Directing
TV's most-watched history series brings to life the compelling stories from our past that inform our understanding of the world today.
Shortly after the end of the Second World War: In 1945 and 1946, the men of the British "War Crimes Investigation Unit" drove through northern Germany on the hunt for Nazi criminals. One of them is Captain Anton Walter Freud, the grandson of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Anton Walter Freud fled to London with his family from the Nazis in 1938. Now an intelligence officer, he's back to track down killers on Allied wanted lists: hitmen in pinstripes, brutal SS henchmen, and ruthless doctors who conducted medical experiments even on children. The soldiers who witnessed the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp months earlier are not squeamish about it. 24-year-old Freud is a free spirit known for his unorthodox methods. He knows how to make war criminals talk. So he comes across a crime that has hardly been known before, the murder of 20 children in Hamburg in the last days of the war.
Adolf Hitler spent over 1,000 days on the Obersalzberg, his mountain holiday refuge near Berchtesgaden. It was there he made his decisions about war and destruction. The producers, through special permits, explore the abandoned concrete tunnels in search of the relics of history of Hitler’s mountain and to tell almost forgotten tales of the people who lived there, high up in the shadow of power.
No description available.
Adolf Hitler spent the last ten days of his life in a bunker underneath the Chancellery of the Reich. Unwilling to face the consequences of defeat, the dictator ended his own life on April 30, 1945 in this fortified underground complex. Featuring exclusive interviews with the last survivor’s of Hitler’s inner circle and extensive archival footage, Death in the Bunker is an illuminating look at the Führer’s final decisions in preparation for his suicide.
What happened in the last days before and after Hitler's suicide in 1945? The last surviving witnesses remember the dramatic events.
About Adolf Hitler's time in Germany. On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany and his tenure in power lasted for more than twelve years. It began with a standing ovation and ended after a world war in which 50 million people were killed.
Born into a Bavarian bourgeois family, Heinrich Himmler became the driving force behind the indescribable crimes that made the Nazi regime so unique in modern history.
The Second World War entered its final phase in the summer of 1944. With the advance of the Allied armies on all fronts, the Third Reich is determined to embitter resistance. After the failed assassination attempt on Hitler in July, even more people will die than in all war years before. But what kept the gear of the Nazi dictatorship going for almost ten months and why did the Germans keep fighting until the bitter end? In the end, millions of people lost their lives and half of Europe is in ruins.
In 1991, professional diver John Chatterton discovered a sunken German U-boat from World War II, lying undetected only 60 miles off the New Jersey shore, its unexploded torpedoes and the bodies of its crew still aboard. This two-hour special follows Chatterton and his dive partners in their dangerous quest to identify the missing U-boat, a pursuit that takes six years and costs three lives. The U-boat's history involves unusual coincidences and a startling twist of fate.
Even high Nazi leaders like Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring were almost contemptuous of this party comrad, and yet he was one of the most influential figures in the Third Reich: Julius Streicher, publisher of the anti-Semitic weekly "Der Stürmer", responsible for the worst propaganda and infamous for his corrupt and violent regime as Gauleiter of Franconia. By the Allies he was considered a symbol of Nazi hatred of the Jews. In 1946 he was sentenced to death in Nuremberg and executed.
One journalist described it as a chance "to see justice catch up with evil." On November 20, 1945, the twenty-two surviving representatives of the Nazi elite stood before an international military tribunal at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany; they were charged with the systematic murder of millions of people. The ensuing trial pitted U.S. chief prosecutor and Supreme Court judge Robert Jackson against Hermann Göring, the former head of the Nazi air force, whom Adolf Hitler had once named to be his successor. Jackson hoped that the trial would make a statement that crimes against humanity would never again go unpunished. Proving the guilt of the defendants, however, was more difficult than Jackson anticipated. This American Experience production draws upon rare archival material and eyewitness accounts to recreate the dramatic tribunal that defines trial procedure for state criminals to this day.
A history of Nazi television programming and technology, from 1935 to 1944.
This remarkable trove of color footage, assembled from far-flung private and state collections, presents Hitler's Europe as never seen before. Amateur film enthusiasts - soldiers, tourists, Hitler's own pilot, even Hitler's mistress, Eva Braun - began experimenting with color film in the late 1930s, their camera eye recording the Third Reich from every angle. Some of this film was only recently uncovered in former Soviet-bloc archives, hidden for almost 60 years; all of it, thanks to digital technology, has been newly transferred to video with surprising clarity. (This documentary was produced with two different narratives, both an English and German language version.)
Countless people around the world know the pictures from Leni Riefenstahl's films, even if they have not seen them in their entirety. The work of the German director has burned itself into the collective memory. Even decades after the end of the Nazi era, she showed no remorse and presented herself as an apolitical, naive follower of the Nazi criminal regime. Her artistic service for the cinema was always recognized. But book author Nina Gladitz shows after decades of research that Hitler's favorite filmmaker was not only a follower, but also a perpetrator during the Third Reich, who instrumentalized other filmmakers such as the brilliant cinematographer Willy Zielke in order to gain fame for herself.
