"More civilians died during the War in the East than in any other conflict in history." "It's estimated that as many as 13 million" "Soviet civilians died under the German occupation." "Why did this war result in such human catastrophe?" "As winter came in 1941 , the Germans advanced on Moscow in Operation Typhoon." "The Germans had covered 600 miles since their invasion of the Soviet Union the previous June, and captured three million Red Army prisoners." "But they had expected the war to be won before the onset of winter." "Now, with their supply lines stretched almost to breaking behind them, they found themselves still battling on towards the Soviet capital." "Up to Moscow, we said there's a good chance to win the war, or at least to win the - the - the battle in Russia." "I was a signals officer with the erm, battalion staff, artillery battalion,   putting together the - the maps of the surroundings of er," "Moscow, very good quality maps,   and the measuring and putting in the positions of our batteries." "I measured this er, distance to the Kremlin, said, what the hell, if we had long range cannon we could shoot at the er, at the Kremlin." "And then the whole night the guys were shooting, always shooting at the Kremlin." "In November 1941 , just days before the Germans came in artillery range of the Kremlin," "Stalin recorded a speech to rally the Soviet people." "But Stalin also knew that these troops might not stay and fight." "Many of the Red Army had turned and retreated in the face of the German Blitzkrieg that summer." "Now, Stalin determined, his soldiers would be made to hold their ground." "Just behind the front line, he ordered blocking detachments to assemble." "They had one simple task:" "if Red Army soldiers ran past them, then they were to shoot them dead." "An estimated 8,000 Red Army soldiers were executed for cowardice or desertion in the winter of 1941 ." "As the Soviet resistance grew harsher, so did the weather." "This was not a war for which the Germans had planned." "Then the Red Army counter attacked, using reinforcements, many drawn from the East of the Soviet Union." "When this film was taken, in December 1941 , the war was not going to plan for Hitler." "The Germans now found themselves at war with America, as a result of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour, and the German army faced desperate problems before Moscow." "Hitler responded to the crisis in a brutal way." "He ordered the inadequately equipped German army to bear any losses but to stay where they were." "Heinz Guderian, one of his most successful generals, protested at the order." "Hitler baldly stated:" "Do you think Frederick the Great's grenadiers enjoyed dying for their country either?" "The temperature that winter dropped to minus 43 degrees Celsius." "But on all fronts the Germans tried to stand their ground." "It was easy for Hitler to say 'stand firm'." "Soldiers were overwhelmed by fatigue and couldn't think straight." "Nearly numbed by fatigue." "But that may have made them more willing to obey orders." "No step backwards, we must hold the line." "No step backwards." "Those who retreat will be shot." "That kind of thing." "So we just stayed there in our bunkers,   not too happy about it." "The infantries, they had to sleep in the open." "You could - try - tried to make a hole in - in - in the snow   and er, then was the order that er, a guard had to go every two hours   to make sure that you were still alive," "otherwise you could freeze to death." "It is a very nice death, but er, you don't want to have it." "And particularly if you had been sweating during the day, and   and then cooling off during the night, that was the greatest danger that you would freeze to death." "The crisis was over as both sides bogged down in the spring thaw of 1942." "The Red Army had prevented the Germans from taking Moscow, but did not yet possess the tactics or the equipment to defeat the invaders." "The battle of Moscow had demonstrated the ruthlessness of both Hitler and Stalin, a ruthlessness that was to be one of the defining reasons why this war became as brutal as it did." "During 1942," "Hitler moved his headquarters from the Wolf s Lair in East Prussia to Vinnitsa in the Ukraine." "This is all that remains of Hitler's forward headquarters at Vinnitsa." "From here, he oversaw not just the battle on the front line, but also German rule of the occupied territories." "And how the Nazis chose to govern their conquered lands would be another crucial factor in making the War in the East so cruel." "From the outset of the invasion," "Hitler had made clear that this was no ordinary war." "There is only one duty:" "to Germanise this country by the immigration of Germans and to look upon the natives as redskins." "As Hitler saw it, the people of the occupied territories, including the Ukrainians who now lived around him, should be denied even basic schooling." "The locals should be educated just enough to understand our highway signs so that they won't get themselves run over by our vehicles." "When the Germans had first occupied the Ukraine the previous summer, they had been welcomed by many local people." "To these Ukrainians, the Germans promised relief from the rule of Stalin, rule which in the 1930s had brought them collectivisation, oppression and mass starvation." "Aleksey Bris, a fluent German speaker, began to work for the Nazis as an interpreter." "But the Nazis were not about to create a better life for the Ukrainians." "To begin with, Hitler cast an envious eye on the country's agricultural produce." "It is inconceivable that amorphous masses which contribute nothing to civilization occupy infmite tracts of a soil that is one of the richest in the world." "True to Hitler's belief, the Germans set about stealing food from the Ukrainians and transporting much of it back to Germany." "Em Freund, em guter Freund, das ist das Beste was er gibt aufder Welt..." "The man Hitler appointed to oversee this exploitation was Erich Koch, one of the hardest of the hard-line Nazis." "The way Koch chose to run Kiev, and the rest of his fiefdom of the Ukraine, was to be one of the first tests of just how brutal the Nazi occupation would be." "Koch was guided by his own maxim that the lowliest German worker was a thousand times more valuable than the population of the Ukraine." "Koch's boss, Alfred Rosenberg, disagreed with this approach." "Although a committed Nazi himself, he wanted the co-operation of the Ukrainians and was even prepared for them to have a limited independence under the Nazis." "Koch and Rosenberg clashed, with Koch contemptuous of his superior." "The dispute reached Hitler." "And his position was clear, as the minutes from a meeting he had with Koch record." "Both the Fuhrer and Reich Commissar Koch reject an independent Ukraine." "Besides, hardly anything will be left standing in Kiev." "To the Nazis, the Jews were the most hated enemy." "This propaganda film shows Jews being forced to work for the Germans in the occupied territories." "But by the autumn of 1941 the Nazis were also hunting down and killing Jewish men, women and children, often with the help of the local population." "Viktoria lvanova was nine years old when in 1942 she witnessed the betrayal of her mother." "Although Jews," "Gypsies and Communist Party members were singled out by the Germans, the rest of the population also lived in fear, for this was an occupation based on terror." "We came for them as a kind of liberators," "liberating them from - from the Bolshevistic, Communist system, and er, and my personal opinion is the Nazis were too stupid to exploit that." "You see, we could have really come as liberators." "But with their idea of the Herrenmensch, that they were second class human beings, that was ridiculous, you see, that - the feeling we never had in - in the army." "The idea that responsibility for the suffering of civilians in the occupied territories rests solely with dedicated Nazis is disproved by what happened here in Kharkov in the East of the Ukraine." "Because it was near the front line, Kharkov was administered by the army, and they pursued the same exploitation policy as Nazis like Koch." "German soldiers sealed the city and stopped the population getting food from the countryside." "Only those who worked for the Germans were given rations." "As a consequence, thousands began to starve." "They didn't pay much attention to people dying." "They - l think they thought it was a norm." "Er, I don't think they were shocked." "No, they weren't." "They took it easy, I'm afraid." "Well, I wouldn't like to think so, you know, but I'm afraid that it was so." "They took it easy." "At first they killed dogs and ate dogs,   but dogs didn't last long." "Well, either they had escaped or they had been killed." "Well, people ate rats, pigeons, crows." "Inna Gavrilchenko was luckier than most." "She had occasional work in a German-run slaughterhouse and sometimes could take home a bottle of cow's blood." "Blood, if you know, you may make - you can make an omelette with blood." "Just as you make scrambled eggs, you know." "So without - this is an omelette without eggs." "I was just filling my stomach, if I could afford it,   you see." "And all people who could afford it did it." "Have you ever tried er, the well, just er, the bark of a birch tree?" "I can advise you, it is sweetish." "It is not exactly sweet, but sweetish." "You can try it." "And you can try er, the leaves and the er, young twigs of Jasmine." "It is eatable." "There are a - a lot of eatable things er, that   you hate to think of today." "Around one hundred thousand civilians died during the German occupation of Kharkov, many of them children." "Among the children who suffered during the German occupation was six year old Anatoly Reva." "From the first days of the war, Stalin had called for the people of the occupied territories to fight back against the Germans." "As a result, this was to become the biggest guerrilla war yet seen." "These partisans included not just those who had fled from the Germans and run to the forests, but also special Ministry of Interior guerrilla fighters who were infiltrated behind enemy lines - - men like Mikhail Timoshenko." "The Soviets staged the supposed exploits of the partisans for their propaganda newsreels." "This his an inconvenient truth about the partisan war, for the way it was conducted helped escalate the brutality of the conflict." "To start with, Soviet partisans did not look kindly on any German prisoners they captured." "Soviet propaganda showed well behaved partisans accepting food from locals, happy to contribute to the Communist cause." "The reality could be very different indeed." "In an act which was to heighten the terror in the occupied territories, he approved an order calling on the partisans not just to kill Germans but also to kill any Soviet citizen they believed might be helping them" " a command that was often interpreted to mean that the suspect's relatives should be killed as well." "Stalin's desire was to remind those of his subjects who were now under German rule that they could still not escape his vengeance." "It was a recipe for anarchy." "The widespread terror wrought by the partisans was not a story the Communists wished to tell after the war." "This rare archive shows a woman hanged by the partisans and displayed to the rest of the population as a warning." "complains that amongst one large partisan division:" "Drunkenness, robbery, beatings and rape are universal occurrences." "One of the suspected murderers was partisan Efim Goncharov." "Before the war he had been the local teacher." "The Communists never held any investigations into these killings." "After the war, Efim Goncharov was given a medal and became chairman of the district committee." "The partisans became a growing problem for the German occupiers." "If the Germans suspected a village had been used as a partisan base, then it was common practice to bum it to the ground." "We saw empty trenches and spent bullets lying around, so the partisans had been there and shooting at us and had run away." "So I gave the order, 'Pour out gas,' and spread some straw and set them afire." "And we burnt the houses." "We didn't take it so seriously to - to say, well, fire a Russian house or damage them and so on and so on." "So that they were on a lower level practically." "So we didn't respect them as - as - as civilised as we are." "On the one hand I didn't regret it too much because I knew what" " what is the worth of a Russian house?" "They are so primitive anyhow." "But all in all, it's not much value in it, in such a house." "And they will survive." "That was my feeling." "Not comparable to a German house or - or an English house or" "French house or so on, not at all, you see." "The cows were stolen also and brought back." "But you also stole their pigs, didn't you?" "Yes." "What were they supposed to eat if you'd taken their food from them?" "I know." "They had vegetables." "But didn't you feel that it was dishonorable to make war on women and children in this way?" "Yes, naturally." "We didn't shoot them, you see." "We let them live." "It was the best we could do, you see." "Many of them might have died as a result." "It was cold." "Yes, I know, I know, it could have happened." "But we know Russians are quite resourceful, you see, in coping with cold." "They could easily fell new trees, build shelters, just like we did, you see." "What would you say then to someone who would say you burning down that village was a war crime?" "Yes, maybe it is a war crime." "But there was the order, so I did it." "In the Ukraine, the Germans' brutal rule helped create a new partisan movement, one which was to wreak further havoc." "Ukrainians had always been fiercely nationalistic, and now that their hopes for an independent Ukraine had been crushed, many took up arms against the invaders." "Thousands of Ukrainians left the towns and sought refuge in the forests." "Even some of those who had previously collaborated with the Germans, like Aleksey Bris." "Bris joined the Ukrainian nationalist partisans, a third force which hated not just the Germans but the Soviet partisans as well, and conducted a bloody war, rich in atrocities, against both of them." "Around Bris's town of Gorokhov, as elsewhere in the Ukraine, the Soviet partisans took revenge against supporters of the Ukrainian partisans." "And it wasn't just the Ukrainian partisans who suffered such a fate." "These film rushes, never shown to the German public during the war, reveal Soviet mutilation of German prisoners." "Actions like these only served to escalate the level of the German reprisal." "Hitler would not have been concerned by these arbitrary killings." "At the start of the war, when he learnt of Stalin's call for partisan action," "Hitler had remarked:" "This partisan war has its advantages." "It gives us a chance to eliminate anyone who turns against us." "Hitler believed that only by terrorising the local population would the partisans be defeated." "But the policy of ever-escalating terror reprisals did not appear to be working." "In November 1942, the head of the German army's intelligence agency for the East," "Colonel Reinhard Gehlen, argued for a different approach." "He called for the locals to be encouraged to help the Germans and said that the current Nazi idea of treating the Soviets as inferior was:" "An error of the most grievous kind." "Hitler disagreed." "He had reached an entirely different conclusion." "Only where the struggle against the partisan nuisance was begun and carried out with ruthless brutality have successes been achieved." "The result was a greater emphasis on a huge anti-partisan operation which swept over the occupied territories leaving chaos in their wake." "During these raids, occasionally some villages would remain in their homes, thinking that because they were innocent they would be safe." "A brother killed by Hitler's army, a sister killed by Stalin's partisans, that was Nadezhda Nefyodova's experience of this war." "It was obvious that the Germans were not now too scrupulous about who they defined as a partisan." "Peter von der Groeben was a senior officer with German Army Group Centre." "He read and initialed a report on one of the anti-partisan actions," "Operation Otto, in his capacity as 1A, Chief of Operations." "It details 1 ,920 partisans and their helpers killed by soldiers of his army group." "But only 30 rifles and a handful of other weapons were ever recovered." "More than 90 per cent of those killed by the Germans had no guns." "In the Belorussian village of Maksimauka, the Germans conducted another anti- partisan sweep." "Their actions here demonstrated how cheap a life in the occupied territories had now become." "There were many reasons why such huge numbers of innocent people died in this war:" "in particular the Nazi drive for an empire based on racial dominance, the atrocities of the partisans together with the German reprisal, and the character of Hitler and Stalin, two men who believed that terror could only be beaten by more terror." "But no matter how much the innocent suffered, the war itself could not be won with their blood." "This war would only be decided on the battlefield, in a savage conflict that echoed the brutality of the actions behind the lines."