WORLD AT WAR, THE, PART 21: NEMESIS (TV)
Summary
Part twenty-one in this twenty-six-part documentary series chronicling the history of World War II. In this installment, the Third Reich -- which Adolf Hitler had boasted would last for a thousand years -- crumbles into ruins. Highlights include the following: the culturally significant city of Dresden, swollen to double its size from the influx of refugees and prisoners-of-war, sustains relentless Allied bombing -- civilian casualties exceed one hundred thousand; Ursula Gray recalls the firestorms which swept through the ravaged city; Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War Productions, comments on the recruitment of children to fill in the ranks of the decimated Wehrmacht; Allied forces cross the Rhine and advance toward Berlin; Lt. Col. C.J.R. Duffin elaborates on the Allied advance across the Rhine and towards Berlin; the Allies are greeted with tough resistance in the northern city of Uelzen; U.S. paratrooper John Seney recalls tensions in the villages his battalion occupied; U.S. artilleryman Felix Putterman talks of his encounter with a young, starving German woman; their towns and villages destroyed, displaced persons fill the roads in search of new homes; Speer remembers attending the last wartime performance of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra -- the finale to Richard Wagner's opera Gotterdammerung -- and recounts Minister of Propaganda Dr. Joseph Goebbels' reaction to the news that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had died; undaunted by the encroaching Russian forces, who cross the Oder River two days after his fifty-sixth birthday, Hitler, sheltered in his bunker beneath the Imperial Chancellory, adamantly refuses to address the issue of surrender; Heinz Linge, Hitler's personal valet, and Tradl Junge, Hitler's secretary, reconstruct events inside the bunker during the final days of the Third Reich; Berliner Carola Stern remembers a radio address by Goebbels which not only failed to acknowledge the imminent defeat but promised Germany a speedy victory; Willy Feldheim, then a fifteen-year-old recruit in the Wehrmacht, describes the Russian invasion of the capital; Red Army Maj. Gen. Vladimir Antonov and Maj. Anna Nikulina analyze the street-by-street guerilla-style fighting which marked the Battle of Berlin; Lt. Yelena Reveshkaya, who served as an interpreter for the Red Army, considers her encounters with the citizens of Berlin, who, fearful of the vengeful Russian soldiers, sought hiding places in their cellar or caved-out piles of rubble; Hitler is infuriated to receive a telegram from Hermann Goering in which the Reichsmarschall lays claim to Hitler's title; Eberhard Bethge, a prisoner of the Gestapo, talks of his escape from prison as Russian artillery levels the city; Friedrich Luft talks of how the Russians saw themselves as the liberators of Berlin; Christa Ronke recounts how she was raped and beaten by a platoon of Red Army soldiers; Linge details how he and Martin Bormann found the bodies of Hitler and his new bride, Eva Braun -- the victims of suicide -- and carried them out to the garden, where they were set afire; and Nikulina describes her efforts to plant the Soviet flag on the dome of the Reichstag. Commercials deleted.
Details
- NETWORK: Thames (United Kingdom)
- DATE: April 3, 1974
- RUNNING TIME: 0:50:28
- COLOR/B&W: Color and B&W
- CATALOG ID: T82:0213
- GENRE: Public affairs/Documentaries
- SUBJECT HEADING: Berlin; Berlin, Battle of, 1945; Berlin Philharmonic; International Collection - United Kingdom; Thames Collection; World War II
- SERIES RUN: Thames (United Kingdom) - TV series, 1973-1974
- COMMERCIALS: N/A
CREDITS
- Jeremy Isaacs … Producer
- Martin Smith … Producer, Director
- Noble Frankland … Production (Misc.), Historical Adviser
- Stuart Hood … Writer
- Carl Davis … Music by
- Laurence Olivier … Narrator
- Vladimir Antonov
- Eberhard Bethge
- C.J.R. Duffin
- Willy Feldheim
- Ursula Gray
- Traudl Junge
- Konev, Marshal Ivan S.
- Heinz Linge
- Anna Nikulina
- Felix Putterman
- Christa Ronke
- John Seney
- Albert Speer
- Carola Stern
- Georgy K. Zhukov
- Martin Bormann
- Eva Braun
- Josef Goebbels
- Hermann Gšring
- Adolf Hitler
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
- Richard Wagner