Time is Blood - Hitler Uncovering His Fatal Obsession

In 1941, Hitler's empire covered Europe from the continent's western corner to the east. Berlin rode a wave of euphoria while the German army rampaged from victory to victory. I've always argued that the World War II German army was one of the most remarkable fighting machines that the world has ever seen. What could stand in the way of the Wehrmacht? How could Hitler's lightning war be extinguished? Perhaps only by the mania of its own creator. In June 1941, Hitler tore up the non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, invading by surprise across a thousand-mile front, and attempting to stun Stalin's Soviet lands into submission. Some of his most important and influential advisors came to him before he invaded Russia, and they said, Mein Führer, this cannot be done. We do not have the resources. Well, Hitler just listened and said, thank you, and then went invading Russia. Led by a deluded belief that racial superiority and willpower were enough, Hitler took on a vast land and people in their own world of ice and grit. The Hitler-Stalin conflict is something that you cannot really find an analogy for in history. There, Hitler's soldiers writhed amidst the snowdrifts of Moscow, the ruins of Stalingrad, and the dust clouds of Kursk. Everything was freezing. The guns were freezing. The clothing was freezing. The men were freezing. It is absolutely brutal, and many of them are not prepared. Humans, seize up. The tools of war, seize up. They were attacking with sharpened spades through sewers. They were attacking out of cellars. It was a savage battle which actually terrified the German soldiers. Well, it's wrong to talk about the Second World War as if it was a conventional war in which rational military considerations play an important part. These people only take power in political chaos, and then out of that chaos, they build something, and that looks like an achievement at first. They build a monolithic state, and then, of course, their ambitions don't stop there. This vast invasion would bring Hitler's Reich crashing down around him, stretching resources, manpower, and his deranged vision to their limits. This is Hitler uncovering his fatal obsession. On June the 22nd, 1941, Hitler had launched Operation Barbarossa, with the aim of quickly defeating the Soviet Union. The German army had launched a three-pronged attack. To the north, the city of Leningrad, formerly St. Petersburg, was laid under a siege that would last almost three years. In the south, the Ukraine, long known as the breadbasket of Europe, was swiftly conquered. And in the center, the task had been to capture Moscow. But the separation of forces over such a wide area, and the brutal Russian winter, had halted the Germans' advance on the capital. Now, in the summer of 1942, the German army was about to launch an offensive into southern Russia, codenamed Case Blue. We can see a lot of stuff now with the clarity that the people who were living through it, of course, couldn't see. That at the end of 1941, both the British and the Americans still believed that the Russians were going to lose. They were taking longer over losing than they'd expected, but they were convinced they were going to lose in the end. The Germans were getting very scared indeed. And the Russians were absolutely determined to fight to the last death. The failure to capture Moscow did certainly awaken many German officers to the fact that maybe they had actually bitten off more than they could chew. What they could not understand was that, although they had encircled, made huge encirclements, I mean, under Kiev, they captured over 600,000 prisoners. How could the Red Army go on existing? This is what they could not really understand. And there was always this feeling, just one more push, and the whole thing will fall to pieces. In the minds of the, you could say, German soldiers in particular, this is the precedent of 1980. Because Russia was just as big in 1917, 1918, and in fact, the German army war, two thirds of it were committed in the West. So the Germans actually have to fight this war with one arm tight behind their collective back, and they still managed to defeat Russia. So imagine how difficult can it be when you're now in a position to commit most of your field army to this task, and at this time with a very large motorized and mechanized element. One of the most extraordinary phenomena of the Second World War was that here you had Russia, which had suffered unspeakably, at Joseph Stalin's hands. And yet, in the face of invasion, it brought out in the Russian people a passion for Mother Russia, a commitment to endure anything, and they did endure everything, rather than to give way, which Joseph Stalin had never believed they possessed. When you think what Stalin had done to his own people in the preceding 15 years, that by 1942, he'd killed more people than Adolf Hitler. It was only in 1942 that Hitler overtook him. But Stalin knew all this, and he'd never believed the Russian people would rally in the way that they rallied. He was conscious of the famines, the purges, the terrible sufferings of the Russians. But every Russian I've ever met who participated in the Second World War, it mobilized a love for the motherland, a willingness to suffer anything that very few people could ever have summoned up, and that Stalin himself did not believe that they possessed. The River Don, mute witness to some of the bloodiest fighting in all history. Here, Russian soldiers keep up the year-old fight against the despised Nazi. They march past the graves of former comrades, where women weep. But there is pride in these tears, pride for a Russian army that ripped the German Wehrmacht's timetable to shreds. This same Russian army, which a year ago was annihilated, only in the communiques of the Nazi ministry for propaganda. The head of the army in Nazi Germany at this time was von Brauchitsch, who was a classic Prussian military officer, but a rather weak man who found it impossible to stand up to Hitler. Although he knew that things were going badly, in December 1941, Hitler simply bawled him out and said, this is ridiculous, you're just weak-willed. And in the end, when Brauchitsch had a heart attack and Hitler fired him, and then decided, the generals are so useless, I'm going to head the army myself, which is what he did after that. Hitler then decided to resume the advance and generate a new sense of optimism moving forward. And he managed to do this, I think, fairly successfully. Again, you get, as you had in 1941, these terrific advances, vast areas of Russia overtaken by the German army. Again, huge numbers of prisoners taken. And once again, in the West, in Washington and London, they think it's the same story, this can't go on, the Russians are going to be beaten. The Russians themselves are suffering stupendous losses and the Germans have another phase of triumphalism. But then Hitler made one of his many critical mistakes of the Second World War. The Germans said, you've got to go for the Schwerpunkt, you've got to go for the one single big thrust. And Hitler insisted that you went for two thrusts because he wanted the oil fields that were in the south. Hitler's mind was fixed on oil, he knew that Germany was in desperate straits for oil and so he made this critical strategic decision to send his armies two ways instead of just one. And he was also maintaining the siege of Leningrad in the north and then he made yet another sort of subsidiary mistake on top of all these others. When he sees on the river, on the map ahead of him, he sees this city with the name Stalingrad. It was a city of particular importance to Stalin because he'd messed up very badly there in 1920, nearly lost a civil war despite how it was named after himself. And for the idea that the Germans capturing was especially important, something to stop because the city named after you falls, you feel you too. And then the Volga could be crossed. And the Russian army, of course, was there with its back against the river, absolutely desperate and they had to fight. And the generals again put their hands over their eyes and they say, Mein Fuhrer, this is madness. You cannot yet again divide the armies, yet again do this. And Hitler again in this surge of triumphalism in the summer of 1942, when again he thinks the generals were all wrong, that it mattered we didn't get Moscow. These Ivans, they're collapsing everywhere, we're again on the brink of a great victory. So he sends one army down towards the Maikhov oil fields and he sends a sixth army to Stalingrad. Hitler's obsession with conquering the Soviet Union had now driven him to take on the city named after his fellow dictator, the consequences of which would turn the tide of the war itself in the eyes of the world. In the summer of 1942, the German armed forces were marching into southern Russia in an offensive known as Case Blue. The two-pronged attack featured two main objectives. The capture of the oil fields on the Caspian Sea was codenamed Operation Edelweiss and the capture of Stalingrad was codenamed Operation Fischreihe. In August 1942, the triumphalism that had prevailed in Berlin, especially in the Führer's headquarters, at the same time the previous year, was once again ascendant. And when they hear the news that the spearheads of the sixth army had reached the outskirts of Stalingrad, they think, well, we've got Stalingrad. Stalingrad came close to falling for about a week in August of 1942. Just to the west of Stalingrad, and there basically the Soviet 62nd Army made a stand, was defeated, but a large, large part of it escaped the cauldron that the Germans were preparing, the encirclement, and managed to essentially make its way back into Stalingrad. And there, you could say by forced circumstance more than anything else, they end up fighting in a major city fight. The Russians did not have a plan for city fights. In fact, 1941 probably would have gone more their way if right from the start, they had made a point of fighting in the cities because many of the Germans' advantages in high-speed mechanised armoured warfare would have been negated if they had been sucked into city fights. Stalingrad, again, was a huge military operation. Hitler wanted desperately to take Stalingrad, so he threw everything at it. Aerial bombardments devastating the city, armoured columns moving in on it, huge masses of infantry, and beating the Soviet forces back until the Germans had occupied about two-thirds of the city. But it degenerated then into hand-to-hand fighting and very close quarters. And so it became a kind of almost a war of attrition in Stalingrad itself, block by block, house by house, through this devastated, blasted urban landscape. By the time the Germans got there, they were seriously short of supplies. They just underestimated the sheer distances involved. They were over 1,000 miles from their border and lines ran out, nothing could catch up. They'd scorched the earth so there was no food which they could take from the peasantry all around. And it became a desperate battle in which the Russians just proved they had more stamina than Germans. The Soviet army's heroic defence of Stalingrad gave them the chance to launch another massive counter-attack, just as they'd done the previous winter, when Moscow was being defended. This was the moment in basically September, October, when Stalin learnt the lesson of war leadership, of trusting his generals. And this is when he got Zhukov and Vasilevsky to plan the great counter-attack on Stalingrad. And they came up with a very ambitious plan, which was Operation Uranus, which was to encircle the whole of the Sixth Army, the largest army in the whole of the Wehrmacht, in Stalingrad and the surrounds to it by deep penetration of attacks from the rear. Now, this was also absolutely heretical in Stalinist terms because Marshal Tukhachevsky, who'd been the sort of chief theorist, had been even executed for coming up with these ideas. But here they were and they had the courage to persuade Stalin to accept this idea of the complete encirclement. Halfway round the world on the plains outside Stalingrad, the Russians started their offensive. Two Russian armies, one in the north and one in the south, drove forward in a powerful pincer's movement to encircle the Germans. Four days later, the arms of this pincer had joined, cutting off the whole of the German armies in the Stalingrad area. With the success of Operation Uranus, the German Sixth Army was now completely encircled. Operation Winter Storm was soon launched by the Germans with the aim of rescuing their compatriots, but it failed. The largest of all Germany's armies was now adrift. They were exhausted. The Sixth Army was exhausted. They were in despair because they weren't getting mail, they weren't getting supplies, they felt abandoned, and yet they'd been forbidden to surrender. So they felt they were just there to be killed slowly by snipers, by rocket fire, by aircraft. So the morale must have been extraordinarily low. Well, one has to remember that on the 23rd of August, there was the bombing of Stalingrad, but by converting the bulk of Stalingrad into rubble, they were actually creating the perfect killing ground for their own troops. It was a savage battle, which actually terrified the German soldiers. They were afraid of having their throat cut in their trenches. They were afraid of anything that happened. And as a result, you know, one shot would set off shooting up and down the line. I think one of the most shocking things that I remember reading in the archives was the way that the snipers, the Soviet snipers, were ordered to shoot down these Russian children who'd been bribed by the German infantry to fill their water bottles in the Volga. I mean, they were so desperate for water, so dehydrated. The pitilessness of the battle, I think, was underlined by the fact that they would literally shoot down these Russian children. On February 5th, 1943, 24 German generals, as well as numerous other high officers, both German and Romanian, surrendered to the Russians. Paulus and the Sixth Army were going to be destroyed. It was clear to Hitler, it was clear to Goebbels, Goering, and they began to prepare the German public for the news of a defeat. Hitler wanted this to become now an example of self-sacrifice, as he saw it, for the interests of the German nation. So he promoted Paulus to the rank of field marshal. And this was a clear, strong hint that he was expected to commit suicide. Paulus was not that kind of general. He was a kind of rational staff planner. And so at that point, he rebelled. He said, no, I'm not going to. I'm not going to kill myself. I'm going to surrender. And he then negotiated a surrender, which was ceremoniously carried out, table, the signature, the cameras, recording, and all the rest of it, a very, very public surrender. Subsequently, Paulus then started working for the Soviets and becoming part of a movement orchestrated by the Soviet Union of German soldiers and others who were fighting now for the Soviet side. So it was a pretty comprehensive betrayal by Paulus. The other extraordinary thing is that General Paulus, as an officer, was given a nice villa to stay in. And he was allowed to order new clothes and things from Turkey, which were sent. And his family in Germany were billed. It was the most extraordinary situation this disgraced general. Stalin seemed to be personally grateful that Paulus had given in. The smoke of siege and battle over Stalingrad, city of steel. These films were made under fire just before the winter snows marked Russia's great counteroffensive. These are the Russian street fighters that the Nazis could not conquer. It caught the imagination of the world at the time, the fact that this city was named for Russia's leader. And at that time, we have to remember, when Stalingrad was being fought, the American and British armies were doing remarkably little. Yeah, they were fighting against the Germans in North Africa, but this is only a handful of divisions. And even when they got into Italy, it was still tiny compared with what was going on in the Eastern Front. So it suited not only Soviet propaganda, but also American and British propaganda to seize on this great epic and boom it to the skies as they did. German prisoners of war were marched out of Stalingrad on frostbitten feet. I'll never forget the way that there was actually a Russian colonel who yelled in their faces, pointing to the ruins around saying, this is what Berlin is going to look like. And it was that moment, which was spread all the way around the world. Basically, the war was now going to end in Berlin, that Stalingrad was the real turning point, the psychological turning point. I mean, you have Pablo Neruda in Chile writing his great poem of homenaje a Stalingrado, homage to Stalingrad. It was that moment when also the French resistance really started to rise up and to fight the Germans. People knew that the war was going to end. I mean, the German army is going to still be dangerous and was going to fight on. But it was the moment when it was obvious to the whole world that the war would end in Berlin. Hitler's obsessive nature had caused his downfall once again. In targeting Stalingrad, a city of little strategic importance in search of a symbolic victory, he had doomed his plans once and for all. In February, 1943, the surrender of the German Sixth Army in Stalingrad was the first outright defeat that Hitler had faced in his attempt to conquer the Soviet Union. Hitler had congratulated his generals too soon. Too soon had they made lithograph stones boasting that the city on the Volga had fallen. Too soon had they struck this medal in honour of the city's capture. In every war, there are always moments, whether it's the American Civil War at Gettysburg or the British always made a big deal out of Alamein, although it was very small potatoes compared with Stalingrad. But at that time, it was this symbol. Most people found the whole idea of the Eastern Front too big to get their minds around. This idea of fighting, going along, along thousands of miles, embracing millions of men. These are all very vague ideas for people to understand. But people all over the world could understand this idea of this one city that Hitler had bussed himself to try and seize and which so many men on both sides had died, either to capture or to defend, and which finally our side, the Allies, the ground alliance, as Churchill christened it, had prevailed. Well, a further blow that happens to the German army is that it's forced to retreat from the Caucasus. It encounters increasingly stiff resistance from the Red Army and eventually its supply lines are overextended and the generals get Hitler's agreement that it can't be done and they have to withdraw. So they withdraw into the main area of combat. As the Axis powers retreated from the Caucasus, the Soviet Union reclaimed the city of Rostov-on-Don and they soon attempted an ambitious strategy of cutting off the entire army group south on the Crimea, but were unable to break through. However, they were still driving back the invading forces. When the Russians started recapturing the territory they lost, it not only gave them a sense of being ultimately victorious, it gave them a sense that the Germans really had to be exterminated because what they had done in terms of the population of towns, of everything that had been achieved from factories, hydroelectric station, was sheer vandalism. It was absolute barbarity. And they did become convinced that they themselves were the civilised people and the Germans were the barbarians. So in a way, it added to morale. As the Red Army found, the Germans were still very dangerous. They may have been beaten at Skalingrad, but they could fight back very effectively indeed. And on a number of occasions, particularly at Kharkov, they were suddenly surprised and they received not just a bloody nose, but I mean, they were really hit hard. So, you know, the war wasn't over by a long way. But by the time that it got to well into 1943, the spring rains and so forth were passed. It was obvious what both sides were actually measuring up for a big summer clash. And it was obvious where that clash was going to be. There could only be one place and that was the Kursk salient. The Battle of Kursk would begin on July 5th, 1943. The Kursk salient was a Soviet bulge that stretched over 100 miles into German-controlled territory. And it seemed vulnerable to being cut off by a pincer attack. Hitler wants to decide, well, what can we do next? How can we stop the Soviet advance? And how can we strike a major pro? And he decides it's the town, it's the area of Kursk. There, the Red Army lines have got a kind of salient, a kind of bulge. And so you can cut that off and surround them and destroy them. And he then plans, meticulously plans, a major operation, Operation Citadel. Unfortunately, he's unable to keep this secret. The Soviet generals, particularly Zhukov, then learn of these plans and make massive preparations. Defence in depth, one line after another, move up huge numbers of troops, tanks and military equipment. Eventually, this becomes the largest land battle in history. Four million troops are involved, thousands and thousands of tanks. And there are a lot more in reserve in the Red Army behind the lines. The battle was basically a slogging match of the worst order, with huge defences which had been dug for months, with hundreds of thousands of civilians as well as soldiers. The Russian forces were so overwhelming in size. I mean, they were losing five to one in terms of casualties, but that was still enough to force the Germans into a retreat. Even the most experienced generals on both sides, German and Russian, were awed by what they witnessed at Kursk, by these terrific clashes of titans, of these armoured masses in headlong collision, and the scale of destruction that almost every day... I mean, the Russians were taking far heavier casualties because the Germans had better tanks at that stage, and they used them better. And Nikita Khrushchev, he was there as a senior commissar, and Khrushchev, till the day he died, said he would never forget the stink of bodies incinerated in the tank hulls of Kursk. All these, at the end of every day's fighting, you were seeing all these flaming wrecks across the world. It was a spectacle that appalled and terrified even the most experienced soldiers on both sides who witnessed it. Despite the enormous losses, the Soviet Union would eventually come out victorious from the Battle of Kursk, thanks to yet more successful counterattacks. Kursk essentially kills dead the idea that German setbacks on Russia are just down to things like winter, or autumn mud, or suchlike. Okay, this is essentially the German sign there. Element, the weather is sunny, they have air superiority most of the time, the ground is firm, and they have concentrated like three quarters of their armor just to crush a bulge which is about the size of the Isle of Wight. And they can't do it. Not only can they not do it, but from the moment their attack starts, the Russians unleash two major counterattacks to the north and the south of Kursk, which essentially sent them reeling back, which essentially just goes to show that the Russians were bidding their time. The Russians were prepared to allow the Germans the first move. And if you keep in mind that essentially giving the Germans the chance to have the first move in 1941 and 1942 brought the Russians to the brink of defeat, doing the same thing in 1943 is pretty impressive. I mean, the only frame of reference Russian generals have is that, my God, it's summertime, everything is in bloom, there are the German panzers. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? Because it was a near disaster in 1941, and it was pretty unpleasant in 1942. Will it be that different in 1943? Not this time. The Germans are allowed the first move, and they are still defeated. It was the last time that the Germans cherished any sort of vaguely realistic hopes that they might be able to turn the tide. But they were still convinced that they could break through. They were massing so much force on the new Tiger tanks, and half the tank output of Germany for months was all being pushed in this one direction. On the scale of this battle, what we have to remember is that at the same time as the Kursk battle was fought, the Americans, the British, were fighting in Sicily. And they lost in Sicily, to capture Sicily, about 6,000 dead. At the same time in Kursk, and immediately north of Kursk, you've got 400 divisions on the two sides, German and Russian. And in all, about half a million people die. After the Battle of Kursk, Soviet forces recaptured both the cities of Smolensk and Kiev by the end of 1943. Then in January of the following year, the Siege of Leningrad, which had lasted almost three years and left the city devastated, was finally ended. The Soviet forces were now moving through the Baltic states as Germany was in full-scale retreat. History's greatest offensive rolls on. From Leningrad in the north, to Sevastopol in the south, more Russian cities hail the returning Red Army. And before its avenging fury, enemy sappers hastily wreck railroads as shown in these captured Nazi bills. Hitler calls this voluntary disengagement of his troops. That's double talk for double quick retreat. Then the ruthless devastation goes on. The Nazi elite were so committed to Hitler that they could never accept that anything else would happen except for, you know, final victory. The elite of the army, on the other hand, had got a very clear idea that in fact, with the exception of one or two, that basically they were heading towards defeat. Hitler knew perfectly well that he would be strung up in one form or another. Worst of all, his greatest fear was being taken back to Moscow in an iron cage and to be tormented. So he knew perfectly well that if he didn't win, there was no question of any form of peace. What is fascinating is that the British decided that they would cancel Operation Foxley, which was the plan to assassinate Hitler down near Berchtesgaden, because they realised that actually with Hitler in command, they would win the war more rapidly. Stalin, meanwhile, cancelled his plans to assassinate Hitler because he realised, or felt, that he believed anyway, that if Hitler was replaced, then the British and the Americans might do a deal with the successor government and allow them to go on fighting the Soviet Union. So even though he was wrong on that particular score, it was fascinating that both of them, in both sides, decided to cancel plans to assassinate Hitler. But despite the cancelling of plans by his enemies on both Western and Eastern fronts, Hitler was still the target of yet another assassination attempt. There's a significant turning point on the 20th of July, 1944, when army officers, backed by a certain number of civilian politicians and churchmen, attempt a coup d'etat. There's an attempt by Colonel Klaus von Stauffenberg to plant a bomb in Hitler's headquarters. It fails. Stauffenberg can't arm the bomb fully. Hitler's standing in a place where he's shielded, partly by a heavy wooden table. The bomb goes off. But Hitler survives and broadcasts on the radio a few hours later, telling the German people he's still there. The military coup d'etat fizzles out because not enough generals are willing to support it. That then is, in a way, the final act in Hitler's disillusion with the generals. From now on, the generals are treated by him with absolute, not just contempt, but also suspicion. By the end of 1944, the walls were closing in. Soviet forces would soon be regaining all of their lost territory and reaching the borders of Germany itself. In the second half of 1944, the Western Allies were marching across Europe, having landed in France on D-Day. The Soviet forces on the Eastern Front were crossing into Poland and soon traversing the border they had negotiated with Nazi Germany in 1939 and where Operation Barbarossa had begun in 1941. Every German officer who'd had anything to do with the Eastern Front knew what his people had done in Russia. And therefore, he knew what the Russians would do to them if they ever got into Germany. And I've met many German veterans who said this explicitly. He said, we knew what they would do if they got into Germany. So once the Germans had committed all these unspeakable crimes in Russia, they were trapped by these crimes. They had to fight on because there could no longer be any hope of a negotiated peace. But the Western Allies were always terrified that Stalin might make a negotiated peace. But in truth, the Germans never thought the negotiated peace was likely, partly because they knew that Hitler would never sign up to it. And I've asked many veterans, when you get to as late as 1944 or 45, surely you guys could see the game was up. Surely you'd have been better to make a compromised peace. And they said, well, maybe we could have made terms with the Americans and the British, but with the Russians, never. By early 1945, Germany had lost all the territory it had gained since the beginning of World War II, and its own borders were now being approached on both sides. Call out smash on Germany. The Red Army striking for Berlin. American forces sweeping across the Rhine and breathtaking operations inside the Nazi West Wall. The very day after the Americans managed to capture the bridge over the Rhine, Stalin knew that he had to move very, very quickly indeed. And this is where he summoned both Zhukov, Marshal Zhukov and Marshal Konev to Moscow to prepare the attack on Berlin. Stalin knew perfectly well that he had to surround Berlin. He was terrified because the Americans had already got to the River Elbe on the other side, and they could actually get to Berlin more quickly if they'd wanted to. Partly because all of the SS troops were already, and all of the best armed troops were facing the Soviet side on the Eastern Front, while the troops on the Western Front were surrendering to the Americans as rapidly as possible because they wanted to be a prisoner of war of the Americans rather than of the Russians. In Berlin, the great story at the time was, or the great joke at the time was, you know, optimists were learning English and pessimists were learning Russian. So not surprisingly, there was a willingness to give in that particular way. The jaws of a giant vice clamped down on the German capital. On the Western Front, it was the Allies. On the Eastern Front, the Russians. Already battered by air, Berlin was now blasted on the ground. The conquest of Berlin comes after the Yalta Conference. February 1945, the Allies have agreed to basically how they're going to partition Germany and occupy Austria. These issues have all been sorted out. So essentially, if, say, the Russians get to Berlin ahead of the British or the Americans, this doesn't get them anything. It's a purely, you could say, prestige victory. Somebody, you could say, not so keen to waste his soldiers' lives would have just thrown a tight siege around Berlin and would have cut off power, gas, and water and would have left it at that. And if they essentially want to stay there for a week or a month or even three, by all means, let them. Essentially, just to give you an idea, if you include the preliminary battles just outside Berlin, the Red Army, these last days of the war, and we're speaking basically, I mean, this is slightly more than a fortnight, okay? They lost more soldiers in this operation than the Americans did in seven years in Vietnam. An operation which basically got them nothing which they didn't already have. Some people afterwards charged General Eisenhower, the Anglo-American Supreme Commander, with having been naive because he'd left the Russians a free run at Berlin. And his answer after the war, he said, but we'd already agreed that the Russians were going to take Berlin and why was it worth the idea of American and British soldiers dying for something that the Russians were going to get anyway? I don't think anyone anticipated, with a possible exception of Winston Churchill, that the final line and the Soviet capture of Berlin was going to be as important as it was. But one thing we have to recognise is that at the time, everybody was desperate for as many as possible of their loved ones to be still alive to see that happy day. I do not believe there was one family in America or Britain who would have said it was worth the lives of their soldiers to get to Berlin before the Russians. It was the Russians who were so ruthless that they were prepared to take the losses for Berlin. And almost every man in the Western Allied armies would have said, if they want it that badly, let them do the dying. And they did indeed do the dying. As the Soviets were losing vast numbers of men in their attempt to capture the German capital, Adolf Hitler was hiding in the Führerbunker. On the 30th of April, with his capture inevitable, he committed suicide and his body was burnt. His own obsession with conquering the Soviet Union had brought about his downfall. And his defeat in World War II had been assured by the forces of his greatest enemy, Joseph Stalin. The Hitler-Stalin conference is a study of, I would say, two psychopaths who managed to achieve control of two major countries. This is a terrible coincidence. Hitler by his rhetoric and Stalin by sheer cunning, raising himself from a mere gopher for the revolution to become the chairman of the party and the exterminator of every other political rival so that two great nations finally governed entirely by the whims of two figures who have no concept of remorse and are prepared to risk the lives of millions to achieve a sort of fanciful aim. Well, it's wrong to talk about the Second World War as if it was a conventional war in which rational military considerations play an important part. You have to measure success in war by the aims of the war. And Hitler's war aims were in no sense rational. This is a war of racial extermination, a war driven by paranoid conspiracist fantasies. The Holocaust was a war aim. It wasn't some kind of sideshow. All of these things were bound up together in his racist, destructive, murderous vision of politics born out of the First World War. There's nothing much rational about them. Nobody saw it then with the clarity that it afterwards emerged. But of course, the lines that were drawn in those last days and weeks of the Second World War define the shape of Europe for the course of the Cold War. But Churchill did understand months, many months before he delivered his Iron Curtain speech that an Iron Curtain was indeed descending. That all those people whom the Red Army claimed that they liberated in Czechoslovakia and Hungary and Poland were not being liberated. They were merely exchanging the tyranny of Hitler for the tyranny of Stalin. And that's now clear to us. We can see that. But it wasn't so clear at the time. I think that the paradox of the Second World War in some ways, we may think that we were fighting for democracy and freedom or whatever. But actually, we ended up with half of Europe liberated and half of Europe under a new totalitarian regime. So, you know, did good triumph or did evil triumph? All we know is that when it comes to assessing the clash between two totalitarian regimes like the Nazis and the communists, Andrei Sakharov came up with the right formula, I think. He said Stalin killed more people. But Hitler had to be defeated first. And that is absolutely true because with the hunger plan, with all of what Hitler was planning in the Soviet Union, it would actually have even dwarfed the Shoah in its horrors. But actually, all we're talking about now are just lessors of evils. Today, we feel that sort of somehow we've got control over our lives. One has to remember how little control people had over their lives during that particular period. We are in a post-military society, a health and safety environment and all the rest of it. Very few people had that sort of control. And yet, at the same time, many of them had to make extraordinary moral choices, whether to support the resistance, whether to hide Jews from the Gestapo, whatever it might have been in that particular way. Things which we have never had to face up to today. And that, I think, is the importance why a younger generation does need to learn about it, even though it may seem for many of them very ancient history. But actually, it's not that ancient at all.