(intense music) (narrator) A new world rose from the ashes of the First World War.

♪ (blasting) In Germany, an empire collapsed and was replaced by a republic that could not last.

(Julia) Germany was in a really terrible state.

(Professor Kallis) Hyperinflation, economic crisis, political instability, you name it.

(narrator) Amongst the chaos, Germany turned to one man.

(Professor O'Shaughnessy) This extraordinary messianic figure with his golden oratory.

(Dr. Pine) He was going to make Germany great again.

(narrator) A man who would drive the nation to war, and would be responsible for history's largest genocide.

♪ It took just 12 years for the nation to be defeated, devastated, and divided.

♪ This is the story of life in the Third Reich.

(speaking German) ♪ (cheering) (dramatic music) 1940.

Hitler has been in power for seven years, and has unleashed a great war across Europe.

(exploding) In just five years, millions will be dead, the Holocaust will be carried out, and Germany will suffer the greatest defeat of any nation in modern history.

♪ (haunting music) On June 22nd, 1940, just six weeks after the outbreak of fighting on the Western Front.

The instrument of surrender between Germany and France was signed.

(Dr. Gusejnova) Hitler made a point of actually extracting the very train carriage in which the German Armistice of the First World War was signed in order to stage symbolically the humiliation of France.

(Professor Lehnstaedt) And here Hitler changes his presentation.

He presents himself as a successful general, uh, someone successfully conducting a war.

(dramatic music) He as the noncommissioned officer achieved only six weeks of warfare against France what all the generals of World War I didn't achieve in four years.

And this is why after 1940, after the defeat of France, Hitler reached the peak of his popularity.

♪ (narrator) Great crowds greeted Hitler upon his return to Berlin.

The image, so carefully crafted in six years of propaganda and rallies, was confirmed by his astonishing military success.

(cheering) (Dr. Dillon) Hitler's seen as being a genius and an inspiring figure by many Germans, a political leader to stand with Alexander the Great or Napoleon.

(Dr. Lynch) Every campaign is successful, or appeared to be on the verge of success.

The Blitzkrieg, the taking of the low countries in 1940, the near defeat of Britain.

(Dr. Salvador) The war appeared to be very fast, and the superiority of the German forces appeared to be clear.

(cheering) ♪ (narrator) For Germany, the war seemed won.

Their losses were not substantial, and only Britain remained, barricaded behind a narrow strip of water.

The Third Reich had become a European empire.

(ominous music) But, the treatment of those within its borders was not equal.

♪ (Dr. Gusejnova) Generally Western Europe was treated with sort of a greater degree of humanity to some extent, if one can sort of apply that word really to the Nazi regime.

There was certainly respect for cultural institutions, for example in France, from the Nazi regime in places like occupied Paris and so on.

Even in Belgium, where the Germans in the First World War had committed the well-known atrocities against the civilian population, their attitudes towards the Belgium authorities were still ones of institutional corporation, not of kind of racial hatred.

This was very different when it comes to German attitudes towards the Poles, for example.

♪ (Professor Lehnstaedt) In Poland, after '39, we have something like new racial hierarchies.

We have the occupiers who are on the upper tier.

Then, we have ethnic Germans, the Volksdeutsche.

The lowest level was obviously Jews, and only a little better were Poles.

Those ethnic Germans, those Volksdeutsche in Poland, they took over the expropriated possessions of the local Polish population, which set them well above the local population, and when the Reich Germans looked upon those ethnic Germans as some sort of German second class, these ethnic Germans looked upon the Poles as well, inferior race.

This is what the propaganda suggested.

So, what we have here is racial hierarchies, even among the so-called "Volksgemeinschaft."

(dramatic music) ♪ (narrator) On the 15th of May 1940, British Bomber Command authorized air attacks on industrial targets east of the Rhine in response to Germany's bombing of Rotterdam on the 14th.

♪ After the commencement of the Battle of Britain in July 1940, a German bombing campaign intended to bring Britain to the negotiating table.

British Bomber Command attacks escalated, making the war a reality for the German population.

(Dr. Schaarschmidt) Something which changed was the rather early start of the evacuation of children from Berlin and other urban centers.

The idea was that these children represented the future of Germany and had to be protected.

And strange enough, in the early stages, the Nazi leadership said it was not because of the area bombardments, but rather as a chance of children to get into more healthier surroundings, and everybody knew that it was due to the bombardment.

♪ (whistling) (narrator) After British Bomber Command's first raid on Berlin on the 25th of August, 1940, Hitler announced, "When they declare they will attack our cities in great measure.

We will eradicate their cities.

The hour will come when one of us will break, and it will not be National Socialist Germany."

But, in the following years, most of Germany's major cities would be flattened, and over 305,000 civilians would perish from the Allied bombing campaign.

(tense music) ♪ On the evening of the 10th of May, 1941, as 800 tons of bombs fell on London during the last phase of the Blitz, a German plane crash landed in Eaglesham, 648 kilometers away.

Its pilot was not a member of the Luftwaffe, but was instead Deputy Führer of the Nazi Party, Rudolf Hess.

(ominous music) (Dr. Lynch) Rudolf Hess was so mad even his fellow Nazis noticed.

He was a lapdog to Hitler, and had Hitler died before '41, Hess would've become Führer.

Extraordinary when you think of what's gonna happen.

A critical part of the relationship with Hess and Hitler is, a few weeks before Bobrovska's going to be unleashed, the attack upon Soviet Union, and Hess takes a private plane.

He flies from Germany to Scotland, bails out, lands awkwardly, breaks his leg, is picked up by some farming folk, and he says in broken English, "Take me to someone who can lead me to London.

I want to see Mr. Churchill and the British Cabinet.

Now the Scottish crafters pick him up, think, "Where's this man come from descended from the skies?"

But, he's interested.

He's then taken under guard to London.

He doesn't get his interview with Churchill.

He's imprisoned, but he makes no contact with the Cabinet or with Churchill.

They just don't trust him.

The view was of Churchill and the Cabinet, "He's come to disrupt the system.

He's come to offer something, but it's not genuine.

It's a ploy."

(narrator) After the war, Hess maintained that the purpose of his mission was to broker a peace between England and Germany, fearing it could not survive a war on multiple fronts.

(Dr. Lynch) Now when the news got back to Berlin to the Chancellery where Hitler was, Hitler went into one of his apoplectic rages, and he cursed the man's name, and immediately dismissed him from office, and said, "The man is mad."

And they all agreed.

(narrator) Following Hess's flight, Hitler demanded that the German press portray Hess as a madman.

Hess also had a great interest in mysticism, and so on June 9th, 1941, Action Hess was launched, in which occultists and astrologists were imprisoned, and many spiritual practices were banned.

(Dr. Lynch) Now the British thought it was a ploy on the German part.

Hitler thinks it was a British ploy with the Soviet to interfere with their program for the attack upon the Soviet Union.

Now it wasn't formally announced up to that point, but it's so tense the atmosphere, the preparations.

(unsettling music) (narrator) Despite Hess's intervention, the invasion went ahead.

On the morning of the 22nd of June, 1941, Joseph Goebbels took to the airwaves to deliver a statement directly from the Führer.

He said, "I have decided today to place the fate and future of the Reich and our people in the hands of our soldiers.

May God aid us, especially in this fight."

Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, -had begun.

-It came as a big shock to them.

They thought Russia was their ally, and I think many people were very disturbed by it.

I mean, they felt that Hitler had bitten off more than he could chew this time.

(Professor Lehnstaedt) With war against the Soviet Union, Hitler was no longer acting as a politician.

He didn't care about interior politics anymore.

He just cared about conducting the war.

♪ (Professor Bauerkämper) In the early stages of Operation Barbarossa, the attack on the-- on the Soviet Union, many Germans, including soldiers, still clung to the illusion of a quick victory.

♪ Another Blitzkrieg was their hope and the expectation.

An expectation that had been created, and propagated by the regime, of course.

♪ (Julia) The Wehrmacht made progress very quickly, so within a couple of weeks they had penetrated very deep into Soviet territory.

(narrator) Throughout Barbarossa, the German advance would push 1,600 kilometers, bringing the Wehrmacht to the outskirts of Moscow.

(foreboding music) (Julia) But, just as it happened for Napoleon, the winter came along.

It was a particularly cold winter, and the soldiers hadn't been issued with winter kit.

So, it was just horrible.

(Professor Bauerkämper) Disillusionment set in in October and November, 1941, as weather became cold, as rain made life difficult, you know, for the invading army.

Marching through the mud, for instance.

Uh, moving tanks became a major challenge.

And then, many soldiers realized it would not be a quick victory in Russia.

They realized that the generals as well as the Nazis had underestimated Russian military strength, and that the quick victories in the first few months of Operation Barbarossa were an illusion and were deceptive.

(Dr. Brodie) The rather hubristic assumption was that the Soviet armies would collapse way before the onset of snow, and that there wouldn't be need for too much by way of winter equipment.

And this, of course, has horrendous consequences for the German soldiers in the Soviet Union in the winter of 1941 to '42, with a very many suffering from frostbite and other ailments, resulting from fighting in temperatures of, you know, -20, -30, without appropriate equipment.

(narrator) By October 10th, 1941, the Völkischer Beobachter was reporting that Stalin's armies had disappeared from the Earth.

But, they had not.

Gossip, rumors, and letters home began to contradict the propaganda.

(Julia) Barbarossa is this turning point.

Prior to that when soldiers were killed, it was full of sort of Nazi rhetoric about sacrifice for the fatherland, and how they would live forever and so forth, when, of course, the death toll went up so hugely.

The letters written back to the grieving families were much less bombastic in tone.

They were much more centered on what actually happened, and on the grief of the family.

There is a real change, at least in the letters that I've seen.

(Dr. Kay) From 1941 onwards we see a waning in popularity for the war, a greater resignation amongst the German population, which obviously increased as the war went on, and as German defeat looked more likely.

(grim music) I don't think this went hand-in-hand, however, with a lot of popularity for Hitler.

Grievances and complaints were then directed at the people under Hitler, and not at Hitler himself.

There was a lot of faith in the military's conduct of the war.

Hitler's popularity remained remarkably consistent.

♪ (Professor Bauerkämper) Hitler was seen as a kind of father figure by many Germans, and this is why they glorified him and admired him.

Hitler was rather untouchable.

Germans differentiated between the Führer on the one hand, and the Nazis on the other.

♪ Hitler epitomizes the idea of charismatic leadership, and by "charismatic leadership," we don't just mean a leader who is a very good speaker, or a very good propaganda brand, if you like.

It means something more than that.

It means somebody who can establish a kind of rapport that goes above rational judgment, that goes into the sphere of emotion, into the sphere of almost quasi-religious reverence for a quasi-saint--saint figure.

♪ (blasting and crackling) ♪ (narrator) But, as the war dragged on, Hitler's mental state began to decline.

(somber music) (Dr. Lynch) Really from 1941 on, Hitler was on drugs, heavily on drugs.

Morphine, other types, and often they were cocktails that Morell, his Chief Medical Advisor, mixed up, hoping to help the pains that Hitler suffered from.

He had back pain, he had leg pain.

He was an insomniac, and Morell treated insomnia once on a daily basis.

Hitler would sleep, what, three hours a day, they reckoned.

He would retire at 12:00, read, or listen to Wagner till 3:00 in the morning, then try to sleep fitfully until 6:00, 7:00, then he did fall asleep and stayed in bed till midday.

But, Morell is the man who keeps Hitler going, one might say.

He was disliked by other doctors, who noted, you're treating him as a guinea pig.

He said, "I'm keeping the Führer alive.

The great man must survive."

(haunting music) (Dr. Kay) His waning health from partway through the war onwards was also not particularly visible, because yes, he stopped making so many public appearances, but he was still talking regularly over the radio, and so there wasn't really a general awareness of any waning of Hitler's health.

♪ (narrator) But, as his health deteriorated, Hitler made one of his greatest miscalculations in response to events overseas.

♪ (Julia) December the 7th, 1941, with Pearl Harbor, that really was the turning point.

♪ (narrator) On December 11th, Hitler declared war on the United States in support of Japan, Germany's Axis partner.

The declaration served as a convenient distraction from the situation unfolding on the Eastern Front, and bolstered hopes that Japan would come to the support of Germany against Russia.

But, history tells a different story.

(dramatic music) (blasting) Throughout the campaign on the Eastern Front, German forces imposed a policy of fear and brutality on the Soviet population.

(Dr. Brodie) The fear of being attacked and ambushed by partisans is something which animates many German soldiers, and flows seamlessly into the horrendous atrocities perpetrated against local civilian populations, which involves the systematic murder of local civilians and the destruction of their villages and housing.

♪ (Professor Lehnstaedt) When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, it had a so-called "Hunger Plan" prepared.

(Dr. Pine) This was a scheme put into place by Herbert Backe in the Ministry of Food, and essentially it was process by which the Nazis exported hunger to those territories in the East.

(Dr. Kay) The The Wehrmacht troops were given the orders that they should live off the land.

They were not supplied from Germany.

They were told to live off the land, so they took whatever they needed, and this was an army of 3 million men.

And when they had enough, they didn't then give the food to the local population, they actually sent it back to Germany.

(Professor Lehnstaedt) Germans said, "Well, they are racial enemies, so it's good if millions of them starve."

♪ (Dr. Kay) Whether the German people were aware of this is not entirely clear.

There were rations on certain goods in Germany, but I think any thinking German would've realized that they were able to live relatively well and eat relatively well only because food was being confiscated from the German-occupied territories.

♪ (narrator) In 1942, as increasing numbers of men were brought into the war effort, large changes were occurring on the home front.

(Dr. Lynch) In 1942, Albert Speer becomes Minister for Munitions, and he's extraordinarily successful, and it's arguable that had Speer not been the Armaments Minister, Germany would've lost the war at least a year, if not 18 months earlier.

He maintains armaments production by sheer organizational skill.

He's also to blame, of course, for much of the slave labor that Germany employed.

♪ (Dr. Gusejnova) As Nazi Germany loses its male workforce, instead of drawing in German women, the Nazi regime preferred to use cheap labor from the occupied territories of the Soviet Union.

(Professor Lehnstaedt) We have, like, 1.7 million Ukrainians alone living in Germany and working in Germany, and actually one can say that German industrial production would have been completely impossible without these forced laborers.

(narrator) Between 1939 and 1944, the number of forced laborers within Germany rose from 300,000 to more than 5 million.

(Professor Bauerkämper) With regard to the treatment of these laborers, one has to distinguish between urban centers and factories, on the one hand, and the countryside on the other.

Usually relations were less anonymous in the countryside, and were welcomed by many Germans, as Himmler complained.

"A lack of racial consciousness," as he put it.

In the cities, um, industrial sites, it was different.

Large-scale production prevented strong relations between Germans and the foreign laborers.

Foreign laborers were beaten.

Foreign laborers were punished.

And in the cities as well as in countryside, foreign laborers were punished for sexual intercourse with German women in particular, and there were severe penalties on this, usually they were shot dead.

♪ (grim music) (narrator) But, while numerous atrocities were being committed across Europe, and the tide of war slowly turned against Germany, reporting of the war remained positive.

The press were told to use particular euphemisms to describe battles.

"A shift in the front" meant the German Army had lost territory or had been forced back.

The word "catastrophe" was banned, or at least was discouraged.

These were ways of ensuring that the true levels of defeat were concealed from the population.

The problem with euphemisms is eventually people begin begin to see through them.

(Professor Lehnstaedt) There is a lot of chatter in Germany, and one has to wonder where all the information might come from, if not from the soldiers, um, reporting from the front.

(Julia) Soldiers who were coming home on leave gave lectures about what they'd been doing, and publically they gave a very upbeat account of what was happening.

But, then, of course, behind their own closed doors, they must've given a very different picture.

Some of the stories that come back from the front are implied criticisms of the way the war was being conducted, which is an implied criticism, not an open one, but an implied criticism about the leadership.

♪ (narrator) Propaganda did not admit that the German 6th Army had surrendered here at Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad, on the 2nd of February, 1943.

(haunting music) It claimed that the army had fought to the last man and the last bullet.

(Professor Bauerkämper) The 6th Army was encircled, uh, in Stalingrad, by a successful Russian counterstrike.

They were cut off from supplies, so life became increasingly difficult.

Many German soldiers died not only due to the fighting, but also because of the extreme cold, because of lack of food, lack of provisions.

So, it became an ordeal.

(narrator) Over 800,000 German soldiers and 1,100,000 Red Army soldiers were killed, wounded, or reported missing during the Battle of Stalingrad, and of the 91,000 German soldiers captured in a city, only 5,000 would survive.

The defeat in Stalingrad is the first proper defeat of Hitler and Nazi Germany.

(Dr. Pine) That was really the moment when the tide of the war changed against the Germans, and that was the moment where Hitler's authority and leadership now really for the first time came to be called into question.

♪ (Dr. Lynch) After the defeat at Stalingrad in 1943, the generals knew the war was a loser.

With the Americans in their vast manpower, with the Soviet strong enough to win a major campaign, Germany really had no room for maneuver.

(Dr. Brodie) Stalingrad is the moment in which people in a critical mass start to blame Hitler personally for negative developments in the war.

They don't blame other members of the Nazi hierarchy.

They start to point the finger at Hitler himself as the author of this disaster.

(Dr. Lynch) And Hitler declines to make any public statement about it.

Privately he says it was a great disaster, but he won't appear on radio, for example, and he leaves Goebbels to give the voice of the Nazi Party for really from that point on.

(Dr. Brodie) And so, as Ian Kershaw says, "After the Battle of Stalingrad, the German people's love affair with Hitler was at an end.

Only the bitter process of divorce remained."

(Dr. Lynch) I mean, he never showed up, for example, as Churchill did.

After a bombing, Churchill would go and sympathize with the local residents.

There's no example of Hitler ever doing that.

Now the German people were puzzled, but most people did accept that Hitler didn't appear not for any reason of embarrassment, but simply because he was too busy doing something else, and Goebbels could do it anyway.

(ominous music) ♪ (grim music) (narrator) On the 18th of February, 1943, 16 days after the German defeat at Stalingrad, Goebbels took to the stage at the Berlin Sportpalast to deliver a now infamous speech to 14,000 Nazi fanatics.

♪ In Joseph Goebbels so-called "Total War Speech," he rhetorically asks the German people, "Do you want a total war?"

And, of course, the hand-picked audience screams, "Yes!"

(Julia) They were told they had to just give everything to the fatherland, that the future of Western civilization was at stake, and if they didn't fight to the very last, communism would sweep over them and destroy them.

(Dr. Brodie) And it's only really at that point that more radical measures start to be put in place in terms of the mobilization of women for various forms of work on the home front, and increasing evacuation of areas heavily hit by bombing.

(Professor Lehnstaedt) Because millions of men were serving in the German Army, women took over much more active roles.

(Dr. Neuhaus) Women had to work in factories.

Women had to work in agriculture obviously.

Women had to run transport, drive trams, had to take over their husbands' businesses, run shops.

That was really quite a big departure from what at first the Nazi propaganda had said women's roles should be.

But, if you compare it to other war societies, we could say it was too little too late.

The armaments industry was already under enormous strain, and it was difficult even when women were forced to work.

Very often these industries were close to breakdown.

(narrator) In 1943, women between the ages of 17 and 45 had to register for work.

But, of the 3 million eligible women, only 1 million actually registered, and of those only 400,000 were employed due to the Reich's preference for forced labor.

(grim music) (Dr. Schaarschmidt) And Goebbels, who saw himself as the driving force for total war in Germany, was extremely annoyed, and at a certain point he wrote that the British are far more nationalistic than the Germans because they managed to mobilize their population far earlier than in Germany.

(Dr. Pine) In Britain, two-thirds of women were engaged in work during the war.

In Germany, it was less than 50 percent.

(ominous music) ♪ (narrator) In Goebbels's Total War Speech, he also warned that, "Behind the onrushing Soviet divisions, we can see the Jewish liquidation commandos."

But, at that very moment, Nazi Germany was engaged in the greatest genocide in history.

(Dr. Kay) What we now know today as the Holocaust started with the mass shootings of Jews in the first months of the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

(Julia) Going back to Operation Barbarossa, there were units called the Einsatzgruppen, whose job it was to go into occupied territories to murder political opponents, Jews, gypsies, on a massive scale.

♪ (narrator) With the assistance of Wehrmacht soldiers, the SS, and police battalions, the Einsatzgruppen murdered 1.3 million Jews, 21 percent of the total number of Jewish people murdered during the Holocaust.

After witnessing the killing methods for himself during a trip to Minsk on the 15th of August, 1941, Heinrich Himmler decided a more efficient solution was needed, a solution which would be provided by Reinhard Heydrich on the 20th of January, 1942, at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin.

So, he planned in a very methodical way the destruction of the Jews during the Wannsee Conference, where they planned what we now call the Final Solution.

♪ (narrator) The Wannsee Conference formalized the Nazi's policy of extermination.

Jews in occupied territories, many of whom who had already been deported to ghettos, would be sent to extermination camps to face special treatment.

(Dr. Horan) And it's quite clear from the documentation that we have that people working within the SS were well aware that "special treatment" was a synonym for "liquidate," "eliminate," "murder," "kill."

(dramatic music) (narrator) The techniques devised during Aktion T4, Nazi Germany's euthanasia program, would form the basis of the Final Solution.

(Dr. Kay) The T4 program was a secret operation run between late 1939 and late summer 1941 for the murder of the mentally sick and physically disabled in Germany and Austria, which claimed the lives of around 70,000 people.

(Dr. Brodie) And these disabled people are the first people to be murdered by poison gas in Nazi Germany.

(narrator) Killing centers equipped with gas chambers were established at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka.

♪ (Dr. Kay) When the Jewish communities across Europe were deported to the death camps, they had very little awareness of what awaited them.

This is maybe hard for us to understand with the hindsight that we have today, but the idea that an entire nation was being systematically murdered was difficult to comprehend.

They genuinely believed they were going to be resettled in the East, they were going to be put to work there.

They did not expect to be gassed.

Inevitably, some information trickled through.

By late 1943, they knew what deportation meant.

They knew it meant death, but this was very late in the day.

By then, more than two-thirds of the victims of the Holocaust were already dead.

♪ (narrator) Conservative estimates place the total number of people killed in the six major extermination camps as follows: 80,000 at Majdenek.

250,000 at Sobibor.

320,000 at Chelmno.

600,000 at Belzec.

800,000 at Treblinka.

and 1,100,000 at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

In total, over 3,215,000 people were killed in extermination camps across Europe.

(grim music) The question asked most about those who lived in the Third Reich is, "What did they know?"

(Professor Lehnstaedt) We can say that almost all Germans were aware of the removal of the Jews.

(Dr. Kay) One could not fail to see that suddenly the entire Jewish community of a given town, or city, or village was gone overnight.

Of course, when we think about concentration camps, we think about camps like Auschwitz, which has become the symbol of the Holocaust.

These were very small components part of the overall camp system.

There were actually across German-occupied Europe an excess of 40,000 individual camps.

This means that camps were everywhere in German-occupied Europe.

It wasn't possible to miss them.

(ominous music) (Dr. Salvador) The concentration camps were not a secret.

What was a, uh--a secret, uh, for a large part of the war was the Final Solution.

(Dr. Brodie) The German-Jewish diarist Victor Klemperer, as early as 1942, notes in his diary that he's aware of what he terms "A frightful concentration camp called Auschwitz, in which the people said they don't survive very long."

(Professor Lehnstaedt) Even if one was not fully aware of the total dimension of the Holocaust, it was quite obvious that these Jews were being murdered, if not all of them, then many of them.

♪ (Dr. Brodie) If you look at the sort of morale reports compiled by the Nazi State, there are many, many pieces of evidence in there in which people say things like, "We should not have solved the Jewish question the way that we have solved it, because now the global Jewish conspiracy will show no mercy to us."

We see people referring to the mass murder of the Jews in the East.

So, in many ways the idea that there was ignorance concerning the Holocaust is a myth.

(Professor Lehnstaedt) There are even German newspapers that inform us about, "With more than 5 million Jewish victims, we have to fear the revenge of the Russians, because the Russians, they are all Jews and Bolsheviks, so they will take revenge."

♪ (Dr. Kay) There was knowledge that had trickled through of what was happening to the Jews sent to the East.

Therefore, I think however much German people wanted to deny it at the end of the war, this was something they were actually aware of.

But, I think it's worth pointing out that during the war, people in Germany weren't focused on what was happening to the Jews by and large.

They were focused on, "Is my house going to be bombed tonight?"

"Is my father, brother, son, husband going to come back from the Eastern Front?"

"Are we going to have enough to eat next week?"

♪ (narrator) As the war progressed, the Allies shifted away from precision bombing of industrial sites to a policy of area bombing, a policy which did not discriminate between military and civilian targets, and was designed to break the morale of the German people.

(dramatic music) (Julia) Anybody who lived in the cities had a really terrible time, because the Allied bombing was so intense and remorseless.

(Dr. Brodie) It becomes something which shapes life on a daily basis, disrupting sleep patterns, making nighttime in particular a time of fear.

(Julia) And night after night after night, so they got no sleep, they were taking drugs to try and get some rest.

(Dr. Brodie) And, of course, the air war is regional and certain cities are bombed at different times.

(whirring) (narrator) Operation Gomorrah, the massive Allied raid on Hamburg on the 27th of July, 1943, resulted in the deaths of 42,600 civilians, 37,000 wounded, and some 1,000,000 civilians forced to flee the city.

(Dr. Brodie) Fear of bombing becomes a very dominant theme in the final tiers of the war, and the psychological strain of being bombed as well takes a toll on Germany's soldiers at the front.

There are morale reports saying that soldiers think, "Well, here we are fighting against overwhelming odds at the front, and back home our wife and kids are being bombed out of house and home anyway."

(Julia) So, you had horrible things happening all around you.

You had the disaster on the East Front.

You had more bombing from the Allies.

Food was getting scarcer, and there were many, many refugees fleeing the big cities and the bombing, and looking for sanctuary in the countryside.

Just the whole quality of life became pretty horrible.

(somber music) (narrator) The final figures for the destruction caused by the Allied bombing campaign throughout the war are staggering.

An estimated 305,500 civilians were killed, 3.6 million German homes were destroyed, and 7.5 million people were made homeless.

♪ With so much of the war years filled with bad news and bad experiences, it would seem that a large-scale uprising against Hitler and the regime was inevitable.

But, this did not happen.

(Professor Bauerkämper) These air raids did disrupt, if you like, relations between the German population and the Nazi leadership, but they did not lead to revolt.

They did not lead to large-scale disillusionment, and they did not force the Nazis to surrender.

(Julia) You had to be superhumanly brave to resist Hitler once he was in power.

Any resistance was stomped on by the Gestapo.

♪ (Dr. Dillon) Now it's no coincidence that within the last couple of years of the war, the terror ramps up to reach levels that have not been seen since 1933, because in the place of consent, coercion becomes the Nazi regime's tool of mobilization.

(Julia) Right up until the last days of the war, there were SS groups going 'round killing anybody who made defeatist remarks or looked as if they were going to surrender.

♪ (Professor Bauerkämper) There were minor opposition groups in the Second World War.

Youth group, for instance, the White Rose, and some other groups.

The Edelweiss Pirates in Cologne.

♪ (Dr. Salvador) And there was a circle of conservative Catholics and Protestant opponents to the regime.

(Professor Bauerkämper) But, these were minor groups, you know.

On the whole, I mean, their impact was-- was a minor one, one has to admit.

(dramatic music) (narrator) Perhaps the most notable example of resistance in Nazi Germany came in 1944 during the so-called "20th of July Plot," Operation Valkyrie.

(Professor Bauerkämper) Leading military generals and officers had thought about, uh, toppling Hitler from 1943 onwards.

German Armies were now on the defensive.

There was no chance of Germany winning the war, as some high-ranking officers clearly realized.

(Dr. Lynch) And they came together in a conspiracy with the aim of assassinating Hitler.

By July '44, fella called Von Stauffenberg, a military commander, and very close to Hitler in personal terms, he takes in a briefcase with a bomb to a war conference in the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia, where military headquarters are, and he goes to conference, he puts the case by the leg of the table that Hitler's standing at.

♪ (Professor Bauerkämper) The attempt failed.

Hitler was still alive.

Stauffenberg and his supporters were shot dead on the same day.

(Professor Kallis) When it is clear that Hitler has not been killed, and when, after a lot of pressure from Goebbels, he speaks to the German people on the radio, there is a massive spike in public opinion sentiment towards Hitler and towards an optimism about the war, so Hitler had this effect up until the very end.

(Professor O'Shaughnessy) That was the enduring legacy.

They were loyal to him, not to the Party, but to him.

That was an achievement of the propaganda.

(narrator) Despite Hitler's survival and an increase in support, the tides of war did not change for Germany.

(Dr. Brodie) Bereavement becomes an increasingly common theme on the home front.

Germany loses around 5 million soldiers in the course of the Second World War, and many of those casualties happen in the war's final moments, in the final desperate battles on German soil itself and in neighboring societies.

(grim music) (Dr. Lynch) Hitler makes a broadcast New Year's Day, '45, which, read in between the lines, it's his swan song, his farewell.

It's a terrible febrile atmosphere, the last year of the war, particularly the last six months, and it needed leadership and it didn't get it, apart from Goebbels.

(narrator) On the 16th of October, 1944, in a last-ditch effort to defend Germany from the Allied invasion, Joseph Goebbels founded the Volkssturm, the People's Storm.

(Professor O'Shaughnessy) The inception of the Volkssturm is one of the great rhetorical moments of the Third Reich.

(Dr. Schaarschmidt) It was a last attempt to mobilize as many people as possible for military defenses.

But, there were only elderly people left over young people who were enrolled to the Volkssturm, and from the beginning there were large doubts how efficient these defenses would be.

♪ (Professor O'Shaughnessy) The actual symbolism derived is not the symbolism intended.

The symbolism intended is this, uh, kind of demotic frenzy of the people.

But, what actually read in the cinema, when you see it, is these poor old men with panzer fires and grenade throwers going to fight the elite of the Red Army.

♪ (narrator) Joseph Goebbels's efforts were in vain.

By 1945, the Allied forces were racing towards Berlin.

♪ On January the 16th, 1945, Hitler relocated to the Führerbunker here in Berlin, along with his senior staff and his mistress, Eva Braun.

♪ (Dr. Lynch) From January on, the Party members who were loyal to Hitler go to the bunker as the Soviet approaches the East and the Allies from the West, and the bunker is the place of death.

They know they're going to die.

No consideration was given to a possible peace, and that's the fanaticism that Hitler imposes.

He saw what had happened to Mussolini.

Mussolini, in the last six months of the war, was strung up with his mistress upside down in a petrol station in Milan, and he said that that would never happen to the leader of Germany.

(narrator) By the 20th of April, the Red Army had encircled Berlin.

The fall of the Third Reich was immanent.

(Professor Bauerkämper) For the inhabitants in Berlin, life became desperate.

They lacked provisions, they lacked basic human needs.

Losses mounted, of course, and women were raped by advancing soldiers.

(intense music) It was hell.

♪ (Dr. Lynch) Now when it's obvious that the war is lost by late April, Hitler proposes to his mistress.

She accepts, of course, and they're married the day before they commit mutual suicide.

Their bodies are taken out into the open, kerosene is poured over them, it's lit, and they go up in flames.

(grim music) (Professor Bauerkämper) The sheer sight of Adolf Hitler, uh, on the 30th of April, 1945, led to very mixed reactions on the part of the Germans.

Some Nazi enthusiasts still believed in the last lie of the regime that Hitler had died while fighting.

But, this group was a tiny one.

Many Germans were just disinterested.

They concentrated on their own survival.

(narrator) The final instrument of surrender between Allied and German powers was signed on the 8th of May, 1945, in Berlin by a delegation led by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Supreme Commander of the German Armed Forces.

♪ Following the surrender, the three major Allied Powers met between July the 17th and August the 2nd, 1945, for the Potsdam Conference to discuss the administration of post-war Germany.

Germany was subsequently reduced to its 1937 borders.

All German territory east of the Oder Neisse line was redistributed between Poland and the Soviet Union, and the remainder of Germany was divided into four military-occupied zones.

♪ The Potsdam Agreement also mandated reparations be paid to allied governments.

Germany would be disarmed and demilitarized, and the ethnic Germans living in the eastern territories would be expelled.

(Dr. Gusejnova) They kind of reversed in some ways the racial laws of Nazi Germany, and started resettling the Germanic populations, and kind of sending them back, as it were, to Germany, even though they had actually historically lived there.

(Professor Bauerkämper) We had about 12 to 30 million refugees altogether, and because of atrocities, because of lack of food, lack of hygiene, lack of housing, 2 million of them died.

♪ (somber music) (narrator) In just 12 short years, Germany was almost completely destroyed.

Over 7 million German Nationals had been killed during the war.

Its economy was devastated, and its future placed in the hands of an unstable alliance.

(Professor Bauerkämper) And most Germans, I think, were just relieved that the war was over, and that they would survive in all probability.

(Dr. Brodie) That German memory of hunger in this period attaches itself much more to the post-war period than to the Third Reich.

Germans had far less to eat in late '45 and 1946 than they had in the Third Reich itself.

(narrator) In the years immediately after the war, the Allies embarked on a process of denazification.

(Dr. Gusejnova) It's important to highlight that denazification occurred in kind of three stages, and the first stage was a very top-down approach.

The Allied Powers set up, of course, the Nuremberg War Trials.

It was actually nobody's interest to create a kind of regime of terror where most Germans would be accused of being Nazis.

Rather, kind of the opposite is the case.

(Professor Bauerkämper) The Nuremberg Trials were necessary, on the one hand.

However, they made many Germans feel that it was the most important and influential Nazis that were guilty, not them.

It enabled many Germans to live on with an illusion, and to cover up their compliance, or even enthusiastic support for Nazism.

(Dr. Brodie) Then, of course, a Western Allies in particular forced local German civilians to visit concentration camps as a form of denazification.

(Dr. Kay) Everybody in Germany knew about these concentration camps.

Whether they knew the exact conditions there, or the extent of suffering and loss of life in concentration camps, that's a different matter.

(Dr. Brodie) Most of them reacted with horror to the atrocities that they witnessed.

I think that they were horrified by the sight of dead bodies, the horrendous smell in these places.

(Dr. Kay) But, there had been so much anti-Jewish rhetoric, it can't have come as much of a surprise what the German people then were forced to see.

(grim music) (Professor Bauerkämper) Many Germans tried not to discuss their role in Nazism.

It was only in the 1960s that a critical memory of Nazism set in.

A memory that was not restricted to German victimhood.

A memory that discussed German compliance and German support for Nazism, as well as foreign victims, for instance and in particular, the Jews.

♪ (Dr. Gusejnova) And this brings me kind of to the third level of denazification, if you like.

There was no symbolic representation for that absence of Jews in cultural memory, and that only happened really with reunification, when reunified German actually ended up carving out this large space in Central Berlin to create this Holocaust memorial as a kind of site of national trauma.

♪ (narrator) Today, Germany is a highly developed and progressive society.

It has the second highest rate of immigration in the world, and is a leading member of the European Union.

(Professor Lehnstaedt) I find it quite ironic that, despite all the efforts to create a homogeneous Volksgemeinschaft, a racially homogenous society, despite all the efforts to murder the Jews and all non-Germans, all those millions of slave laborers, of concentration camp inmates, despite the war, we have a Germany that is, um, ethnically more heterogeneous than ever.

♪ (dramatic music) ♪ (electronic music)