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(narrator) The bombing has stopped. The fires are out.
Europe lies in ruin.
The dead are gone forever.
The living carry on.
Everywhere the same:
no gas, no water, no telephones, no trams.
Time to count the cost.
Time to start again.
Springtime 1945.
The end of the war in Central Europe.
The end of the thousand-year Reich.
Untidy. Messy.
A time without pity.
A time of brutality,
rape.
revenge.
The Germans come back from the eastern lands they'd tried to conquer,
where some had lived for generations.
They'd been bad masters.
Now they pay the price.
At least they are alive.
The last hours of the Wehrmacht, an army in dissolution.
lt has made war on the world.
Now it saves what it can.
(man #1) The mood of the German troops who were surrendering was one of relief.
They were happy, for the most part, to surrender.
They were interested in getting to the American lines,
in preference to surrendering to the advancing Russian line.
(narrator) A defeated army - but even at the end, not always a broken one.
The habits of a lifetime die hard.
But at last, the blood-letting is nearly over.
(man #2) You had a European civil war that began in 1914.
There was a long armistice in that war.
lt finally comes to an end in 1945. ln the process of coming to the end,
what happens is that sweeping into Europe from the outside
are the Russians and the Americans.
And they meet at Torgau on the Elbe River in May of 1945 -
with the result that no European nation wins the European civil war.
The winners in the European Civil War are outsiders:
the Russians and the Americans - most of all the Americans.
So that you have the physical control of the Continent
in the hands of three outsiders - because the British were a part of it,
although they only contributed 25%
of the whole total to Eisenhower's Anglo-American force.
Britain, the United States and Russia now control the Continent,
and they will decide what happens to it.
(narrator) Neither Russians nor Americans had wanted this war.
Now comrades in arms, they have won a great victory.
When their generals meet,
they can speak the language of combat, of tanks and guns.
But have they anything in common except soldiers' talk?
(man #1) The Russians were overjoyed - but we also -
and there was handshaking and back-slapping
and the exchange of souvenirs.
l have a Russian watch
and somebody's gold wedding band.
And l lost my watch.
l lost all sorts of insignia from the uniform.
All the Russians were very friendly. A lot of them didn't speak English.
Yet there were a few that spoke beautiful English -
educated at Oxford and Cambridge.
l remember speaking to one,
and l thought, "l'll never forget your face as long as l live."
"l'll never forget you."
He was rather young. He was quite young. And he was very pleasant.
But you always kept feeling that they really hated us,
which l'm sure they did.
(Ambrose) The United States during the war
had been propagandised into seeing Russia as a democracy,
a land of freedom lovers,
with essentially broad social aims about the same as those of the West -
which seemed to make sense,
since they were clearly an enemy of the Nazis, as we were.
Thus, it appeared we had a great deal in common.
Fellow delegates, the President of the United States of America.
(applause)
(narrator) San Francisco, April 1945,
a month before V-E Day:
the United Nations Organization is born.
The Charter of the United Nations, which you are now signing,
is a solid structure upon which we can build for a better world.
There was great hope in the world that this would happen -
that this was the last war.
That the victors would now be able to cooperate in peace,
as they had in war, to see to it that "the four policemen",
Britain, France, the USSR and the United States,
sometimes "the five policemen" with China thrown in,
would be able to see to it
that there would be no more aggression in the world.
That the war had meant something,
that it had been fought for something, rather than simply against Nazism.
There is a time for making plans,
and there is a time for action.
The time for action is here, now!
(newsreel) Nation by nation, the delegates stand up
for the great new charter they hammered out.
50 nations standing side by side, unanimous for peace.
Now final signing of the charter.
China signing first, as the first nation attacked in this war -
Dr Wellington Koo's signature topping the long list to come.
For Russia, Ambassador Gromyko commits his country also
to the agreements and objectives decided
after days and nights of compromise and cooperation -
four main agencies upon which the world now puts its hope.
(Ambrose) A better world was going to emerge -
a non-colonial world, a world of self-determination.
And this was felt very deeply in 1945,
even by the most cynical of the world's leaders.
l suspect even Stalin felt it.
l'm sure that Harry Truman felt it.
And Winston Churchill felt it. The common people everywhere felt it.
(narrator) Germany remains, even in defeat,
the key to the problems of Europe.
She started the war, so her leaders have to be punished.
The Germans themselves have to be made to pay
for the suftering they have caused.
But they cannot pay if Germany remains a heap of rubble,
or if the country is dismembered, as some wish.
No one wants Germany to be strong again,
yet no one can face the consequences of keeping her a ruin forever.
The answer: military control.
Four armies of occupation will superVise Germany's recovery.
The watchful Allied generals will build her up,
but only in order to make good again what she has destroyed.
Germany can remain whole, united,
but must never be able to threaten the peace again.
July 1945.
The military administration gets under way.
American troops have occupied Leipzig,
a city well within the Russian zone of occupation.
Now the Americans pull back - west, across the River Elbe.
The Russians move in.
The Germans - wary, watchful, nerVously smiling -
see their Russian conquerors for the first time.
When the fighting stopped, the armies ended up here.
But the occupation zones had been decided earlier,
at the Big Three conference at Yalta.
There were to be four zones.
The Russian zone had the food and raw materials.
The Western zones - American, British, French - had the industry.
For the occupation to work as intended,
there would have to be trade between them.
Berlin, the capital, became the home of the Allied Control Council -
a testing ground for the plan to work together.
There's been some question as to whether we weren't a little premature
in fixing these zones until we saw how the armies were going to come out.
And there's some evidence to indicate that our leaders underestimated
the striking force of the Anglo-American armies that invaded Europe,
because when we adopted the zonal positions
we gave up Saxony and Thuringia.
But on the other hand, we got back good pieces of Western Austria,
which had been occupied by the Soviets.
The thing that stands out here
is that the Russians do let the West come into Berlin
which is 80 miles within their zone.
They didn't have to do it.
They could have acted in Berlin as they acted in Poland.
They could have just said, "To hell with you. We're not letting you in."
"We're not going to live up to the agreements we signed at Yalta."
"We're going to hold on to Berlin -
after all, we captured it, we paid the cost. 100,000 Russians died."
(narrator) Berlin, July 1945.
The Big Three meet for the Potsdam Conference.
A crowded agenda for this first meeting of victors.
But for the West, one question dominates:
what does Stalin want?
(man) At our first meetings, Stalin put forward at once
the demands which the Russians maintained
right through until the meeting at Potsdam.
What he wanted was basically to ensure the security of his own country,
regardless of the interests of his neighbours.
l'd seen a good deal of him during the war.
l went up to him and said, "This must be a great satisfaction to you,
after all the trials that you've been through
and the tragedy that you've been through, to be here in Berlin."
He looked at me and said, "Tsar Alexander got to Paris."
(narrator) The conference takes no new decisions.
lt simply confirms what was decided at Yalta six months before.
What is new is the mood.
Despite smiles for the newsreels,
the Western leaders and Stalin do not get on.
(Ambrose) The feeling - especially in the States,
and most especially with President Truman -
was that Stalin was another Hitler.
They didn't think, "We made a great mistake in the war
and backed the wrong side."
They were perfectly clear that Hitler was much the greater menace.
Hitler had to be crushed,
and the crushing of Hitler absolutely depended upon the Red Army.
(narrator) The Red Army has 300 divisions in Europe.
They are Stalin's trump card,
the source of his strength at the conference table.
(Ambrose) Suddenly you were faced with the fact
that the Americans were demobilising -
or rather, at the time of Potsdam, they were redeploying,
pulling the army out of Europe, taking it back to the States
and getting it ready to send to Japan,
as they expected to have to invade the home islands
for the final defeat of Japan.
l was invited to see President Truman.
And he shut all the doors and told me in great secrecy
the greatest secret of the war:
the fact that the Americans had an atomic bomb,
which they were going to drop very soon,
and which he thought would bring the war to an end.
The reason for his decision
was this would save thousands upon thousands of Allied lives,
which would otherwise be lost
in a frightful massacre on the shores of Japan itself.
He warned me l might find myself suddenly in the position
with the Japanese having surrendered.
Then l saw Churchill, and Churchill told me the same thing.
He said, "They will surrender. What are you going to do about it?"
l said, "You've only just told me. l haven't thought."
(narrator) August 1945. The bomb is dropped.
The Japanese do surrender.
Their cities, too, have been laid waste, their dreams of conquest shattered.
They, too, are at the mercy of their conqueror.
They do not know what lies in store.
(Ambrose) The Americans wanted Japan rebuilt as quickly as possible,
and a highly industrialised Japan to emerge from the war -
well within the American orbit.
Truman decided at Potsdam that no one would be allowed into Japan
except for American troops.
The Aussies weren't let in, the British were not let in,
and of course, most of all, the Russians were not let in.
(narrator) The conqueror comes -
General MacArthur with his American advisers,
his American court.
He will try and remake Japan in America's image.
(cheering)
The prisoners are freed -
US airmen who burnt Japan's cities to the ground.
They are the masters now.
ln Europe it is still summer.
There are 700,000 concentration camp surVivors.
lt may be enough to be alive,
to be reunited,
to have surVived,
to go home.
Six million former slave labourers -
Poles, Russians, Yugoslavs, Estonians, Czechs, French -
free to pick up the threads of their lives,
now that their German masters have gone.
Prisoners of war with no country to go to -
deportees, Germans, soldiers, deserters.
(man) lt was very difticult to tell the difterence
between a German refugee and a Polish refugee
in the part of Germany that l was located in -
l wouldn't know which were which.
You could be pretty well sure,
if they were humping things on their back and carrying bags
but hadn't got a truck, they were almost certainly refugees.
(narrator) Or perhaps SS guards in stolen prison clothes.
Some choose death.
Himmler, lord of the SS, takes poison.
Some surrender or are caught.
Von Rundstedt, Hitler's general, in full dress uniform.
Admiral Dönitz, last leader of the Third Reich.
Albert Speer.
What to do with these broken monsters?
Stalin, at the Yalta Conference
that was attended by President Roosevelt and Mr Churchill,
said that he thought 50,000
of the German general staft and ofticers
should be gathered together
and summarily executed.
He wasn't joking.
President Roosevelt thought he was, and said, "Well, perhaps 49,000."
But Churchill said that he'd rather be taken out into the garden
and shot at once than be a party to such an iniquity.
But the Russians persisted almost until the end
in saying that there should be no trial -
these men were criminals and should be immediately executed
the moment they were caught.
(narrator) There is a war crimes trial at Nuremberg, Hitler's city.
The charges: crimes against peace, crimes against humanity,
waging aggressive war.
The defendants are all German.
Göring is called to plead guilty or not guilty.
(speaks German)
(judge bangs gavel)
(judge) l informed the court
that defendants were not entitled
to make a statement.
You must plead guilty or not guilty.
(speaks German)
Rudolf Hess.
Nein!
(judge) That will be entered as a plea of not guilty.
(Shawcross) l think you'd say the purpose was a twofold one.
The first was retribution - the punishment of people
who had launched this war against the world.
And not only the war, but who,
prior to the commencement of the war and during it,
had committed the most terrible crimes against humanity -
as, for instance, by exterminating certainly seven million Jews.
The second purpose of the trial
was, as we hoped,
to lay down the rules of international law for the future -
not only making the waging of aggressive war unlawful,
but, for the first time, making the statesmen
who led their countries into an aggressive war
personally responsible for what they'd done.
12 million men, women and children have died thus -
murdered in cold blood.
Millions upon millions more today mourn their fathers and their mothers,
their husbands, their wives and their children.
l was rather surprised at the appearance of the defendants.
l thought, "Well, if l'd seen these people in the Clapham omnibus,
l wouldn't have looked at them twice."
l think that was true of all of them,
except perhaps Hess and Ribbentrop,
who both looked pretty miserable creatures,
and Göring, who looked a very remarkable personality.
He did dominate the court.
He was the outstanding personality in the court.
And sometimes, in the course of a long trial like that, lasting over 200 days,
something would go wrong.
You would ask a witness a question,
and the answer you expected would be "yes",
and the witness would answer "no".
At that point you had to be very careful not to catch Göring's eye.
He was sitting at the corner of the front row.
lf you glanced across at him or caught his eye
when there was an incident like that,
he would raise his eyebrow and shake his head in a rather smiling way,
and it would be very difticult not to smile back.
(narrator) Göring cheats the gallows with a cyanide pill.
The rest are hanged, or imprisoned, or set free.
They have brought their revolution to Germany,
and death to Europe.
Their mad adventure over,
now they pay their reckoning for Hitler's Reich.
The British come back to Asia in triumph.
An empty victory -
lndia's no longer docile.
Two million of her troops fought for Britain in Britain's war.
Now they want their own country to be free.
His Majesty's African troops, they want freedom, too.
Malaya, Burma.
Britain is too weak to hold them, even if she wants to.
The main eftect of the war against Japan in the Far East
was the nourishing of the spirit of nationalism in Asia.
A large part of Asia had been under British rule,
and most of that that was not under British rule
was under Dutch rule or some European rule,
and the people were beginning to aspire
to the creation of their own political institutions.
The demonstration by the Japanese
that the British could be beaten, and beaten very severely,
naturally encouraged in the eyes of the people of Southeast Asia
the belief that they, too, might be able to secure
a much stronger position against the British
than they'd dreamt possible.
This had a great eftect on opinion in lndia and all over Southeast Asia.
Suddenly l found myself responsible, as the supreme commander,
for an enormous area of the globe,
with a distance
of 6,000 miles across it -
as far as from London to Bombay,
with 128 million starVing and rather rebellious people
who'd just been liberated,
with 123,000 prisoners of war and internees,
many of whom were dying and whom l had to try and recover quickly.
And at the very beginning,
l had some 700,000 Japanese soldiers, sailors and airmen
to take the surrender, disarm, put into prison camps,
awaiting transportation back.
lt sounds a big problem, but l had no idea what l really was in for.
What in really was in for was trying to re-establish civilisation
and the rule of law and order
through this vast part of the world.
We didn't even know what the conditions were going to be.
l had no staft really trained or qualified
to help me in this task -
except some professional civil aftairs ofticers
from various countries concerned, whose one idea was to go back
and carry on where they left oft three or four years before.
(narrator) The police are not ideal either.
lndonesians do not want the Dutch back.
lf order must be maintained in the East lndies,
there is only one force to do it:
the Japanese army.
Mountbatten uses them there, and in Singapore as well.
(Mountbatten) lt may sound odd now, after the war,
but at the time - and it still didn't make sense - what was l to do?
lf l was to order them to lay down their arms
and concentrate themselves in prison camps,
and leave the outside world without policemen or anything at all,
that would have been very odd.
No, l think they had to carry on as they were
until they were eftectively relieved - that's the only order l gave.
l didn't consciously employ them.
They carried on until l could relieve them
with Allied soldiers as soon as possible.
(narrator) Americans are in Japan to stay.
Almost everywhere else in Asia, white men prepare to leave.
Reluctantly, uncomprehendingly, the Dutch go.
The French are difterent -
they will not give up lndochina.
They send troops to take it back, commanded by General Leclerc,
a hero of the European war.
(Mountbatten) When l spoke to Leclerc when l was about to turn over
the military responsible for the south of French lndochina to him,
l urged him to try and make friends with local inhabitants, local insurgents.
l said, "That's the way for France to come back -
with a friendly relationship."
"l don't think you can impose by military means your old colonial rule."
He said, "l see the point. l'm sorry, l'm a soldier."
"My instructions are to take over the military way."
And that, of course, is what he did.
(machine-gun fire)
(narrator) So the killing goes on.
lt goes on there to this day.
Berlin in the first months of occupation.
Cheery Frauieins, once the handmaidens of Hitler's new order.
Some of the victors have the time of their lives.
(man #1) Germany was on a cigarette and chocolate-bar economy
right after the war, right after combat.
As a consequence, there was little an American soldier
couldn't buy if he wanted to buy it -
including serVices of all sorts.
(man #2) lt's the same old story -
if a boy and a girl want to get together,
there isn't any law that says you can't or you're not going to do it.
The black market was blooming.
We had nothing. A piece of soap
was a most valuable possession.
So...
you practically prostituted yourself,
just to get a piece of soap, maybe a can of coftee,
or maybe even some cigarettes - people who smoked. l didn't.
But you just did everything.
l know people - very, very fine people - who just would have done anything.
And you lose some of your human dignity when you are so hungry,
when you are so without food,
without clothing, without everything.
(man) How could you blame a starVing girl?
She might not want stockings, she might not want cigarettes,
or a bicycle, or butter,
but she did want badly something,
which could be provided
by the appropriate, typically, British or American Gl.
l had to give up smoking in the streets.
ln those days l was a cigarette smoker.
Carelessly, you'd throw your cigarette
on the floor.
Before you knew it,
a fellow had almost caught it.
He'd been trailing you because he saw you were smoking.
l remember that in one of the cinemas in one of the big towns
there was going to be a performance for the American Gls.
They had queued up before it started.
The Americans don't allow smoking, but they were all smoking in the queues.
Practically opposite every smoker, there was a line of hungry-looking men -
hungry for tobacco - waiting until the doors opened.
And then as the cigarettes fell into the street, there was a rush.
The key place in that queue was just at the entrance to the cinema,
because that's where most of the cigarettes came down.
(man) ln retrospect, being a conqueror seems very dubious to me,
but at the time it seemed quite right.
We were convinced of our virtue and the German vice,
and it was very pleasing to be able to tell them what to do.
(narrator) Time to rebuild.
Time for Germany to recover, so it can start to pay.
The Russians want 20 billion dollars in reparations.
Americans think that's more than Germany itself is worth.
The West won't help the Russians collect that much.
They stop sending goods and hardware to the East.
The Russians send little food and raw materials to the West.
The Allies are starting to fall out with each other.
The Germans, caught in the middle, get on with rebuilding themselves.
There are no slave labourers now.
(Spencer) They had cleared the street, and trams went by.
l'd have hated to ride on one.
They were packed to the roof -
there were people hanging on the outside, though it was cold,
there were people standing on the bufters.
And there were patient queues to get on these trams,
but nobody ever seemed to me to get oft.
(translation) Horst Gerlach, born 4 May...
(narrator) The Suchdienst - the missing persons register.
12 million Germans, driven from the eastern lands,
trying to find each other.
They're not alone.
60 million Europeans have been uprooted.
Some never find their way home again.
November 1945.
The Germans live on 1500 calories a day -
a third of what the American troops get.
(woman) lt was a very hard time, because we suftered from hunger.
The Americans had much food.
My mother decided to work for them.
And l decided to work for them, too.
My mother was in the kitchen,
and l was a waitress.
Well, it was rather hard for me,
because the Americans ordered that l had to smile always.
And l couldn't smile, because l...
The American ofticers were so proud, and they treated us as Nazis.
(narrator) No peace conference ever takes place.
There is no new Versailles.
Germany is divided.
The occupation zones become frontiers -
unintended, unwelcome and permanent.
(Ambrose) lf you have a unified Germany that belongs to the Russians,
you have Russian domination of the whole of the Continent.
lf you have a unified Germany that is in the hands of the Anglo-Americans,
then you have a Western domination of the Continent
that would cheat Russia
out of her just claims to the security
that was Stalin's number-one concern
all through the war and afterwards.
So dividing Germany along the Elbe
was probably the best solution.
One's tempted to use words like "fair" and "just",
but l don't think they apply here -
it's the workable solution.
Wherever the Red Army was in a contiguous territory,
they would install a Sovietised system -
and there was no argument about it.
We did the very best we could on Poland.
The tragedy of Poland is that she's got Germany for a neighbour on one side
and Russia for a neighbour on the other side. lt's a terrible position.
lt's always been the Polish dilemma and the Polish tragedy -
Poland has to fall into the orbit of one or the other.
Given those choices, and given the natures of Hitler and Stalin,
l suppose if l were a Pole,
l'd say, "We're better oft under Stalin's heel than under Hitler's."
Soldiers of Poland,
l wish you all a speedy and safe return to your home country.
(band plays)
(narrator) Poland's tragedy. Russia's triumph.
Victory Day in Moscow.
(Ambrose) The Russians paid an enormous price for victory,
but they did gain from the war -
security for themselves, control of East Europe,
and the opportunity, which they took advantage of,
to exploit East Europe economically.
(narrator) A nation bled white by war has somehow to rebuild.
The Soviet Union has surVived.
lt is one of the world's great powers,
and now everyone knows it.
London, 1945.
Eros comes home.
Britain has surVived, too. But a curious victory.
You can picnic again,
but look out for unexploded mines.
No invasion, no occupation,
yet the nation's treasure is exhausted.
For six years it has fought and been a workshop for war.
The bullets have been bought with Britain's wealth.
They won't be needed now.
Britain has won the war,
and has nearly gone bankrupt doing it.
The British had as many problems, if not more, in recovering from victory
as the Germans did in recovering from defeat.
The British... What did Britain get out of the war?
Not very much. Not very much. She lost a very great deal.
l suppose, if you want to look at it positively,
she got a moral claim on the world
as the nation that had stood against Hitler alone for a year,
and had provided the moral leadership against the Nazis
at a time when everyone else was willing to cave in to the Nazis.
(narrator) America, 1945.
The boys come home - again.
(Ambrose) The big winner in World War ll
is the United States of America - by far.
We get much more out of the war than anyone else.
There's a paradox here - very quickly after the war was over,
Americans began to take the attitude: "Aha! Here it is again."
"We got fooled once more, as we did in World War l."
"We made this enormous eftort,
we beat the Germans, we beat the Japanese."
"And who wins? The Russians. The Russians get East Europe out of it."
"We were suckers."
This was very widely felt in the United States.
lt was a strange attitude to hold when you look,
with whatever objectivity that one can muster,
at what the real results of the war were.
(narrator) Americans come home to a country untouched by bombs,
a country twice as rich as when the war began -
more food than it can eat,
more clothes than it can wear,
more steel than it can use.
The only country in the world with money to spare.
The country with the atom bomb.
The Germans, too, are victors - though they do not know it yet.
The soldiers come home from internment camps,
put on ordinary clothes, go back to work.
Feudal, Prussian, peasant Germany is no more.
ln its place, the structure of a modern state.
lronically enough, that was Hitler's work.
Now, in the West, a new Germany will emerge:
rich and free and democratic - and strong.
England, too, changes - though some voices stay the same.
You will be taken to the civilian clothing depot
to get your civilian suit.
After that, a bus will take you down to the station.
You're free then to push oft home as fast as you can.
(newsreel) The procedure is comprehensive -
there are a lot of things to be thought of
when a man or a woman leaves the army.
Civilian life nowadays is fairly full of snags,
and the ex-soldier must be armed against them
when he marches into civVy street.
lnformation pamphlet. 14-day ration card.
- Good luck. Thanks for all you've done. - Thank you, sir.
- AC Clott? - Sir! 252.
(narrator) Britain's soldiers come home,
to a land without much cheer,
to a land of ration cards, queues, black markets and austerity.
But to a land of National Health
and the welfare state.
To a land of free men and women.
To a world no longer at war.
ln the first place, if we hadn't won the war,
it would have meant that the Japanese and the Germans
would have won it.
l think you can imagine what kind of a world that would have been.
lt's true that the problem of Russia - the Soviet Union, rather -
emerged sharply after the war.
But l would say on the whole
that that was the lesser of the two evils that could have happened.
And the more or less principles on which democracies operate,
on which societies are based,
certainly didn't get much satisfaction out of the results of the war -
but l think this was inevitable, given the Soviet system.
On the other hand, there's still a large portion of the world
that still is able to exercise a certain degree of freedom,
particularly in their internal aftairs.
Not that by any means
that everything that isn't communist is perfect - far from it.
But l think the world would have been quite intolerable
under Nazi and Japanese rule.
The principal eftects of the war on people and political systems
bore upon the countries in Eastern Europe -
Poland most of all, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and those countries.
These peoples were hoping, or some of them were hoping,
that the war would liberate them from the threat of Nazi tyranny,
and in fact at the end of it they found themselves in the communist bloc -
which l must say was far less sinister than the Nazi bloc.
This was a very solid achievement of the Second World War -
a very much less sinister type of tyranny
replaced a highly sinister tyranny.
But this was not the freedom for which they had hoped,
and for which, to a large extent, we had fought.
The most important single result of World War ll
is that the Nazis were crushed,
the militarists in Japan were crushed, the Fascists in ltaly were crushed.
Surely justice has never been better serVed.
(narrator) For 30 years now, there has been peace in Europe.
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