BBC - War of the Century: When Hitler Fought Stalin (1999)

"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 Laurence Rees, author and producer of the Peabody Award–winning The Nazis: A Warning from History, uses previously unpublished material, photographs and film, dramatic interviews with witnesses who knew Hitler or Stalin, and the voices of soldiers and civilians on the Eastern Front to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making and filmed in Germany, Hungary, Poland, Russia, the Ukraine and Belorusia, War of the Century reveals hitherto unpublished documentary evidence that challenges many of our assumptions about why Hitler decided to invade Russia and the Soviet response to German aggression.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

1. High Hopes
From today's perspective, it seems almost inconceivable that Hitler believed he could militarily defeat the Soviet Union, the largest country in the world, in such a short time. Even Stalin, as late as 1941, considered an invasion by the Wehrmacht unthinkable. He responded to intelligence reports warning him of an imminent German attack with foul insults. The military leadership in Germany, and even numerous observers in the West, however, found the attack plan perfectly logical. Part 1 of the documentary describes the successes of the first few months, in which the "Blitzkrieg" tactic seemed to be proving its worth.
The Wehrmacht had already triumphed in France, Norway, and Yugoslavia using the same method. The victories at Minsk, Vyazma, Bryansk, and Kiev further reinforced Hitler's megalomaniacal plans. And behind the front lines, the war crimes of the SS Einsatzgruppen and the Wehrmacht were already beginning. On October 16, 1941, Stalin's armored train stood ready in Moscow to evacuate the Soviet leadership eastward. But the train never departed. At the last moment, Stalin decided to win—at any cost.

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.

3. Learning to Win
As late as the spring of 1942, it seemed that the Red Army had no chance of ever repelling the German Wehrmacht. But by autumn, at Stalingrad, the Germans had suffered one of the most devastating defeats in their history. The third episode describes how and why the tide turned. While Hitler increasingly blatantly ignored the military expertise of his generals, Stalin gradually learned to listen to his leading military figures. Soviet arms production ramped up, and the German Wehrmacht—over 1,500 km away in Soviet territory—faced growing logistical difficulties.
The decisive moment came at Stalingrad on the Volga, in the bitter, hand-to-hand combat of house-to-house fighting. As new research has revealed, the Soviet soldiers paid a heavy price: one million dead. A Red Army soldier arriving at Stalingrad had an average life expectancy of 24 hours. Eyewitnesses from the small group of surviving Soviets recall the tragedies of Stalingrad: assault squads tasked with occupying buildings proved to be suicide missions. Penal battalions were sent into enemy fire simply to gain a better understanding of the enemy positions. And orphaned children tried to survive despite the cold, hunger, and exhaustion.
On January 30, 1943, General Paulus, commander-in-chief of the 6th Army, was promoted to field marshal. The true meaning of the promotion: Hitler was indirectly urging him to commit suicide, as no field marshal had ever before surrendered. Eyewitnesses also recall, in a very personal way, how the end of the Battle of Stalingrad was experienced on both sides.

4. Vengeance
In the final stages of the war between the German Reich and the Soviet Union, atrocities against civilians escalated. Militarily, the war had long been decided, but for the people, it brought further suffering on a massive scale. Surviving victims and perpetrators alike recount their experiences. Shortly before their retreat, the Nazis deported hundreds of thousands of Jews from Hungary to death camps. Where his armies recaptured territory, Stalin swiftly and ruthlessly re-established the Communist Party's monopoly of power. Ethnic minorities suspected of collaborating with the Germans were forcibly resettled in Siberia.
A quarter of a million people died during the transports alone. The final episode of the series explores the interplay of bitterness, impotent rage, and the desire for revenge. The Wehrmacht's retreat was accompanied by the scorched earth policy, a euphemism for the indiscriminate destruction of buildings, roads, and entire villages. The further west the Red Army soldiers advanced and the more they witnessed the consequences of the German invasion, the more intensely they felt the need for revenge: vandalism in captured Budapest, millions of rapes in Germany, and individual murders of captured soldiers.
In the end, the Soviet victory devoured its architects. The commanders of the navy and air force were arrested and disgraced. Even Marshal Zhukov, who had played a decisive role in the outcome of the war, was exiled to Odessa. Stalin, whose misjudgments in the early stages of the war had almost had fatal consequences, wanted the glory of victory for himself alone.