning wreck. The last significant resistance had been broken.
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Late in the afternoon on March 6th, peace returned. In the districts of Cologne on the left bank of the Rhine, the Second World War was over. The next day, the high command of the Wehrmacht reported succinctly, the heap of rubble that is Cologne has been left to the enemy. The US military, on the other hand, reported extensively from the conquered city.
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Cologne was one of the great German cities, by far the largest city conquered by the Allies up to that time. Hamburg, Leipzig, Berlin, Munich were still far away, so it made sense to conquer Cologne. The Cologne Cathedral was a landmark in the west of the Reich. So you document this more widely than the conquest of Wesel.
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Film had already played a big role in World War II as documentation, but also as propaganda. Camera technology was portable and practical, and eventually also in color, shot in color by the Americans. And they wanted to bring the images home with them. They wanted to document not just for the cinemas, but also for the military internally. Before the defeat, the military was a very important part of the war. the defenders of Cologne had successfully blown up the bridges over the Rhine. Thus,
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for the time being, the Allies were denied a way across the river.
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A day after capturing Cologne, the Americans pulled off another coup some 55 kilometers upstream.
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A small advance party of the 9th US Armored Division reached Ludendorff Bridge, which spans the Rhine near Remagen. To their surprise, the bridge had not been blown up, and there was also little or no resistance from enemy troops.
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The Remagen Volkssturm didn't assemble. If the Remagen Volkssturm battalion had been there, had fired a few more rounds, then this small patrol, there weren't that many American soldiers, wouldn't have been... able to reach the bridgehead so easily.
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The bridge was successfully captured in a surprise attack. The action was reenacted for propaganda purposes a few days later. Thus, during the next 24 hours, more than 8,000 US soldiers reached the eastern bank of the Rhine.
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Wehrmacht units try to correct their mistake and destroy the bridge by airstrikes and artillery fire. However, it took 10 days for the bridge to actually collapse. By then, US sappers had erected a pontoon bridge and continued to move units across the Rhine on a large scale. It was a severe blow to the defense of the Reich, which was not without consequences for those responsible.
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Hitler was absolutely furious,
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and the bridge commander was executed right away.
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And all the others they could find,
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they were tried and murdered, I'd say.
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The Fuhrer no longer appeared in public. On the 20th of March, he allowed himself to be filmed one last time in the garden of his Reich Chancellery.
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Did Hitler realize that the war was lost, and if so, when did he realize it? One argument was that Hitler was not stupid and knew how things were going. This led to him withdrawing and showing himself only when he could announce a victory. where these announcements of victory failed to materialize and he became more and more depressed physical decline set in because it was clear to him how this was going to end here
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the fuhrer awarded hitler youth who had distinguished themselves militarily the fact that the war was lost does not change the sense of duty to continue fighting the younger generation in particular fell victim to the inhuman fanaticism.
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In this last phase of the war, the kits were the last reserve of the Third Reich,
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very individually as cannon fodder.
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All of these children were used as cannon fodder for the final battle.
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The
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Boy With The
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Bazookas.
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was Wilhelm Hübner. At the time, he was the subject of numerous newsreel reports.
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The Lower Silesian city of Lauban in present-day Poland had already been largely captured by the Red Army in February of 1945. In early March, however, It was recaptured by the Wehrmacht, one of the extremely rare German success stories of those days.
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Propaganda minister Josef Goebbels immediately traveled to the region and shortly afterward gave a fanatical speech in nearby Görlitz. It was his last appearance in a newsreel.
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In the next few weeks and months, they will be a great influence. They will enter this battle as a service to God. And when they load their guns and their tanks, they only have their beaten children and their victims.
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Göbbels in particular, if you will, comes into his own with his speech in the spring of
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1945. It is of course also a staging of the downfall and the emphasis is that we will not survive it. That's it, actually. There's always talk of the turning point and of victory,
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but the underlying motif is actually its Nazi ideology or nothing. In January 1945, Goebbels called for a people's sacrifice for the Wehrmacht and Volkssturm.
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In the face of impending doom, the regime desperately tried to compensate for the losses, including with women.
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The brutal thing of course was the distance of these bazookas, which was a maximum of 100 meters, usually 50-60, in order to be really effective. Those who fired them of course always paid with their lives. Of course that was also the cynical calculation of the regime.
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A Volkssturm man who then carried it out, who destroyed an enemy tank. It was the choreography of doom.
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The territory still under German control was shrinking day by day. According to the will of the Nazi leadership, people had to now sacrifice not only clothes and iron, but also themselves.
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This was an indication of the regime's lack of inhibition. and brute willingness to die, which in the end was ready to open all the floodgates, to discard any form of responsibility and to do everything possible to continue this war, no matter how futile it had become, to the last bullet." On March 19, 1945, US B-29 Superfortresses were loaded with bombs on Saipan, the main island of the Marianas. The target of the long-range planes was the Japanese capital.
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Mission Commander Major General Curtis E. LeMay had previously made a major decision. As part of Operation Meeting House 2, Tokyo was to be attacked not only with explosive bombs, but also with incendiary bombs. These were also to be dropped over residential areas.
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An armada of bombers took off from three island airfields on the afternoon of March 9. Each of the more than 300 planes was loaded with 40 cluster bombs, each containing 1,500 napalm bombs. The GIs called them Tokyo Calling Cards.
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Original footage of the large-scale night attack is not available. Scenes shot later showed the superfortresses dropping their deadly load. More than... 1,600 tons of bombs were dropped from a low altitude over the urban area.
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Japanese houses were mostly made of wood and paper and immediately burst into flames. Strong westerly winds ignited a firestorm. Up to 100,000 people were reported to have died in the operation. Over 40 square kilometers of the city was destroyed. The attack is still considered the heaviest conventional airstrike.
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The intent was to convey the message to the Japanese opponents of the war that Japanese war propaganda had very strongly stirred up the will on the part of the Japanese soldiers to really go to their deaths. The fanaticism with which the Japanese military fought was once again evident on Okinawa, the largest island in the Ryukyu chain of the Japanese military. is located about 500 kilometers off the southern main island of Nippon.
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The US military had assembled 180,000 troops for an invasion of Okinawa. When the enterprise launched on Easter Sunday 1945, the GIs initially encountered little resistance. The defenders had retreated into the hinterland where they put up fierce resistance.
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When you think about the Battle of Okinawa, A lot of civilians there were holed up in caves, and Japanese-Americans were deployed here to deliver the message in Japanese, come out of the caves, surrender. It doesn't make sense for you to kill yourselves or to wait to die by flamethrowers or by hand grenades.
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But not everyone was willing to give up. For example, teachers would throw themselves and their students to their deaths from cliffs on the island to escape life. under U.S. occupation. It would take months before Okinawa could be brought completely under American control.
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On April 12, 1945, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt died at the age of 63. In a funeral procession through the streets of Washington, Americans bid farewell to their head of state. Vice President Harry S. Truman became his successor. In Berlin, the news caused a furor. Here you have the miracle I always predicted Hitler is said to have shouted when he heard of Roosevelt's death. Now who's right? The war is not lost.
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We will defend our house, whatever they've got maybe. We will fight on the beaches, we will fight on the landing grounds, we will fight in the fields, and in the streets, we will fight in the hills, we will never surrender.
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United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. We will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.
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April 1945 on the Oder River, a good 60 kilometers northeast of Berlin. In what was then Niederwutzen, a Wehrmacht infantry battalion was engaged in combat with units of the advancing Red Army. This footage was among the last scenes shot by German propaganda units in that war. Despite the Third Reich's hopeless military situation, shots of good-humored German soldiers and fallen Red Army soldiers was supposed to spread optimism. According to Nazi logic, surrender was not an option.
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Hitler decreed that it was a kind of duty to die, which many soldiers did. It was simply that they didn't want to suffer another 1918, that is, a defeat, because they surrendered too early.
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This time, the soldiers would rather surrender five minutes after 12 than five minutes before 12. All this, of course, with horrendous losses. January 1945 was the month with the most casualties of the entire war, with 450,000 dead, and in the weeks that followed, the great dying continued. Despite the omnipresent danger of death, many German soldiers fought on doggedly, especially on the Eastern Front. The idea of surrendering From today's point of view,
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one would say that the war was lost after all. But that wasn't an option for the vast majority of soldiers on the Eastern Front.
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You only go into captivity when you look down the barrel of the tank and have no alternative.
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Otherwise, the measure is to avoid, if possible, captivity, which one imagines terror.
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By mid-April, The Red Army had reached almost every part of the western bank of the Oder. On the Seeleu Heights, a natural elevation in the Oderbruch, German units entrenched themselves in order to achieve the impossible and to stop the advance on Berlin.
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In the early morning hours of April 16, some 900,000 soldiers of the 1st White Russian Front, supported by heavy artillery fire, began the assault on the Seeleu Heights. The German defense consisted of worn-out frontline fighters, Hitler Youth, and KBH soldiers, which the Wehrmacht administration translated as, fit for war. in soldier jargon, can limp excellently. Numerically, the Soviet enemy outnumbered them at least four to one. Nevertheless,
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they succeeded in stopping the Red Army for the time being. Russian Commanding General Georgy Zhukov became increasingly nervous.
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The Soviet side was under enormous pressure. It was an unspoken goal to conquer Berlin by May Day.
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The Soviet leadership reacted accordingly and tried to break through the German front line by any means possible.
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In their desperation, the commanders resorted to unconventional means so they could announce the demanded breakthrough. In doing so, they showed no consideration for their own soldiers.
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One example was that the Soviet attackers tried to illuminate the battlefield with the help of searchlights. As a result, the German defenders saw the silhouettes very clearly and knew exactly what to shoot at.
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The toll in blood on both sides was enormous. The Russians suffered more than 30,000 casualties, while the Germans lost at least 12,000 men. After four days, the road to Berlin was cleared.
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In the west, the situation for the German defenders continued to deteriorate. After crossing the Rhine, the Allies advanced inexorably eastward, conquering city after city.
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The strength of the Wehrmacht had been exhausted in February 1945, and by March of 1945 they no longer had the strength to maintain an orderly defense. Everything was collapsing.
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Like the Red Army in the east earlier, as they advanced, The forces of the Western powers were faced with the evidence of the crimes of the Nazi era, to which millions of people had fallen victim over the past years. In mid-April, British units reached the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Selle. For years, people were tortured, abused and murdered there. The battle-hardy soldiers were used to death and suffering, but what they saw there dwarfed what they had experienced so far.
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British soldiers have described that they thought they would be greeted with cheers, and that they would arrive as liberators.
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Instead, what they saw in Bergen-Belsen was terrible, emaciated figures, corpses on the street.
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The survivors were not able to move at all. The cheers were quite limited because everyone was too weak to express human emotion.
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By the end of the war, at least 75,000 prisoners were crammed there, including many women and children. The German-Jewish girl Anne Frank, who later became famous, was also interned there and died in the camp. The British immediately set about feeding the survivors.
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They succeeded in arresting Josef Kramer, the camp commander. To their surprise, the German soldiers were the ardent Nazi showed no remorse.
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The camp commander still acted as if he was the boss, because he assumed that the conquerors who arrived there also considered the people lying there on piles of corpses to be subhumans, that they would consider that normal. In the separate room he was in at some point, when the job of murder became routine, he felt that he was doing a job that was not morally wrong in the Nazi regime. because after all, they were the enemies of society, and he was putting things and life in order.
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A few days earlier, US troops had liberated several concentration camps. In Turinjia, they had taken control of Buchenwald and the Ordruf satellite camp. For many GIs, what they saw in the camps changed their attitude toward the enemy. Most of my comrades had no personal reason to fight the Germans, one soldier later recalled. They thought that many of the stories they had read or heard in newspapers were made up, or at least exaggerated. Now, the soldiers were proved wrong.
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After the liberation of the camps, the Allies forced the population of neighboring towns to visit the complexes and see for themselves the horror.
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For many Germans, that was a shocking experience.
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The idea was, when they were fully confronted with the crimes, it would start their cognitive process, which should lead to the purification of the German civilian population.
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It is well known that this didn't work immediately. Some people reacted rather defensively to this.
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But one can at least theorize whether it was a beginning, so that parts of the civilian population came to terms with the crimes in the first place,
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and that at least hopefully then did lead to a reorientation. On the 19th of April, U.S. units reached Leipzig. Joseph Goebbels appealed to the German population on that Thursday, bravely take on a fight that is inevitable and unavoidable, to stand upright before one's fate with a clear conscience and a pure heart, to endure all suffering and every trial, but never even think of wavering in the agonizing hour of the final decision and throwing in the towel.
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That is not only manly, it is also German in the best sense of the word. Pathetic words that were unable to stop the advance of the GIs. In Leipzig, the main train station was quickly taken.
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There was only isolated resistance. Resistance groups had been distributing leaflets for days with slogans such as, End the Insane War of the Nazis and Bring Out the White Flags. Many Leipzigers had obviously taken the messages to heart and hoped for a bloodless end to the war.
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They kind of just wanted to get through it, they waited for the Americans. That's when you had the most hope. And somewhere, at some point, this madness would end. At least, that was the dominant feeling among the people who no longer believed in National Socialism.
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But, as in all parts of the Reich, there were also fanatical supporters of the regime in Saxony. At City Hall, the Americans made a gruesome discovery. The mayor had committed suicide, along with his wife and daughter. The city treasurer also followed them to their deaths.
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This situation was accompanied by an unprecedented wave of suicides. So for many people it really was the downfall, and they couldn't imagine a world beyond the NS. But they could imagine a world beyond these conditions.
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That was of course the unique mood of doom that prevailed at that time.
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50 kilometers northeast of Leipzig lies Torgau. The small town on the Elbe became world famous shortly before the end of the war. On April 26, 1945, soldiers from the Red Army and the U.S. Army celebrated their meeting there. In fact, their units had met for the first time the day before. 3. and a half years of a brotherhood in arms against the Nazis lay behind them.
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The new U.S. President Harry S. Truman spoke from Washington, The joining of our armed forces at this moment is a signal to ourselves and to the world that our nations working together in the cause of peace and freedom is an effective cooperation. But reality was different. It was a friendship whose end would not be long in coming.
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While propaganda images were still being taken on the shore, people were fleeing in boats across the Elbe to the west. They wanted to flee the Soviet sphere of influence. It was a step that many soldiers also took during those weeks, as here in Tangermünde, soldiers were desperately trying to get across the Elbe. Their motive was clear.
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For German soldiers it was clear, in Allied captivity you were likely to be treated somewhat in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. And so it was much easier for a German soldier to raise his hands on the Western Front than on the Eastern Front. Having arrived in the territory that was barely under Western Allied control, many of the infantrymen surrendered. During that time, US troop cameramen documented on almost a daily basis with color film how more and more members of the Wehrmacht were
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putting their hands in the air instead of on a gun. This was not without danger. The commander-in-chief of the German Army Group South issued an unequivocal order at the end of March. Anyone who strays from the troops in combat must report immediately to the nearest fighting troop. Finding them is not difficult. The noise of battle is the surest guide. Anyone who disobeyed the order ran the risk of being sentenced to death for desertion. But more and more soldiers were willing to take that risk.
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The Americans took millions of prisoners of war. The Wehrmacht was crumbling as they crossed the Rhine.
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And now the question was what to do with them.
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The men were initially locked up in fenced-in open-air meadows and fields. Then the idea came up to group them together in huge camps.
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Thousands of infantrymen were loaded onto military trucks and taken to the Rhineland. In April, huge open spaces along the river were fenced in with barbed wire.
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The so-called Rhine Meadow Camps were built. To make it difficult for the prisoners to escape, the complexes were built on the west bank of the river. They were officially called prisoner of war temporary enclosures. The sanitary conditions and the food supply in the camps were catastrophic from the very start.
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Now the policy was that the Germans should feel that they had lost the war.
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They should understand what they had done.
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There had to be punishment. That's what the soldiers had to endure there.
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Because they were badly fed. Thousands died.
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And you have to say quite clearly, they died senselessly. Because the Americans could take better care of them. But they accepted the fact that a few thousand would die there.
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While hundreds of thousands of soldiers in captivity in the West awaited the end of the war, people in Berlin faced the prospect of a final battle proclaimed by the regime. For weeks that spring, the Berliners had been setting up 1,945 barricades and roadblocks and armed themselves as best they could for the impending attack by the Red Army, an endeavor that was as helpless as it was hopeless. On the 1st of February, the city was declared a fortress.
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The Battle for Berlin was the last act of the war. At that time, in 1939, Berlin was a city that had over 4 million inhabitants.
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At the end, there were about 2.5 million left, and this very densely populated area now became a battlefield. On April 21st, The first Soviet units crossed the Berlin Ring Road. As heavy artillery fire began and the Soviet Air Force attacked and Red Army troops advanced into the outlying districts, Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels addressed the city's population by radio.
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We have entrusted you with your life, your happiness, your health and your future. You now know your task and I know you will fulfill it exemplary. The Mongolian storm will and must be broken at the walls of our city. Our fight will be the banal one for the most decisive fight of the whole nation.
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Fulfilled by the fanatical will. The capital of the Reich must not be left in the hands of the Bolsheviks. We are united in fighting and working. A last loyal contingent of the regime was forming up in the ruins to defend Berlin and the Fuhrer. The dictator had decided to stay in the city.
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Before these battles began, they had considered flying Hitler out to Berchtesgaden. But he deliberately chose a really big stage, a stage on which he could act as a statesman and a general.
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The Red Army soldiers fought their way inexorably through the outskirts toward the government district. There was heavy fighting in the ruined landscape, which was documented by Russian cameramen. 30,000 meters of propaganda footage were created during those bloody battles. The Soviet commanders showed no consideration. neither for German civilians nor for their own soldiers.
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Berlin could have been surrounded. Instead, they took it house by house. And 10,000 Red Army soldiers died in that senseless fighting. And the way the Soviet Union waged war, well, that surprised even the Allies. On the German side too, the The price that had to be paid was enormous. Exactly how many people lost their lives in Hitler's capital is unknown. At noon on April 25th, the Red Army closed the ring around Berlin. Their tanks advanced toward the center of the city.
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Hitler remained in his bunker under the Reich Chancellery, refusing to acknowledge defeat.
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For the last time, the Fuhrer let himself be seen in the ruins of his official residence. It is not known exactly when this photo was taken.
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Hitler then asked how long they could hold out. And the commander said only 24 hours. No longer. And only then, you can imagine, only then, after some delay, Did Hitler decide to commit suicide? He really tried to continue the fighting until the last conceivable moment.
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Hitler dictated his political legacy. Then he married his longtime lover Eva Braun. In the early afternoon of April 30th, they both retired to their private rooms in the bunker. These are photos of the rooms taken weeks later. The dictator shot himself in the head with a bullet. His wife died by poison. Both bodies were then doused with gasoline in the garden of the Reich Chancellery and burned.
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Hitler always repeated, I will not stop until five minutes past twelve. That was basically brutal, inhuman, but also a simple strategy, which he implemented to the end.
8:53:00
Even after the death of the Fuhrer, the fighting continued. On the 1st of May, the Red Army had taken parts of the government district and stood within sight of the Brandenburg Gate and the Reich Chancellery. Joseph Goebbels was now in command here. Hitler had decreed that Grand Admiral Dönitz would become Reich President and Propaganda Minister Goebbels Reich Chancellor. The latter tried to start negotiating surrender terms with the Red Army, but the Soviets, on Stalin's orders,
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insisted on the immediate and unconditional surrender of the city.
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On the 1st of May 1945, the majority of Berliners recognized the reality on the ground and hung white flags from their windows. In the evening, the Greater German Radio reported a lie.
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In the next few hours, Joseph Goebbels also took his life. His wife died with him. Earlier, they had poisoned their children. In the mind of the fanatical Nazi Goebbels, that was inevitable.
8:54:28
Goebbels wrote in his diary that when a fortress commander surrendered, he didn't even have the courage to kill himself. He was consistent, and it was also consistent to kill his children, because after a Soviet occupation, life would no longer be possible, and they shouldn't have to endure that. A life in a post-Nazi era.
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The charred remains of the Goebbels and the bodies of their six children were lined up by Red Army soldiers in the Garden of the Reich Chancellery a short time later. In the meantime, Berlin had surrendered unconditionally. The Soviets took command of the city on the 2nd of May, 1945.
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But there was still no peace. A woman in Berlin described the apocalyptic scenes in her diary. Panic reigns in the city, dismay and horror, wherever we go, robbery, looting, violence. In unrestrained lust, the army of our victors has pounced on the women of Berlin. They ravish our daughters, they rape our women, the men complained. Not once, no, six times, no, ten times and twenty times. There is no other conversation in the city.
8:55:48
Even after the fall of the German capital, the war was still not over. The new government under Reich President Dönitz tried to delay the impending surrender. Their logic? To buy time so that as many German soldiers as possible could reach the areas controlled by the British and Americans and thus escape the dreaded Soviets. Here, as in Saxony, long lines of soldiers formed in many places. All were headed west.
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The commander-in-chief of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, U.S. General Eisenhower, had been based in Reims, France, since September 1944. On the 6th of May, a German delegation under Colonel General Alfred Jodl went to the city. In a middle school in Rue Jolicoeur, a decision was made to end the war. Completely misjudging the situation, the German negotiators still believed they had room to negotiate.
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There was still this idea, we'll negotiate,
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we'll surrender only in the West.
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But then it was total surrender.
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After all German attempts had failed, Yordle radioed Reichs-President Dönitz at a quarter to ten in the evening. I see no other way out than chaos or signing. A few hours later he received a reply. Authority to sign granted. At 2.41 on the morning of May 7th, Yordle signed the document.
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France in the unconditional surrender of Germany.
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General Alfred Yodel, Nazi Chief of Staff, signed the document formally ending all German resistance as drawn by the representatives of Russia, Britain, France, and the United States.
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General Walter Beadle Smith signed for the Supreme Command. And the end of one of history's most massive and most brilliant campaigns brought a moment of well-earned joy to an American soldier. named Ike Eisenhower.
8:58:13
As in London, joy erupted across much of Europe when the news from France was announced. After more than five and a half years, peace would return to the continent. But not everyone was celebrating exuberantly. On the Soviet side, mistrust mingled with the joy of victory.
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Ronson settled the Soviets because there was a great fear on both sides, that, so to speak, one side could make a separate peace with the other side and then somehow still continue the war or something like that. And the Soviet Union then insisted that this surrender ceremony will be repeated again.
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The procedure was repeated on May 8th in a former Wehrmacht pioneer and engineering school in the Berlin Karlshorst district. That way, Soviet fears were to be allayed and the contribution made by the Red Army in the liberation of Europe could be properly recognized. General Georgy Zhukov took part in the ceremony on behalf of the Soviets. In addition to the British and Americans, French representatives were now part of the delegation of the victorious powers. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel,
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the head of the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht, arrived to represent Germany. The surrender was signed on the night of the 8th of May. It read, We the undersigned, acting by proxy for and on behalf of the Supreme Command of the German Armed Forces, hereby declare the unconditional surrender of all land, sea, and air forces under German command or control at the present time simultaneously to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces and the Supreme Command of the Red Army.
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At that moment, which was the process of several days when the Germans capitulated, everything that the German Empire had to offer in terms of power was used up. Stunde null, zero hour is a very old-fashioned term, but it describes it. There is nothing of substance left of the military and politics.
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A few days after the formal end of the war, one of the best-known leaders of the Third Reich fell into the hands of the Allies. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring had long been second in command. In the last days of the war, however, he fell from grace and was deposed by Hitler. After the collapse of the regime, he now saw himself once again in a state-supporting role and was surprised to find that, like any ordinary soldier, he was first disarmed and then imprisoned.
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The moment he was captured by the Americans, he adopted a different role and claimed that he had been the foreign policy officer who tried to prevent what happened.
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Claimed to be the moderating factor. He said that the Allies now needed him as a prominent man of the state to now lead the German population into a new era.
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Stuff like that. Wrong. Confused assumptions.
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In 1935, Göring had promulgated the Nuremberg Laws, which sealed the disenfranchisement of Jewish citizens. Later, he signed the order for the so-called Final Solution of the Jewish Question, and thus played a part in the Holocaust.
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A few months in the fall of 1946, after these films were made, Göring, along with other Nazi criminals, were indicted by the Allies and sentenced to death in Nuremberg. However, The sentence could not be carried out.
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He had hidden two poison capsules in his luggage and had written a farewell letter. In it he wrote, the German Reichsmarschall will not let himself be executed by hanging.
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So I choose the death of the great Hannibal. And then shortly before the execution he poisoned himself.
9:02:34
The British were also searching for German war criminals. On the 20th of May, they noticed a man who called himself Heinrich Hitzinger and claimed to be a member of the secret field police. The policeman looked suspicious and was arrested. During his interrogation in Lüneburg, he was caught up in contradictions. They also noticed that he resembled the most wanted Nazi mass murderer.
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Heinrich Himmler was caught. When they went to search him, he bit down on a cyanide capsule hidden in his mouth. After Hitler and Goebbels, the former Reichsfuhrer SS thus also cowardly evaded responsibility for his murderous actions.
9:03:15
Wednesday, the 23rd of May, 1945, also marked the end of Grand Admiral Dönitz's insane attempt to rule Germany from Flensburg. Dönitz had been appointed Reich President by Hitler, but in fact remained... completely powerless. Together with other men of his cabinet, he was arrested. Thus, only three weeks after the suicide of its leader, the Third Reich was history.
9:03:44
On June 24, 1945, victory over Nazi Germany was celebrated in Moscow with a huge military parade in Red Square.
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Here, by the walls of the blue Kremlin, the country of its sons, who returned victorious, shouted out the heroes of the unmatched battles on all fronts of the Patriotic War, from the Barents to the Black Sea. Here are those who have forced Dnieper and Oder, Königsberg and Vienna, and those who have enshrined the banner of our victory over Berlin.
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For the Soviet side, of course, it was existential, especially after what they went through.
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There were about 26.6 million victims. That's the official figure, both civilians and soldiers.
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And that moment of victory was, of course, quite central to the Stalinist regime.
9:04:52
With Stalin watching, 10,000 soldiers from all branches of the armed forces marched past Lenin's mausoleum. General Zhukov, who had led the offensive against Berlin, played a central role. Zhukov was the one who embodied this, this big heavy man on a strong white horse that embodied victory for the people. The downside of Zhukov was that his military career, as well as his political influence in general, was of course over. Because Stalin as Generalissimo,
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was of course considered the actual architect of this victory and that legend should not be changed stalin was at the height of his power with the victory over hitler's reich eastern europe had fallen into the hands of the soviet leader from then on stalin's soldiers were his most loyal supporters with their help he could consolidate the soviet union's status as a superpower and stand up to the united states in a new conflict that was slowly brewing, the Cold War,
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a time when hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers were sent to their death seemed to be forgotten.
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In Berlin, the picture was different. The city lay in ruins. More than 28 square kilometers of the city had been destroyed over the years by air raids and the defensive battle against the Red Army. The city center had been hit particularly hard. The magnificent Boulevard Unter den Linden where 12 years earlier Nazis had celebrated Hitler's seizure of power and paraded through the Brandenburg Gate with torches, lay in ruins.
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Some Berliners lived in apartments without exterior walls called birds' nests. But almost immediately after the Soviets moved in, people set about rebuilding. Cleanup crews were on the move everywhere. Their pay for the hard work? 72 pfennigs an hour.
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The four victorious powers officially assumed supreme government power in Germany. It was exercised by the Allied Control Council, which was made up of representatives of Great Britain, France, the U.S., and the Soviet Union. At the beginning of July, the agreed-upon division of Berlin into sectors was implemented. The three Western Allies moved into their areas in the city. U.S. troops were accompanied by cameramen of the Special Film Project 186 unit.
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Their job was to document the bomb damage on the German side. More and more frequently, however, they also filmed people,
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like these children in Berlin who, presumably in search of relatives, spoke directly into the camera. The sound on the film of these scenes did not survive, nor is there any information about whether their search was successful.
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In the middle of the month, the new U.S. President Harry S. Truman landed in the city. Seeing the condition of Berlin made the democratic politician pensive. He noted, I witnessed a great world tragedy and I was grateful from the bottom of my heart that my country had been spared this unimaginable destruction. Truman had traveled to Germany to consult with the Soviets and the British about how to proceed in the future.
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The venue for the summit meeting was Sicilianhof Palace in Potsdam. It was the home of the German crown prince and his family before 1918. Starting on July 17, representatives of the three main allies met in the palace. It was an effort to publicly demonstrate unity after their triumph over the enemy. In addition to U.S. President Harry Truman, Stalin was also there. The British side was initially represented by Winston Churchill, who was replaced during the course of the conference,
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after an electoral defeat.
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The aim in Potsdam was, we have won and we are now collectively responsible for moving this continent securely into the future.
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But as we all know, war and violence continue.
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An end to the common ground of the anti-Hitler coalition was not long in coming. Just before the conference began, President Truman received news that after a long effort, a new weapon with highly destructive and threatening potential was at his disposal.
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The US had been working on an atomic bomb for a long time. The tests had progressed to a point that the bombs could then be used. It was also apparent to the United States that sooner or later, for ideological reasons, the Soviet Union would become an adversary, and they wanted to demonstrate that the US was technically able and ready. to use atomic bombs.
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In the coming weeks, intensive negotiations took place at the Sicilianhof Palace. The big three agreed on the amount of reparations Germany had to pay and on the denazification, democratization and demilitarization of the country. Geographical changes were also determined. East Prussia and the areas east of the Oder and Neisse rivers, for example, were separated from Germany.
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What they also decided in Potsdam was the resettlement of the German-speaking population of Eastern Europe, that is, the so-called contractual definition of resettlement. All remaining Germans were to be removed from Eastern Europe.
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In the run-up to the summit, German-speaking people had been expelled from Eastern Europe. Those expulsions took place mostly in the Sudetenland. which had been annexed by the German Reich in 1938, but also in Poland, and often it was done with great brutality.
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The Czech government in exile under Benes said they would not be punished, but that such an expulsion was a logical consequence because of the previously German forced rule. And German property could be taken away from them without any further ado. Under the agreement in Potsdam, the German government was forced to withdraw from the A regulated phase of expulsions followed in late summer. Once again, large streams of refugees set out for the West.
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But those people were not always welcome in their new homeland.
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After the war, Germany had to deal with a multitude of problems. There were many who had been bombed out. Poverty, worries about the future. So that an influx of a large number of people was not exactly celebrated. In fact, many were greeted with blatant rejection. They were also perceived as foreign, had a different dialect, looked different.
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In addition, there was interconfessional mixing. Catholics came to Protestant areas and Protestants went to Catholic areas, which was problematic at the time. In total. at least 12 million people of Germanic origin were affected by flight, expulsion and forced emigration. Despite the challenges, many managed to quickly settle into their new homeland.
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It was a very, very great achievement that these people were accommodated in the occupation zones. But there was also a concerted effort on the part of the people who came to build a new life under difficult conditions.
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And it was amazing that people managed to get a foothold there in a relatively short time.
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While the guns were silent in Europe after more than five and a half years, World War II was not yet over in the Pacific. The Japanese Empire was fanatically resisting the threat of defeat. The battles for Okinawa had been raging since the beginning of April. The island's defenders had entrenched themselves in the hinterland and often fought to the death. death against the attacking US units. It was only after nearly three months of fighting that
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the island was finally conquered at the end of June 1945. After a dearly bought victory, the US military leadership began to consider its further action against the enemy. The Battle of Okinawa as well as other battles in 1945 had shown the United States that it would probably be unrealistic to conduct a landing operation on the Japanese mother islands. And that then led to the decision to use atomic bombs. The logic being, it's better if the Japanese die rather than if American soldiers die.
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The plan was quickly put into action. After Japan refused a US ultimatum for unconditional surrender in late July, US B-29 bombers were loaded with a new type of weapon of mass destruction on the Pacific island of Tinian. in early August. On August 6th, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Three days later, Nagasaki was the target of another atomic bomb. At least 100,000 people were killed instantly in the attacks. Tens of thousands of others were irradiated,
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pushing the death toll higher in the years to come.
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But it also became clear that protecting the Japanese, protecting Japanese life of course, was not how people were thinking. The question, should we do this, that had been lost during the course of the war.
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Footage shot weeks later in Hiroshima. At 8.16, the bomb had been detonated at an altitude of about 600 meters, obliterating the city. The pictures showed the devastating extent of the destructive power of the new weapon and heralded a new age.
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On August 15, Emperor Hirohito addressed his people over the radio. It was the first time the Japanese had heard the voice of the emperor.
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The first time, the priority of the government is to improve the development of the U.S. economy, which is the only one in the world. The world will not change, nor will it be the same. The enemy will be the same. The enemy will be the same.
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On the morning of September 2, 1945, the battleship USS Missouri was anchored in Tokyo Bay. Also aboard the flagship of the U.S. 3rd Fleet was Commander George Cosco. He had a small camera loaded with color film with him, and so he shot this footage of the formal signing of Japan's surrender.
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the USS Missouri and Tokyo Bay on Sunday, September the 2nd, 1945, the most horrible war in history came to its complete and formal end. Foreign Minister Shigemitsu signed for Japan.
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Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander.
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General Su Yong-Chang signed for China.
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In New York City, as throughout a rejoicing nation and world, vast throngs of grateful, happy people celebrate the end of fighting, the dawn of peace. Two million New Yorkers jam Times Square. It's official. It's all over. It's total victory.
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The balance sheet of the Second World War was staggering. The number of its victims can only be estimated. But there were at least 60 million war dead, a number that cannot begin to describe the unimaginable suffering that began with Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland. The costliest war in the history of mankind lasted six years and one day, 2,193 days of suffering and death.
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