"The Soviet Union fought and won the biggest war of the 20th century" " a war in which more than 30 million people died." "Close to Red Square, in a private museum in the General Staff headquarters, lie trophies of that war, snatched from an enemy which had been crushed." "Ten million German soldiers were captured, wounded or killed." "The scale of Germany's defeat was unprecedented in her history." "So it's hardly surprising that Hitler's decision to invade the Soviet Union has come to be seen as a catastrophic mistake " "almost the action of a madman." "But that's not what many people thought at the time." "Communism had always been a repugnant and dangerous ideology to the Nazis." "And when, in the 1930s, the Nazis looked at the Communist regime in the Soviet Union, they hated and they feared what they saw." "At the heart of this world conspiracy, as the Nazis saw it, was one man." "Someone whose character would help shape and determine the course of the forthcoming war" "Joseph Stalin." "Boris Godunov, Stalin's favourite opera." "A story of suspicious death, intrigue and a Tzar's double-dealing." "The Nazis watched as, beginning in 1937," "Stalin purged the Red Army of anyone suspected of the merest hint of disloyalty." "Seven thousand army officers were sent to the Gulag." "Another 35,000 were expelled from the armed forces." "ln 1939 the newly purged Red Army invaded Finland." "The Soviets had a more than two to one advantage over the Finns, and the Germans took careful notice of what happened next." "ln the summer of 1940, only months after the Soviet army had failed in Finland," "Adolf Hitler celebrated the Nazis' conquest of France." "But despite these ecstatic scenes, Hitler knew he still had a problem." "Great Britain wouldn't make peace, and a German invasion across the English Channel remained a risky option." "So Hitler's eyes turned to the Soviet Union." "ln spite of signing a non-aggression pact with Stalin in 1939," "Hitler still considered the Soviets his ideological enemy." "By invading the Soviet Union, Hitler believed he would eliminate the greatest potential threat the Nazis faced on mainland Europe and gain living space and raw materials for the Germans." "He thought his three-pronged attack would also destroy any hopes the British had that the Soviet Union might one day come to their aid." "At the time, to his military planners, all this seemed perfectly logical." "At the time this film was taken, during Red Army military exercises in the autumn of 1940, the Soviet High Command knew of German troop movements East." "But what did it mean?" "Was the Soviet Union about to be invaded?" "Surely, Stalin felt," "Hitler would not embark on a war against the Soviet Union while still fighting the British." "ln Spring 1941 , some senior officers in the Red Army, including Georgy Zhukov, suggested one option was to mount a pre-emptive strike against the Germans." "Stalin never approved the plan." "He wanted to do nothing to provoke Hitler, and still didn't believe the Germans would risk an invasion." "This recently declassified Soviet lntelligence report, dated June 1941 , predicts that the German army will attackat any moment." "Stalin has scrawled over it:" "'Comrade Merkulov, you can send your source from the headquarters of the German Air Force to his fucking mother." "He is not a source, but a dis-informant.'" "But Stalin's spies were right." "The Germans were about to invade." "An armed force of more than three million Germans and their allies massed along an invasion front of 1 ,800 miles." "This bridge over the river Bug was just one of hundreds of crossing points." "At 3.15 on the morning of June 22nd 1941 , the German invasion began." "I enjoyed the strength of our army sending thousands of shells into the" "Russian border line defences and so on, so it was   partly a great feeling also about the power being unleashed against the dubious and despisable enemy." "We had been victorious in - in Yugoslavia in er," "Norway and in France and so and so on." "So we felt we might make it   because we are experienced troops." "We were well trained, well equipped." "So we might make it, maybe." "By the end of the first week of the invasion 150,000 Soviet soldiers were dead or severely wounded, and the Germans were more than 200 miles inside Soviet territory." "The tactic of Blitzkrieg, the lightning attack, was the chief reason for the Germans' success." "Conventional military theory had said that armoured attack should be in waves, but the Germans' tanks, artillery and Stuka dive bombers all focused their attacks simultaneously on one narrow point of the enemy line." "The whole Panzer spearhead advanced swiftly on a front sometimes no wider than one road." "Then the German infantry forced on through the gap and encircled the confused Soviet troops." "Some Soviet troops surrendered." "Others retreated and watched as their officers deserted them." "ln Moscow, Stalin was at first unaware of the extent of the military disaster." "Until he attended a meeting here, at the Commissariat of Defence on June 29th." "Stalin studied the maps, heard the briefing, and learnt that Germans were advancing on all fronts." "Whole Soviet armies had been encircled and destroyed." "It looked inevitable that Minsk, the capital of Belorussia, would shortly be captured." "It was much worse than Stalin had feared." "Stalin stormed out of the meeting, saying:" "Lenin left us with a great legacy." "We, his heirs, we fucked it up." "As the rest of the world learned of the Germans' advance, many were pessimistic about the Soviets' chances." "The US Secretary of the Navy wrote to President Roosevelt that it would take between six weeks and two months for Hitler to 'clean up' in Russia." "The British War Office told the BBC not to give out the impression that Soviet armed resistance would last more than six weeks." "The Soviet Union - and Stalin - seemed to be facing catastrophe." "One of the greatest secrets concealed in Russian archives is whether or not at this desperate moment the Soviets tried to contact the Germans to negotiate peace." "It has long been rumoured that an approach was made, but no document from the Communist period has ever been found to confirm what happened" " until now." "One of the consultants for this programme recently uncovered a top secret report from a Soviet intelligence office called Pavel Sudoplatov." "The report tells how, on the orders of the head of the secret police," "Lavrenty Beria, there was a meeting held at the Aragvi, a Georgian restaurant in the centre of Moscow." "Sudoplatov met the ambassador of Bulgaria, the country which now represented Germany in the Soviet Union." "They met at the end of July 1941 , in Beria's private room, high above the main dining room." "Sudoplatov asked the Bulgarian ambassador if he could find out whether Germany would make peace in exchange for large portions of Soviet territory." "No one can be sure if this was a genuine attempt to buy the Germans off or a way of stalling for time." "After the war, victory won, the very fact of the meeting was cause for shame." "Pavel Sudoplatov, the man who ate the meal, was charged with treason." "For this and other alleged crimes, he was sentenced to 15 years in the gulag." "But the Germans were not about to let the Soviet Union make peace" " even a humiliating one." "When we made 30-40 kilometres a day we said, 'well, we can see that our Blitzkrieg tactics still also works in Russia.' lt was professionalism, you see." "We are better, you see, where we come we will clean that up, that was absolutely sure." "As the avalanche of Soviet prisoners continued, the very sight of them confirmed in many German soldiers their own racist beliefs." "Hitler despised the entire Slavic population of the Soviet Union and declared this conflict to be a 'war of annihilation'." "But he felt a special hatred for the Jews, believing that Moscow was the home of a Judaeo-Bolshevist world conspiracy." "Having joined the Hitler Youth when he was ten years old," "Carlheinz Behnke volunteered for the Waffen SS in 1940." "While special killing squads in the occupied territories were hunting down one hated enemy, the Jews, ordinary Germans soldiers like these were expected to cooperate in the elimination of the Soviet commissars, the political officers within each army unit." "This infamous order calling for German soldiers to select and hand over Soviet commissars to be shot was issued before the war began." "One of the witness signatures on the order is that of Bernhard Bechler, an officer in the German Army's high command." "There were German divisions who didn't carry out the commissar order, but most did." "From the beginning of the war in the East, the leadership of the Germany army was complicit in the criminal policies of the Nazis." "Another consequence of the war the war was conceived was the mistreatment of the Soviet prisoners of war." "Here being fed scraps of food by their German guards." "This document from the Wehrmacht's economic agency for the East, dated May 1941 , casts light on why the German army didn't care about their prisoners of war." "It predicts that in the forthcoming war:" "Tens of millions of men will undoubtedly starve to death if we take away all we need from the country." "Once the war had begun, Gring even joked:" "Things have got out of hand." "Soviet prisoners have just eaten one of our German guards." "But it wasn't only the Germans who were fighting a cruel and brutal war." "Just before the Red Army retreated," "Stalin's secret police killed many of their political prisoners." "And on the battlefield, as these photographs of mutilated bodies show," "Soviet forces were capable of venting their fury on captured German prisoners." "It was completely different type of war." "This was the kind of brutality, doing it that way, you see, and that made - also that made us furious when you see your" " your - your friend there brutally killed, and er   the - the reaction was from our side that erm, people didn't erm, want to fall wounded into their hands and they shot themselves." "I still remember a young officer from the - our infantry regiment I knew very well, who was left behind wounded and when we got back in our counter attack, he had shot himself in the meantime." "We could have rescued him otherwise as a wounded one." "And thereafter we decided er, that will never happen to me myself." "We kept always the last bullet for ourselves." "ln August 1941 ,Adolf Hitler visited the captured city of Minsk." "ln less than two months his Nazi empire had expanded 400 miles into the Soviet Union." "But problems still existed." "German forces had advanced so far and so fast that there were difficulties supplying them on the bad Soviet roads." "And Blitzkrieg as a tactic had been designed to conquer countries the size of France." "Whether the same strategy would work in a country forty times bigger had always been a gamble." "As Hitler studied the situation map that August, he saw that in places the Red Army was putting up more resistance than expected." "West of Kiev, the German army was finding it hard going." "So Hitler ordered his army groups to capture the city in a pincer movement and delayed the advance on Moscow." "Nearly a million Soviet troops were positioned to protect" "Kiev and the surrounding area." "But Soviet defence tactics were still extremely primitive and no match for German Blitzkrieg." "These forces were simply ordered to stand fast and wait for the Germans." "ln the face of the oncoming Panzers, the Soviet commanders of Kiev believed that they were in danger of being encircled." "They communicated their fears to Stalin, in messages received by Stalin's personal telegraphist." "Stalin's stubbornness led to more than 40 Soviet divisions being trapped around Kiev, many cut off by the Dnieper River." "Six hundred and fifty thousand" "Soviet soldiers were captured at the battle of Kiev." "It was the largest encirclement in military history." "The situation was desperate for the Soviet Union." "Leningrad was surrounded, and Kiev," "Minsk and Smolensk were now all in German hands." "The Red Army was floundering." "Many of its recruits were poorly equipped and badly trained." "This propaganda archive shows each new soldier at least receiving a rifle" " but the reality could be very different" "The town of Vyazma, just 130 miles West of Moscow, now stood between the German army and the Soviet capital." "ln October 1941 , this was the site of a battle in which, in 12 days, 150,000 Soviet soldiers were killed." "More dead than the British lost in the five months of the Somme." "Out on the great plains of Vyazma stood five Soviet armies." "Just as at Kiev, the Soviet forces were swiftly encircled." "Desperate to escape," "Soviet soldiers even attacked the German line without weapons." "You see, the first line had rifles, the second line had even no rifles, they took the rifles from the dead." "No German soldier would have attacked without any weapon." "Incredible for us." "You are destined to attack even without weapons." "If you are - there will be weapons of the dead." "The German Panzer units held the high ground and looked down on the Soviet forces trapped in the plain." "I saw one of these attacks coming." "We are sitting er, on top of the hills and then   like a herd of vehicles and men coming up by the thousands." "And what - what I always say, make your blood freezing, you see." "And then the Russians came into the ground where the creek was there, it was a swampy area, and then all the vehicles at once sunk in -in the mud, then the, you know, the people coming out are now like a herd of sheep coming against us, you see." "And then, also let them come, let them get near, let - let them come on, you see, and then at the same time our   machine guns then mowed them down." " They were lying then by the thousands, like the battlefields of the old history there." "ln another part of the encirclement, some of the Soviet soldiers ran into Wolfgang Horn and his men." "The Russians came out of the forest and   the Russians were so cowardly that some of the crew of these tracks hovered behind the vehicle, took cover, and bent down forward totally, crouching on the - on the - on the ground and not moving at all." "Ruki verkh, I said, Ruki verkh, raise your hands." "And he didn't, they - they pretended to be dead, and we started shooting them, naturally." "Under the impact of the bullets, they - they wavered a bit - shook a bit." "Wolfgang Horn is still convinced he was right to kill those crouching Soviet soldiers." "When they don't raise their hands, what can we do?" "You see, what can they do?" "You see, they might throw hand grenades, they might er, what can they do?" "If they don't surrender, we shoot them." "It was natural for us to do, and we joined - several ones joined me and we naturally shot them all." "Crouching there, cowards, they didn't deserve any better anyhow." "That was our feeling." "That October, with German soldiers winning victories at Vyazma and the nearby battle of Vyansk," "German newspapers announced that the war was as good as won." "The Germans had now captured nearly three million Soviet soldiers." "The Germans pressed on towards Moscow, where in mid-October only 90,000 men stood defending the capital." "Stalin called on General Zhukov to prepare the defence of Moscow, and told Zhukov to meet him at his dacha." "When Zhukov arrived, he heard Stalin talking to Beria." "ln the 1960s Zhukov confided to a military historian just what he had overhead Stalin saying, but this was not a story the Soviet people could hear until after perestroika." "Only now, because of the discovery of the secret document dating the first meeting to July, is there evidence of at least two separate discussions within the Soviet leadership about approaching the Germans." "Panic was growing inside Moscow as the Germans neared the city." "Maya Berzina rushed with her three year old son to the city's southern port on the river Moscow." "Crammed on board one of the last ships to leave, they fled the capital." "Now the question was, would Stalin and his entourage desert Moscow too?" "Evidence that they were about to leave is provided by this recently declassified document signed by Stalin and dated by him 15th October 1941 ." "The state defence committee has resolved to evacuate today the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet and the top levels of government." "Comrade Stalin will leave tomorrow or later, depending on the situation." "At Moscow's Yaroslavski railway station," "Stalin's armoured train waited to head East towards the Ural mountains." "On the night of October 16th, having been ordered to clear his office in the Kremlin," "Nikolay Ponomariov sat on the train and waited to leave Moscow." "But the train didn't leave." "Stalin decided to stay and defend the capital." "On October 19th, he ordered his secret police to quash the panic in Moscow - by whatever means necessary." "Vladimir Ogryzko and his unit of secret police prevented Muscovites from fleeing." "They stopped cars and overturned them - sometimes with the drivers still inside." "As winter came, German soldiers were at the gates of Moscow." "They had covered more ground more quickly and captured more prisoners than any army ever had before." "But according to their original plan, by now they should already have won the war."