Fighting to the End

After the Battle of Stalingrad in the autumn of 1942 and the winter of 1943, the German people experienced nothing but disaster. So why, when the war seemed lost, did the Nazis fight on?

This programme examines why Germany had to suffer so much, and in her suffering inflict destruction on countless others. Between July 1944 and May 1945, more Germans would perish than in the previous four years of the war put together.

The film shows how fear and hatred of Bolshevism drove many Germans to fight to the bitter end. The extent to which Germany had also become a dramatically racist country also played a part. A former member of the Hitler Youth reveals why he approved of the brutal treatment of Polish forced workers in Germany, and a former slave worker at the IG Farben concentration camp at Auschwitz tells his dramatic story.

Germans who lived in the former eastern bloc also talk openly about the whirlwind of death and destruction unleashed by the collapse of the Nazi regime. Their stories include a dramatic eyewitness account of when more than 900 inhabitants of a German village committed suicide by drowning rather than risk facing the occupying Soviet army.