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(narrator) Berlin in the summer of 1940 welcomed victory beyond belief.
The soldiers of the Third Reich came home after only a year of war.
They had conquered France.
Central and northern Europe had fallen, too.
These crowds were delirious with exultation and relief.
They turned to their Führer in a frenzy of gratitude.
They had not fancied war. They had feared defeat.
Now they thought the war was over
and they rejoiced.
(narrator) The men came home.
They were brown and fit and only a few of them had died.
(woman) l just went shopping
when somebody told me, "Don't you hear the noise?"
And there l saw this part of the army coming back just near us.
So l bought a bowl of cherries and ran there.
We all were so glad.
We heard so much of the First World War with those dreadful battles
and those many dead.
l felt a sort of national pride we ended the war so quick.
(narrator) ln cities untouched by war,
the German people had hardly begun to give up the ways of peace.
There was rationing, even shortages,
but to make up for it, the regime preached enjoyment, luxury.
(♪ "Rosamunde")
While the British had declared frivolous things immoral,
the Nazis tried to show that luxury flourished.
Promises were their propaganda.
Those who ran the war eftort came to believe their own promises.
Only a few saw further.
Just about August it was ordered
that a lot of production was stopped
or minimised or things like that.
And there was a kind of euphoria that the war was, so to say, over.
l didn't believe in that at all.
No, l thought l knew the British
and l had the opinion that they would see this thing through
and that the United States would join the war,
and therefore every eftort should be made
to prepare for a long blockade.
(crowd cheers)
(narrator) Hitler had no plans for a long struggle,
no preparations for the total mobilisation of all productive capacity.
German industry had been geared to a blitzkrieg war.
The regime still let the factories turn out peacetime goods.
The workers, subjugated but not fully converted,
watched the comings and goings of the Nazi princes without enthusiasm.
Wanting to be loved, the Nazis gave and gave.
For 1940, propaganda minister Dr Goebbels was Father Christmas.
He gave to children. He gave to mothers.
(newsreeI) In BerIin wurde der neue FiIm "Mutterliebe" uraufgefürht.
Auf VeranIassung von Reichsminister Dr. Goebbels
lud die NSV 1 .200 Trägerinnen...
(narrator) Ladies with larger broods
were invited to the film premiere of Mother Love,
the regime's hymn to family and folk community.
Das heißt, er wird uns ja vom Himmel aus helfen, so gut er kann.
Er wird mit dem lieben Gott sprechen.
Und weil er so lustig ist und alle Engel lachen macht...
(narrator) On their breasts they wore the Nazi Mother Cross.
The pram was the tank of the home front.
The government hoped for a breakthrough on the birth rate.
Happy babies, happy future mothers
and very specially happy music soused the nation.
(♪ march)
The big smile glued across the face of the people,
still often dubious and nerVous, was stretched even wider.
(singing in German)
Everybody must learn to enjoy the happy teamwork of Hitler's folk community.
Vierzehn Uhr und eine Minute. Der Wehrmachtsbericht.
(narrator) Radio was the instrument
which the Nazis made their own from the beginning.
Their foreign-language broadcasts,
technically marVellous but grotesquely unconvincing,
reached greedily out to minds abroad.
Today's ofticial German war communiqué reads as follows.
(narrator) But listening to foreign radio was forbidden.
Many, like the propaganda comics Tran and Helle,
argued the toss between getting a glimpse of the outside world
and the risk of a jail sentence.
(woman) lf we listened to foreign radio, which we always did,
we turned it very low and we used to sit right up close against it.
And l remember one particular moment when my son,
who was a little schoolboy,
told me that he had a very funny story to tell me,
that his friend's mother also listened to the radio
with her ear right up against it the same as we did.
l suddenly realised that l could have her imprisoned
and she could have me imprisoned,
because these two children had been talking about it.
(narrator) As well as geography and the rest,
Nazi schools were obliged to add a special subject.
Children were taught with pictures and measurements
the dimensions of a healthy Aryan race.
Ofticial films prepared the Germans
for the consequences of keeping the race pure.
The mentally incurable, condemned as the bad seed,
went to experimental gas chambers.
(man speaks German)
(narrator) But now, for once,
the Germans learnt what was going on and protested.
Bishop Galen of Münster attacked euthanasia from the pulpit.
For a time, the programme was stopped.
A controlled press avoided such misgivings.
Some newspapers were mere party sheets of hate and lies.
Some slipped criticism between the lines.
None of them satisfied a people which was still highly educated.
(man) lt was terribly frustrating
never to be allowed to say your opinion openly.
l myself was quite happy
when l was called up,
early 1940, to the army,
and that suddenly left behind
all the oppression l had every day.
Being a soldier, you don't read newspapers.
You don't listen to the radio.
You're not always under the stress of the propaganda
which was pointed at you every hour.
(narrator) European war became world war in June 1941 .
The Nazi leaders had secretly resolved that the conquest of Russia must come.
(newsreel) Reichsminister Dr. Goebbels verliest die Proklamation des Führers.
Deutsches Volk.
ln diesem Augenblick vollzieht sich ein Aufmarsch, der...
(narrator) For many, the attack on the Soviet Union
brought fear and bewilderment.
Of course l'd heard of certain preparations
but it was all... well, hushed up,
and till the last moment,
l didn't think that the war would come about.
(narrator) For a long war,
Germany would need to have the south Russian oil fields for her own.
Russia had delivered a million tons of oil the previous year
under the Nazi-Soviet Pact, now flung away.
(Kehrl) As a matter of fact
we had the greatest trade agreements with them that we ever had
and they delivered promptly,
and from an economic point of view everything seemed to be in order.
l personally had, through my men,
negotiations with them of putting up a synthetic fibre mill in Russia
and the treaty was signed on 15 June, 1941 ,
and the first ten million marks in gold
should be shipped on July 1 , 1941 .
(woman sings in German)
(narrator) The Germans drove eastwards over disintegrating Russian armies.
Victory looked like a matter of weeks, another blitzkrieg,
and morale at home revived.
Göring inspected what was now the German colony of Ukraine,
intended to be a serf region of agriculture.
Nazi experts on the Slavs hoped that this simple folk
with simple customs would enjoy this prospect.
Six months later, in the blinding snow before Moscow,
the Germans were stopped.
They lacked winter clothing
and the government appealed for furs and warm coats.
An den letzten Tagen der Sammlung drängen
drängen sich vor den Annahmestellen die Gebefreudigen,
um ihre Spenden abzuliefern.
Tut Ihnen das nicht leid? So einen schönen Pelz? Oh, ist das warm da drin.
(narrator) No amount of rehearsed enthusiasm
could conceal that this was the Reich's first military reverse.
The minister of munitions and head of the war eftort Fritz Todt
flew to inspect the construction work on the Eastern Front.
One of the men who should have been on the plane was Hitler's architect,
the producer of the Nuremberg rallies, Albert Speer.
l heard in the headquarters that Todt's plane crashed.
He was dead. And half an hour afterwards l was asked to come to Hitler
and to my great surprise he told me,
"You shall be his successor in all his oftices."
Todt got the funeral of a National Socialist hero.
By now nearly 250,000 Germans had been killed on the battle fronts,
but Todt was the first of Hitler's close comrades to meet death in the war.
Hitler was shaken. The war had reached him personally.
Speer had already seen the chaotic, disconnected way
that Nazi war industry worked.
Transport, munitions - all had to be brought under a single control.
One of his first targets was the labour supply.
Nazi Germany had never mobilised its full workforce.
(Speer) l tried to get the women in the war production machinery,
but it was opposed by Sauckel who was in charge of all the labour.
And the thing came to Göring and Göring flatly denied, too.
Then it came to the decision of Hitler,
and Hitler also said, "No, the women must be preserVed."
"They have other tasks. They are for the family. They have to bear children
and it would spoil their health and their morale
if they are working in the factories."
(narrator) But Ukrainian women were being imported as maids -
foreign conscripts for slave labour.
Under Speer, a great irony was fulfilled,
for Germany was becoming exactly what the Nazis said it would not become.
They had promised a return to the land, an end to great capitalism.
lnstead, the armaments drive
was strengthening the vast industrial monopolies
and swelling the cities with German and foreign labour.
ln two and a half years,
Speer multiplied armament production nearly four times.
80% of industry came under his control.
He brushed aside bureaucracies and worked through his own experts.
(Kehrl) He had ideas and he put all his energy
behind these ideas
and put them through with very much success.
He didn't know how things
had been done in the past.
He hadn't anything to do with it,
so he didn't know what was impossible and what was possible,
and he succeeded sometimes in doing the impossible, too.
(Speer) lt is astounding for everybody
who didn't live in our authoritarian system
to hear that it was difticult to get through with orders.
But it was difticult
because Germany was divided into many districts, 32 districts.
At the head of every district was a Gauleiter.
He was strong political man and had absolute power in his district.
He was only subordinated to Hitler himself.
So when my orders didn't please one of the Gauleiters,
possibly they weren't carried out.
(narrator) Tank production showed how even Speer failed to get all of his way.
He could not slice through the competing hierarchies
in Hitler's chosen style of government.
There were too many types of tanks. Too few tanks in all.
Too many calibres of gun and difterent sizes of ammunition.
(Speer) Hitler thought he was far superior to such problems
and what for others would have been discussions of weeks and weeks
for him was a decision of just a fraction of a minute.
Of course, there was a change, too.
One can never say that a man is always the same person,
and Hitler changed a lot from '42 to '43.
ln '43 he was more and more convinced
that he didn't need any more advice of anybody
and he made the decisions by himself without listening.
(narrator) Hitler spent more and more time at the Wolf's Lair,
his melancholy, remote encampment at Rastenburg
in the East Prussian forest.
Those around him were obsequious.
The better advisers lost touch.
Hitler's personal SS adjutant was Richard Schulze-Kossens.
(Schulze-Kossens) Nearly all ministers were stationed at Berlin
and some of them had contact ofticers in the headquarters.
Only Ribbentrop, Himmler and sometimes Göring had their own headquarters,
not so far from our headquarters.
Speer was very often in the headquarters
because his ministry was very important for the war.
Only Bormann was always in the headquarters
where there was the only direct contact to Hitler.
(Speer) Bormann, as the secretary, was the most powerful man -
more powerful, l think, than Hitler, because when the power was divided,
all those men who were in power had to go via him to Hitler.
Except me. l had direct access to Hitler.
There wasn't much cooperation.
The cooperation was in the lower levels of the smaller technocrats.
We didn't have anything like a cabinet.
Ministers met, if at all, very seldom
and didn't talk about very important matters -
so was my impression.
Every ministry worked for itself
and sometimes they got orders from Hitler, but very, very seldom.
(narrator) Foreign visitors like Mannerheim, the Finnish leader,
could see that Hitler was living in a world of illusion.
He still trusted the reassurances of Göring, head of the Luftwafte.
Göring, a few months later,
claimed that his aircraft could supply the Eastern Front
even when a whole army was cut oft at Stalingrad.
(man #1) Achtung, ich rufe noch einmal Stalingrad.
(man #2) Hier Stalingrad. Hier ist die Front an der Wolga.
(man #1) Achtung, die U-Bootfahrer im Atlantik.
(narrator) Christmas 1942.
(man #1) Achtung, Catania.
(man #3) Hier ist die Mittelmeerfront und Afrika.
(narrator) The man at Stalingrad
had come through on the radio link-up loud and clear,
but the brave words were faked in a Berlin studio.
(♪ "Stille Nacht")
For the last time the cathedral stood undamaged
as the Christmas fair took place in Berlin.
But Stalingrad was still cut oft
and deep down the nation sensed what was to happen.
(man) Dritter Februar.
Das Oberkommando der Wehrmacht gibt bekannt:
Der Kampf um Stalingrad ist zu Ende.
(narrator) "The Battle of Stalingrad has come to an end."
For once the radio spoke the truth, and with some dignity.
91 ,000 surVivors surrendered.
Only a few thousand ever saw Germany again.
l was not long in the headquarters
but l felt very significant the atmosphere on this day.
All people were depressed
and Hitler himself was very serious
and he started on his soup
without saying any word, and...
He was... He was very depressed.
(narrator) The world realised
and the Germans realised that this was the turning point.
This was the tragedy which could not be hidden.
And Stalingrad did not come alone. A week before the city fell,
the Germans learned that the Allies would demand unconditional surrender.
There was, then, to be no mercy for the Germans.
Nazi and non-Nazi both lost some illusions
and drew a little closer together.
The escape hatches had been bolted.
This was to be a total war, fought to the finish.
(Bieienberg) The general feeling was, well, we can do nothing.
lt doesn't matter what we do. We'd better stick it out.
Ausharren was the word, l remember, on everyone's lips.
There's no alternative. We've got to fight to the bitter end.
And this Goebbels used to the uttermost in his propaganda.
(cheering)
(narrator) Two weeks after Stalingrad,
Goebbels brought a picked Nazi audience to a last mass frenzy.
(narrator) lt was his supreme moment, the proclaiming of total war
and the invoking of the nation's hidden power.
(narrator) "Now, folk, rise up and storm, break loose."
They were the words of 1812,
of the national uprising against Napoleon.
They were empty now.
(♪ fanfare)
ln 1943 it was better listening to music than to news.
(sings in German)
(narrator) lt was total war and retreat on all fronts.
Total war meant that even German women must work.
lt brought its own sour humour.
(Tucking) There was a slogan, "Do enjoy war. Peace will be dreadful."
(narrator) There was a new equality
among the boys drafted to the mines and factories.
The Hitler Youth was mobilised into production and eventually into battle.
The barriers between people crumbled as they had crumbled in the London Blitz.
People wanted to huddle together, to sing and forget.
By the morning, they might be dead.
(gunfire)
By day the American bomber fleets ranged over the Reich.
At night came the British.
ln the shelters the people waited for dawn
and wondered if their cities would still be there.
(Tucking) When we had the first bombs, we were shocked.
We saw all the sky lighted up from the fire.
lt was an enormous and a dreadful sight.
We were very angry when we saw
that so many residential areas were destroyed.
There were so few men left
that everybody who had the strength was firefighting.
(narrator) One by one the German cities were incinerated by firestorms.
Ten days' raids on Hamburg left 40,000 dead.
Goebbels noted, "The people in the west
are gradually beginning to lose courage."
"Hell like that is hard to bear."
(Bieienberg) l think that the bombing
hadn't the eftect one would have thought.
lt had the eftect of bringing people together.
lf you were all under the same bombs,
it didn't matter whether your neighbour was a Nazi
or what they were.
(narrator) To avoid seeing the ruins,
Hitler's rare visits to Berlin were made by night.
And yet banners were ordered for his birthday.
They read, "Our walls have broken, but not our hearts."
(Junge) Hitler lost more and more his sense of reality.
He never, never had the will
that he must see with his own eyes what the war was.
We had no information from outside
and so l had the feeling to live in a monastery,
in a concentration camp.
One of the generals once said, "l feel like a concentration camp."
"We are included
and we all use the same phrases."
"We are all thinking the same. We are all hearing the same."
"We are all led in our thoughts
and our feelings by Hitler."
We all were playing in a play, each his role
and he was the only one who knew the script.
He made us all do our play and speak our text.
Nobody else knew how it would end.
Neither Hitler nor Göring nor Himmler were seen in public. Only Goebbels.
Whenever there was a very heavy bombing,
Goebbels stood there on the marketplace and held his speeches
and tried to say ausharren.
l personally had respect,
because there was a sort of inspiring.
You were sort of in a trance.
(♪ "The Mastersingers of Nuremberg" - Wagner)
(narrator) A strained, exhausted nation could still lose itself in music.
The orchestras still gave what was great and true
in the tradition of German art.
ln the galleries there was only the empty grimacing
of Nazi painting, Nazi sculpture.
True Aryan models simpered and scowled,
their features carefully designed to portray the victorious Nordic race.
Race was the empire of Himmler and the SS.
But now the SS was itself an empire.
Himmler, the ex-chicken-farmer,
ruled the death camps and the concentration camps.
The SS had its own schools and factories and courts.
lt administered huge tracts of the occupied east.
lt was the instrument of German dominion over Europe. lt was even an army.
The generals had little control
over the hundreds of thousands of elite troops in the Waften-SS.
lnto the SS training schools were drawn Aryan-looking volunteers
from the occupied countries,
for the SS state was to be not merely German but European.
(Schulze-Kossens) All had volunteered for active serVice in the Waften-SS
because they regarded the fight against Bolshevism
as the most important task in Europe.
New was the point of European education
because we were of the opinion
that only an imaginary contrast
existed between the nations
who had the same or were from the same origin, yes.
(narrator) For those of difterent race origin, there was no place.
For the Jews there was deportation to eastern ghettos
and then the gas chambers of the SS.
The ofticial word was "resettlement".
Most Germans preferred to believe that it meant no more than that.
(Speer) Hitler often mentioned that he is hating the Jews
and he gave many examples already in an early time when l was with him,
and l should have been warned that he is serious about it
because he proved to be serious about other things he predicted too.
(speaks German)
(translator) One night, it must have been around midnight, the doorbell rang.
l opened it and in front of me
there stood a Jewish couple.
This was how l began to help persecuted Jews.
All of a sudden l'd entered into an invisible circle
of people who smuggled Jews about.
As soon as one hiding place had been detected,
they were quickly passed on.
They'd always move about at night.
That's how l came to belong to a group who had to put up Jews
when they were passed on like this.
l've never found out who it was who'd sent them to me in the first place.
Decent people, l'm sure.
The problems started with the feeding of the Jewish people.
They neither had food rationing cards nor did they have any money,
so we in our turn made use of friends
who exchanged their cigarette ration cards
for the odd potato or some bread.
One day a friend of ours who used to collect food cards for these Jews
came to me and she came with another woman
with dyed blonde hair.
l can see her sitting there now twisting her wedding ring
and telling me that it wouldn't be for long,
that she would help me in the house and her husband need never go out.
He could live in the cellar or wherever.
(narrator) But Christabel Bielenberg's husband was away
and was involved in a plot to overthrow Hitler.
She consulted her trusted neighbour and friend Carl Langbehn,
another conspirator.
Langbehn told her compassionately but firmly
that the risks to herself and her family and to the conspiracy were too great.
l was astonished - overcome, really -
at the response that l got from my neighbour
who told me that under no circumstances whatsoever could l house these people,
that housing of Jews meant concentration camp
not only for myself but for my husband, possibly also for my children.
l can remember going through and out into the road
and out of the darkness came a voice - l knew there was somebody there -
came a voice saying:
"Frau Doktor... Frau Bielenberg,
haben Sie einen Schluss gefasst?"
which means, "Have you decided?"
And l simply couldn't say no.
l just said, "Well, l can't for longer than two days."
And l let him into the cellar.
They stayed for two days
and on the second day
or rather in the evening, they must have left
because in the morning she was gone,
the cellar was empty,
the little bed l'd put up all tidily arranged
and they had gone.
l knew later that they were caught
buying a ticket at a railway station
and were transported to Auschwitz.
And why l say this is the most painful and terrible story
for me to have to tell
is because after they left
l realised that Hitler had turned me into a murderer.
One day in '44,
Gauleiter Hanke came in my oftice and told me
that he was visiting a concentration camp in Upper Silesia
and warned me never to go in a concentration camp there
because horrible things would happen.
This together with other hints l got
should have made my decision
to go to Hitler immediately or to Himmler
and to ask them what is going on
and to take my own steps.
But l didn't do it and not doing it was, l think nowadays,
the biggest fault in my life.
We felt that people should know
what was going on,
and maybe typical is this little experience
which l had one day
standing in the line for vegetables or something like that.
l told my neighbours standing around me
that now they start to kill the Jews in the concentration camps,
that it is not true that they only are brought there
and can live there as they live here, as it was told them.
They are killed and they even make soap out of them.
l know that.
And they said, "Frau Bonhoefter, if you don't stop telling such horror stories
you will end in a concentration camp too and nobody of us can help you."
"lt's not true what you're telling."
"You shouldn't believe these things. You heard them from foreign broadcasts."
"They tell these things to make enemies against Germany."
l said, "No, that's not from broadcasts. l know that directly from first hand."
"You can be sure it is that way."
And coming home l told my husband in the evening
and he was not at all applauding to me - on the very contrary.
He said, "My dear, sorry to say,
but you are absolutely idiotic, what you are doing."
"Please understand,
a dictatorship is like a snake."
"lf you put your foot on its tail,
as you do it, it will just bite you
and nobody will be helped."
"You have to strike the head."
(narrator) Only the commanders of the army
could strike eftectively at the head.
Others had struck bravely at the tail and perished.
ln Munich, a few students around the Scholl brother and sister
had protested with leaflets and been slaughtered.
ln Berlin a communist spy team
led by Harro Schulze-Boysen and the Harnacks had been crushed.
Communists, socialists, Christians, anonymous men and women
defied the dictator in tiny groups.
150,000 Germans suftered prison or worse for political resistance.
The plot against the snake's head was a federation.
There were conserVatives like Goerdeler, aristocrats like Moltke,
churchmen like Bonhoefter, diplomats like Trott.
Faced with defeat, many staft ofticers joined in.
All were slow to accept that to strike at the head
demanded the physical murder of Hitler.
But in 1944, there appeared a man for action -
Colonel Count Claus von Stauftenberg.
(man) All the difterence was brought in, of course,
when Stauftenberg came to Berlin.
He had lost his left eye,
his left hand,
or three fingers of his left hand,
and his right hand altogether.
Originally he was only the planner of the coup d'état,
but he had to report to Hitler's headquarters
and to attend conferences there.
This enabled him to get near to Hitler and then to make an attempt,
which he did on July 20, '44.
(explosion)
(Junge) Suddenly there was a very alarming bang.
We heard voices crying for a doctor
and we saw some generals with bloodstained uniforms.
Then came one of the adjutants
and said, "There was a bomb explosion, but the Führer is not hurt."
"He's still alive."
We went towards Hitler's bunker
and we met him.
Maybe it was an hour after this explosion.
He looked funny
because his hair stood up like a brush
and his trousers were slit
in small stripes.
He said, "You see, fate has saved me for my mission."
"l am to do what l must do."
(narrator) At the War Ministry in Berlin,
the plotting generals believed that Hitler was dead.
(John) When l came to the headquarters, Stauftenberg was busy with telephoning
the various army commands, and Haeften informed me of what had happened,
how they'd thrown the bomb, and then he said, "Hitler's dead."
We did believe it because Stauftenberg then came in.
We had a short talk with him - he was much too busy to give details.
He said, "Hitler's dead. Leave everything alone."
"We'll see what can be done."
(narrator) The man the plotters ordered to occupy the city was Major Otto Remer,
a fanatical soldier programmed to obey any superior order.
At first he obeyed the plotters, then Goebbels got hold of him.
(Remer speaks German)
(translator) Goebbels was really very pleased to see me. He was beaming.
He said, "Remer, what do you know about all this?"
"What's going on here? What orders have you got?"
l said, "Minister, l have come to you so that you can clarify the situation."
Goebbels replied, "They're trying to pull the wool over your eyes."
"Hitler's alive. l've just spoken to him."
l was so astonished that l said, "Please, let me speak to the Führer,"
and this was done.
On the other end of the line Hitler said, "Herr Remer, you see l am alive."
"l am Adolf Hitler. You recognise my voice."
"Now do you believe l'm alive?"
(narrator) Now Remer was reprogrammed.
He marched back to the War Ministry and arrested everyone he found.
The plot collapsed. The wavering army returned to its oath.
(man) Der Angeklagte von Witzleben.
(narrator) Many of the plotters, after prison and torture,
were to face a ghastly sham trial
conducted by Roland Freisler, the star judge of Nazi Germany.
Their families were seized and their children sent to orphanages.
The luckier conspirators, among them Stauftenberg,
had been shot out of hand in the War Ministry courtyard.
Some attempted to explain their motives in court.
Count von Schwerin was an ofticer who had serVed in Poland.
(judge)
(narrator) The condemned were hanged slowly on meat hooks.
A film of their agony was made and shown later to Hitler.
But the plot left Hitler a frightened, damaged man.
The repression after 20 July broke the power of the aristocracy
and of the Prussian tradition forever.
But there was no ruling class to take their place.
To Hitler, all generals now seemed suspect.
Only Goebbels, Bormann and Himmler could get close to him.
(Junge) Slowly but steadily he became weak.
The doctors went in and out and he became totally apathetic.
Not interested in anything.
lt was a very critical situation on the West Front
and on the East Front, too.
And some days it was like Hitler didn't exist.
He was deteriorating suddenly in his health,
but l wouldn't go so far as to say
that he was no more responsible for what he was doing.
ln some ways he was...
l have the experience of a prisoner of 20 years.
ln some ways he was behaving like a prisoner.
(narrator) Through the devastation the Germans somehow kept going.
Down ruined streets, the workers made their way to ruined factories
where a few machines could still be made to turn.
Life retreated to the cellars.
People learned that eight bombs fell in a row and then you were safe.
They learned to live a day at a time.
(Tucking) lt was really dreadful to endure it.
We were so tired.
You were always in a hurry.
All the railways were destroyed and the lorries had no petrol.
We had rations from the beginning
and step by step it was worse and worse.
(narrator) Germany itself was near the end of its tether.
Seven million foreign forced labourers were not enough.
Everything - oil, metal, food - was running out.
Everything from clothes to planes was patched and made to serVe again.
Men, too.
The war cripples were recycled for the factories.
The brain-damaged soldiers were taught to speak again.
Nun wollen wir einmal das hauchen.
Was ist das für ein Laut?
A.
Hauchen wir das A, dann heißt es?
Ha.
Nun werde ich Ihnen dieses Buch hier zeigen.
Was sollen wir hauchen?
Ha, ha, ha.
- Schnell hintereinander. - Ha, ha, ha.
(narrator) Now the enemy was approaching the very frontiers of the Reich.
The Volkssturm, the home guard
of the elderly, the underaged and the unfit, was sworn in.
(men repeat oath)
Männer des Berliner Volkssturms, ihr habt soeben...
(narrator) They listened with closed faces to oratory from Goebbels
about fighting to the bitter end.
(Goebbels) ..wehrbereiter und wehrentschlossener Männer verfügt,
die den festen und unerschütterlichen Willen haben...
(narrator) The Volkssturm trudged out through that same Brandenburg Gate
which had seen the soldiers march back from Paris four years before.
They went towards the Russians,
keeping their thoughts to themselves.
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