BBC – War of the Century: When Hitler Fought Stalin (1999) Part 2. Spiral of Terror
English | Documentary | Size: 897 MB
“We always kept the last bullet for ourselves…” Walter Schaefer-Kehnert, 11th Panzer Division.
It was the bloodiest war in history, yet Hitler’s brutal invasion of the Soviet Union and Stalin’s subsequent fight back is surprisingly little known in the West.
With Hitler’s Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the most brutal war in history began: 30 million dead, immeasurable suffering, an unprecedented scale of atrocities and senseless destruction. The war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was more than just a part of the Second World War. Here, the ideological and genocidal war revealed its true face. The war as a whole was decided on the Eastern Front – with far-reaching consequences for the political map of Europe. Laurence Rees, author and producer of the Peabody Award-winning The Nazis: A Warning from History, uses previously unpublished material, photographs and film, dramatic interviews with witnesses who knew Hitler or Stalin, and the voices of soldiers and civilians on the Eastern Front to shed new light on Hitler’s “war of annihilation.” Rees and his international team worked for three years on this four-part documentary.
More than 30 million people died during Hitler and Stalin’s terrible war in the East – more than in any other single war in history. But only since the fall of the Berlin Wall have Western journalists been allowed free access to those who took part in the conflict. More than two years in the making and filmed in Germany, Hungary, Poland, Russia, the Ukraine and Belorusia, War of the Century reveals hitherto unpublished documentary evidence that challenges many of our assumptions about why Hitler decided to invade Russia and the Soviet response to German aggression. The series uses archive footage, documentary evidence and moving testimony to reveal the complexities of this most brutal of wars, bringing the unspeakable to the screen and allowing victims and aggressors to tell the truth as they see it.
The sheer scale of the horror of the war on the Eastern Front is hard to appreciate, but WAR OF THE CENTURY brings the human experience into focus by concentrating on the stories of individuals. At last the truth behind the war can be revealed with direct testimony from people who perpetrated atrocities and the victims who suffered on both sides. Soldiers and civilians, members of the SS, the Soviet NKVD and high-ranking officers and officials, all tell their stores, illustrated with combat footage (including rare colour material) and supported by recently de-classified documents from Russian archives.
Historical Consultant for the Series: Professor Ian Kershaw ; Associate Producer: Detlef Siebert ; Written, Directed and Produced by Laurence Rees ; A BBC/History Channel/NDR Co-Production
Narrator: Samuel West
2. Spiral of Terror
The second part of the documentary deals with the suffering of the civilian population. Hitler’s war was a war of annihilation. He wanted to ruthlessly plunder the conquered territories. From the Nazi perspective, only a portion of the local population was to be condemned to the fate of slave labor. Mass murder and deliberately inflicted famines were the consequences. Stalin called for the partisan movement, and with that, the spiral of violence was accelerated a crucial step further. In many places, Soviet partisans terrorized their own countrymen, providing the Germans with a pretext for further acts of violence against the civilian population. It is little known that an independent national partisan movement arose in Ukraine, fighting against both the Germans and the Soviets.
Moving individual stories vividly illustrate these events. There is the Belarusian woman who lost her brother to Hitler’s soldiers and her sister to Stalin’s partisans. Or the Ukrainian woman who, as a young girl, had to survive on birch bark and cow’s blood. The Wehrmacht soldier who, in a fit of rage over the death of his comrades, shot defenseless civilians. But also the Soviet soldier who forced his own men to rush forward at gunpoint, and who executed frightened Red Army soldiers behind the front.
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