(soft music) ♪ (narrator) During the 1930s, the ownership of cine cameras became widespread across Germany.

♪ This was welcome by the Nazis because it allowed ordinary people to record their thousand-year Reich.

♪ With history being made all around them, many Germans couldn't wait to load their cine cameras and begin filming.

♪ Others preferred to record their thoughts in the time-honored form of the personal diary.

♪ After many decades of these diaries and films being hidden away, they are starting to find the light of day as new generations come to terms with Germany's Nazi past.

♪ What emerges is a unique insight into life under the swastika, a record that starts with optimism bordering on hubris.

Few know it yet, but by the end of 1941, Nazi Germany is teetering on the brink of catastrophe.

♪ (pensive music) ♪ Christmas traditions are precious for Germans, who gave the world the Christmas tree and some of its favorite carols.

A time for family, frivolity, and fun.

These are glimpses of small human moments in between the grand sweep of war.

This is the Burshe family from Berlin putting on a Christmas display, loving captured by husband Hans.

♪ (woman) The traditions of the Christmas tree, that is a tradition you share as a German and that's something very problematic too.

When you see it used in the same context that you're familiar with, it feels almost like everything was misappropriated by the Nazis and it's your own culture that you share with them.

Because it's the most important family gathering of the year.

I don't know, they look very pleased with themselves in a staged way to me.

It doesn't--it looks like there was a certain purpose somehow to this film.

I think when you look at photographs or films from that period, you-- you get these in-between moments that make you realize seemingly banal scenes of celebrating Christmas, you understand that not everything about that time was about Nazi ideology or the war, that of course, people lived their lives and because of that, it was probably not always apparent to them that many decisions they made on an everyday basis were political decisions.

(soft music) Gender roles.

Woman is knitting something, man is reading.

And the train set.

♪ Everything's under control.

It's meant to signify that there was money there to be able to give something like that as a Christmas gift.

Here, the gingerbread house that's-- I think every German has fond feelings for in some way and it's uncomfortable to see that reflected on the children's face that lived at that time.

♪ Just clearing the snow.

(pensive music) ♪ Pushing the hand cart.

Of course the weather is a huge factor in the whole war, particularly when the Germans go eastward, because it's wonderful in the summer, but once you start getting these terribly cold winters, it's so difficult for people to survive without coal, without food.

And as the war starts to bite, not only are the peoples of Eastern and Central Europe affected, but the Germans themselves come to be affected.

It's not the case here.

People are still well fed, energetic, little kids are helping, clearing out the snow.

♪ (narrator) Although many of the people look healthy, the population's view of the war is changing.

Fifty-year-old Hans Eggers lives in Hamburg, and by February 1942, his diary is preoccupied with food and the weather rather than military successes.

♪ ("Hans") It is minus 40 degrees today and we have restrictions on the supply of electricity and gas.

Our nutrition has become worse.

Hard, frozen cabbages and turnips are all we have for lunch.

Most of the grain is wintered out.

Many potatoes are frozen in the rows.

Some are not harvested, even in autumn, because there was a lack of manpower.

We've all become skinny as dogs.

(narrator) For Victor Klemperer, a Jew living in Dresden, the cold and lack of food are part of the daily horror of life under the Nazis.

♪ Klemperer has avoided deportation so far, thanks to his marriage to Aryan wife Eva.

But many of his friends are not so lucky.

♪ ("Victor") Before a deportee goes, the Gestapo seals up everything he leaves behind.

It is all forfeit.

Yesterday evening, before he was evacuated, Paul Kreidl brought me a pair of shoes that fit me perfectly and are most welcome given the dreadful condition of my own.

The latest transport includes many of the elderly, weak, and sick.

It is unlikely that many will still be alive on arrival.

♪ (narrator) Across the Reich, thousands of Jews await their fate, but one German married to a half-Jewish woman hatches an astonishing plan to persuade Nazi officials to change the racial status of his wife.

♪ This is Helmut Machemer, who is also a prolific filmmaker.

To do this, he must win an Iron Cross 1st Class, a medal that, according to an obscure bit of Nazi law, might entitle his family to be recertified as German.

♪ (man) I think the story of Machemer is essentially one of, in a sense, a bewildered human being who is married to the daughter of a Jew and can't find a way out, other than to go to the front and try to become a highly decorated soldier in the belief that this will protect his family at home, even though, by implication, he would be up to his neck in the slaughter of innocent people.

(narrator) His division is sent to Ukraine.

The fighting here is not only savage, it soon includes the murder of tens of thousands of non-combatants, many of them Jews.

So one of the interesting things about this footage is its provenance, and in particular, the fact that the doctor who made it didn't have to serve.

He was already old enough not to have to volunteer, but chose to, partly to protect his Jewish wife.

He couldn't know whether the marriage would be dissolved.

In fact, the Nazis never got around to dissolving marriages.

They put a lot of pressure on Aryan partners to divorce their Jewish partners, but they didn't actually dissolve marriages, and yet there was a constant fear that they would do so.

He essentially sees himself as a patriotic German who is shadowed by the fear of being classified as being Jewish or as being somehow connected to being Jewish.

(soft music) ♪ (narrator) Dr. Machemer throws himself into his dual mission: saving the wounded and rescuing his family.

♪ (man) This is my father now.

He was just giving narcosis to wounded man.

You know, he's moving in pain.

This must be a scene within the truck for wounded people where a young man with a bloody arm is being treated.

Just imagine, my father was a trained eye doctor, but of course, he had also basic training in the work of a general physician.

And you see so many helping soldiers.

♪ And that is the wounded man who is now happy.

Well done.

So he gets out of the truck.

The next is coming.

If he would be a very brave and successful medic and soldier, he might have a chance to get his so-called gnadenerlass by the Führer.

That would mean that his wife and his children would not be treated as Jews.

♪ A chance to save his wife who was half Jewish, and his children, for instance, myself.

♪ So everything looks very peaceful.

The feelings of the people looks quite relaxed.

♪ So this is nearly the end of the story because after he had received in early May 1942 this Eisernes Kreuz Erster Klasse, and was extremely happy, a few days later, he was killed in his car while he was driving across the battlefield in order to collect wounded soldiers.

And the enemy, that is the other Soviet side, was lucky just to set a grenade near to his car and he was... was dead instantly.

That was on the birthday, the fifth birthday of my youngest brother, Peter, on the 18th May of 1942.

(solemn music) ♪ Wooden crosses of those German soldiers who had fallen, as we say-- who had died in combat.

♪ In the middle there is the captain of the company, who is talking to the soldiers.

Oh, now as he--what is about?

They are just saying goodbye to some dead comrades.

It happens that I saw my mother sitting at the desk of my father, in front of her a white piece of paper, and she was crying.

I never had...

Excuse me.

I never had seen my mother crying, so I was shocked, and she was hitting her fists in desperation... on the table, and this was the moment I never forget, that I knew my father is dead.

♪ (narrator) In due course, his bravery earns a posthumous declaration from Hitler's office, declaring that his wife Erna has been reclassified as an Aryan German.

It is the only known instance of this ever happening.

♪ Yeah.

♪ I have a high appreciation of his decision to risk his life to protect his wife and his children.

It would have been very easy for him just to get divorced from his family, from his wife.

And in fact, many Germans did this.

And so, I think he was a very brave and loving father that he was willing to risk his life for us.

♪ (narrator) Machemer saves his family but seems unquestioning about the racial hatred that underlies it.

He's also part of an invading army which brought untold misery and death.

♪ (Hans) Just... ♪ Dead corpses.

Horrible.

♪ Dead, frozen corpses.

♪ Yeah, I think that's enough.

♪ (soft music) ♪ (narrator) In November 1942, a major deportation of Dresden Jews begins.

Klemperer is not on the lists, but these Jews being moved into a transit camp include many of his friends.

They can communicate while they await trains to the East.

♪ ("Victor") They are taking people to the Jews' camp at Hellerberg.

Eva said this kind of evacuation is so shameless, because everything happens so openly.

Eiserman called it catastrophic.

Unimaginably crowded and barbarically primitive, especially the latrines, but also the narrow beds.

The carpenters who build barracks for Polish prisoners of war stated they were luxury hotels compared to this Jews' camp of sand and mud.

♪ Although we don't know who shot this footage, it has to have been filmed by a German in authority.

The camera angle's from above.

He obviously has some privileged vantage point.

We get to see the luggage labeled, as Jews were forced to give themselves either Sara or Israel as a given name.

♪ Jew with his star on.

♪ Suitcases.

♪ You know, we think of Dresden as being an innocent place that was bombed needlessly in February 1945.

It's often forgotten that it was an absolute hotbed of Nazism.

Over 130 factories producing war material as well, a major rail hub.

And also the way they dealt with their Jewish population was as brutal as anywhere, really.

Yeah, it's just so wrong, isn't it?

You know, you look at these families with their kids.

I mean, Jesus.

Looking quite clearly distressed.

♪ Oh dear.

You wonder how many of these living people in this footage, you wonder how much longer they were.

♪ Their shoes have been stolen from them and they've been replaced with wooden clogs.

"Get rid of these shoes.

We'll have those, thank you very much.

Put on these cheap wooden shoes instead."

You know, you're lesser citizens.

In fact, you're not even citizens at all.

You're outcasts.

It's really grotesque.

Checking for lice.

♪ (Nicholas) In Bielefeld and Minden in November 1941, within 10 days of the first Jews being deported, rumors came back as to what had happened to them.

Those who had been able to work had been put to work in former Soviet factories, and those who couldn't work-- the elderly, women, the small children, and the ill-- they'd all been summarily executed.

♪ (James) God, this is so undignified, isn't it?

Germans watching on and laughing.

♪ Jewish men just being made to stand naked together.

Boys and adults together.

This is deeply humiliating for them, because of course, you know, you live in a society where it's not okay to be naked.

You know, for these older gentlemen to be there like that, that would've been deeply humiliating.

♪ All wearing their wooden clogs, struggling to walk in them, 'cause they don't fit properly.

They're too big.

You know, it's muddy, it's wet, it's cold.

♪ You know, it's little details like that that often get forgotten when you're thinking about the Holocaust.

It's really disturbing.

You know, you just think about the death camps.

You forget about the processes of deep humiliation, degradation that is going on in the process up to them arriving in concentration camps and death camps.

Horrible.

(solemn music) ♪ (narrator) Across Europe, millions of Jews now live under Nazi occupation and dread the day their names appear on the deportation lists.

Some have gone into hiding, notably Anne Frank in Amsterdam, the most famous diarist of the war.

♪ But less than a mile away from where she writes, another group of Dutch Jews are also in hiding from the Germans.

Cooped up for months on end, they turn to the cine camera to stave off despair and boredom.

The filmmaker is called Harry Swaab.

(introspective music) ♪ (Alexandra) Oh, this is obviously Jews wearing the Star of David.

Beautifully dressed, doing an acting, acting--play-acting.

This is a Jewish group in hiding in Amsterdam living above a cafe with the man who's hiding them, and they're putting on a play.

It's recreating life as if it was normal life.

Welcoming guests into their supposed cafe or house, cutting out ration coupons.

So this is normal life for those who are not in hiding in Amsterdam, and it actually is very, very comfortable.

I'm struck at the beautiful clothes, hairstyles, the humor, playing cards, the food, the sorts of things that would simply be unthinkable in Eastern Europe at this point.

There's a certain amount of normalcy even to it.

This is--the idea is to alleviate boredom, to have some fun despite all the horrible things that are going on.

Now you have to hide, because the time has come to wake up and go into your hiding place.

So here's an amazing piece of footage of a hidden door behind a closet, and you roll it back in front of the hiding place.

And there's another hiding place in the cupboard or oven in the kitchen.

It's all fake so the people can hide and avoid being discovered by the SS, which of course, despite the humor in this, and despite the sort of jolly nature of it all, you know that death hangs over each and every one of these people if they're discovered.

So although they can make light of it, they can amuse themselves, try to make it look as if things are okay, they all know, you can tell in their faces.

There's a hat, 1942, 1943.

How many more years do they have to live like this until the war ends?

♪ But despite the jolliness of it, you can see... there's the sort of mimicking the "Heil Hitler" sign, mimicking the crazy idiots who are following Hitler like dolls.

♪ Picture of Hitler.

♪ Incredible footage.

♪ (narrator) Four months into 1943, the Jews hiding above Cafe Alcazar are betrayed by pro-fascist Dutch collaborators who scour Amsterdam for hidden Jews on behalf of the Gestapo.

♪ All but two of the people in Harry Swaab's film are captured in this way.

The Nazis pay the Dutch collaborators a bounty worth 47 pounds 50 for each countryman they betray.

♪ For Nazi leadership, it is a turning point.

It is time the German people share the truth about their plight.

(speaking German) (indistinct shouting) (Nicholas) It's an important moment in March 1943 where Goebbels writes down in his diary that he's talked to Göring and they've agreed together that it's not a bad thing for the German people to know what has happened to the Jews, because they will realize that they've burned their bridges and as he reflects, "A society which has nowhere to retreat to will resist and fight all the more fanatically."

And that idea of holding out and fighting fanatically is the touchstone for Goebbels of what a successful war effort amounts to, and he continues with this right until the very end until 1945.

(soft music) ♪ (narrator) The Total War speech comes at a time when ordinary German civilians need few reminders of how dire things have become.

♪ In the early years of the war, the British bombing inflicted little damage, but as it intensifies during 1943, the authorities call up those born in 1926 and '27 to man the guns.

Young boys of just 15 and 16 years old.

♪ These child soldiers come from near Leipzig.

It is May 1943.

The Wehrmacht assumes boys will be less effective than adults, so initially, allocate 100 boys to replace 70 men.

♪ The boys turn out to be far more energetic than their elders, and before long, are in sole charge of flak batteries.

♪ Children like these are about to face Armageddon.

(ominous music) ♪ (James) Well, Hamburg was quite simply the worst ever series of raids on a single city ever in the Western world.

Color footage of buildings burning.

I mean, 42,600 people killed in Hamburg over a number of raids.

At the very end of July, three and a half thousand heavy bombers, 80 percent of the second city in Germany completely destroyed.

♪ Just horrendous.

Wow, look at that.

♪ Firemen trying to subdue the fires but, you know, we're-- in Britain, it's all about the Blitz and the bombing of the East End, but it's just absolutely nothing compared to this.

♪ Wow.

♪ (Nicholas) This is unique film footage that Hans Brunswig shot of the Hamburg firestorm.

And these images became famous as a set of atrocities that had been inflicted on the German population by not just the RAF, but by the Jewish lobby operating in Washington and London.

In the words of Goebbels, the Jewish terror attacks.

And this idea that this is terror bombing, that these are terror raids finds its ultimate confirmation in Hamburg.

It's these dazed evacuees from the city.

Spread their stories as they're evacuated, you know, from trains in the summer heat.

The city of 1.2 million, Germany's second largest city, 800,000 of its inhabitants flee.

♪ (James) It's just a shell.

Absolutely ruined.

Look at that.

I mean, you know, that's like Manchester being 80 percent destroyed or something.

It's just totally unimaginable.

Lots of refugees standing around bewildered, sitting on boxes.

There's nothing left.

♪ Wounded man, bandages around his head.

Trucks going out with... Wow, it's amazing, really.

It's a sort of exodus of people.

I mean, how do you cope with that?

You have dead lying where they are.

Oh dear.

♪ Wow, yeah, it's pretty gruesome.

♪ I mean, lots of and lots of dead bodies.

♪ It becomes extremely political, because people quite quickly ask themselves the question, "Why is this happening to us?"

And they don't just talk about the British air raids.

They also talk about this as retaliation for what they have done to the Jews.

And this picks up a crucial element of official propaganda which has been peddled since the spring of 1943, that the Jews abroad who've somehow captured the governments of Churchill and Roosevelt are pushing for a war of annihilation against Germany.

This is repeated by Goebbels, it's repeated by Göring.

Göring makes a famous speech a few months after the Hamburg raids in which he says, "Do not imagine if we are defeated that they would make any distinction between Nazis and non-Nazis, between people who supported these things and people who didn't."

And he says, "This is not the Second World War.

This is the great race war."

("Hans") Hamburg is destroyed as if an earthquake had passed over it.

The violence and heat of the conflagration was so great that many people left the cellars and were killed by the rain of the phosphorous bombs.

The streets are full of buried and burned people.

Thousands more are still lying in the cellars, burned, suffocated, or crushed.

Hamburg is finished for many years.

(narrator) The fire chief who organized the filming wasn't just recording the enormity of the firestorm.

He was telling Germans they are now victims too.

(melancholic music) (Nicholas) What Germans have done to the Jews is clearly on the moral deficit.

It's not something to be proud of, and yet people talk about it because they do think that it is linked to the Allied bombing of German cities, which they also think is a moral aberration.

It's something which goes beyond the pale.

And so, the bit of the rhetoric that works is the idea that these are Jewish terror attacks and that only Jewish terror could explain why German civilians are exposed to what they have to endure in Hamburg.

It's only in the spring and summer of '43 as the war comes home to German cities in the most extraordinary and destructive form of aerial bombing that they start to see themselves as caught up in an impossible cycle of destruction.

(soft music) (narrator) For millions of Germans, a sense of their own suffering deflects questions of guilt for what had been done to the Jews.

♪ (Ben) By the middle of the war for the average German worker, say, the hardships that they were experiencing and the danger, if they were living in a city like Hamburg or Berlin, was very significant.

They were probably more caught up in the day-to-day struggle to survive.

They were probably largely indifferent to what was happening to Jews.

I think to a significant degree, if they reflected on it, many of them would still be buying into the anti-Semitic tropes that they had probably grown up with and thought, "The Jews probably have this coming," or, "This is good because then we can get their stuff."

And of course, one of the big issues around deporting the Jews was the economic value of what they left behind and that ordinary German citizens could benefit from that by taking the furniture or taking over the flat or the house or whatever.

So, in my imagination, the dominant attitude would be, "I don't really care.

I've got enough problems of my own here, and the Jews were never very good, and we're glad to see the back of them."

(soft music) (narrator) By 1944, making home movies is no longer possible or even desired.

But even this late on, the borders of the Reich stretch across Europe, and for some, life under occupation is just about tolerable.

♪ Fernand Bignon filmed this near the town of Terville in Normandy.

Bignon was a member of the Pictorialism photographic movement whose members regarded photography as an art form.

♪ (James) Well, large parts of the Atlantic coast, you know, it's a pretty comfortable place to be.

I mean, if you're German, it's pretty cushy.

I mean, you know, these are rich agricultural areas and because the transport systems are so impaired by 1944, completely dependent on trains, there's not much petrol, so there's not much trucks going around.

A lot of the food that's being developed has to be eaten there.

I mean, there's nowhere else for it to go.

It's not being shuffled off to Paris or to, you know, the main cities or anything like that.

So being on the coast is cushy.

You're gonna get much better fed than you would if you were back home in Germany, and there's not an awful lot going on.

And unless you're unfortunate enough to be in Normandy itself, you know, you're sort of okay.

I mean, you know, 90 percent of the Atlantic wall was never involved in combat.

And if you're French there, again, you know, you're not going that hungry for the same reasons.

The food is staying there.

You're a secondary citizen compared to German troops, occupation troops, but it's perfectly possible to sort of keep your head down and you know, survive and battle it out, frankly.

♪ Normandy, up until the beginning of June 1944, is not a bad place to be.

Cut off from the rest of France.

Yes, you're occupied, but again, if you keep your head down, it's sort of okay.

There's rising civil war, of course, because the French Forces of the Interior, the resistance movement is growing because they know there's a light at the end of the tunnel and because of the obligatory work orders which means young men have to go and do labor service in Germany and lots of people don't want to do that.

So the alternative is to run to the hills and join the Maquis, join the resistance.

So if you're a young man at this time, you know, the choices are few and far between, and it's getting tougher and tougher, but if you're a sort of ordinary person, you can mind your Ps and Qs and you can sort of keep your head down and you're sort of going to be okay.

It is absolutely the case that while the Germans are hogging all the food because of this lack of transport, a lot of food has to stay in Normandy and actually, it's as good a place as any.

♪ (narrator) In April 1944, another group of young men arrived in the area.

(ominous music) ♪ Jo Dahms is a member of an elite German paratroop regiment here to strengthen the defenses along the Atlantic wall.

♪ ("Jo") The positions were built in such a way that you could stand up in the pit and be well camouflaged, protected from shrapnel and covered with wood and earth to hide our position.

One day in May, we were told Field Marshal Rommel would be inspecting the position.

A moment of excitement will break up the monotony of the daily routine.

We were all excited at the thought of meeting a greatness like Rommel and to answer his questions in the right way.

But he stormed through the positions like a driven man and we only caught a brief glimpse.

He still had a huge amount to deal with that day.

We were only the first stop.

♪ (narrator) Little did Jo Dahms or the Bignon family know, they are on the front line of one of the most monumental moments of the war.

♪ ("Jo") Despite all our efforts at camouflage today, we got a visit from a very threatening combat aircraft of the Royal Air Force.

It was a three-fuselage aircraft of the newest type with the characteristics of a fighter plane and the firepower of a bomber.

It flew over the positions at low altitude.

We could see the guns in the nose and rockets on the wings simultaneously opening fire.

Only a timely jump into the cover of a sunken path saved us.

♪ I learned later the plane was the terror of all infantrymen, a Lightning of the aircraft builder Lockheed.

♪ (narrator) The Bignon family filmed these same fighter planes, P-38 Lightnings.

♪ On the 6th of June, 1944, Jo Dahms is dug in just five miles from the D-Day beaches.

♪ Dahms' regiment fight bitterly to hold back the Allies.

They have no time to film themselves, but this official footage shows his unit in bleak and desperate combat with Allied forces.

♪ By the time Dahms' regiment leaves Normandy, they are reduced from 4,600 to men to just 500.

♪ (melancholic music) Back in Terville, Fernand Bignon has his camera out again, filming secretly as the Germans finally start to retreat.

♪ After four years of occupation, liberation is finally upon them.

♪ Fernand Bignon no longer has to film in secret.

♪ He and his family are at the roadside exchanging kisses and flowers with their British liberators.

♪ Back in Germany, the news of the invasion brings a new round of propaganda.

♪ But Hans Egger's diary shows he is no longer convinced.

("Hans") The long-awaited invasion of the West began.

According to an official statement of the army leadership, it will end with a complete destruction of the enemy.

The battle in Normandy is raging.

In the night from the 15th to the 16th, we have begun as retaliation to shower southern England and London with new high-explosive devices.

Both events, which have been told of coming many times, and whose occurrence has often been doubted, have now become fact.

How will both have an effect?

(narrator) In Dresden, Victor Klemperer hangs on.

One of just a handful of Jews left in the city.

He too watches the invasion, but longs for a very different outcome.

("Victor") The English have held on for three days and are near Caen and Bayeux.

The landing itself, therefore, is successful, but how will it go now and at what pace?

I can no longer hope for anything.

I can hardly imagine living to see the end of this torture, of these years of slavery.

(narrator) This footage, shot northeast of Berlin, is amongst the last taken from the German side in the war.

(soft, tense music) It is filmed by a newsreel cameraman called Gerhard Garms.

♪ He knows none of what he films will make it onto the newsreels.

♪ Instead, he records the last-ditch stand as an epitaph to a regime in its death throes.

(Alexandra) These last battles on the Oder Front were really the last Soviet attacks into Germany before the final assault on Berlin.

♪ It's really, really interesting why it is that German people keep fighting as long as they do.

There's a number of reasons.

First of all, there is the iron will of the Führer who has this unbelievable hold over people.

♪ (Alexandra) This is really the last-- sort of last stand of the German's sort of desperate attempt to try and keep the Soviets from breaking through in toward Berlin.

This very young boy, must be 14, if he's even that.

This tragedy of these very old men and very young boys by now were being called up because Himmler had created this so-called Volkssturm, which was made up of young kids and men who were in their 50s and 60s.

♪ (James) The second thing is, there were choices, this kind of fight on and somehow come to some settlement, but the alternative is Armageddon.

It is the end of everything you know.

Destruction, defeat, marauding Ivans coming across from the East.

♪ (Alexandra) These very young kids, it's tragic that the Germans just didn't stop.

They just kept on calling up anybody they can find by this point.

A lot of them didn't even have uniforms, they just had arm bands.

And old guys who really couldn't fight.

And this is just the very end of the war.

The Germans were so short of fuel and ammunition that everything they fired and everywhere they went had to be so carefully planned out, because they simply couldn't spare any men or materiel at this point.

♪ (James) And the third reason is sort of fanaticism.

It's this fanaticism of a certain proportion of the population who will just keep fighting to the end and ensure that everyone else does as well.

So you have ludicrous situations of Nazis in towns that are about to be overrun executing people who they consider to be traitors even though they're about to be overrun by the Allies half an hour later.

I mean, it just makes no sense at all.

So I think there's a combination of factors that keeps them fighting.

I think the biggest factor of all is fear.

It is fear of the alternative, and that's what keeps them going.

(narrator) Hans Eggers is under no illusions about what this means.

("Hans") Berlin seems to be on the verge of collapse.

About 85 percent of the Reich is in enemy hands.

Every resistance is meaningless and useless.

(soft piano music) (narrator) By the 28th of April, 1945, Victor and Eva Klemperer are taken in by a family in a village outside Munich.

♪ ("Victor") Suddenly, the familiar sound of artillery fire became explosions very close by.

Eva even heard the whistle of bullets.

We sat cowering in the corner of the kitchen, which seemed the safest.

A last small group of soldiers put up resistance for a few minutes before even they fled.

The American attack had rolled over our village.

The war was behind us.

♪ (narrator) Klemperer died peacefully in 1960, aged 78.

His diaries were published in 1995.

They became a literary sensation.

♪ Hitler dreamed of building an empire.

He encouraged his people to film every step along the way.

♪ What they filmed was only ever intended to be viewed by victorious Germans.

Instead, what they chronicled was their country's descent into the abyss.

(dramatic music) ♪ The Allies take Germans from the towns near the camps to see what has been done in their name.

Fittingly, there is a cine camera on hand to record the moment.

♪ It is not enough these German civilians confront Nazi crimes.

Posterity must see them doing it.

♪ (Ben) When the camps were uncovered and these terrible scenes were revealed of mass death and people starving and so on, I think the effect on the Allies was very profound and they wanted to confront the local population with these realities.

But also, this has to be recorded.

And one thing if you're a German citizen watching a column of people going off to a railway station and you know that they're never coming back, but it's a very different thing to confront the immediate physical evidence of what was done to these people after they got on that train and were taken away.

The Germans knew a lot, but they didn't know that last bit of what went on in these camps.

And they needed to know that.

♪ (bright music)