Professor Saul David uses the BBC archive to chart the history of the world's most destructive war, by chronicling how the story of the battle has changed. As new information has come to light, and forgotten stories are remembered, the history of World War Two evolves. The BBC has followed that evolution, and this programme examines the most important stories, and how our understanding of them has been re-defined since the war ended over 70 years ago.
To confront his past trauma, an amputee veteran acts in a hyperrealistic military simulation.
Benito Mussolini: Anatomy of a Dictator
In the 1930s, Count Almásy is a Hungarian map maker employed by the Royal Geographical Society to chart the vast expanses of the Sahara Desert along with several other prominent explorers. As World War II unfolds, Almásy enters into a world of love, betrayal, and politics.
The true story of pianist Władysław Szpilman's experiences in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation. When the Jews of the city find themselves forced into a ghetto, Szpilman finds work playing in a café; and when his family is deported in 1942, he stays behind, works for a while as a laborer, and eventually goes into hiding in the ruins of the war-torn city.
The true story of how businessman Oskar Schindler saved over a thousand Jewish lives from the Nazis while they worked as slaves in his factory during World War II.
Shortly before the end of the war in 1945, the Allies can already be heard in Nesselbühl in Swabia when three freight cars are uncoupled at the station. The screams of the starving concentration camp prisoners inside can be heard throughout the village, but nobody dares to help them. Only the innkeeper's daughter Anna takes heart...
During the Nazi occupation of 1944 Rome, Resistance leader Giorgio Manfredi is pursued by the Nazis as he seeks refuge and a means of escape.
The real Great Escape didn't feature Steve McQueen racing through the Third Reich on a motorcycle like in the 1963 movie, but the big breakout was still thrilling in every way. This program sheds new light on the audacious escape of 76 Allied airmen from a Nazi POW camp during World War II.
The little known story of one of the worst non-combat disasters in the history of the US Navy, …AS IF THEY WERE ANGELS is a story of courage, heart, sacrifice and the heroism of miners & fishermen of 2 small towns, who risked their lives to save nearly 200 American sailors, shipwrecked on the rugged cliffs of Newfoundland. Narrated by Peter Coyote, it’s a deeply layered tale of navigation errors, courts martial mistakes, a steep loss of life, and resonates today as if the very telling of its deep humanity offers a lifeline for our fractured times.
In 1944, two prisoners miraculously escaped from Auschwitz. They told the world of the horror of the Holocaust and raised one of the greatest moral questions of the 20th century.
A German submarine hunts allied ships during the Second World War, but it soon becomes the hunted. The crew tries to survive below the surface, while stretching both the boat and themselves to their limits.
A look at the recently discovered fascinating behind the scenes footage shot by the legendary Hollywood director John Ford at Pearl Harbor in 1942 while filming his popular World War II documentaries December 7th and The Battle of Midway.
After his father is murdered by the Nazis in 1938, a young Viennese Jew named Ferry Tobler flees to Prague, where he joins forces with another expatriate and a sympathetic Czech relief worker. Together with other Jewish refugees, the three make their way to Paris, and, after spending time in a French prison camp, eventually escape to Marseille, from where they hope to sail to a safe port.
When in 1941 Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, their troops quickly besieged Leningrad. Foreign journalists are evacuated but one of them, Kate Davies, is presumed dead and misses the plane. Alone in the city she is helped by Nina Tsvetnova a young and idealist police officer and together they will fight for their own survival and the survival of the people in the besieged Leningrad.
After breaking the enemy's rings, a partisan batch is left only with three wounded and two healthy fighters. Through his binoculars, the German captain Anders monitors the surviving soldiers who are walking through the fog in an effort to reach their brigade. Anders quietly starts a manhunt on wounded while anticipating their physical and mental exhaustion.
Wounded in Africa during World War II, Nazi Col. Claus von Stauffenberg returns to his native Germany and joins the Resistance in a daring plan to create a shadow government and assassinate Adolf Hitler. When events unfold so that he becomes a central player, he finds himself tasked with both leading the coup and personally killing the Führer.
At the end of WWII the Dutch resistance kills a German officer in front of the house of a Dutch family. Years after the war the young boy who witnessed the killing runs into the members of the resistance who committed the killing.
The untold story of a Royal "propagandist in pearls" whose wartime friendship with President Roosevelt became a vital catalyst to win back freedom for her tiny occupied country.
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