8th of May, 1945,
at last the darkness was lifted.
The people celebrated across Europe
and throughout the world, victory over Nazi Germany.
From the D-Day landings on the beaches of Normandy
in June 1944, it took almost a full year to win the war.
Facing defeat, Adolf Hitler became ever more
relentlessly determined to fight to the very finish.
As his Third Reich slowly collapsed about him,
the brutality of the warfare, the fanaticism of the Nazis,
have only increased.
Those 11 months, the most relentless and brutal period
of the Second World War left an eternal scar on hearts,
and on history.
Summer 1944, for nearly five years, Europe had been at war,
awaiting its liberation.
On the 6th of June,
the winds of freedom finally began to blow
over the beaches of Normandy.
On the evening of the longest day,
more than 150,000 soldiers had made it to land.
By July the 1st,
almost one million men were fighting in Normandy.
The Allies had control over the skies.
They were systematically destroying the infrastructure
used by the Germans.
All their convoys of reinforcements were strafed.
Even Field Marshal Rommel,
the head of German forces in Normandy,
was wounded in an aerial attack.
A joke began to do the rounds in the German ranks,
"If you see a white plane, it's an American one,
"if you see a black plane, it's an English one,
"and if you see nothing, it's the Luftwaffe."
And yet, the outcome was far from settled.
Hitler's armies put up fierce resistance.
The British general, Montgomery,
hoped to take the city of Caen within 24 hours.
In the event, it took six weeks
and carpet bombing that flattened the city.
At last, in the final week of July, the front gave way.
The Americans managed to break through
on the Cotentin Peninsula.
Allied troops liberated Brittany,
and soon after, General Patton's rampaging 3rd U.S. Army
liberated town after town and pushed east.
The liberation of western Europe was finally underway.
Western France was in ruins.
The population were embittered,
but after four years under the Nazi jackboot,
there was finally hope.
The mood was one of confidence.
"We'll cut through Germany like butter,"
predicted those around General Eisenhower,
the Supreme Allied Commander.
This mood of optimism was heightened
since on the Eastern Front, a huge offensive was underway.
Stalin had unleashed Russian forces in Operation Bagration.
His objective was to seize Belarus,
with the subsequent aim of opening the route to Warsaw,
which in turn controlled access to Berlin.
The Red Army was advancing like a steamroller,
crushing everything in its path along a 1,000 km front.
More than a million men, 4,000 tanks,
30,000 artillery pieces,
and over 6,000 planes came at the enemy.
Nothing could stop them.
The strongman of the Kremlin
showed he had a sense of history.
Stalin waited until the 22nd of June
to launch his offensive.
Hitler had attacked Russia three years before to the day,
on the 22nd of June 1941.
On this front, the Soviets went from one victory to another.
Hitler had ordered his generals
to apply a fortress strategy,
to dig in at a few well-defended places to contain the enemy
and force him into long and bloody fighting.
By imposing a war of movement in 1940,
Hitler was a step ahead in terms of tactics.
By pegging his generals in citadels,
the Fuhrer had now taken a step back to old-school war.
The Soviets surrounded the towns
and waited for them to fall like ripe fruit.
Vitebsk, Orsha, Mogilev, Bobruysk, Minsk,
the cities of Belarus fell one by one.
Vassili Grossman,
correspondent for the Soviet Army newspaper,
the Red Star, noted, "The road to Bobruysk
"is the road of retribution.
"Here, the cauldron of death boils,
"swallowing up in merciless vengeance
"all those who have not laid down their weapons
"and fled west."
To slow the Russian advance,
the Germans carried out a scorched earth policy,
ravaging towns and destroying all infrastructure.
But nothing could halt the Red Army,
neither the blown-up bridges
nor the thousands of mines laid by the Germans.
Their progress was so rapid
that they were running out of fuel.
To keep up the pace,
Russian soldiers sometimes mixed vodka and diesel oil
to keep the tanks rolling.
One German corporal wrote to his wife,
"If the Russians continue in this direction,
"you won't have to wait long
"before they're on your doorstep."
The liberated territories were in flames.
The liberated population had lost everything,
their belongings, often their homes,
sometimes even their lives.
To celebrate what was one of the biggest defeats
inflicted on the Wehrmacht,
Stalin paraded 57,000 German prisoners in Moscow
on the 17th of July 1944.
Three years earlier,
Hitler had promised them they would march through Moscow.
A promise now fulfilled.
Attacked from the west by the British, American,
and Canadian forces, from the east by the Soviets,
the Reich was threatened with sudden collapse.
Especially since a major blow
was about to be dealt to its head.
Convinced of the imminence of defeat,
a circle of German officers wanted to eliminate Hitler
so they could open negotiations with the Allies.
On the 20th of July,
while the Fuhrer was meeting with his top brass,
the bomb went off.
The blast caused huge damage.
But despite the violence of the explosion,
Hitler had miraculously survived.
He suffered a burst eardrum and a dressing covered his ear,
but he was alive.
Not everyone was so lucky.
Several men who were with him were gravely wounded,
and would later die.
That same day, Benito Mussolini,
who still reigned over the northern half of Italy,
paid him a visit.
When Hitler showed him the location of the attack, he said,
"The bomb exploded just by my feet.
"It's clear nothing can happen to me.
"My destiny is to pursue my course and complete my task.
"I am more certain than ever that the great cause
"which I serve will triumph, despite the current dangers."
Hitler interpreted his survival as a sign from heaven,
Mussolini refrained from contradicting him.
Before leaving, Il Duce told him,
"After this miracle,
"it is unthinkable that our cause might fail!"
When the Germans learned that Hitler had survived,
many wept with joy.
"Thank God, the Fuhrer is alive!"
people were saying on the streets of Berlin.
For in July '44, many Germans still thought their fuhrer
represented the only hope of winning.
The very evening of the assassination attempt,
the dictator addressed his people:
The bombing heightened Hitler's
natural tendency towards paranoia.
Five thousand people were arrested.
This was followed by swift trials.
Certain generals, smartly dressed a few weeks earlier,
now appeared before the judges in shabby clothes,
looking dirty and haggard.
Judge Freisler, a fanatical Nazi,
showered them with insults.
He shouted so loud that the technicians responsible
for recording this parody of justice
asked him to bring the volume down.
The sentence gave no recourse for appeal.
Some 200 people were executed.
Following this brutal purge,
Germans tended to become more fervent,
to avoid being suspected of half-heartedness.
One had to show loyalty to the Fuhrer to the bitter end.
In the army, the "Heil Hitler" salute
replaced the traditional military salute.
The regime placed its most trusted men in the top posts.
Starting with the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler,
who was appointed head of the Replacement Army.
He now had full authority over almost two million men.
Goebbels, the minister of propaganda,
became the Reich's overall minister for war.
Pleased with these enlarged powers,
he confided to his friends,
"It takes a bomb under his ass to make Hitler see reason."
The bombing hadn't broken the regime.
On the contrary, it had consolidated it.
However, the Allies were still advancing,
both from the east and the west.
Farther south, in mid-August,
French and American forces landed in Provence.
The GIs of General Patch
and the soldiers of the 1st French Army
commanded by General de Lattre
began to make inroads into southern France.
Helped by the FFI, the French Forces of the Interior,
they liberated Marseilles,
before moving up the Rhone Valley.
But these images of a humiliated Wehrmacht
are misleading.
The large majority of Hitler's soldiers
managed to pull back.
More than 400,000 made it back to Germany
and prepared to defend the fatherland.
Far from the front, back in Germany,
news reports screened in cinemas
strived to brighten up daily life.
In the summer of '44, despite the bombardments,
and while the Reich was crumbling,
for many Germans the war was still distant.
The images testify to the comfortable lifestyle
and folklore traditions that reigned in the country.
The Germans still had faith in Hitler.
How could they do otherwise, when the party was omnipresent?
The population was well-fed,
the factories continued to operate.
The administration was functioning,
and Berlin Zoo remained open.
It was a wonderful summer,
and those at home made the most of it.
The war?
What war?
Yet this swimming scene filmed in August 1944
was in the town of Dachau.
A few kilometers away,
the oldest concentration camp in Germany
continued to eliminate deportees
arrested from across Europe.
While Germany basked in the summer sun,
occupied Europe remained in the grim shadow of the Nazis.
The regime pursued its policy of annihilation.
Between May and July 1944,
more than 435,000 Hungarian Jews
were sent to the death camps.
In August '44, the crematoriums at Auschwitz
could not keep pace with the number of bodies piling up.
The SS began to burn them in open pits.
Even as the Allies approached Paris,
one last convoy of deportees left the Paris region
for the death camps on the 17th of August 1944.
Only a week later, on the 25th of August,
Paris was liberated.
The Allies did not expect to make such swift progress.
The Americans paraded triumphantly amid the cheers.
The Parisian women hugged their liberators.
Euphoria could be read on their faces.
Many GIs thought the worst was over,
and that defeating the Reich
was now no more than a formality.
Summer held the promise of victory.
Autumn would deliver a series of setbacks.
Since the D-Day landings, the U.S. general, Eisenhower,
had distrusted the commander of Allied land troops,
Britain's General Montgomery,
who had overseen a string of failures in Normandy.
Despite these setbacks,
Montgomery demanded to run operations against the Reich,
placing all Anglo-American forces under his command.
But this demand was unacceptable for Eisenhower.
To avoid putting all his troops under Montgomery,
Eisenhower divided his forces into two groups.
The first was under Montgomery's command.
It would attack via the north
towards Belgium and the Netherlands,
with the objective of seizing the port of Antwerp.
Once in Allied control, tanks and munitions
could then be shipped closer to the front.
The second group was assigned to the U.S. General Bradley,
and would attack to the east,
backed by the armies of Generals Patton and Simpson.
Things moved fast from September 1944,
the British and Canadians under Montgomery
continued their advance and took Brussels.
The following day, in Antwerp,
the victors captured hundreds of prisoners
but did not know what to do with them.
The zoo was quickly reassigned.
Although the Belgian authorities hailed Montgomery,
he made a mistake.
In the rush to invade Germany,
his troops had taken the port of Antwerp, as planned,
but they had neglected to clean out the islands
and the riverbanks which control its access.
They were held by heavily-armed German units.
As a result, no Allied shipping could use the port
and supply the front.
This new failure enraged Eisenhower and for good reason.
For two longs months, Allied troops now had to break down
German resistance through dangerous amphibious operations.
The failed offensive cost Montgomery 13,000 casualties.
But it would take more than that to undermine Montgomery.
He persuaded the skeptical Eisenhower
to give him all available resources.
His objective, to launch a huge parachute operation
on Arnhem in the Netherlands.
Code name, Operation Market Garden.
On the 17th of September 1944,
over 20,000 parachutists
and more than 13,000 troops in gliders
took off heading for the Netherlands.
It was the biggest airborne operation in history.
The American, British, and Polish parachutists
were dropped behind the German lines
to take a series of bridges across the Maas,
the Waal, and the Rhine,
to stop the Germans destroying them.
Once these bridges had been secured,
land troops could go round the defenses
of the Siegfried Line by the north and invade the Reich.
Monty was sure of himself,
the war would be won by Christmas.
Unfortunately, the situation on the ground
soon became tricky.
The gliders landed, but some crashed.
The drop zones were too far from their objectives.
The Germans got hold of a glider
and recovered some equipment and supplies.
But more importantly,
they also found a plan of the operation
that an officer had taken with him,
in contravention of orders.
When the 4th Parachute Brigade
was dropped as reinforcements,
its soldiers were shot out of the sky like pigeons
by Germans who were expecting them.
In the town of Arnhem,
two panzer divisions raced towards the British paras
and besieged them.
After five days of dogged fighting,
Montgomery's soldiers were forced to surrender.
Overall, the Allies lost over 17,000 men
and liberated only a part of the Netherlands.
The failure of the expedition was only the beginning
of a terrible disaster.
To help Operation Market Garden,
Dutch railwaymen went on strike.
As a reprisal, the Reich blocked all food imports
to occupied the Netherlands.
The queues lengthened outside the food stores,
which were all but empty.
From October onwards, famine took a terrible toll.
Thousands of civilians died of hunger.
Henri, aged 10 at the time, recalls,
"Nothing was more important than food.
"I woke up in the morning thinking about food.
"We used to talk about food all day long.
"And when I went to bed, hungry, I dreamt of food."
The Dutch suffered for longs months
in what they call the Hongerwinter, the winter of hunger.
At least 16,000 civilians perished.
While Monty was halted in the Netherlands,
Bradley's U.S. forces were making progress.
In September, his troops reached the German town of Aachen.
Hitler ordered his forces to defend the town to the last bullet.
The First U.S. Army had to take the town street by street,
house by house, in a fierce combat.
"I don't understand," said one GI.
"They know they will most likely get killed.
"Why on earth don't they just surrender?"
After five weeks of siege,
during which more than 1,000 GIs were killed,
the town finally fell.
The Germans experienced for the first time
what many people across Europe had felt a few years earlier
when they fled the Wehrmacht hordes.
The taking of Aachen was a symbol.
It was the first German town to fall into Allied hands.
This toehold in German territory
was a long way from spelling victory.
The Allies were stalling
in the face of fierce German resistance.
Monty had failed in his operation in the Netherlands,
the port of Antwerp was still impracticable.
And the hard-driving General Patton,
who was eager to pursue his advance eastwards,
was deprived of fuel.
"My men can eat their belts,
"but my tanks have gotta have gas!" he raged.
He was at a standstill.
In a further twist of irony,
part of his fuel had been diverted to the British.
By slowing down Patton, the Allies were unable to exploit
the breakdown of the Western Front.
As a result, the Germans had time to regroup their defenses,
taking up positions beyond the Rhine.
The Western Front was blocked.
The war over by Christmas?
That dream had evaporated.
The war would go on.
On the Soviet front, Operation Bagration was a success.
Between the 22nd of June and the 31st of August 1944,
Russian offensives had put 700,000 Germans out of combat.
The troops under General Zhukov's command
covered 500 km in five weeks.
The Soviets were approaching Warsaw.
Radio Moscow called on the population to rise up.
Convinced they would be backed by the Red Army,
the Polish Home Army launched an insurrection
on the 1st of August.
The first days were euphoric.
Barricades went up in every neighborhood.
Everyone took part in the combat in their own way.
These resistance fighters threw everything into it
and drove back the Germans.
The Polish knew the Russians were just nearby,
on the other side of the Vistula.
With this powerful ally waiting in the wings,
the insurgents had nothing to fear.
But on the 4th of August, the Germans sent reinforcements.
Their mission, to eliminate the Polish problem,
by whatever method.
The city was mercilessly shelled.
Gradually, the Germans retook control of the city
and crushed the insurgents.
The hospital was torched, the wounded executed.
The resistance movement could have tipped the balance
if it had had support.
But the Red Army stood on the sidelines.
While the German forces destroyed the city,
the Soviet troops camped on the banks of the Vistula.
Stalin was unmoved.
He would not intervene.
For a while, he even refused permission
for the Americans and British to use his airfields
to supply the insurgents, leaving them to face slaughter.
He had a dual motive,
he had to allow his troops to recoup their strength
after Operation Bagration.
The supply corps had to bring up fresh fuel, weapons,
munitions, and spare parts
to this new front line on the Vistula.
Meanwhile, Stalin left the non-Communist Polish resistance
to be wiped out, a cynical move
he may have hoped would clear the way for the communists
to assume power at a later date.
The Anglo-Americans protested.
But not so strongly
as to threaten their relationship with Moscow.
That was the price of the Soviet alliance against Hitler.
The uprising in Warsaw ended in a bloodbath:
Some 250 000 civilians
and 15,000 Polish insurgents were killed.
After two months of fierce combat,
the guns fell silent.
The resistance army surrendered.
Warsaw was almost totally destroyed.
The Polish, who had hoped for support from the Soviets,
now feared falling into their hands.
As one poet put it, "We await you, red plague,
"to deliver us from the black death."
While the Red Army camped on the Vistula,
to the west, the Allied armies
had at last been able to open the port of Antwerp.
The Americans had reached the Rhine.
The Reich was finally caught in a pincer.
But despite this attack on two fronts,
the Nazi regime showed no sign of crumbling.
On the contrary.
The army blindly obeyed its supreme leader.
In October, Himmler unleashed the Volkssturm,
the People's Storm Troop.
This militia recruited men who were not already serving
in a home defense force.
At a stroke, a provincial solicitor,
a teenager in the countryside, or a village baker,
found himself armed with a rocket launcher
to defend the Reich.
The German people were still solidly behind their fuhrer.
They couldn't imagine any alternative to the Nazi regime.
This was because during the 12 years he had been in power,
Hitler had indoctrinated the Germans.
In December 1944,
Germany had been holding out on two fronts
for almost six months.
The Reich was wounded. It was bleeding.
But on the economic level,
the country redoubled efforts in factories producing tanks,
planes, submarines, and munitions.
While they couldn't win the battle in terms of quantity,
the Germans employed new weapons,
like remote-controlled miniature tank-buster vehicles...
and one-man torpedo submarines.
But above all, Hitler put great store
in what he called miracle weapons.
The V1 flying bombs which had been raining down on London
since June and had killed thousands of civilians.
The V2 was the first ballistic missile in history.
For several years, they had been secretly developed
in the Reich's factories.
In the fall of '44, they were finally ready.
These rockets could carry one ton of high explosives.
Although these retaliatory weapons had a limited impact,
they galvanized the Germans.
One young man wrote,
"All we talk about is the V2.
"Perhaps we can launch them against America.
"I'm sure that victory is ours."
This industrial prowess was due to one man, Albert Speer.
The Fuhrer's architect supervised this reorganization,
which he portrayed as a miracle.
Because despite the Allied bombardments,
weapons production had actually increased up to July 1944.
But this unholy miracle bore a name, slavery.
The Reich exploited millions of workers.
Deportees, Jews, Communists, resistance fighters.
There was also labor conscripts,
rounded up from across Europe.
Prisoners of war were turned into workers.
Almost nine million men and women
work in atrocious conditions on behalf of the Reich.
German industry could thus keep up with the war effort.
The Reich was even able to go from being on the defensive
to the offensive.
On the Western Front,
the division of Allied forces into two blocs
had left the sector of the Ardennes
dangerously ill-defended.
That was where Hitler decided to strike.
On the 16th of December, to the astonishment of the Allies,
1,900 cannon guns opened fire.
Here, Hurry!
In the first few hours,
the element of surprise gave the German high command
an unexpected success.
The Allies thought they were dealing with a routed army.
Instead, they found themselves facing
a fierce counter-attack.
For Hitler, it was a big gamble.
He hoped this offensive might stabilize the Western Front,
convincing the Anglo-Americans that they could never win,
and, who knows?
Maybe even prompt them to side with him
against the Bolshevik demon.
The Fuhrer was convinced
the east-west coalition was against nature
and was destined to break up.
Marxists allied with capitalists, it was simple heresy.
This alliance would crumble.
It just needed to be dealt the coup de grace.
The Germans made progress, helped by the bad weather
which prevented Allied aviation from intervening.
The advance was spectacular.
One lieutenant wrote to his wife,
"You cannot imagine the days of glory
"that we're experiencing at the moment.
"It's as if the Americans cannot withstand
"the might of our thrust."
The news spread in Belgium and Alsace,
both of which had only just been delivered
from the brown plague.
"The Germans are coming back."
Civilians who had only just returned to their homes
took to the road again.
As they prepared to celebrate Christmas,
German families also celebrated this new offensive.
"What a wonderful Christmas present!"...
one could hear in the streets.
Goebbels' pollsters noted,
"People are profoundly happy
"that we have seized back the initiative,
"especially since no one expected it."
This operation reinvigorated the German population.
One soldier wrote to his wife,
"The snow must be stained red with the blood of Americans.
"We're going to cast them into the ocean, the arrogant,
"loud-mouthed apes from the New World.
"They will not set foot on our Germany."
But the determination of the Germans soldiers
sometimes escalated into acts of brutality,
as they committed numerous war crimes.
On the 17th of December,
69 American prisoners of war were shot dead by the SS.
The same day in the little town of town Malmedy,
the bodies of 86 GIs executed by the same SS unit
were discovered.
Belgian civilians, men, women, and children,
were also massacred.
They spared no one.
Meanwhile, chaos reigned on the American lines.
To add to the confusion,
German commandos disguised as Americans
had infiltrated Allied territory,
switching road signs and carrying out sabotage.
The GIs were suspicious of everyone and everything.
They intercepted vehicles
and carefully checked identity papers.
They were told to ask questions
that only an American could answer.
In one of the most critical periods of winter 1944,
the military police would ask at every checkpoint,
"Who is Donald Duck's girlfriend?
"What is Roosevelt's dog's name?"
Sometimes, spies were captured.
The German troops pushed on with their breakthrough.
They besieged the small Belgian town of Bastogne,
a crucial strategic point
for the success of their operation.
Eighteen thousand GIs were defending the town.
In their ranks, the rumor spread that the Germans didn't take prisoners.
The American soldiers redoubled
their determination to resist.
But the town was quickly surrounded by panzers.
The U.S. troops were caught in a trap.
While he was preparing an offensive farther south,
General Patton was called to the rescue.
In mid-winter, he swung his army round 90-degrees
and headed straight north, pushing hard for Bastogne.
He had promised Eisenhower that this maneuver
would take him no more than three days.
His tanks drove day and night through appalling conditions.
But they had not planned for icy roads.
Meanwhile, in Bastogne,
the GIs were up against the Germans and the weather.
Many died frozen in their fox-holes.
On the 23rd of December,
the Germans looked up at the sky in horror.
The snow had stopped.
The snowflakes had been replaced by the planes
of the U.S. Air Force, which pounded the German positions.
Soon after, as he had promised,
Patton's Third Army came to relieve the siege of Bastogne.
Just in time.
Hitler's gamble had backfired.
The human cost was high.
On the Allied side, 80,000 men killed or injured.
The Germans counted 120,000.
Overall, the battle merely pushed back the hour of reckoning
for the Reich, but it came as a wake-up call for the Allies.
They had realized one thing, Germany was still dangerous.
At the Fuhrer's headquarters, the mood was one of concern.
Goering suggested to Hitler that he should seek an armistice.
"The war is lost," he explained.
Hitler replied,
"I forbid you to take any such decision on this point.
"If you disobey my orders, I'll have you shot."
Hitler was wrapped up in his delusions.
He insisted: "We will never surrender.
"We may go down, but we will take a world with us."
Despite the withdrawal of Hitler's armies on all fronts,
five months of war and chaos still lay ahead
before the fall of Berlin and the defeat of the Third Reich.
The beast was weakened but not yet dead,
and the Germans seemed ready to follow the Fuhrer
to the very end.