- 6/17/2025
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00:00Eighty years ago, a war of an unprecedented scale shook our planet and changed the face of the world.
00:17Never had war been so widespread, so brutal, or so destructive.
00:24A torrent of fire and steel.
00:27Steeped in courage and cruelty.
00:38From the Pacific Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea, from the deserts of Africa to the Russian steppe.
00:50The war broke up nations and forged empires.
00:57It redefined our borders, our ideals, our fears.
01:05The Second World War shaped the world as we know it.
01:13We know it.
01:27This is the story of a war that changed everything.
01:31The End
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04:11At the same time, the French resistance would sabotage the railway network
04:16to prevent the Nazis from sending reinforcements to northern France.
04:23On June the 3rd, the preparations were complete.
04:33The soldiers waited, gripped by anxiety.
04:38In the west, steel was about to rain down on the beaches of France.
04:47In the east, the Red Army was preparing to sweep through central Europe.
04:55The war had one last act to play.
04:59Despite the Allies having a common enemy,
05:02a silent rivalry was already brewing over who would reap the spoils of victory.
05:06Because behind each advance, another battle was being played out,
05:12that of influence.
05:13During the night of June the 5th to the 6th, 1944,
05:42thousands of parachutists fell from the sky.
05:49Their task, to destroy enemy gun batteries,
05:53to take bridges and secure areas inland of certain beaches.
05:56The bombers of the Royal and U.S. Air Forces joined in to destroy the formidable Atlantic War.
06:12Finally, a vast armada emerged from the sea mist.
06:34D-Day began.
06:36With it, America wasn't just sending its GIs to European soil.
06:40It was asserting its influence and ushering in a new era.
06:45At 5.30 a.m., a torrent of fire rained down on the Normandy coast.
07:02Tens of thousands of men braved the waves and their fear.
07:06Americans, British, and Canadians, along with 177 Frenchmen,
07:17advanced towards the beaches.
07:24By noon, the beaches were taken.
07:27A miracle.
07:28With one exception, Omaha.
07:35Later nicknamed, Bloody Omaha.
07:39It would leave deep scars on both sides.
07:44By the night of June the 6th, all of the beaches had been taken.
07:48The heaviest losses were at Omaha, but despite the tragedy,
07:54the Allies counted 10,000 victims, as opposed to the expected 25,000.
08:00The Atlantic War hadn't lasted a single day.
08:05156,000 men had landed in Normandy.
08:12The landing sealed the fate of Western Europe.
08:15Its liberation would align half of the continent with the United States.
08:20From rock and roll to blue jeans, from the movies to Coca-Cola.
08:24The old and new continents blended as the 20th century became the American century.
08:29While in the East, the Soviet Union was leaving its footprints on the ruins of the Nazi Empire.
08:54The noose was tightening around Germany's neck.
08:56But Hitler categorically refused to surrender.
09:10The Red Army went on the offensive in Belarus.
09:14On June the 22nd, Stalin launched the operation he had promised the British and Americans.
09:21Three years to the day after the Nazi invasion of the USSR, it was finally time for revenge.
09:33Millions of men hurled themselves into battle.
09:41But the Soviet forces were far superior to those of Germany.
09:44In just five days, the Wehrmacht was swept aside.
09:51Operation Migration was a decisive turning point.
09:58The Red Army's advance preceded that of the Allies in the West,
10:02laying the foundations for the Soviet Union's domination of Eastern Europe.
10:06For Stalin, it was not only a question of defeating the Third Reich,
10:14but of seizing territories where communism would ultimately take hold for decades to come.
10:21Czech leaders like Milošiakis are trying to keep their feet
10:24in a minefield of Middle European communism that threatens to engulf you.
10:28On July the 3rd, after Minsk had fallen into Soviet hands,
10:37the Red Army pressed on through the Baltic states and Poland.
10:42Its advance suggested the future Iron Curtain,
10:45the invisible border that would one day become real.
10:49Unlike the Soviets, who owed their success to the concentration of their troops,
11:00American forces were divided between Europe and Asia.
11:09Gathered around President Roosevelt,
11:12U.S. High Command began planning another landing,
11:16like the one in Normandy.
11:19In Asia, G.I.s continued their progress from island to island,
11:31gradually approaching Japan,
11:33from the coasts of New Guinea to the Marianas,
11:37from Guam to the Philippines.
11:38But the fighting resulted in bloodbaths,
11:50as Japanese resolve did not waver, despite the defeats.
11:54On the island of Saipan,
12:07soldiers and civilians fought down to the last bullet,
12:11in caves and tunnels,
12:13before succumbing to grenades or flamethrowers.
12:15Facing defeat in the Pacific Islands,
12:24the Japanese set about showing their strength on the mainland,
12:28with Operation Ichigo,
12:30a campaign of major land battles in China,
12:33which would seriously disturb the country's political balance.
12:37The Japanese crushed the Chinese guerrillas.
12:39It was a heavy blow to nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek,
12:48who lost a huge number of soldiers,
12:51unlike his ally of convenience, the communist Mao Zedong.
12:59In fewer than 10 years,
13:01communist troops would definitively defeat the nationalists
13:04and seize power.
13:07This forced Chiang Kai-shek into exile,
13:10giving birth to a second China,
13:12which owed obedience to capitalism,
13:15Taiwan.
13:26Spared by Operation Ichigo in the south,
13:29the communists took advantage of the nationalists' defeat
13:32to claim its territories.
13:35Communist assistance to the ailing populations
13:37helped them make inroads among the peasants.
13:44China slowly began its advance
13:46towards a new type of communism,
13:49Maoist, popular and rural.
13:55After Stalinism,
13:57Maoism became a new ideal
13:59for part of the youth and the third world.
14:04Nazi Germany was on the point of collapse.
14:12In the summer of 1944,
14:20Nazi Germany was on the point of collapse.
14:24The highest-ranked military officers anticipated the end and hoped to negotiate an honourable defeat, which was impossible under Hitler.
14:46At his HQ in East Prussia, his officers gathered around him.
14:50It was 12.37pm. On July 20th, 1944, Colonel Klaus von Stauffenberg discreetly placed an attaché case containing a bomb beneath the table.
15:03He was part of a plot aiming to kill the Führer.
15:06Five minutes later, an explosion rocked the conference room.
15:10Somehow, Hitler survived. Increasingly paranoid, he brutally punished those responsible for this affront.
15:27Suspects were arrested, and the plotters summarily executed.
15:31The German people remained united behind their Führer, prepared to defend the empire he had built, not for an instant believing it could be defeated.
15:41In mid-July, Soviet soldiers entered Poland.
16:04The citizens of Warsaw had been under Russian occupation since 1939, and had suffered the massacres carried out by the Red Army in 1940, and domination by the Nazis after that.
16:22In August of 1944, they rose up against the Germans, hoping to avoid Soviet tutelage.
16:29The Polish resistance wanted to liberate Warsaw before the Red Army's arrival.
16:39Positioned on the other side of the River Vistula, Stalin's troops abandoned the insurgents to play out the fight lost in advance, without coming to their aid.
16:59The Germans won, razed the capital, and decimated the citizens, or sent them to the camps.
17:21At the same time in France, the Allies progressed from Normandy towards the south and east,
17:27helped by the resistance.
17:31To speed up the liberation of France, a second invasion was put into action.
17:40On August the 15th, the Allies landed on the beaches of the Riviera.
17:49Two-thirds of the troops were French, mainly men from the colonies.
17:53Riflemen from West and North Africa, taking their very first steps on the mainland.
18:03Thanks to them, France took part in its own liberation.
18:07An ambition shared by Paris.
18:26The capital had to free itself.
18:28This was the condition demanded by General de Gaulle, so that a defeated nation could rise from its ashes,
18:36and crucial to maintaining its voice in the post-war world.
18:43On August the 19th, 1944, Parisians rose up in the City of Light.
18:48Most of them were communist members of the resistance.
19:00If they could chase out the Germans, they could impose their authority on France and challenge de Gaulle.
19:06To impose himself as liberated France's new leader, the General negotiated with the Allies for General Leclerc's 2nd Armoured Division to enter Paris first.
19:34On August the 26th, General de Gaulle paraded before cheering crowds.
19:46He'd won the crazy gamble he made with his appeal of June the 18th, 1914.
19:55And convinced the Allies, who had long distrusted him, to recognise his legitimacy.
20:00United during the war, and then after the liberation, Gaullists and Communists formed a national constituent government,
20:15which would bring in unprecedented political and social measures.
20:20Like social welfare.
20:21And at last, the right to vote for French women.
20:27And at last, the right to vote for French women.
20:27The Third Reich was in its death throes.
20:54Allied bombers struck targets in Germany unrelentingly.
21:01And the Soviets marked up victory after victory.
21:04In Romania and Bulgaria, after an offensive lasting only three weeks.
21:10In Yugoslavia, with the help of its resistance movement.
21:14While in Greece, taking advantage of the widespread collapse of Germany, the British marched in as liberators.
21:26A victory for Churchill, who since 1940 had refused to abandon the Greeks.
21:32Against all odds, the Führer remained convinced he would turn the situation around.
21:47He had faith in his engineers, who had built the first jet plane in history, capable of flying at a thousand kilometres an hour.
22:05He was also convinced that with his new V-1 and V-2 rockets exploding over London, he would bring the British to their knees.
22:19But the Führer's miracle weapons served only to maintain the illusion that a German victory was still possible.
22:37Self-deception that was shared on the other side of the globe by the Japanese leaders.
22:42In the Pacific, the Japanese army was in desperate straits.
22:51The American forces were about to launch their offensive on the Philippines.
23:06So Japan invented a new way of fighting.
23:09Young pilots, in the prime of life, would defy death.
23:16The first kamikazes were ready to kill themselves by voluntarily nosediving into the hulls of American ships.
23:25In truth, the majority of them simply yielded to hierarchical or group pressure.
23:39The psychological effect was huge, the attacks devastating.
23:49Horrified, American sailors lapsed into psychosis.
23:59In their eyes, this morbid spectacle resulted from extreme fanaticism.
24:04Used as a last resort at the end of the war by a regime on its last legs, in the following decades, the suicide attack became a favorite means of destruction of terrorist organizations.
24:22Madness, relentlessly repeated to this day.
24:25World War II had reached breaking point.
24:40An ascent to extremes, where moral considerations had all but disappeared.
24:47And the kamikaze attacks were the ultimate manifestation.
24:50But after this shock, the U.S. Navy came to its senses, counterattacked, and crushed the Japanese Imperial Navy for good.
25:02The conquest of the Philippines lasted several months more.
25:26The conquest of the Philippines lasted several months more.
25:32The next step, the invasion of Japan itself, would be a bloodbath.
25:39In the United States, analysts placed the figure at 500,000 American losses.
25:45Contrary to the tyrannical regimes, democracies had scruples about sacrificing the lives of their soldiers.
25:53Their only preoccupation was to obtain victory at the least possible cost.
26:02The first results of the Manhattan Project, begun two years earlier, were running late.
26:16At this point, nothing could guarantee that the atom bomb would be ready in a reasonable amount of time.
26:22Early in 1945, the Allies had liberated all of France.
26:44By taking Alsace, German since 1940, they were at the gates of the Third Reich.
26:52But on January the 12th, 1945, it was the Russians who first marched onto German soil.
27:01From Ukraine and Belarus, the Red Army pushed on to 70 kilometers from Berlin.
27:07The balance of power was disproportionate.
27:23One German to three Russians.
27:25Driven on by approaching victory, the Soviet troops had acquired fearsome, battle-hardened efficiency.
27:40Forged in the brutality of ever more devastating offensives.
27:45German civilians bowed down before this new offensive.
27:51Particularly women, whom the Red Army raped in their hundreds of thousands.
27:56In Berlin, the Führer seemed to have lost all sense of reality.
28:18On January the 16th, he and his most loyal officers locked themselves in the chancelry bunker.
28:31Appointed Reich plenipotentiary for total war,
28:35Joseph Goebbels conscripted valid men in factories,
28:39emptied the administration offices, and closed down theaters.
28:42Landlocked sailors and grounded aviators were turned into infantrymen.
28:51Sixteen and seventeen-year-olds were called up to fight under the swastika flag.
28:56It was these men and boys, poorly prepared and barely armed,
29:00who would die in the final battles.
29:04Hitler was prepared to lead his people into the abyss.
29:07He ordered that his soldiers hold the lines at the cost of their lives,
29:16and destroy any infrastructure that could be useful to the Allies.
29:25Hitler clung on to one last hope, which bordered on obsession.
29:30Amid the chaos, he was convinced that the alliance between the Soviets and the Americans
29:34was about to collapse, a turning point which, to his mind, would change everything.
29:56On the contrary, none of the big three Allied powers envisaged a divided peace.
30:02In February 1945, their leaders met again, this time at Yalta in Crimea.
30:14Just two months before his death, the increasingly sick Roosevelt
30:19thought only of maintaining peace between Moscow and Washington.
30:24They wouldn't be allies forever.
30:26Roosevelt and Stalin both knew this.
30:30The USSR agreed to join the United Nations.
30:35Against Churchill's advice,
30:37the US president accepted the viewpoints of the Soviet dictator.
30:42Stalin obtained guarantees regarding Eastern Europe,
30:45which he was in the process of conquering.
30:48In return, the USSR would allow America
30:51to regain its fear of influence in Asia.
30:53For nearly 50 years, former Allies turned rivals
31:01clashed over their spheres of influence,
31:04striving to avoid all-out war
31:06haunted by the fear of a third world.
31:15The big three did agree on one point.
31:18The German people must take stock of their country's defeat.
31:21Peace would only be obtained through force.
31:31Two days after Yalta, in the east of Germany,
31:35the Royal and US Air Forces dropped almost 4,000 tons of bombs
31:39on the historic city of Dresden,
31:42causing 25,000 deaths.
31:45In the days that followed,
31:47similar raids were made on other German cities.
31:49During the German Blitz of London in 1940,
31:55bombings had specifically targeted civilians.
32:01As the end of the war drew nearer,
32:03the Allies put a temporary hold on their own moral considerations.
32:07For months, British and American bombs
32:12had ravaged German positions across occupied Europe.
32:15From the French coast to the heart of the continent,
32:18Europe would soon lie in ruins,
32:21unable to rise on its own,
32:23giving way to a crushing dependence on Washington and Moscow,
32:27two giants that would impose their rules and vision.
32:30But from this blank slate would also emerge a drive for unity,
32:35the ambition to rebuild a democratic order.
32:39Which will bar ancient rivalries and the causes of war.
32:43Since marching onto German soil,
32:55the Red Army had vented its anger.
32:58Rapes, pillaging, murders.
33:00Stalin's troops brutally made the Germans pay for their barbarity.
33:04The paranoid master of the Kremlin urged his forces on towards Berlin,
33:16fearing that the Americans and British would beat him to the finishing line.
33:25And this, despite a promise from the United States
33:29that Soviet troops would have the honour of entering the German capital alone.
33:34Reward for the great sacrifices made in the previous months.
33:51In April, the Allies conquered northern Italy.
33:54Throughout liberated Europe, so-called wild purges broke out.
34:04Linches, public shaming and settling of scores
34:08came as brutal revenge against real or supposed collaborators.
34:13After a period of intensive shelling, the 1st Soviet divisions entered Berlin on April 21st.
34:43The Führer finally gave in to despair, causing disarray among his entourage.
35:04Goering claimed total command of the Reich.
35:06Himmler told the British and Americans he was willing to negotiate Germany's surrender with them.
35:17They were both disavowed by Hitler, who remained as a recluse inside his bunker until the fall.
35:23On April 30th, he committed suicide with a bullet to his temple, having bitten into a cyanide pill.
35:36Like his mistress, Eva Braun, the Goebbels couple, and their six children, Berlin surrendered to the Soviets.
35:42In what had once been Hitler's majestic capital, the German parliament building, the Reichstag, was once again in flames.
35:50At its summit, three Soviet soldiers.
35:53One wearing wristwatches, maybe stolen from German corpses.
35:59Nazi Germany was no more.
36:01On May the 8th, Germany's surrender was celebrated in every big city in the Western world.
36:13President Roosevelt, who had died a month earlier, never saw his triumph.
36:17But grief for their president didn't stop Americans from celebrating victory.
36:23Two million New Yorkers gathered on the streets around Times Square.
36:26In London, millions joined in street parties, singing and dancing, and burning Hitler effigies.
36:48In Paris, a huge parade was held on the Champs-Elysées.
36:52In Paris, civilians mixed with soldiers and prisoners of war and a few rare deportees rescued from the Nazi camps.
37:16Allied soldiers liberated the camps one by one.
37:22Germans, who continued to deny their existence, were forced to face the reality they had chosen not to see.
37:38The mass graves.
37:42The gas chambers.
37:44The ovens.
37:47And piles of thousands of bodies that the Nazis didn't have time to process.
37:52A crime so unnameable, that justice would invent a new term to condemn its authors.
38:04A crime against humanity.
38:07Commit crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
38:11Sloveran Milošević faces three trials in one for war crimes in the Croatian, Bosnian, and Kosovo conflicts of the 90s.
38:22At the White House, Harry Truman had replaced Franklin Roosevelt.
38:46The determination of the Japanese was still of great concern to the Americans.
38:53They were about to take an irreversible decision.
38:56In the desert of New Mexico, the atomic bomb had become reality.
39:10On July the 26th, the US, the UK, and China signed the Potsdam Declaration, demanding Japan's unconditional surrender.
39:27In case of refusal, they promised prompt and utter destruction.
39:31Washington interpreted Japan's delayed response as a refusal and gave the order to use the atomic bomb.
39:39In the upper echelons of American power, the A-bomb was not only a means of obtaining victory, but also of imposing American supremacy on the world.
39:54The Soviets had already infiltrated the team of scientists behind the bomb, and soon they too would become a nuclear power, plunging the world into fear.
40:04On August the 6th, 1945, teacher Ogura Toyofumi looked skywards.
40:20A flash of white ripped through the sky, blinding him.
40:24As the bomber Enola Gay flew away, it was violently shaken by the shockwave.
40:41Its co-pilot, Robert A. Lewis, wrote in his log,
40:44My God, what have we done?
40:54In a fraction of a second, Hiroshima ceased to exist.
41:0170,000 people died on the day itself.
41:04Tens of thousands of others would follow them in the weeks, months, and years to come.
41:16Three days later, at 11.58am, the United States sent its second warning.
41:22This time, the city of Nagasaki was wiped off the map.
41:28Humankind had just entered the nuclear age.
41:33Fear of the bomb would become a structuring feature of international relations,
41:37leading to an arms race of a new kind and a permanent threat in case of conflict.
41:42On hearing the news, Stalin was furious.
42:03To his mind, the Americans had triggered the apocalypse to dispense with his support.
42:08Since the defeat of Germany, tensions between the Allies had been mounting.
42:14Regardless of the promises made by Russia,
42:17communist regimes with increasing power had been installed in Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria.
42:26Stalin had no intention of stopping there.
42:29For fear of being denied victory, on the night of August the 8th, 1945,
42:40he ordered his troops into Manchuria, still under Japanese occupation.
42:44Surrounded on all sides, Japan laid down its arms.
42:57Three months after the defeat of Germany, Emperor Hirohito announced his country's surrender.
43:04World War II was finally over.
43:07In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, humankind had taken a path on which there was no turning back.
43:18After six years of horror, humankind stood together to celebrate victory.
43:37In New York, photojournalist Alfred Eisenstedt crisscrossed Times Square.
43:46All around him, a euphoric crowd parted on hearing of Japan's surrender.
43:52In this human tide, a uniformed sailor enthusiastically kissed a young nurse.
43:57An iconic photo that symbolized shared hope in the future.
44:03With its long list of losses and destruction,
44:06war gave way to a world desperate to live once more.
44:13Driven by the dream of a peaceful and prosperous life,
44:17the baby boom produced the generation that built the world of today.
44:27War destroyed everything, but also gave rise to a new world.
44:44As the generation that lived through World War II gradually leaves us,
44:49its memory survives in pictures and writings.
44:53A shockwave whose tremors are still felt today.
44:57And a reminder that peace is always fragile.
45:01And a reminder that peace is always fragile.
45:27For all means of both,
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