The World at War Episode 05 - Barbarossa (June - December 1941)
Transcript
00:00Russia, mid-June 1941, a bewildered, uncertain country.
00:27It was abounded of invasion by Hitler's Germany.
00:49Here in the Kremlin, Russia's leaders seemed oblivious of the Nazi threat.
00:53Or if not oblivious, then complacent, as if by ignoring it, it might disappear.
01:04Yet already, millions of German troops were poised along Russia's border to launch the bloodiest land battle in history.
01:11The battle that was eventually to decide the Second World War.
01:53The Second World War
01:58The Second World War
02:03The Second World War
02:23The Second World War
02:28The Second World War
02:33Hitler, in July 1940, returning from France in triumph, stood at the pinnacle of his power.
02:41Hitler, in July 1940, returning from France in triumph, stood at the pinnacle of his power.
02:46Hitler, in July 1940, returning from France in triumph, stood at the pinnacle of his power.
03:05The speed and sureness of his victories had astonished even his generals.
03:09Their doubts had been answered, their opposition could be discounted.
03:16It was now that Hitler confided to them it would be the Russians' turn next.
03:28In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler had written,
03:31When we speak of new territory, we must think of Russia.
03:34Destiny itself points the way there.
03:37The Second World War
03:42Russia would provide living space for the German folk.
03:46Lebensraub.
04:08The ordinary German, like the ordinary Russian or the ordinary person anywhere,
04:13had been surprised by Hitler's pact with Stalin in August 1939.
04:18To him, as to them, it had seemed the least likely about-face by the world's bitterest rivals.
04:25The Nazi-Soviet pact had served its purpose for Hitler.
04:30He had not been hindered while he dealt with Poland and France.
04:35Stalin, for his part, gained a breathing space
04:38while he put his army in order after the blood-letting purges of the thirties.
04:43He had gambled, too, on a lengthy struggle between Germany and the Allies.
04:55But the German victories in the West had been swifter than he had expected.
05:00Hitler wanted to attack Russia already in the fall of 1940
05:05and to let himself, for once, be persuaded that it would be impossible to go to war at that late time
05:16on account of the weather in Russia,
05:19and for the reason that it would be urgent and necessary
05:26to enforce the German army as well as the German air force
05:31before entering into this new campaign.
05:34In August 1939, when Hitler had signed the pact with Russia,
05:40in the evening there was a movie, and Hitler,
05:44In the evening there was a movie, and Hitler,
05:49this movie showed the parade of the Russian troops before the Kremlin.
05:54He was very much impressed and was relieved that now, with the pact, this army is neutralized.
06:02But afterwards, when the German troops met the Russian ones in occupying Poland,
06:12officers reported to Hitler that the equipment of those Russian units were very poor.
06:22He first didn't believe it so much, but then, when the Russians attacked the Finns
06:29and they didn't have any progress, he was convinced that this was really the truth.
06:36And he was now considering the Russian army no more as strong as before.
06:48Doubts about the Red Army's strength had been raised inside Russia itself,
06:52for the purges of the Thirties had decimated its leadership.
06:55Ninety percent of its generals, eighty percent of its colonels,
06:58and well over half its corps commanders had been put to death at Stalin's whim.
07:07Every single commander of a military district was eliminated.
07:12Every single commander of an army division has been eliminated.
07:16Every single commander of a regiment, with some exceptions here, also eliminated.
07:22Now, you see, this is a little more than political weakness.
07:27The army was beheaded, so to speak.
07:31After the Red Army's poor performance against the Finns, steps were taken to reform it.
07:37When the news reached Moscow of the Wehrmacht's decision to retreat,
07:42the Red Army was forced to retreat.
07:45The Red Army was forced to retreat.
07:48The Red Army was forced to retreat.
07:51The Red Army was forced to retreat.
07:54The Red Army was forced to retreat.
07:57When the news reached Moscow of the Wehrmacht's crushing of the French,
08:01these reforms were accelerated.
08:04They were still incomplete by the summer of 1940.
08:07All the same, Stalin seized his chance,
08:10while Hitler was preoccupied with the battle for Britain,
08:13to grab first the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania,
08:18and then, within the same month, those parts of Romania,
08:22known as Bessarabia and northern Bukovina,
08:25a move that, in Hitler's eyes, brought Russian troops uncomfortably close
08:29to the Romanian oil wells at Ploesti,
08:32Germany's only oil supply, vital for its tanks and planes and ships.
08:44But with the bulk of its forces still in the West,
08:47Hitler did not intervene.
08:49Instead, he stepped up diplomatic pressure
08:52to woo the Balkans into the German fold.
09:03First, King Boris of Bulgaria was invited to visit Hitler
09:06that autumn at Berchtesgaden,
09:09and he was followed by Prince Paul of Yugoslavia
09:12and by young King Michael of Romania.
09:15Michael was already under the sway of his pro-German Prime Minister, Antonescu.
09:22When news broke that Romania and Hungary had joined the Axis,
09:26the Russians reacted sharply.
09:29They accused Berlin of violating the spirit of the August 1939 pact.
09:34The frail Soviet-German friendship was beginning to fall apart.
09:42Hitler that same month further strengthened the Axis.
09:46He signed a new military alliance with Italy and with Japan,
09:50the Bipartite Pact.
09:54It was aimed allegedly at only the United States and Britain.
09:58The Russians thought otherwise.
10:00They protested angrily.
10:11Hitler invited Stalin's closest adviser, Molotov,
10:15to Berlin that November 1940
10:18to help, as he put it, clarify the situation.
10:24It was a disastrous visit for Soviet-German relations.
10:38When Molotov visited Berlin,
10:41he was obviously afraid of being poisoned by bacteria,
10:45and he asked that all the plates, all the glasses he used,
10:50are boiled before they came in use.
10:54He was blunt in his remarks,
10:57and he didn't spare Hitler at all.
11:00Very uncompromising, hardly smiling at all,
11:04reminding me of my mathematics teacher
11:07with the spectacles,
11:10hostile spectacles looking at his pupil Hitler.
11:14And saying, well, is our agreement,
11:17last year's agreement, still valid?
11:20And Hitler thought it was a mistranslation.
11:23He said, of course, why not?
11:25And Molotov said, yes, I ask this question because of the Finns.
11:29You are on very friendly relations with the Finns.
11:32You invite people from Finland to Germany,
11:35and you send missions there.
11:37And the Finns are very dangerous people.
11:40They undermine our security,
11:42and we are going to do something about that.
11:45Whereupon Hitler exploded and said,
11:47I understand you very well.
11:49You want to wage war against Finland.
11:53And that is quite out of the question.
11:55Do you hear me? Impossible.
11:57Because my supplies of iron and of nickel
12:01and of other important raw materials would be cut.
12:05It was a very tough,
12:07almost heavyweight championship in political discussion.
12:12Even while Molotov was still in Berlin,
12:15Hitler ordered his generals to plan an attack on Russia
12:18for May 15, 1941.
12:21They responded with a detailed scheme
12:23which he now named Operation Barbarossa,
12:26after the red-bearded Prussian emperor
12:28who centuries earlier had crusaded against the Slavs.
12:32Hitler's generals had taken some convincing,
12:35for to attack Russia, with Britain still resisting,
12:38was to fight a war on two fronts,
12:40something that even Mein Kampf maintained
12:42to be the gravest of military mistakes.
12:45But Hitler argued, and with some truth,
12:47that winter of 1940,
12:49that Britain, although not beaten,
12:51was not a threat.
12:53So an eastern campaign would be the only front,
12:56provided it was over quickly.
13:01Years earlier, Hitler had written,
13:04Armies do not exist for peace.
13:06They exist solely for triumphant exertion in war.
13:28The Wehrmacht's morale was at its height.
13:31Where was it to march next?
13:33It couldn't move against Britain on land,
13:35and amphibious warfare was not to Hitler's liking.
13:38Magnetism alone, it seemed,
13:40must draw it against its sole remaining antagonist within Europe.
13:44Draw it in the same way as Napoleon's armies had been drawn
13:48when they too had been left champing at the bit along the Channel,
13:51eastwards, ever eastwards,
13:54to the boundless motherland of Russia.
14:03MUSIC PLAYS
14:06MUSIC CONTINUES
14:31The Red Army in 1941 was the largest in the world.
14:34In tanks it outnumbered, in airplanes it equalled
14:37the rest of the world's armies put together.
14:49Despite its shortcomings,
14:51the Red Army was better equipped than previous Wehrmacht victims,
14:55and its reorganisation since the fiasco of the Finnish war
14:58was well under way.
15:00But what of its morale?
15:02Hitler felt sure he knew the answer.
15:04You have only to kick in the door
15:06and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.
15:11Russia's leaders still thought they could buy time
15:14while their army made ready for the struggle.
15:26By March 1941,
15:28Russian troops were already being faced by German troops
15:31along the borders of Hungary and Romania and even Bulgaria.
15:35Yugoslavia too looked like becoming a German satellite
15:38until, encouraged by British intelligence,
15:41a popular uprising in Belgrade pushed out the Nazi puppets.
15:45Incredibly, Moscow concluded a pact with the rebels.
15:50The very next day, Hitler attacked Yugoslavia.
15:58Incensed by the revolt,
16:00he named the operation Retribution.
16:31Operation Retribution
16:41Operation Retribution
16:43meant postponing Operation Barbarossa by five crucial weeks.
16:47But now Russia stood by
16:49while the Wehrmacht overran her newest ally.
17:01Operation Barbarossa
17:09Hitler marched into Greece,
17:11again without Moscow so much as protesting.
17:19This inaction cannot have been lost on Hitler.
17:21It made him even more headstrong
17:23as his army swept on to further easy victories.
17:31Stalin's own spies had been sending back reports
17:34of German troop concentrations along his borders,
17:37reports which he chose to ignore.
17:39When Western diplomats warned him to,
17:41he again shrugged them off.
17:43He argued to his cronies
17:45that however inevitable a Nazi-Soviet conflict might be,
17:48these present reports were simply a British ruse.
17:51The interesting thing was that both Roosevelt and Churchill,
17:54each on their own, informed Stalin
17:57that Hitler was going to attack Russia.
18:00Stalin thought that was a trick on our part
18:03to get him to mobilize and to divert,
18:07to provoke Hitler to attack.
18:09Stalin was very conscious that World War I,
18:13it was the Tsar's mobilization
18:17that caused the German, the Kaiser,
18:23to attack Russia.
18:25And he wasn't going to have any part of it.
18:28There was a traditional pathological mistrust.
18:31When the British say something,
18:34Stalin's philosophy used to tell us,
18:37you must think the opposite.
18:39The British warn us,
18:41that must mean that they try to put us against Germans.
18:47For that reason, along the main reason,
18:50he neglected all the warnings.
18:52May Day in Moscow, 1941.
19:02Particularly impressive military parade,
19:05as if to reassure the Russian people
19:08in the face of all the rumors of impending invasion.
19:12Russian diplomacy was still aimed at appeasing Hitler,
19:16hoping to delay any attack
19:18until the Red Army's reforms would be complete.
19:25And so, while the generals lectured,
19:28the diplomats rushed grain
19:30and much-needed raw materials to Germany,
19:33turned a blind eye to the incursions
19:36of German reconnaissance planes
19:38over Soviet territory,
19:40and even slowed down their building of frontier defences
19:44so as not to offend Berlin.
19:50Yet even as Stalin's defence commissar
19:53shook hands with Hitler's military attaché in Moscow,
19:57three million German troops were moving up to the border.
20:01The biggest land battle in history was about to begin.
20:08BATTLE FOR BELARUS
20:38The shock was all the greater when it did come.
20:41I remember that particular night,
20:43I'd been out somewhere and came home rather late
20:46and turned on the radio,
20:48and I got on to, I think it was Kharkov or Kiev
20:51or somewhere like that,
20:53and there were accounts going on
20:55of bombing and attacks and things,
20:57which I thought was a sort of Orson Welles programme,
21:00like when he bombed New York, remember?
21:03And then we turned around,
21:06and then we checked around and found it was real.
21:19We were told that the Red Army
21:21will never fight on its own territory,
21:24that the very first shot will be made on enemy's territory, etc.
21:28Then suddenly, in 20 seconds,
21:30we were told that Sevastopol is being bombed,
21:33Kiev is being bombed, Smolensk bombed.
21:35The enemy smashed, wiped out our forces.
21:54After the success of the other campaigns,
21:57we had confidence that Barbarossa would be successful too.
22:04The first period of the advance was very quick.
22:09We made more than 100 km partly per day.
22:18We hadn't lost a battle,
22:20so we were used to being victorious.
22:24Hitler's plan was for three vast armies
22:27to seek out and destroy the Russian forces
22:30within four months.
22:33I never was in war before.
22:36We had no fear,
22:38because we thought we will win the war against Russia.
22:43Because the wars against Poland and France,
22:49we had ended with victories for Germany.
22:54As well as surprise,
22:56the Germans had the advantage of overwhelming superiority
23:00in men and firepower
23:02at those points chosen for their armoured thrusts.
23:05Three Russian infantry divisions were annihilated that first day,
23:10and another five cut to pieces.
23:24During the River Bug crossing,
23:28we were attacked by several obsolete Russian aircraft.
23:35They were shot down immediately,
23:37and we were very impressed
23:40by the superiority of our air force at the beginning.
23:54During the first two days,
23:572,000 Russian planes were destroyed,
24:00mostly on the ground.
24:05The world's largest air force had been well nigh eradicated.
24:10Their air cover gone,
24:12the Russian frontier armies wilted and disappeared.
24:23In a week, the Wehrmacht was already half way to Moscow.
24:28In a month, the Germans had won an area
24:31double the size of their own country.
24:53A woman, a man,
24:55a young boy,
24:59a young boy,
25:03two colours, three colours,
25:05bright red and stars,
25:07hearts and kisses,
25:09the girl liked so much.
25:11A woman, a man,
25:13a woman, a man,
25:15a young boy,
25:20a young boy,
25:23a young boy,
25:33Russian cities fell like ninepins to the panzers.
25:36One was captured with its tram still running.
25:39Its citizens setting off for work
25:41cheered the German tanks, thinking them their own.
25:47We were, in parts,
25:49very friendly,
25:51received by the population.
25:53We had the impression
25:55that we could win the population in Russia.
26:06Like the French the summer before,
26:09the Russians used their tanks in penny packets
26:11instead of the mass formations of the German panzers.
26:20Easy meat for the German anti-tank gunners.
26:24Their blazing hulks littered the battlefield.
26:27Six thousand Russian tanks were lost
26:30in just two engagements at Minsk and Smolensk in July.
26:50Half a million Russians were killed in the first fortnight,
26:54and nearly a million taken prisoner.
27:00As the weeks went by,
27:02the Russian losses mounted,
27:04bewildering the Germans who refused to believe
27:07such profligacy in human life could possibly continue.
27:14As in France the year before,
27:16Hitler was concerned more to destroy the enemy's forces in the field
27:20than to capture cities or to conquer territory.
27:27But his generals didn't always see it that way.
27:30Tempted, perhaps, by golden spires,
27:32they vied with each other to be the captor of this or that great city,
27:36especially Moscow.
27:46Moscow
28:02To capture the Russian capital without delay,
28:05the generals argued, would be decisive.
28:08Hitler preferred to destroy the Russian forces in the south first,
28:11hoping for a decisive battle there.
28:14Moscow was not his first priority.
28:18In August, he ordered his panzers to swing south.
28:24Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine,
28:27was taken in mid-September.
28:34In one of the most spectacular encircling movements in military history,
28:38the German panzers took prisoner at Kiev
28:41nearly three quarters of a million Russians.
28:57The German newsreel cameramen made great play
29:00of these long columns of luckless Russians
29:02for whom front-line fighting was now over.
29:05But ahead lay another hell,
29:08imprisonment at the hands of the Nazis.
29:11Of every hundred Russian prisoners seen here,
29:14only three would ever return alive.
29:33By the end of September 1941,
29:36after just three months of war,
29:38the Russians had lost nearly three million men.
29:43But Russian resilience before such fatal seeming blows
29:46was to astonish the world.
29:50The German was told to regard his Russian foe as sub-human.
29:54But it was not long before the German front-line soldier at least
29:58came to think of him as more super-human than sub-human.
30:02The Russians seldom cried out when wounded.
30:06The Germans were not afraid of death.
30:09They were not afraid of death.
30:12They were not afraid of death.
30:15The Russians seldom cried out when wounded.
30:19And there always seemed to be more of them on the horizon.
30:23One Wehrmacht colonel wrote,
30:26in fighting Russia, the German army is like an elephant
30:29attacking a host of ants.
30:31The elephant will kill thousands, maybe millions,
30:34but in the end, their numbers will overcome him,
30:38and he will be eaten to the bone.
30:45Orientation in Russia is as difficult as it is in the desert.
30:51Only you don't see the horizon.
30:55You are lost.
30:57The immense base here was so immense
31:00that we had many soldiers who became melancholy.
31:08The valley, flat valleys, flat hills,
31:14flat valleys, flat hills, endless, endless.
31:17There was no limit. We could not see an end.
31:21And it was so disconsolate.
31:25We saw the big fields, the corn fields,
31:30from the horizon to the horizon.
31:33We never saw it before.
31:35It's very large.
31:37Unimaginable vastness of this country.
31:43And we advanced from one river to the other,
31:46from one position to the other,
31:48and there was no end to it.
32:14Trade space for time was the traditional Russian strategy.
32:19Time was not on Hitler's side
32:21if he was to achieve his decisive victory before winter.
32:25I remember flying back from Krivoshev,
32:28and there was this great tank trap
32:30they were digging all round outside Moscow,
32:33and one saw what looked like ants moving around it,
32:38and it was practically the entire civil population of Moscow,
32:42man, woman, and child, were out there digging.
32:44I think they did tap every emotional resource
32:47that was available to them.
32:49I remember, for instance, a lot of the churches being opened again
32:52that had been shut for a long time.
32:56In that very situation,
32:59something else appeared among us,
33:02the tradition of Borodino.
33:05Borodino is the place when Napoleon was defeated.
33:08Then suddenly, religious feeling just appeared from nowhere,
33:13and that helped to unite people.
33:17With the Ukraine subdued and Leningrad surrounded,
33:21Hitler now turned his attention to the biggest prize of all, Moscow,
33:26something his generals had been beseeching him to do
33:29ever since the start of the campaign.
33:32Moscow in October 1941 was already a front-line city.
33:37German troops had been only 200 miles away since August
33:41when Hitler had diverted his panzers southwards.
33:45Rumours had been rife of early capitulation.
33:49The city had long been placed under military rule.
33:53Hardly a day went by without a visit from the Luftwaffe.
33:59The battle for Moscow began in earnest in early October.
34:04Straightway, things went wrong for its defenders.
34:09In two vast pincer movements, the Germans captured another city.
34:14The German troops were even now preparing for battle.
34:19The battle was fought on the outskirts of Leningrad.
34:23The Germans had been in the city for about 24 hours.
34:27The Germans had been in the city for about 24 hours.
34:31The Germans had been in the city for about 24 hours.
34:35In two vast pincer movements, the Germans captured another 700,000 Russian troops.
34:41Goebbels summoned American war correspondents to Berlin to announce Moscow's impending fall.
34:47We had had a very beautiful summer, no problems, climatic problems, or anything of this sort.
34:54As I remember it, it started snowing and becoming cold around October 10th.
35:00And then we knew immediately that we were totally unprepared and unequipped for what
35:07was lying ahead of us.
35:09But when one Panzer commander asked his headquarters when he could expect winter clothing, he was
35:14told not to make further unnecessary requests of this type.
35:19On the day the first snows fell before Moscow, its defenders received a new commander, Zhukov.
35:26Something German intelligence didn't consider worth telling Hitler, although Zhukov had
35:30led Leningrad's defense with enormous energy since mid-September.
35:35But Moscow's defense was to be a bigger test of Zhukov's generalship.
35:41The first snows soon melted, turning roads into quagmires.
35:50Only a few roads in Russia were paved.
35:54Therefore, in autumn, the terrible period of mud was beginning, and the roads became
36:02deeply soothed, and therefore, useless for motor cars except tanks.
36:09We had as infantry to march along the sides of the roads to let pass cars and the tanks.
36:28The wheels of my guns were broken.
36:35And within a period of two or three days, we had to improvise mobility by requisitioning
36:44100 horses and wagons.
36:48We all were quite happy about the success of the German armies in Russia, but the first
36:58England said something is wrong, was when Goebbels made a big action in whole Germany
37:05to collect furs and winter clothes for the German troops, and we knew that something
37:11was ahead which was not foreseen.
37:16We had no warm mantles and nothing, only the things we had also in summertime.
37:26And we were actually angry that we didn't have better equipment.
37:34The weather worsened.
37:36Many German commanders favoured halting for the winter.
37:39Hitler would have none of it.
37:41Convinced total victory would be his before winter proper began, he ordered his generals
37:44on, on as soon as the ground had hardened enough to bear his panzers.
37:52The welcome delay allowed Zhukov to organise Moscow's defences.
38:07The Russians had less than 400 tanks left to defend Moscow.
38:12Space was running out fast for Zhukov, but time was still on his side as the cold winds
38:18of winter swept in from the north.
38:26But on October the 14th, a panzer group broke through and took Kalinin, less than 100 miles
38:32away to the north.
38:34A few days later, another unit took Mozhaisk, 60 miles west, while an infantry division
38:40reached Gorky, just 40 miles away.
38:46Panic gripped Moscow's citizens.
38:48Those who could, left.
38:49Two million of them, including most government departments.
38:52Even Lenin's coffin was evacuated, along with other Kremlin treasures.
38:56There was a bit of a shock when, in those two or three days, I suppose they were just
39:01the advance, sort of a spear tip, probably, a few chaps on motorbikes or something, got
39:05to within 40 or 50 kilometres of Moscow.
39:09Then there was a, I must say, a considerable shock in Moscow, and people were trying to
39:13get out.
39:14They thought the German army was going to roll in.
39:17In fact, I should imagine, from 16th of October to about 20th of October, an average citizen
39:26of Moscow probably expected that Moscow will fall within the next few days, and that was
39:31what the panic was about, really.
39:34People used just to stop top-ranking Secret Service officers and shout insults at them
39:40without any fear.
39:42In normal times, you couldn't do anything like that.
39:45These were the only times when, probably, a very weak force of Germans, if they would
39:50manage to drop a unit of some kind of Persianist inside, we would have real trouble.
39:57But while Hitler plotted his final attack on Moscow, Zhukov, too, planned an attack.
40:03But with what?
40:05He had already withdrawn as many troops as he dared from other sectors to defend Moscow.
40:12But there was one reserve the Russians had not yet touched, nor ever thought they would
40:16be able to.
40:17The 40 divisions of the Siberian Front, among the best troops in Russia, trained to fight
40:24in winter conditions.
40:26Since June, they had been expecting a Japanese attack.
40:35Midway through October, Stalin's master spy in Tokyo reported Japan's eyes were elsewhere.
40:42This time, Stalin believed his spies.
40:45He moved the Siberian divisions to Moscow.
40:52Even at this moment of crisis, Moscow took time off to celebrate the anniversary of the
40:56revolution, and Stalin showed himself to his people.
41:03We could say, in spite of all his shortcomings, that Stalin rendered a very great service
41:11to the USSR by that presence, because it showed two things.
41:16One, the supreme commander did not run away.
41:21Secondly, Stalin retained his nerve.
41:25That sense of nerve spread at once into all the armed forces.
41:31All the commanders began saying, Stalin himself, he is here.
41:56The ground had hardened.
41:57The panzers were able to roll again.
42:00On November the 26th, they entered Istra, just 30 miles west of Moscow.
42:09Four days later had taken Krasnaya Polyana, just 25 miles north.
42:20As yet, Zhukov had not used his Siberians, and German intelligence had not stumbled on
42:25the presence near Moscow of such numbers of fresh troops, but the Germans were having
42:29troubles of their own.
42:35And one morning, it was finished with this.
42:40All was frozen.
42:43And the cars were sitting in the mud, frozen, and the tanks could not roll.
42:49And in this moment, my heart broke down.
42:53There was in a distance a large town, and I think that was the first time and the last
42:59time I have seen Moscow.
43:04Temperatures were down to minus 40 degrees centigrade.
43:07Oil solidified in the sumps of lorries and tanks.
43:11Intense cold affected the soldiers too.
43:13There were more casualties from frostbite and stomach troubles than from actual fighting.
43:19We had no winter shoes.
43:21We had no equipment whatsoever to fight or stand the cold.
43:28And I think this became a very, very big problem right away.
43:33We lost considerable part of our equipment, guns, heavy and light equipment in general.
43:41We, of course, due to the cold, lost a lot of people who got frostbitten.
43:48And we had not even the necessary amount of ointments or the most simple and primitive
43:55things to fight it.
43:57Of 900 men of my battalion, 200 fell out because of freezing in the first 14 days.
44:09As it became colder toward the end of November and early December, most of our artillery
44:18had become completely unusable.
44:21We had not the lubrication oil suitable for this winter war.
44:28Nevertheless, the Russian had it.
44:31And suddenly our soldier realized that from one moment to the next, the weapon didn't
44:39shoot anymore.
44:40Well, the worst memory was if the vehicles got frozen on the ground and the motor oil
44:50was thick so we couldn't move.
44:52And we needed and we wanted to move.
44:54I think that was the worst.
44:58In Russia, there were no signposts to mark the ways.
45:05To find our roads, we had set the frozen bodies of horse along the snow walls to find
45:15the way during the snow drifts.
45:18And the scenery was so disconsolate.
45:24Always snow and snow.
45:29We always were alone with us, dreaming.
45:32One day, we will be back in Berlin.
45:37But the powers that be back in Berlin refused to believe the worst.
45:41The newsreels made it all seem great fun.
45:54The reality was different.
45:58At that time, we had advanced almost 2,000 kilometers.
46:13Hitler, at first, did not want to conceive that this crisis was the end of all his strategic
46:20planning.
46:22But the army knew it better.
46:26And the Russians did the most important part in convincing Hitler, too, that the Russian
46:36campaign of this first year had failed and had come to an end.
46:47December the 6th.
46:48With the Wehrmacht's morale at its lowest, although some German troops were just 15 miles
46:53from the Kremlin, Yukov unleashed his Siberians.
46:57It was astonishing.
46:59This time, the first time, I saw the Russian tanks, 34, running through the fields and
47:09through the snow.
47:11Our own tanks couldn't drive, couldn't shoot, because it was too cold.
47:23When I wanted to go back, I met the Russians everywhere, and so this was the first impression
47:38that there was no victory anymore.
47:53December the 7th.
48:23As the Russians regained some of their territory, they began to uncover the horror of the Nazi
48:28occupation.
48:53Comrade, kill your German, became the catchphrase.
49:21During the first month of the Russian counter-offensive, more than 300,000 Germans were killed or captured.
49:26The worst memory of this retreat was the fear, every day and every night, to come in captivity.
49:38And we had seen enough of the enemy to know that in cases like that, prisoners were hardly
50:16It was the first time that our soldiers remarked the dark shadows of the coming times.
50:46When we must retreat from Moscow, the Russian population and the Russian soldiers must think
50:58it's possible to defeat the German army.
51:05Two days after the Russian offensive began, the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbour.
51:11The war was taking a very different turn.
52:11The war was taking a very different turn.
52:41The war was taking a very different turn.
52:51The war was taking a very different turn.