(CROWD CHEERING)
NARRATOR: 8th of May, 1945,
at last, the darkness was lifted.
The people celebrated across Europe
and throughout the world,
victory over Nazi Germany.
(BOMB WHISTLING)
(EXPLOSION)
From the D-Day landings
on the beaches of Normandy in June, 1944,
it took almost a full year to win the war.
(CROWD CHEERING)
Facing defeat, Adolf Hitler became ever more
relentlessly determined to fight
-to the very finish. -(CHANTING IN GERMAN)
-(PROPELLER WHIRRING) -NARRATOR: As his Third Reich
slowly collapsed about him,
the brutality of the warfare,
the fanaticism of the Nazis only increased.
-(CHANTING IN GERMAN) -NARRATOR: Those 11 months,
the most relentless and brutal period
of the Second World War,
left an eternal scar on hearts
and on history.
(EXPLOSION)
(OMINOUS ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING)
(ANCHOR SPLASHING)
In the summer of 1944,
the Normandy landings were a success.
At the same time, on the Eastern Front,
Stalin unleashed his vast army.
The Allies thought
that the war would be won by Christmas.
In December, to the Allies' surprise,
Hitler launched a massive counterattack.
It failed, but Hitler wouldn't surrender at any cost.
The last five months would be the most brutal of the war.
(PROPELLER WHIRRING)
In the new year of 1945,
Hitler launched Operation North Wind.
He used every plane at his disposal
in an attempt to annihilate the Allied Air Force
that had defeated him in the Ardennes.
-(GUNS FIRING) -But the Allies won this battle.
(EXPLOSION)
(UPBEAT ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING)
-(MAN SPEAKING IN GERMAN) -NARRATOR: The Germans were unsettled
to learn of this fresh defeat,
but Hitler, with his exultant style,
convinced them to dig in.
HITLER: (IN GERMAN) I want each German to do his duty till the end.
He must accept all the sacrifices asked of him.
I want citizens to make weapons for this struggle.
And I want the farmer to eat as little bread as possible,
so he can give it to the soldiers and workers.
I want all women to back this struggle
as they have done until now, with extreme fanaticism.
NARRATOR: One German woman wrote,
"For the last months of the war,
"I had to fight back my tears
"each time I heard Hitler's voice on the radio.
"We didn't want to recognize the signs,
"which were ever clearer,
"announcing the impending downfall.
"In our hearts, we were afraid of the terrible truth."
(TANK SQUEAKING)
Meanwhile to the east,
the Red Army took back the initiative.
Fresh supplies had reached the troops
massed along the Vistula,
but this concentration had not gone unnoticed.
In Germany, General Guderian sounded the alarm.
He implored Hitler to regroup his troops
on the Eastern Front
to counter a Soviet attack,
but Hitler would have none of it,
scoffing at the supposed threat,
"It's the biggest bluff since Genghis Khan,
"who came up with this idiocy?"
Even Himmler refused to admit it,
"You see, General, I don't think the Russians
"are going to attack."
General Guderian tried desperately
to convince his superiors.
Hitler repeated, "This intelligence is completely idiotic,
"whoever wrote it should be shut up in a lunatic asylum."
Death to all advice,
Hitler gradually shut himself
into his own world.
(ARTILLERY FIRING)
(EXPLOSIONS)
As Guderian had predicted,
in mid-January, 1945,
first Konev, then Zhukov sent their armies
-across the Vistula. -(EXPLOSIONS)
-(TANK ENGINE WHIRRING) -Endless columns
of T-34 tanks advanced along a front
of more than 900 kilometers,
stretching from the shores of the Baltic,
to the heart of Poland.
It was a devastating attack,
the Russian steamroller was back in motion.
(PROPELLERS WHIRRING)
The gunfire was so loud
that even Zhukov had to cover his ears.
For Stalin, this offensive was of capital importance.
In a few weeks, he was due to meet
Churchill and Roosevelt in Yalta,
he didn't want Poland to slip out
-of his hands. -(BOMBS WHISTLING)
(EXPLOSIONS)
(FORLORN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING)
On the 17th of January, 1945,
five months after the start of the insurrection,
the Red Army entered the Polish capital.
They found a ghost town.
There was no one left to contest
the authority of the new occupying force.
The Polish Communists had no trouble
-taking over the reins. -(CROWD CHEERING)
The Soviets paraded in the capital
to celebrate a victory that came
-a little too late. -(TANK ENGINE WHIRRING)
(CROWD CHEERING)
Having liberated Warsaw on the 27th of January, 1945,
the Soviets discovered the Reich's biggest secret.
(FORLORN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING)
A camp the size of a town
surrounded by barbed wire,
Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The camp had been evacuated by the SS
just 10 days beforehand,
all the guards had fled.
The Soviets found 7,000 deportees abandoned there.
7,000 survivors from more than a million people murdered.
Before they left,
the Nazis had tried to erase evidence of their crimes.
They blew up the gas chambers and the crematoriums,
but these factories of death
also formed the center of a system of plunder.
The Soviets found hundreds of thousands
of pieces of clothing,
tens of thousands of shoes.
In a shed, they discovered seven tons
of human hair.
In January, 1945, around 550 camps
were still active across the Reich.
Even in their downfall,
the destruction of Europe's Jews
remained a primary objective for the Nazis.
For the Allies, the liberation of these killing grounds
was not a priority,
especially since the accounts
given by journalists were so staggering
that many people in the West
refused to believe them.
When the British reporter, Alexander Werth,
entered the Majdanek camp in July 44,
he immediately wrote an article
on how these death machines worked.
The sorting, the gas chambers,
the crematoriums, the bones ground as fertilizer
for the adjacent cabbage fields.
But the BBC and the New York Herald Tribune
doubted the veracity of his report.
Many towns liberated by the Red Army
hid mass graves.
To the Nazis, the Jews, the Poles,
were nothing more than slaves or fertilizer.
(TANK ENGINE WHIRRING)
In 15 days, Zhukov and his men
had covered 350 kilometers.
WARNING BORDER OF THE REICH
No one in the Nazi leadership
had anticipated such a rapid advance.
(SUSPENSEFUL ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING)
General Guderian wrote,
"The Russian tidal wave is taking on
"utterly disastrous proportions for us."
And yet the Germans continued to fight,
mainly because they were afraid.
The Red Army had shown some particularly barbaric behavior,
neighborhoods and villages were sometimes torched.
Stalin's army plundered shamelessly
in this land of plenty,
radios, saucepans, watches.
One Soviet soldier wrote,
"The Germans abandon everything
"and our men have invaded the houses,
"everything is in flames.
"Down from pillows and feathers from mattresses
"are flying everywhere.
"Everyone from the foot soldier to the colonel
"is carrying away his plunder.
"This town has been crucified,
"the Germans are right to flee from us like the plague."
(DOG SNARLING)
Anyone suspected of being a Nazi could be shot,
almost 100,000 Germans were summarily executed.
One Soviet soldier noted,
"The German mother should curse the day
"she gave birth to a son.
"Let them experience what they wanted to inflict on others."
(BUILDING CRUMBLING)
In Eastern Prussia, the Soviets briefly occupied
the town of Nemmersdorf.
The inhabitants were massacred,
an orgy of violence was unleashed.
Several women were said
to have been crucified naked on barn doors.
(CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS)
The Red Army realized the scale of the atrocities
committed by the Nazis.
Millions of prisoners of war starved to death
and millions of civilians murdered.
The Russians discovered the camps at Majdanek,
Auschwitz and Treblinka.
Having lost 20 million of their own,
the Soviets were burning with vengeance.
The propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg
had for months been urging in the Red Star newspaper,
"If you haven't killed a German each day,
"your day has been wasted.
"Kill the Germans, that's what your old mother asks of you.
"The children are imploring, 'Kill the Germans,'
"That's what your homeland demands of you."
The divisions and armies are not advancing alone on Berlin,
with them, there are the trenches, the mass graves,
the ravines filled with the bodies of the innocent,
the cabbage fields of my Majdanek and the trees of Vitebsk
where the Germans hanged so many unfortunates.
The boots, the little shoes and slippers
of the little children murdered at Majdanek
walk alongside them to Berlin.
The Red Army became experts in nurturing hatred,
and in its path, the enemy's womenfolk
were particularly targeted.
Rape became a weapon of war.
One young Soviet officer recalled,
"Women, mothers and their children
"were lying on both sides of the road,
"and before each of them
"was a noisy gaggle of men with their pants down.
"And our men shot those women
"who tried to save their children.
"Smiling officers stood by,
"making sure each soldier,
"with no exceptions, took part."
Stalin, in person, excused these crimes.
He declared, "Imagine a man
"who fought from Stalingrad to Belgrade,
"who has seen his homeland devastated
"over thousands of kilometers.
"How can such a man react normally?
"What is so awful in his having fun with a woman
"after such horrors."
Across the whole German territory,
close to two million women
are thought to have been raped.
-After hesitating for a time... -(UPBEAT ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING)
...the Nazi regime publicized these atrocities.
GERMAN NEWS
(IN GERMAN) How did the soldiers behave towards the women in your area?
One can't really call them soldiers.
They are merely barbarian hordes.
All of them behaved the same, they were drunk every day.
They raped all the women
even girls as young as 13 and women aged 68.
A woman aged 68 was vilely raped in front of me.
What about the women present here?
Even my mother, who is 60, was brutally raped.
NARRATOR: The advance of the Soviet troops
spread panic among the civilians.
Hundreds of thousands of Germans took to the road
in the midst of a particularly harsh winter.
(FOGHORN BLOWING)
To escape, thousands of terrified men and women
swamped the stations and ports.
In January, '45,
nearly 8,000 Germans packed onto the Wilhelm Gustloff,
it was sunk by a Soviet submarine.
More than 5,000 people disappeared beneath the waves,
three times more than were lost on the Titanic.
By February, 1945, four million Germans,
eight and a half million according to some estimates,
were displaced.
Fifty thousand people were arriving in Berlin every day.
While refugees clogged the roads of Germany,
the Soviet troops who started out from the Vistula
stopped about 80 kilometers from Berlin
on the banks of the Oder.
Zhukov's offensive had been a success,
in total, the Germans had 350,000 casualties.
Having conquered most of Poland,
and imposed his domination on the Balkans,
Stalin went to the Yalta Conference
in a position of strength.
Neither President Roosevelt,
who was weakened by sickness,
nor the British prime minister, Winston Churchill,
whose country was drained after five years at war,
stood up to him.
The big three agreed
to divide Germany into four occupied zones.
(UPBEAT ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING)
To the west, there was one last hurdle to cross,
the last natural barrier in Germany,
the Rhine.
All the bridges had been dynamited by the Germans,
Field Marshal Montgomery
was still hoping to be first to cross the river,
but the Americans beat him to it.
An advanced unit of the First U.S. Army
found a bridge still standing at Remagen, near Bonn.
The Germans had rigged it with explosives,
but had not yet detonated them.
(TANK ENGINE WHIRRING)
The Americans immediately established a bridgehead
on the eastern bank of the river.
Hitler was furious
and ordered the engineers
whose charges had not exploded to be shot.
Meanwhile, Patton had sent his troops across
farther south at Oppenheim
without notifying his superiors.
He was already spreading panic in German territory.
Monty had dreamed of being first into Germany,
in fact, he was last,
but it was he who led the biggest offensive.
He was in command of one-and-a-quarter million soldiers.
This time the lessons of Arnhem had been learned,
the drop zones for the parachutists were spot on.
British troops pushed deep into Germany
and increasingly were capturing very young soldiers.
(UPBEAT ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING)
Farther south, the French forces,
under General de Lattre, also advanced.
They fought on German soil alongside the Americans.
For the Allies, there was now a gaping breach,
they could finally invade the Reich.
This was good news for them,
but not for Stalin.
As soon as he learned this,
he ordered Zhukov to take Berlin as soon as possible
to avoid the Americans beating him to it.
(TANK SQUEAKING)
(SUSPENSEFUL ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING)
Once the Rhine had been crossed,
German resistance founded.
Hitler had chosen to concentrate his forces to the east,
he had exhausted his already diminished reserves
in the costly Battle of the Arden.
Now, some towns, rather than fighting to the bitter end,
were flying the white flag.
The Allies were making up ground,
Churchill continually spurred on the Americans,
"We have to push on and shake the Russians' hands
"as far to the east as possible," he urged.
But Berlin was in the future Soviet occupation zone
defined at Yalta.
Even if the Americans did take the city,
they would have to withdraw later.
They would not accept the 100,000 dead
this might have cost,
simply as a matter of prestige.
Such humanitarian issues never hindered Stalin.
(UPBEAT ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING)
So Eisenhower decided not to launch an assault on Berlin,
his troops could even afford a break
for some home-style R&R.
♪ With his plastic eye ♪
♪ You'll be in the heart of his fire ♪
♪ What the world's best man would desire ♪
♪ When he's stresses down ♪
♪ That's big living, sweetie pie... ♪
NARRATOR: Marlene Dietrich
-paid them a little visit. -(CROWD CHEERING)
Hello, boys...
I want to say that sharing this entertainment with you today
is, to me, more important than doing the entertaining.
I'm certain that we can look forward to a speedy victory.
-(TRIUMPHANT ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING) -Goodbye, good luck
and God speed.
NARRATOR: But Ike's armies
did not down their weapons for long.
To defeat Nazi Germany swiftly
without too heavy losses in their ranks,
the Americans and British
pursued a merciless bombing campaign.
They relentlessly pounded German industrial areas
and annihilated cities packed with civilians.
(EXPLOSIONS)
(BOMB WHISTLING)
Their aim was to smash the Reich's economic potential
and to break the morale of the population,
thereby undermining the regime.
Between January and April, 1945,
471,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Germany.
Cologne, Hamburg and Berlin were all hit.
(EXPLOSIONS)
Well, men, now that we've been the first ones to Berlin,
how would you like to go back again?
(PILOTS CHEERING)
(PROPELLERS WHIRRING)
NARRATOR: In mid-February,
Churchill wanted to bombard the city of Dresden
as a show of strength to the Soviets.
The city was consumed in a firestorm.
(CHOIR SINGING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE)
NARRATOR: In under 24 hours,
more than 25,000 inhabitants perished.
A whole city, with no war-related industry
and of no strategic importance,
was destroyed.
But destroying Dresden
meant driving up the number of refugees
and disrupted the movements of the Wehrmacht.
The Allied leaders may have felt some regret over Dresden,
but not for long,
because Hitler's obstinacy
drove them to maintain the bombing campaign,
whatever the cost for the civilian population.
By the end of March, 1945,
the Reich slipped into chaos,
the outcome of the war was no longer in any doubt.
(OMINOUS ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING)
A German officer noted in his diary,
"We are reaching the end,
"do our leaders have any exit strategy in mind?
"The death of our soldiers,
"the destruction of our towns and villages,
"is there any sense to this now?"
Another wrote, "Is there no one there
"to overpower the madman
"and call for an end to this,
"are they still generals?
"No, they are ordure,
-"wet rags, they are cowards." -(CHANTING IN GERMAN)
NARRATOR: But these words of revolt
remained confined to private diaries.
After writing these lines,
those young soldiers returned to the combat.
German society could not manage to rise up,
and as a result, it continued its plunge to new depths.
At Hitler's bidding,
the regime launched a new phase,
radicalization against the Germans themselves.
Whoever was not prepared to fight
would face execution.
In Konigsberg, 80 deserters were executed.
Often victims' bodies
were left at the roadside with a sign,
"I am a deserter and I refuse to protect
"German women and children."
(EXPLOSION)
Villages displaying the white flag
were threatened with destruction.
But this radicalization was even more harsh on deportees.
(FORLORN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING)
The progression of the Allied armies to the west
and the Soviets to the east
led Himmler to close the camps,
sending the deportees on abominable death marches.
The detainees were on the road,
but not to get anywhere.
The Nazis no longer had time to gas people,
so they killed through cold and hunger.
Those who could not keep up the pace of the March
got a bullet in the head.
When the Allies liberated the camps,
they found most of them almost entirely empty.
The Germans had only left certain deportees,
considered too weak to be evacuated.
In April, 1945, the Americans
entered the Ohrdruf concentration camp,
an offshoot of Buchenwald.
Eisenhower was overwhelmed,
"I never had such a shock in my entire life," he confessed.
Patton was physically sick near a shed.
Eisenhower ordered the population
of the next-door town to visit the camp.
In front of a crematorium oven
where they burned 200 bodies a day,
women fainted.
Nonetheless, the officers insisted
that the Germans confront the horrors
which they had allowed to happen.
On a table, stood lamp shades made of human skin.
There were tattooed skins
that a camp official had collected,
and shrunken heads,
trophies of Nazi barbarity.
Discovering these horrors, one journalist wrote,
"The gates of hell had opened."
Other camps were liberated
and more visits were imposed on local populations.
Eisenhower declared, "People tell us
"that the American soldier doesn't know why he's fighting,
"now, at least he knows against who he is fighting."
The discovery of the hell of the concentration camps
was a shock for the whole world.
For 10 months, the Reich had been shrinking.
In April, the final act began.
(TWILIGHT OF THE GODS PLAYING)
Berlin, the last citadel
was preparing for the ultimate battle.
On the 12th of April, 1945,
the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
performed Wagner's Twilight of the Gods.
To make up for the lack of personnel,
an army of children, women and the elderly,
marshaled by several thousand SS fanatics,
had to defend the capital.
They set up obstacles.
Goebbels did a good job
and all those defending the city
had a smile in these propaganda images.
(CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS)
To set ambushes,
every German was equipped with a rifle
or a Panzerfaust, an anti-tank weapon.
The factories had churned out
more than three million of them in recent months.
(INAUDIBLE)
In the streets of Berlin,
people were given fast-track training.
(PANZERFAUST FIRING)
(FIRING)
Many Germans still had faith in their Reich.
Our walls are broken, but not our hearts.
Fighting Berlin salutes the Führer!
Führer, order, we obey!
Berlin remains German!
SURRENDER?
NO!
One young soldier wrote to his parents,
"I simply can't believe that the Fuhrer
"would sacrifice us dumbly.
"No one can strip me of my faith in him.
"He is everything to me."
Certain officers confiscated white handkerchiefs
to stop the defenders using them to surrender.
(CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS)
Nazi dignitaries still believed,
especially since in the United States
on the 12th of April, the day of the concert,
President Roosevelt died.
Hitler rejoiced, "The great miracle,
"the one I had always predicted has happened,
"the war is not lost."
Hitler was blinded by his own illusions,
but the hope did not last long,
because the Red Army was closing in on the capital.
(OMINOUS ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING)
Around a model of Berlin,
Soviet generals discussed the plan of attack.
Supplies from the east
had finally arrived on the banks of the Oder.
(TANK ENGINE WHIRRING)
Tanks, shells, planes, 42,000 guns and heavy mortars.
On the 16th of April,
the biggest artillery barrage of the war commenced.
FOR BERLIN
-(SPEAKING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE) -(ARTILLERY FIRING)
NARRATOR: 1,236,000 shells were fired.
100,000 tons of steel
rained down on the Germans.
(TANK SQUEAKING)
(PLANE ENGINES ROARING)
Two million men moved on Berlin.
The Soviet divisions attacked from every side.
(GUNS FIRING)
(FLAMETHROWER ROARING)
(GUNS FIRING)
The Russians had one objective,
the chancellery, under which Hitler's bunker was located.
(ARTILLERY FIRING)
Zhukov moved forward, suffering huge losses.
Stalin wanted to see Berlin totally encircled
to avoid the Anglo-Americans profiting
from a sudden German collapse
and entering the capital first.
(GUNS FIRING)
In Berlin, the ground itself shook.
(ARTILLERY FIRING)
Each crossroads was defended,
sometimes by young children.
Hitler sheltered in his bunker.
In these last pictures of the dictator
filmed one month earlier,
the sensor cut a piece of film
which was never shown at the time.
Incapable of controlling himself
suffering from what looks like Parkinson's disease,
Hitler is no more than a shadow.
Still, at no point was there any question of surrender?
And yet, some 120 kilometers away,
on the 25th of April, in Torgau,
the long-awaited day finally came,
the Reich was cut in two.
The Soviet and American armies met up.
While for the leadership, this was a time to be wary,
for the ordinary soldier, it was a time of celebration.
That said, certain Soviet soldiers
avoided excessive fraternization
that might have sent them to the Gulag.
(ARTILLERY FIRING)
(BUILDING CRUMBLING)
In Berlin, three million people were caught in the trap.
(OMINOUS ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING)
It was now a matter of survival,
here and there, a horse was cut up.
(TANK ENGINE WHIRRING)
However mighty the Soviet artillery power had been,
even in a mechanized war,
it is the infantry who have to finish the job.
Street by street, cellar by cellar.
(GUNS FIRING)
In these last days, the motivation of the Germans changed.
They were no longer fighting for their great Reich,
for the Fuhrer, or for National Socialism,
but to save their skins.
(CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS)
The Russians were closing in on the bunker
where Hitler was still positioning imaginary armies.
The elites had fled the city.
When Goebbels realized all was lost,
he wondered, "What's to be done with a people
"whose men don't even fight when their women are being raped?
"All the plans, all the ideas of National Socialism
"are too elevated, too noble for such a people.
"These folk deserve the fate they are about to meet."
(CROWD CHEERING)
At the same time, in Italy,
on the 27th of April,
Mussolini was captured while trying to escape.
He was shot,
his body and that of his mistress
were brutalized by the crowd.
When Hitler learned of the death of Il Duce, he concluded,
"Dead or alive, I don't want to fall
"into the hands of the enemy.
"After my death, my body is to be burned
"and no one will be able to find it."
On the 30th of April, deep in his bunker,
Hitler committed suicide,
along with his wife, Eva Braun.
His body was then burned by his chauffeur,
using about 200 liters of petrol.
For 12 years the dictator had ruled over Germany,
he had dreamed of a thousand year Reich,
this mirage disappeared in the ruins of his capital.
(CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS)
One last lie, the radio claim that Hitler had died
leading the heroic defenders of Berlin.
-(EXPLOSION) -(DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING)
On the 30th of April, Zhukov's troops broke through.
His soldiers seized the Reichstag.
Vasily Grossman wrote, "I wanted to shout,
"to call to all our brother fighters
"who lay in Russian, Ukrainian,
"Belarusian and Polish soil,
"who are sleeping the eternal slumber
"on the field of honor,
"'Comrades, can you hear us? We made it.'"
(GUNS FIRING)
Two days later, the Russians reconstructed the scene.
A photo was taken.
(CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS)
But this historic picture had to be retouched
because one detail had been overlooked.
One of the soldiers was wearing several watches
on his wrists.
But where was Hitler?
This question haunted the Russians,
Soviet soldiers found a body
which bore a strong resemblance,
but it turned out they were photographing themselves
next to a doppelganger.
A team of specialists were sent by Stalin to investigate,
they found the charred corpses of Goebbels and his wife,
alongside were the lifeless bodies of their six children.
A few months earlier,
they were still being used for party propaganda.
-(SINGING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE) -NARRATOR: Their parents had
murdered them, before committing suicide.
Hitler's remains were finally discovered in a bomb crater.
When he learned of the Fuhrer' demise,
Stalin exclaimed, "That's the end of that bastard,
"a shame we didn't take him alive!"
The remains were secretly shipped to Russia.
Even Zhukov, who savored his victory
and paid a visit to the beast's lair,
knew nothing of this epilogue.
(UPBEAT ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING)
(CAR BRAKES SCREECHING)
With Hitler dead,
capitulation became possible for his successors.
On the 7th of May, in a modest school in Northeast France,
at the headquarters of Allied Forces,
the German representatives
accepted the terms of an unconditional surrender.
(CAMERA SHUTTERS CLICKING)
After the signing, General Jodl had the temerity
to stand up and declare,
"The German armed forces
"are now in the hands of the Allies,
"I hope that the victor will treat them with generosity."
With the pens used for the signatures,
Ike made the V for victory.
But these images were not yet shown,
because Stalin was not satisfied with this capitulation.
The strongman of the Kremlin bemoaned,
"It was the Soviet people who bore on their shoulders
"most of the weight of the war."
Stalin demanded that a second surrender
be signed the following day in Berlin.
On the 8th of May,
the American, French,
German and British delegations
crossed a shattered city.
In Zhukov's headquarters on the edge of Berlin,
they awaited the arrival of Field Marshal Keitel.
When he entered, no one replied to his salute.
The various delegations
signed all five acts of surrender.
General de Lattre signed for France.
It was 11:00 p.m. on the 8th of May,
but it was already 1:00 a.m. in Moscow,
the Soviets noted the date as the 9th of May.
(FORLORN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING)
But the surrender did not bring an end to the tragedy.
The halt in hostilities was followed
by a wave of suicides.
Besides the high command, like Himmler,
many thousands of anonymous Germans killed themselves,
sometimes with their families,
for fear of the Soviets,
or else to follow Hitler to the afterlife.
Before the war, Hitler had promised the Germans,
"Give me 10 years
"and you won't recognize Germany,"
he kept his word.
(CROWD CHEERING)
"It's over, it's over,"
that was the cry that could be heard in towns around the world
as they celebrated victory.
The people hailed the liberation
they had waited so long for.
But the joy was also tinged with gravity,
the dark shadow of Nazism
would not be erased in a day,
the suffering endured
had left an indelible scar on memories,
Nazism had plumbed the depths of horror.
The extermination of the Jews,
the massacres of civilians,
the torture of resistance members
would forever haunt the conscience of humanity.
Yet a continent had to get back on its feet,
the ruined towns had to be rebuilt,
the millions of displaced persons
had to return home.
These where the huge challenges of the post-war period.
From this chaos caused by the Nazi order,
a new era would nonetheless emerge.
(FLAMES CRACKLING)
(UPBEAT ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING)