World War II with Tom Hanks (2026) s01e01 Episode Script
The Beginning
When I was a kid,
every adult I knew
shared one thing in common
a gap in their lives when
everything appeared uncertain
and time itself seemed to stand still.
When they talked about it,
they simply called it "the war."
For six dark years,
the world was on fire.
Cities were demolished
and whole populations threatened.
When would the war end? No one knew.
How would it end? No one knew.
Life was in stasis.
The war is now a part of our culture,
portrayed in movies and on television
and novels and history books.
The Allies usually defeat the enemy
and save the world.
But the grim reality of the war
is almost impossible to comprehend.
Over 65 million people are killed
the majority civilians.
Everyone fought some version
of the war,
beginning with the mothers and fathers
who sent their children overseas
not knowing when or if they
would ever see them again.
And, of course, the soldiers, sailors,
airmen, and marines
often just a bunch of kids
who served with honor and bravery
to liberate enslaved peoples
and preserve human dignity.
In doing so, they saved
that which is most precious
and valued by us all
freedom.
The Second World War
is the largest event in human history.
No part of the globe is unaffected.
World War II changed everything
for all of us.
All wars change the world,
but none of them changed the world
like the Second World War did.
Japan's on the march,
Germany's on the march.
No one can imagine
the nightmare
they're about to unleash
the most destructive war
in human history.
Suddenly the world
is turned upside down,
and all hell is let loose.
The West is stunned
by the speed of the advance.
You get the Allies,
led by the big three
Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin
men who are dealing
with immensely complicated questions.
It's the biggest military
operation of human history.
The Allies have to come together,
not just militarily,
but industrial scale
it's a global perspective.
They have to fight in every climate,
from the Arctic
to the jungles of the Pacific
to the deserts of Africa
and the depths of the ocean.
But there was no certainty of victory.
It was going to be
a horrific bloodbath.
We see humans at their absolute worst,
how they treat other human beings.
And we see them at their absolute best,
willing to give their lives
that others might live.
World War II was a struggle
in which there could be
one victor and one vanquished.
Sometimes the most monumental events
begin without fanfare
before the world wakes.
And so it is
on the 1st of September, 1939,
as dawn breaks over a sleeping
city on the Baltic Sea,
that the bloodiest conflict
in all history begins.
This is the national program
from London.
Germany has invaded Poland.
Heavy outbreaks of fighting
along the German-Polish frontier.
In just a matter of hours,
a million and a half men
1,300 planes
and 2,750 tanks
crossed the Polish border
at lightning speed.
September 1, 1939
a storm breaks over Poland.
The Germans are racing
through with tanks
and with artillery,
following up with the infantry
and accompanied by the Luftwaffe.
And all of a sudden,
people were waking up
to the sound of tanks rumbling
through the town
not really knowing what was happening.
You're going to see waves of trucks
and mechanized and motorized vehicles.
It looks a bit like
a science-fiction novel,
like all those novels written
in the '20s and '30s
about what the war
of the future would look like.
And, suddenly, in 1939,
the future is now.
At 11:00 a.m.,
Hitler arrives at a Berlin opera house
where he's gathered the Reichstag.
This is the moment Hitler's
been waiting for all his life.
He's been the leader
of the Nazi party since 1921.
He comes to power in '33.
He rearms the country in '35.
And since then, it's been
prepare, prepare, prepare.
But Hitler wants a war.
The invasion follows
months of diplomatic tension
over a strip of land known
as the Polish Corridor
land that had once
been part of Germany
but was ceded to Poland
to give her access to the sea
after the First World War.
20 years earlier,
global leaders gathered
in the French city of Versailles
to sign the historic treaty
ending that war.
After four years of brutal fighting,
an alliance led by Britain and France
and supported by the United States
emerged victorious.
Germany, its military exhausted
and its people near
starvation, had lost.
And now they would pay
the price of defeat.
The Treaty of Versailles
takes territories away from Germany.
It strips Germany of
populations and raw materials.
It turns the entire
German merchant marine
over to the Allies.
It imposes reparations on the Germans.
The Allies were attempting to limit
the future power of Germany.
The effects of the
First World War were so grave,
they were so catastrophic
that no one wanted
to see a repeat of that.
One young Austrian corporal
fighting for the German army
is Adolf Hitler.
Like many, he is shocked
by the way the war ends.
Your average German
was surprised by the news
of the armistice because
it happened so suddenly.
The army was still in the field,
and there was the sense
that we haven't been invaded
and thoroughly beaten.
It was personally a tragedy for Hitler.
He heard the news of the armistice
when he was still ill from
injuries sustained in battle.
He did not process
the end of the war well.
He did not accept
the defeat of Germany.
Surviving soldiers come home angry
and confused.
Frankly, the response of many of them
is disillusionment.
Four years at the front,
I managed to dodge all those bullets,
and now I came home
and this is what I fought for?
When Hitler comes back from the war,
he learns to talk to former soldiers
who are now disgruntled
and begins to feel the fact
that he's actually
quite a good speaker.
He attends a meeting of a small group
which will become
the National Socialist German Workers,
or Nazi Party.
He finds something attractive.
This is a party of grievance
talking about how Germany
could be transformed
and Germany could be made
powerful again.
In 1921, Hitler's talent
for public speaking
makes him the leader
of this tiny party.
Hitler's first move
is an attempted coup
against the Bavarian
state government in Munich.
But it fails,
and he's arrested for treason.
At his trial, the judge allows Hitler
to publicly share
his movement's grievances
against war guilt,
reparations, and communism.
In jail, he publishes his memoir,
"Mein Kampf," or "My Struggle."
With Hitler's notoriety,
Nazi Party membership grows
as Germany's Weimar Republic
moves through the unstable '20s.
The economy is burdened
by heavy war reparations.
In 1923, the cost of one loaf of bread
rockets from 3 marks to 80 billion.
The years that follow
are unstable, chaotic.
Hitler's Nazi Party fuels racial hatred
against Jews and fears about communism.
Then, just as the economy
is recovering,
the Great Depression throws
6 million Germans out of work.
People in Germany are
confused, bewildered, unhappy.
And so there's a real opening
for a leader who will speak
all these lines perfectly
and talk about, how I'm going
to bring the Germans
back together.
In the 1932 elections,
Germany is deeply divided.
But President von Hindenburg,
backed by conservative businessmen,
appoints Hitler chancellor
to run the government
at the beginning of 1933.
In 1934, Hitler declares
that he will now continue
to be chancellor
and take over the role
of the president as well.
He's transformed what was
a democracy in Germany
into a one-party
and a one-man dictatorship.
He's become the German leader,
the Fuehrer.
His first promise as Fuehrer
is to reclaim the land
Germany lost at Versailles.
He seizes the Rhineland,
Austria, and the Sudetenland
German-speaking parts
of Czechoslovakia.
By 1938, just four years later,
he's reshaped the map of Europe.
Desperate to avoid another war,
Britain and France allow
Hitler to expand his empire.
In 1938 at Munich,
Neville Chamberlain,
the British Prime Minister,
and the French actually made
a deal with Hitler.
What he wanted was the
Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia.
The British had said, fine,
we'll just dismantle an entire
country to keep you happy.
But when Hitler turns to Poland,
the West finally takes a stand.
The Poles have already endured
centuries of foreign rule.
The country regains its independence
as part of the Versailles Treaty.
But its new borders now
include 20,000 square miles
of what had been German land.
In summer 1939,
the British and the French
sign a guarantee with the Poles
promising military assistance
if the Germans invade.
Hitler, speaking to his officers
they're asking him questions.
Well, what is the attitude
of the West gonna be
if you attack Poland?
And he snorted. Don't worry, he said.
I've seen my opponents at Munich.
They're little worms.
Hitler doesn't believe
the West has the will to go to war.
So he moves across the border,
ready to invade with the full force
of the Nazi Wehrmacht.
In the first 24 hours
of the invasion
The Germans take out railroads,
bridges, and airfields.
The destruction paves the way
for their army to advance
deep into Poland.
The Poles have a modern army.
It's the fifth-largest army
in the world.
And it's equipped with modern tanks,
with all sorts of artillery
and armored trains.
But Hitler has been putting
almost all his resources
into equipping the military.
The Poles were outgunned
by the Germans,
who had three-to-one tanks
and five-to-one airplanes.
So there's no question that the
Germans were a superior force.
Despite those odds,
the Poles are determined
to defend their country.
Everyone had to help,
and soldiers conscripted
civilians on the street,
putting them to work.
I saw one man who was stopped
six times on his way home
with a loaf of bread.
The Poles remain resilient.
But the question is,
what will Britain and France do?
Here, as ever in critical days,
has seen the coming and going
of the leaders of the country.
The British and French had
an alliance with the Poles.
They have to defend Poland.
But they're not
militarily prepared to do so,
and they're not
mentally prepared to do so.
The home fronts in Britain and France
are dead set against war.
British Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain
tells Parliament he's considering
issuing an ultimatum.
But many feel he's backtracking
on his promise to Poland.
This is a profound injury
to British honor,
that if we don't act and declare war,
no other country will ever trust
a treaty with Britain ever again.
Britain delivers an ultimatum to Berlin
on the morning of September 3, 1939.
Hitler has until 11:00 a.m.
to withdraw his forces.
It's ignored.
This morning,
the British ambassador in Berlin
handed the German government
a final note.
And, consequently,
this country is at war with Germany.
In cities across Britain,
air raid sirens
signal a strange new era,
and millions of gas masks
are sent to British homes.
Across the Atlantic,
America is just emerging
from the Great Depression
and not prepared for war.
The peacetime army is small.
And neutrality laws
make it nearly impossible
to aid the Allies.
In the White House,
the press gathers for one
of President Roosevelt's
fireside chats.
I have said, not once but many times,
that I have seen war
and that I hate war.
I say that again and again.
I hope the United States
will keep out of this.
And I give you assurance
and reassurance
that every effort of your government
will be directed toward that end.
Most Americans, when they're asked,
should the United States get involved?
90% of Americans say absolutely not.
But Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
he's watching what's happening
in Europe very closely.
The question is about freedom
and democracy.
He understands what is at stake.
In Germany, Hitler is surprised
when Britain and France declare war.
When the British declaration
of war is made,
Hitler receives it in silence.
And for a couple of moments,
he stares at his
foreign minister, Ribbentrop.
And then with a quite
vicious tone to his voice,
he says, what now?
Despite the British
and French declaration,
Hitler continues
his master plan for Poland
and sends in the Luftwaffe.
Hitler's air force
is led by a trusted member
of his inner circle
Field Marshal Hermann Goering.
Goering's a German celebrity.
World War I, he was the head
of the Flying Circus,
the Fliegender Zirkus, this
elite group of fighter pilots.
And so he's well-known in Germany.
He's very handsome,
very charismatic guy.
But there's also
a very dark side to Goering.
He feels deeply embittered
by the way the war ended,
and he falls under Hitler's spell.
And he's able to get
huge appropriations from Hitler
for Luftwaffe procurement.
Goering's elite pilots are young
and have spent thousands
of hours in training.
From the cockpits of heavy
bombers, they drop explosives.
But it's the precision dive bombers
that wreak the most terror.
The Sturzkampfflugzeug,
the Stuka
as it's usually abbreviated
you know, it's not
a particularly swift craft.
But they dive at an almost
90-degree angle
And literally drop a bomb in your lap.
And there's even a bit
of psywar here as well.
As they're coming down on you,
there's a siren screaming.
In Poland, there are pilots
flying at low altitude
who can see women and children
fleeing the roads
who actually target them deliberately.
Polish civilians experience modern war
in an unbelievably horrifying way.
They see people killed.
They see bodies all around them.
It's a nightmare.
Poland is being destroyed.
It is not clear when
or even if Britain and France
can send forces to help.
On day three
Adolf Hitler boards his
heavily armored private train,
the "Amerika."
He named it after his admiration
for the way America
settled a vast continent.
Now traveling towards Poland,
he looks out on the territory
he needs to conquer
land stretching deep
into Eastern Europe,
Lebensraum, living space
for his new German empire.
This is his and Germany's destiny.
Hitler talks about
a thousand-year Reich.
Its borders would stretch
from the Atlantic in the west
to Scandinavia in the north
and the Mediterranean in the south.
Poland and the lands to the east
play a special role in
Hitler's foreign-policy plans.
They're wide-open spaces,
farmland as far as the eye could see.
In order to achieve this vast empire,
Germans must clear out
the people living there
in a remorseless race war.
Adolf Hitler's whole worldview
is based on a kind of neo-Darwinism
in which every single act
is a biological struggle,
warfare between different races.
He believes that
the Aryan race, the Germans,
is the superior race on the planet.
It's destined to rule Europe
and indeed the world.
Until now, Hitler's main target
has been Germany's Jewish population.
Under his orders, they lost
their status as citizens,
had their wealth and property seized,
and many were forced into exile.
Hitler believes that humanity is locked
in this existential battle
between Aryans, as he
describes them, and Jews.
And Jews are supposedly responsible
for all of society's
and the world's ills.
So who is responsible
for the German loss in World War I?
Jewish people.
Who is responsible
for economic inequality?
Jewish people.
They control media, newspapers,
all the businesses.
The reason you are poor
is because they are hoarding money.
What the Nazis are seeking
to do at this stage
is to make life so unpleasant,
so difficult for Jewish people
within the Reich
that they want to leave.
Hitler also wants to remove
the Slavs of Eastern Europe,
including the people of Poland.
Day four
Hitler reaches the Polish front lines,
where he holds a photo
opportunity with his troops.
He makes himself very visible,
goes to the front, and he's greeted
by these thousands
and thousands of people.
They're all vying with one another
to get close to Adolf Hitler.
- He's fought in World War I.
- He's a battle-tested leader.
He's taken back
historic German territory.
He's built the armed forces.
They listen to him.
These German soldiers
marching on Poland
believe in Germany's destiny
that they will be the creators
of the great new Germany.
This is the first action
they've had militarily
since the Black Day
of the German Army in 1918.
And it is an average infantryman
from the First World War
who's leading it.
So this is redemption
20 years after what never
should have happened happened.
Shadowing his invading forces
is another wing of the Nazi regime
The Protection Squadron
in German, the Schutzstaffel, or SS.
They were Hitler's personal bodyguards
as he rose to power.
But under the leadership
of Heinrich Himmler,
they become a paramilitary outfit
at the heart of the regime.
Himmler is somebody
who has a sadistic streak.
He's quite meek, he's not
particularly assuming,
he's certainly not
very physically impressive,
but he's somebody who's got
a burning desire
to achieve things.
He gets drawn into the Nazi loop,
and then over a period of time,
he eventually takes control of the SS.
Himmler has developed the SS
from a small kind of a bodyguard unit
that's supposed
to really protect Hitler
Into a vast militarized force.
In Poland, the SS units fan out
across the newly occupied territory,
as does a special wing of the SS
the Einsatzgruppen
mobile death squads.
In September 1939,
during the invasion of Poland,
the Nazi Einsatzgruppen
are under orders
to neutralize any opposition.
The Einsatzgruppen
are specifically set up
to go into towns, villages,
and other areas of Poland
to kill civilians.
That's their only job.
Professors, landowners, politicians,
newspaper editors,
these sorts of people
they were targeted and killed
because these were the people
who are identified as possibly leading
some sort of resistance
against the German forces.
And this is something that the
Poles could not have known yet
on those first days of the invasion,
that this wasn't just going
to be a military invasion,
but this was also going to be
a war of annihilation.
For Hitler, this is a chance
not just to destroy Poland
but to clear Poland,
to crush the Polish people,
who are Slavs.
And Slavs in the Nazi ideology
are Untermenschen, "underhumans."
But it's more than that.
There are also Jews in Poland.
For centuries, Poland has been home
to millions of Europe's Jews,
who fled there to avoid
religious persecution.
The Jews originally settled there
because it was
the freest kingdom in Europe.
Now they found themselves
in a terrifying, murderous trap.
The SS drag Orthodox Jewish
men out into the streets,
and they desecrate
their clothes and their hair.
They smash up synagogues.
They are seeking to amplify the terror
that they've sought
to develop within the Reich
towards Jews within Poland.
These acts of brutality
escalate into public executions.
In the town of Konskie
on September 12th,
German troops order local Jews
to the town square
to dig the grave of a German soldier.
This rather humiliating
forced grave-digging exercise
quickly descends into a pogrom.
Jews are shot.
You know, they try
and run away from the scene.
They're quickly apprehended.
And in total, 22 Jews
are killed on that day.
This was happening across Poland
The brutal mass murder
of innocent civilians.
Nine days into the invasion,
Britain and France continue
to mobilize their forces.
Civilians are being killed
in the streets,
but the army isn't defeated.
With their capital city,
Warsaw, now the target,
two Polish armies stage a counterattack
to the west of the city.
Polish cavalry and reconnaissance tanks
drive German forces back 12 1/2 miles
in the Battle of the Bzura River.
You know, all too often,
the Polish campaign
is talked about
as some kind of pushover.
But the Poles fought hard.
The classic stereotype of the Poles
is that they're all on their
horses with sabers drawn,
riding toward tanks who
are just shooting them down.
This is absurd.
The Poles were very sophisticated.
Very finely trained soldiers,
extremely brave.
As Poles fight
under German bombardment
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain
and French Premier
Edouard Daladier meet
for a supreme war council
and reach a grave decision.
Daladier and Chamberlain
agree to leave Poland to its fate.
They also adopt formally
what they call the long war strategy
the idea that they have
superior resources to Germany
and that, over time, those
resources will come to bear
in the Allies' favor.
Although the statement that is given
to the world's press is one
of wholehearted support,
Poland is essentially cast
to the four winds.
There is one British politician
who has always wanted to take
a more aggressive position
against the Nazis.
Appointed to the new war cabinet
is Hitler's most vocal critic
in the West
First Lord of the Admiralty
Winston Churchill.
Throughout the 1930s,
Churchill had spoken up
with concern about German rearmament,
about the failure
to take effective measures
to enforce the Versailles Treaty.
It's clear now that Germany
couldn't be trusted
as a diplomatic partner.
Two weeks into the invasion
The Poles seem abandoned,
and their counteroffensive
is collapsing.
The German 3rd, 8th, and 10th
armies encircle Warsaw.
The capital is a city of palaces,
churches, and opera houses
the heart of the Polish nation.
But now Warsaw is in ruins
and under siege.
Bombs were falling, and everybody
was trying to help get people
out of the rubble.
When your roof is burning,
when your children are in hospital
because they've been bombed
I mean, these are shocking moments.
American photographer
and cameraman Julien Bryan
is in Poland's capital
filming suffering and defiance.
He pleads for Poland.
President Roosevelt
and the people of America,
listen to my story.
America must act. It must help.
As help is called for,
there is an army preparing to sweep in.
They're not coming from the west
but from the east.
On the 17th of September,
Joseph Stalin
calls the German ambassador
to the Kremlin and says,
we're going to invade Eastern Poland.
Poland's fate isn't sealed
just by the Nazis.
The communists of Soviet Russia
also sense opportunity.
And so does their all-powerful master.
Stalin is one of the most
extraordinary figures
in the history of the 20th century.
From the very beginning of the
Russian Revolution in 1917,
he's been part of the tiny clique
that's been running Russia
and has emerged
as the dominant leader
of the whole Soviet Union.
The inner circle called him
the master, the boss.
But in public, he was the
the leader.
But he was a tough man,
a morbid man, a mysterious man.
He learned the hard way
in the Russian Civil War
that you operate ruthlessly.
You sacrifice, you attack,
you show no quarter to your enemies.
Stalin saw the world
in geopolitical terms.
He recognized that the Soviet Union
couldn't survive isolated,
surrounded by adversaries.
He had to play the poker game
of diplomacy and war.
And the players were
the Western democracies,
led by England and France,
and the dictatorships.
His great fear was that
the two sides would gang up
against him
and destroy the Soviet Union.
And all of his decisions
came from this fear.
In August 1939,
just one week
before Germany invades Poland,
Joseph Stalin shocked the world
when he signed a nonaggression
pact with Adolf Hitler.
The revelation
of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
causes mayhem in the Western capitals.
It changes everything.
It's a complete shock.
For the last sort of five years,
the two dictatorships
Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia
had been pouring excrement
over each other in the media.
They had been calling each
other every name under the sun.
And for each, the other was
the quintessential enemy
of everything they believed.
And now, suddenly, there's a thawing,
and the next thing you know,
Ribbentrop is flying to Moscow.
In August 1939,
by signing a pact with Hitler,
Stalin helps to ensure
that the Second World War
will break out.
In fact, it makes it
virtually a certainty
that such a war will break out.
The pact promises
a decade of nonaggression
between the two regimes.
But there's another secret protocol
which carves up Eastern Europe,
sharing the land between them.
First up is Poland.
Neither the Germans nor the Soviets
wanted Poland to exist.
They both saw it as an affront.
Poland had historically been
a province of the Russian Empire,
and the Soviets want that back
as a buffer
against this stronger Germany
that's emerging.
The division of Polish
territory favored the Soviets,
who got more territory
than the Germans did.
So it's actually the Soviet
invasion of Eastern Poland
that decides the fate of Poland.
The Red Army pours into
Poland's eastern provinces.
They, too, carry orders
to eradicate Polish leaders
and culture.
When the Red Army
goes into Eastern Poland,
they are accompanied inevitably
by the secret police, the NKVD,
and they arrest all these people
writers, diplomats,
aristocrats, army officers.
Some of them are killed instantly.
Some of them are deported.
And a large number of them,
between 20,000 and 30,000,
are stowed in camps
near the Katyn woods.
All of these people are
to be secretly executed,
shot in the back of the head.
On September 22, 1939,
in the town of Brest-Litovsk,
Nazi and Soviet generals
gather to watch a parade
of both armies.
There's this free mingling
of German and Soviet forces.
The two sides are sort of mixing,
sharing cigarettes, sharing anecdotes.
And they even develop
almost a slang between them.
"Together strong."
If you're a Polish person,
to see these two people that
have always been dangerous
on both sides of you
working together to see that
Poland once again disappears,
you had to feel like
there's no help close by.
As Poland burns
and her enemies celebrate
One city resists
Warsaw.
Despite weeks of assault,
Warsaw has not yet surrendered.
Surviving Polish troops
rush to the capital,
where 300,000 soldiers
and civilians hold the city.
To break the resistance,
Goering orders the largest
air raid ever seen.
Goering levels Warsaw
with no regard for civilian casualties.
They strew thousands of pounds
of high explosive
and incendiary bombs,
firebombs over Warsaw.
And they reduce it to rubble.
It is the largest incendiary bombing
that the world has ever seen.
Air raids last
for the entirety of the day.
People are trapped in their basements,
they're trapped in courtyards,
they're trapped in stairwells.
Those who crawl out when
the bombardment is over
there's no water,
there's nothing to feed them.
20% of the city is destroyed
in one way or another.
And about 18,000 people
are injured or killed
in these bombardments.
And the city finally has to surrender.
In London, Winston Churchill
warns his country
that this is just the beginning.
Poland has been overrun
by two of the great powers
which held her in bondage for 150 years
but were unable to quench the spirit
of the Polish nation.
The heroic defense of Warsaw
shows that the soul of Poland
is indestructible.
The British Empire
and the French Republic
have been at war with Nazi Germany
for a month tonight.
Directions have been given
by the government
to prepare for a war
of at least three years.
But Churchill has received
a signal of hope.
A few weeks earlier,
President Roosevelt sent him
a note congratulating him
on his new role in the war cabinet
and opening up a secret line
of communication.
Once Germany invades Poland,
Roosevelt infers that this war
is going to be sizable in its scope
and that the United States
is probably going to need
to intervene at some point.
Churchill has this reputation
of being a fighter.
It's really telling
that Roosevelt seeks him out
rather than Chamberlain
at this critical juncture
at the beginning
of the Second World War.
So there's this relationship
that develops
between Franklin Delano Roosevelt
and Winston Churchill.
There's an understanding
on the part of Roosevelt
that there is someone in the leadership
of Great Britain
who understands what's at stake
and just how dangerous this moment is.
It's not simply about
the German invasion of Poland.
They're two men who are united
in their belief that Adolf Hitler
is perhaps the most dangerous
man on the planet.
After the surrender,
Hitler travels to Warsaw
to survey the ruins.
He points at the utter destruction
and tells the officers
who are with him
this is the real meaning of war.
In less than a month,
a major European nation
has been removed from the map.
It will be engulfed in darkness
for most of the next six years.
And it's only the beginning,
as Hitler looks to the West.
every adult I knew
shared one thing in common
a gap in their lives when
everything appeared uncertain
and time itself seemed to stand still.
When they talked about it,
they simply called it "the war."
For six dark years,
the world was on fire.
Cities were demolished
and whole populations threatened.
When would the war end? No one knew.
How would it end? No one knew.
Life was in stasis.
The war is now a part of our culture,
portrayed in movies and on television
and novels and history books.
The Allies usually defeat the enemy
and save the world.
But the grim reality of the war
is almost impossible to comprehend.
Over 65 million people are killed
the majority civilians.
Everyone fought some version
of the war,
beginning with the mothers and fathers
who sent their children overseas
not knowing when or if they
would ever see them again.
And, of course, the soldiers, sailors,
airmen, and marines
often just a bunch of kids
who served with honor and bravery
to liberate enslaved peoples
and preserve human dignity.
In doing so, they saved
that which is most precious
and valued by us all
freedom.
The Second World War
is the largest event in human history.
No part of the globe is unaffected.
World War II changed everything
for all of us.
All wars change the world,
but none of them changed the world
like the Second World War did.
Japan's on the march,
Germany's on the march.
No one can imagine
the nightmare
they're about to unleash
the most destructive war
in human history.
Suddenly the world
is turned upside down,
and all hell is let loose.
The West is stunned
by the speed of the advance.
You get the Allies,
led by the big three
Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin
men who are dealing
with immensely complicated questions.
It's the biggest military
operation of human history.
The Allies have to come together,
not just militarily,
but industrial scale
it's a global perspective.
They have to fight in every climate,
from the Arctic
to the jungles of the Pacific
to the deserts of Africa
and the depths of the ocean.
But there was no certainty of victory.
It was going to be
a horrific bloodbath.
We see humans at their absolute worst,
how they treat other human beings.
And we see them at their absolute best,
willing to give their lives
that others might live.
World War II was a struggle
in which there could be
one victor and one vanquished.
Sometimes the most monumental events
begin without fanfare
before the world wakes.
And so it is
on the 1st of September, 1939,
as dawn breaks over a sleeping
city on the Baltic Sea,
that the bloodiest conflict
in all history begins.
This is the national program
from London.
Germany has invaded Poland.
Heavy outbreaks of fighting
along the German-Polish frontier.
In just a matter of hours,
a million and a half men
1,300 planes
and 2,750 tanks
crossed the Polish border
at lightning speed.
September 1, 1939
a storm breaks over Poland.
The Germans are racing
through with tanks
and with artillery,
following up with the infantry
and accompanied by the Luftwaffe.
And all of a sudden,
people were waking up
to the sound of tanks rumbling
through the town
not really knowing what was happening.
You're going to see waves of trucks
and mechanized and motorized vehicles.
It looks a bit like
a science-fiction novel,
like all those novels written
in the '20s and '30s
about what the war
of the future would look like.
And, suddenly, in 1939,
the future is now.
At 11:00 a.m.,
Hitler arrives at a Berlin opera house
where he's gathered the Reichstag.
This is the moment Hitler's
been waiting for all his life.
He's been the leader
of the Nazi party since 1921.
He comes to power in '33.
He rearms the country in '35.
And since then, it's been
prepare, prepare, prepare.
But Hitler wants a war.
The invasion follows
months of diplomatic tension
over a strip of land known
as the Polish Corridor
land that had once
been part of Germany
but was ceded to Poland
to give her access to the sea
after the First World War.
20 years earlier,
global leaders gathered
in the French city of Versailles
to sign the historic treaty
ending that war.
After four years of brutal fighting,
an alliance led by Britain and France
and supported by the United States
emerged victorious.
Germany, its military exhausted
and its people near
starvation, had lost.
And now they would pay
the price of defeat.
The Treaty of Versailles
takes territories away from Germany.
It strips Germany of
populations and raw materials.
It turns the entire
German merchant marine
over to the Allies.
It imposes reparations on the Germans.
The Allies were attempting to limit
the future power of Germany.
The effects of the
First World War were so grave,
they were so catastrophic
that no one wanted
to see a repeat of that.
One young Austrian corporal
fighting for the German army
is Adolf Hitler.
Like many, he is shocked
by the way the war ends.
Your average German
was surprised by the news
of the armistice because
it happened so suddenly.
The army was still in the field,
and there was the sense
that we haven't been invaded
and thoroughly beaten.
It was personally a tragedy for Hitler.
He heard the news of the armistice
when he was still ill from
injuries sustained in battle.
He did not process
the end of the war well.
He did not accept
the defeat of Germany.
Surviving soldiers come home angry
and confused.
Frankly, the response of many of them
is disillusionment.
Four years at the front,
I managed to dodge all those bullets,
and now I came home
and this is what I fought for?
When Hitler comes back from the war,
he learns to talk to former soldiers
who are now disgruntled
and begins to feel the fact
that he's actually
quite a good speaker.
He attends a meeting of a small group
which will become
the National Socialist German Workers,
or Nazi Party.
He finds something attractive.
This is a party of grievance
talking about how Germany
could be transformed
and Germany could be made
powerful again.
In 1921, Hitler's talent
for public speaking
makes him the leader
of this tiny party.
Hitler's first move
is an attempted coup
against the Bavarian
state government in Munich.
But it fails,
and he's arrested for treason.
At his trial, the judge allows Hitler
to publicly share
his movement's grievances
against war guilt,
reparations, and communism.
In jail, he publishes his memoir,
"Mein Kampf," or "My Struggle."
With Hitler's notoriety,
Nazi Party membership grows
as Germany's Weimar Republic
moves through the unstable '20s.
The economy is burdened
by heavy war reparations.
In 1923, the cost of one loaf of bread
rockets from 3 marks to 80 billion.
The years that follow
are unstable, chaotic.
Hitler's Nazi Party fuels racial hatred
against Jews and fears about communism.
Then, just as the economy
is recovering,
the Great Depression throws
6 million Germans out of work.
People in Germany are
confused, bewildered, unhappy.
And so there's a real opening
for a leader who will speak
all these lines perfectly
and talk about, how I'm going
to bring the Germans
back together.
In the 1932 elections,
Germany is deeply divided.
But President von Hindenburg,
backed by conservative businessmen,
appoints Hitler chancellor
to run the government
at the beginning of 1933.
In 1934, Hitler declares
that he will now continue
to be chancellor
and take over the role
of the president as well.
He's transformed what was
a democracy in Germany
into a one-party
and a one-man dictatorship.
He's become the German leader,
the Fuehrer.
His first promise as Fuehrer
is to reclaim the land
Germany lost at Versailles.
He seizes the Rhineland,
Austria, and the Sudetenland
German-speaking parts
of Czechoslovakia.
By 1938, just four years later,
he's reshaped the map of Europe.
Desperate to avoid another war,
Britain and France allow
Hitler to expand his empire.
In 1938 at Munich,
Neville Chamberlain,
the British Prime Minister,
and the French actually made
a deal with Hitler.
What he wanted was the
Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia.
The British had said, fine,
we'll just dismantle an entire
country to keep you happy.
But when Hitler turns to Poland,
the West finally takes a stand.
The Poles have already endured
centuries of foreign rule.
The country regains its independence
as part of the Versailles Treaty.
But its new borders now
include 20,000 square miles
of what had been German land.
In summer 1939,
the British and the French
sign a guarantee with the Poles
promising military assistance
if the Germans invade.
Hitler, speaking to his officers
they're asking him questions.
Well, what is the attitude
of the West gonna be
if you attack Poland?
And he snorted. Don't worry, he said.
I've seen my opponents at Munich.
They're little worms.
Hitler doesn't believe
the West has the will to go to war.
So he moves across the border,
ready to invade with the full force
of the Nazi Wehrmacht.
In the first 24 hours
of the invasion
The Germans take out railroads,
bridges, and airfields.
The destruction paves the way
for their army to advance
deep into Poland.
The Poles have a modern army.
It's the fifth-largest army
in the world.
And it's equipped with modern tanks,
with all sorts of artillery
and armored trains.
But Hitler has been putting
almost all his resources
into equipping the military.
The Poles were outgunned
by the Germans,
who had three-to-one tanks
and five-to-one airplanes.
So there's no question that the
Germans were a superior force.
Despite those odds,
the Poles are determined
to defend their country.
Everyone had to help,
and soldiers conscripted
civilians on the street,
putting them to work.
I saw one man who was stopped
six times on his way home
with a loaf of bread.
The Poles remain resilient.
But the question is,
what will Britain and France do?
Here, as ever in critical days,
has seen the coming and going
of the leaders of the country.
The British and French had
an alliance with the Poles.
They have to defend Poland.
But they're not
militarily prepared to do so,
and they're not
mentally prepared to do so.
The home fronts in Britain and France
are dead set against war.
British Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain
tells Parliament he's considering
issuing an ultimatum.
But many feel he's backtracking
on his promise to Poland.
This is a profound injury
to British honor,
that if we don't act and declare war,
no other country will ever trust
a treaty with Britain ever again.
Britain delivers an ultimatum to Berlin
on the morning of September 3, 1939.
Hitler has until 11:00 a.m.
to withdraw his forces.
It's ignored.
This morning,
the British ambassador in Berlin
handed the German government
a final note.
And, consequently,
this country is at war with Germany.
In cities across Britain,
air raid sirens
signal a strange new era,
and millions of gas masks
are sent to British homes.
Across the Atlantic,
America is just emerging
from the Great Depression
and not prepared for war.
The peacetime army is small.
And neutrality laws
make it nearly impossible
to aid the Allies.
In the White House,
the press gathers for one
of President Roosevelt's
fireside chats.
I have said, not once but many times,
that I have seen war
and that I hate war.
I say that again and again.
I hope the United States
will keep out of this.
And I give you assurance
and reassurance
that every effort of your government
will be directed toward that end.
Most Americans, when they're asked,
should the United States get involved?
90% of Americans say absolutely not.
But Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
he's watching what's happening
in Europe very closely.
The question is about freedom
and democracy.
He understands what is at stake.
In Germany, Hitler is surprised
when Britain and France declare war.
When the British declaration
of war is made,
Hitler receives it in silence.
And for a couple of moments,
he stares at his
foreign minister, Ribbentrop.
And then with a quite
vicious tone to his voice,
he says, what now?
Despite the British
and French declaration,
Hitler continues
his master plan for Poland
and sends in the Luftwaffe.
Hitler's air force
is led by a trusted member
of his inner circle
Field Marshal Hermann Goering.
Goering's a German celebrity.
World War I, he was the head
of the Flying Circus,
the Fliegender Zirkus, this
elite group of fighter pilots.
And so he's well-known in Germany.
He's very handsome,
very charismatic guy.
But there's also
a very dark side to Goering.
He feels deeply embittered
by the way the war ended,
and he falls under Hitler's spell.
And he's able to get
huge appropriations from Hitler
for Luftwaffe procurement.
Goering's elite pilots are young
and have spent thousands
of hours in training.
From the cockpits of heavy
bombers, they drop explosives.
But it's the precision dive bombers
that wreak the most terror.
The Sturzkampfflugzeug,
the Stuka
as it's usually abbreviated
you know, it's not
a particularly swift craft.
But they dive at an almost
90-degree angle
And literally drop a bomb in your lap.
And there's even a bit
of psywar here as well.
As they're coming down on you,
there's a siren screaming.
In Poland, there are pilots
flying at low altitude
who can see women and children
fleeing the roads
who actually target them deliberately.
Polish civilians experience modern war
in an unbelievably horrifying way.
They see people killed.
They see bodies all around them.
It's a nightmare.
Poland is being destroyed.
It is not clear when
or even if Britain and France
can send forces to help.
On day three
Adolf Hitler boards his
heavily armored private train,
the "Amerika."
He named it after his admiration
for the way America
settled a vast continent.
Now traveling towards Poland,
he looks out on the territory
he needs to conquer
land stretching deep
into Eastern Europe,
Lebensraum, living space
for his new German empire.
This is his and Germany's destiny.
Hitler talks about
a thousand-year Reich.
Its borders would stretch
from the Atlantic in the west
to Scandinavia in the north
and the Mediterranean in the south.
Poland and the lands to the east
play a special role in
Hitler's foreign-policy plans.
They're wide-open spaces,
farmland as far as the eye could see.
In order to achieve this vast empire,
Germans must clear out
the people living there
in a remorseless race war.
Adolf Hitler's whole worldview
is based on a kind of neo-Darwinism
in which every single act
is a biological struggle,
warfare between different races.
He believes that
the Aryan race, the Germans,
is the superior race on the planet.
It's destined to rule Europe
and indeed the world.
Until now, Hitler's main target
has been Germany's Jewish population.
Under his orders, they lost
their status as citizens,
had their wealth and property seized,
and many were forced into exile.
Hitler believes that humanity is locked
in this existential battle
between Aryans, as he
describes them, and Jews.
And Jews are supposedly responsible
for all of society's
and the world's ills.
So who is responsible
for the German loss in World War I?
Jewish people.
Who is responsible
for economic inequality?
Jewish people.
They control media, newspapers,
all the businesses.
The reason you are poor
is because they are hoarding money.
What the Nazis are seeking
to do at this stage
is to make life so unpleasant,
so difficult for Jewish people
within the Reich
that they want to leave.
Hitler also wants to remove
the Slavs of Eastern Europe,
including the people of Poland.
Day four
Hitler reaches the Polish front lines,
where he holds a photo
opportunity with his troops.
He makes himself very visible,
goes to the front, and he's greeted
by these thousands
and thousands of people.
They're all vying with one another
to get close to Adolf Hitler.
- He's fought in World War I.
- He's a battle-tested leader.
He's taken back
historic German territory.
He's built the armed forces.
They listen to him.
These German soldiers
marching on Poland
believe in Germany's destiny
that they will be the creators
of the great new Germany.
This is the first action
they've had militarily
since the Black Day
of the German Army in 1918.
And it is an average infantryman
from the First World War
who's leading it.
So this is redemption
20 years after what never
should have happened happened.
Shadowing his invading forces
is another wing of the Nazi regime
The Protection Squadron
in German, the Schutzstaffel, or SS.
They were Hitler's personal bodyguards
as he rose to power.
But under the leadership
of Heinrich Himmler,
they become a paramilitary outfit
at the heart of the regime.
Himmler is somebody
who has a sadistic streak.
He's quite meek, he's not
particularly assuming,
he's certainly not
very physically impressive,
but he's somebody who's got
a burning desire
to achieve things.
He gets drawn into the Nazi loop,
and then over a period of time,
he eventually takes control of the SS.
Himmler has developed the SS
from a small kind of a bodyguard unit
that's supposed
to really protect Hitler
Into a vast militarized force.
In Poland, the SS units fan out
across the newly occupied territory,
as does a special wing of the SS
the Einsatzgruppen
mobile death squads.
In September 1939,
during the invasion of Poland,
the Nazi Einsatzgruppen
are under orders
to neutralize any opposition.
The Einsatzgruppen
are specifically set up
to go into towns, villages,
and other areas of Poland
to kill civilians.
That's their only job.
Professors, landowners, politicians,
newspaper editors,
these sorts of people
they were targeted and killed
because these were the people
who are identified as possibly leading
some sort of resistance
against the German forces.
And this is something that the
Poles could not have known yet
on those first days of the invasion,
that this wasn't just going
to be a military invasion,
but this was also going to be
a war of annihilation.
For Hitler, this is a chance
not just to destroy Poland
but to clear Poland,
to crush the Polish people,
who are Slavs.
And Slavs in the Nazi ideology
are Untermenschen, "underhumans."
But it's more than that.
There are also Jews in Poland.
For centuries, Poland has been home
to millions of Europe's Jews,
who fled there to avoid
religious persecution.
The Jews originally settled there
because it was
the freest kingdom in Europe.
Now they found themselves
in a terrifying, murderous trap.
The SS drag Orthodox Jewish
men out into the streets,
and they desecrate
their clothes and their hair.
They smash up synagogues.
They are seeking to amplify the terror
that they've sought
to develop within the Reich
towards Jews within Poland.
These acts of brutality
escalate into public executions.
In the town of Konskie
on September 12th,
German troops order local Jews
to the town square
to dig the grave of a German soldier.
This rather humiliating
forced grave-digging exercise
quickly descends into a pogrom.
Jews are shot.
You know, they try
and run away from the scene.
They're quickly apprehended.
And in total, 22 Jews
are killed on that day.
This was happening across Poland
The brutal mass murder
of innocent civilians.
Nine days into the invasion,
Britain and France continue
to mobilize their forces.
Civilians are being killed
in the streets,
but the army isn't defeated.
With their capital city,
Warsaw, now the target,
two Polish armies stage a counterattack
to the west of the city.
Polish cavalry and reconnaissance tanks
drive German forces back 12 1/2 miles
in the Battle of the Bzura River.
You know, all too often,
the Polish campaign
is talked about
as some kind of pushover.
But the Poles fought hard.
The classic stereotype of the Poles
is that they're all on their
horses with sabers drawn,
riding toward tanks who
are just shooting them down.
This is absurd.
The Poles were very sophisticated.
Very finely trained soldiers,
extremely brave.
As Poles fight
under German bombardment
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain
and French Premier
Edouard Daladier meet
for a supreme war council
and reach a grave decision.
Daladier and Chamberlain
agree to leave Poland to its fate.
They also adopt formally
what they call the long war strategy
the idea that they have
superior resources to Germany
and that, over time, those
resources will come to bear
in the Allies' favor.
Although the statement that is given
to the world's press is one
of wholehearted support,
Poland is essentially cast
to the four winds.
There is one British politician
who has always wanted to take
a more aggressive position
against the Nazis.
Appointed to the new war cabinet
is Hitler's most vocal critic
in the West
First Lord of the Admiralty
Winston Churchill.
Throughout the 1930s,
Churchill had spoken up
with concern about German rearmament,
about the failure
to take effective measures
to enforce the Versailles Treaty.
It's clear now that Germany
couldn't be trusted
as a diplomatic partner.
Two weeks into the invasion
The Poles seem abandoned,
and their counteroffensive
is collapsing.
The German 3rd, 8th, and 10th
armies encircle Warsaw.
The capital is a city of palaces,
churches, and opera houses
the heart of the Polish nation.
But now Warsaw is in ruins
and under siege.
Bombs were falling, and everybody
was trying to help get people
out of the rubble.
When your roof is burning,
when your children are in hospital
because they've been bombed
I mean, these are shocking moments.
American photographer
and cameraman Julien Bryan
is in Poland's capital
filming suffering and defiance.
He pleads for Poland.
President Roosevelt
and the people of America,
listen to my story.
America must act. It must help.
As help is called for,
there is an army preparing to sweep in.
They're not coming from the west
but from the east.
On the 17th of September,
Joseph Stalin
calls the German ambassador
to the Kremlin and says,
we're going to invade Eastern Poland.
Poland's fate isn't sealed
just by the Nazis.
The communists of Soviet Russia
also sense opportunity.
And so does their all-powerful master.
Stalin is one of the most
extraordinary figures
in the history of the 20th century.
From the very beginning of the
Russian Revolution in 1917,
he's been part of the tiny clique
that's been running Russia
and has emerged
as the dominant leader
of the whole Soviet Union.
The inner circle called him
the master, the boss.
But in public, he was the
the leader.
But he was a tough man,
a morbid man, a mysterious man.
He learned the hard way
in the Russian Civil War
that you operate ruthlessly.
You sacrifice, you attack,
you show no quarter to your enemies.
Stalin saw the world
in geopolitical terms.
He recognized that the Soviet Union
couldn't survive isolated,
surrounded by adversaries.
He had to play the poker game
of diplomacy and war.
And the players were
the Western democracies,
led by England and France,
and the dictatorships.
His great fear was that
the two sides would gang up
against him
and destroy the Soviet Union.
And all of his decisions
came from this fear.
In August 1939,
just one week
before Germany invades Poland,
Joseph Stalin shocked the world
when he signed a nonaggression
pact with Adolf Hitler.
The revelation
of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
causes mayhem in the Western capitals.
It changes everything.
It's a complete shock.
For the last sort of five years,
the two dictatorships
Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia
had been pouring excrement
over each other in the media.
They had been calling each
other every name under the sun.
And for each, the other was
the quintessential enemy
of everything they believed.
And now, suddenly, there's a thawing,
and the next thing you know,
Ribbentrop is flying to Moscow.
In August 1939,
by signing a pact with Hitler,
Stalin helps to ensure
that the Second World War
will break out.
In fact, it makes it
virtually a certainty
that such a war will break out.
The pact promises
a decade of nonaggression
between the two regimes.
But there's another secret protocol
which carves up Eastern Europe,
sharing the land between them.
First up is Poland.
Neither the Germans nor the Soviets
wanted Poland to exist.
They both saw it as an affront.
Poland had historically been
a province of the Russian Empire,
and the Soviets want that back
as a buffer
against this stronger Germany
that's emerging.
The division of Polish
territory favored the Soviets,
who got more territory
than the Germans did.
So it's actually the Soviet
invasion of Eastern Poland
that decides the fate of Poland.
The Red Army pours into
Poland's eastern provinces.
They, too, carry orders
to eradicate Polish leaders
and culture.
When the Red Army
goes into Eastern Poland,
they are accompanied inevitably
by the secret police, the NKVD,
and they arrest all these people
writers, diplomats,
aristocrats, army officers.
Some of them are killed instantly.
Some of them are deported.
And a large number of them,
between 20,000 and 30,000,
are stowed in camps
near the Katyn woods.
All of these people are
to be secretly executed,
shot in the back of the head.
On September 22, 1939,
in the town of Brest-Litovsk,
Nazi and Soviet generals
gather to watch a parade
of both armies.
There's this free mingling
of German and Soviet forces.
The two sides are sort of mixing,
sharing cigarettes, sharing anecdotes.
And they even develop
almost a slang between them.
"Together strong."
If you're a Polish person,
to see these two people that
have always been dangerous
on both sides of you
working together to see that
Poland once again disappears,
you had to feel like
there's no help close by.
As Poland burns
and her enemies celebrate
One city resists
Warsaw.
Despite weeks of assault,
Warsaw has not yet surrendered.
Surviving Polish troops
rush to the capital,
where 300,000 soldiers
and civilians hold the city.
To break the resistance,
Goering orders the largest
air raid ever seen.
Goering levels Warsaw
with no regard for civilian casualties.
They strew thousands of pounds
of high explosive
and incendiary bombs,
firebombs over Warsaw.
And they reduce it to rubble.
It is the largest incendiary bombing
that the world has ever seen.
Air raids last
for the entirety of the day.
People are trapped in their basements,
they're trapped in courtyards,
they're trapped in stairwells.
Those who crawl out when
the bombardment is over
there's no water,
there's nothing to feed them.
20% of the city is destroyed
in one way or another.
And about 18,000 people
are injured or killed
in these bombardments.
And the city finally has to surrender.
In London, Winston Churchill
warns his country
that this is just the beginning.
Poland has been overrun
by two of the great powers
which held her in bondage for 150 years
but were unable to quench the spirit
of the Polish nation.
The heroic defense of Warsaw
shows that the soul of Poland
is indestructible.
The British Empire
and the French Republic
have been at war with Nazi Germany
for a month tonight.
Directions have been given
by the government
to prepare for a war
of at least three years.
But Churchill has received
a signal of hope.
A few weeks earlier,
President Roosevelt sent him
a note congratulating him
on his new role in the war cabinet
and opening up a secret line
of communication.
Once Germany invades Poland,
Roosevelt infers that this war
is going to be sizable in its scope
and that the United States
is probably going to need
to intervene at some point.
Churchill has this reputation
of being a fighter.
It's really telling
that Roosevelt seeks him out
rather than Chamberlain
at this critical juncture
at the beginning
of the Second World War.
So there's this relationship
that develops
between Franklin Delano Roosevelt
and Winston Churchill.
There's an understanding
on the part of Roosevelt
that there is someone in the leadership
of Great Britain
who understands what's at stake
and just how dangerous this moment is.
It's not simply about
the German invasion of Poland.
They're two men who are united
in their belief that Adolf Hitler
is perhaps the most dangerous
man on the planet.
After the surrender,
Hitler travels to Warsaw
to survey the ruins.
He points at the utter destruction
and tells the officers
who are with him
this is the real meaning of war.
In less than a month,
a major European nation
has been removed from the map.
It will be engulfed in darkness
for most of the next six years.
And it's only the beginning,
as Hitler looks to the West.