Their annihilation seemed certain - a disaster that could have led to Britain's surrender. Only his most die-hard loyalists stay by his side.Īs France fell to the German armies in May 1940, 300,000 Allied troops were trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk.
With the Nazi regime disintegrating, most of Hitler's deputies are busy making plans to try to survive the end of the war. A two million-strong Soviet army is now just a mile from Hitler's hiding place. Most of Germany is occupied by invading Allied forces.
It's a clear sign that Hitler and many of his supporters are going to end it all. In April 1945, the Nazis organise one of the final acts of the Third Reich - a concert by the Berlin Philharmonic, including the last scene of the opera Gotterdammerung, which features a suicide at its centre. As his life becomes increasingly bizarre, Hitler and Joseph Goebbels look for signs from German folklore that fate will intervene.
Best of enemies documentary online series#
Nazi Germany is on the brink of collapse, and with Berlin under daily bombardment, Hitler has permanently retreated to his bunker, a series of 30 cramped rooms under the Reich Chancellery where night and day merge into one. These are the people upon whom he now relies – children. It's an attack he believes will finally break them.Īt the end of March 1945, with the German army utterly depleted and his circle of trust rapidly shrinking, Hitler invites a group of Hitler Youth to the Reich Chancellery gardens to be congratulated. Instead, he calls leading military generals to a secret location and orders them to start preparing a massive surprise attack against the Western Allies as part of his policy of total war. In the winter of 1944, Germany is losing the war on all fronts, but Hitler refuses to contemplate surrender. The documentary also tells the story of Josef Mengele - who performed gruesome experiemnts on Auschwitz inmates - and the son so appalled by his father's actions he considered turning him in. One such woman was German Beate Klarsfeld, determined to right the wrongs of her country's dark past and identify Nazis who had gone unpunished - including the notorious Klaus Barbie. The continuing story of the diehards committed to hunt down thousands of Nazi war criminals, some of whom were living in plain sight.
This documentary follows the hunt for these two war criminals. They included Adolf Eichmann, who arranged the transportation of millions of Europe's Jewish people to death camps, and Nazi secret police chief Klaus Barbie, who became known as "the Butcher of Lyon" because of his reputation for extreme cruelty. But not all the highest-ranking Nazis had been captured, and the job of tracking them down fell to Allied soldiers.Īfter the Nuremberg trial, the most senior ranking Nazis had been executed or imprisoned - but many of the worst criminals were still at large.
Best of enemies documentary online trial#
Preparations began for a trial at Nuremberg, where 22 of the highest-ranking Nazis, including Hermann Goering, were to face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The return of the documentary, picking up in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when the Allies uncovered the scale of the Holocaust.
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