- 7/10/2025
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00:00Along the coastline of Western Europe lie the remains of one of the largest construction projects of the 20th century.
00:10Hitler says, I want to build an Atlantic wall. I want the fences all the way up the coast.
00:1540 million tons of concrete designed to stop the D-Day invasion of Nazi Europe.
00:2115,000 bunkers along the coastline stretching 3,000 miles.
00:26Built in just four years, a vast network of indestructible bunkers, deadly minefields and impenetrable artillery positions.
00:38It's all separate pieces working together to make this going like a monster really.
00:45It is the most gigantic fortifications that were ever built in history.
00:51This is the story of Hitler's Atlantic war.
01:02The biggest construction projects of World War II, ordered by Hitler to secure world domination.
01:09Now they survive as dark reminders of the Führer's fanatical military ambition.
01:15These are the secrets of the Nazi megastructures.
01:196th of June, 1944. The D-Day invasion has begun.
01:36In Normandy, 1,500 Germans face an Allied force over 150,000 strong.
01:42Soldiers such as teenager Franz Gokko are relying on their bunkers to keep them alive.
01:56Bunkers that form an extraordinary 5,000-kilometer fortification known as the Atlantic wall.
02:02The Nazis built this megastructure along Europe's west coast to protect Hitler's empire from an Allied invasion.
02:20Dr. Peter Lieb, former German army officer and war studies expert, has studied the wall's construction.
02:32There were bunkers all over France along the coastline, in Belgium, in the Netherlands.
02:38It is the most gigantic fortifications that were ever built in history.
02:57The origins of the wall can be traced back to 1942.
03:01Hitler's invasion of Russia has stalled.
03:08And over a million of his best soldiers are heavily engaged with Soviet forces.
03:17And then, in December, Hitler's worst fear becomes a reality.
03:22America joins the war.
03:25Hitler knew this was coming, and he knows it's very bad news.
03:29Not only is he heavily engaged in Russia to the east,
03:34he now knows that Britain has got a very strong ally to the west in the form of the USA.
03:40With the addition of hundreds of thousands of US troops and guns to help them,
03:46the British now pose a serious threat to Hitler's conquests in France, Belgium, Holland and Norway.
03:53To protect his Atlantic coastline, Hitler must take defensive measures.
04:05And so he puts out his famous directive 40, which is basically rattling the cage and saying,
04:11enough, we need to get our act together.
04:14And in a series of bullet points, he states in no uncertain terms what is expected of his fighting forces and of his engineering organizations.
04:24Hitler demands the construction of a 5,000-kilometer defensive barrier, nearly twice the length of America's east coast.
04:38Giant gun batteries and bunkers capable of smashing any Allied invasion by sea.
04:43The job of building them falls to one man.
04:58Attention. These are the Führer's latest orders.
05:03The coast must be armed with as many heavy guns as possible.
05:09Franz Saber Dorsch is a chief engineer of the TOT organization, Germany's biggest engineering company.
05:16These guns are to be enclosed in concrete.
05:20Dorsch and his colleagues are experts in large-scale construction.
05:24They pioneered Nazi Germany's famous autobahns, thousands of kilometers of roads that still exist today.
05:31I will personally direct the work. Is that all clear?
05:39Dorsch has already built 20 heavy gun emplacements at Calais.
05:44The closest French port to Britain, and the most likely site for any Allied invasion.
05:51These giant bunkers, each requiring over 40,000 tons of concrete, will provide the template for Hitler's planned war.
06:02Incredibly, many still survive today.
06:06Visiting these bunkers, it's like a step back into time.
06:10Arthur van Beveren is an expert in the Atlantic Wall, and has been exploring its ruins since he was a boy.
06:17These walls are three and a half meters thick, and if you look at this corner, you can still see the shape of the wood in the concrete.
06:24It left its marks in the concrete while it was being poured.
06:31The huge dome-like building is the actual gun emplacement, which the 38 centimeter gun was beneath.
06:38On this side, we have the crew rooms, kitchens, first aid, and ammunition.
06:46A very atmospheric place back then, and I think it still is.
07:07The shells are 1.6 meters long and weigh over 800 kilograms.
07:18They're so big that they have to be moved inside on a system of overhead rails.
07:22So you can see the rail from the outside going through this gap up here, but you can still see a part left in this gap.
07:34And it was used to transport the ammunition.
07:36This is now just an empty gap, but 70 years ago there should be a door up here, and there was a table up here.
07:50The ammunition was prepared, laying on the table.
07:54And on this side, there was a little train driving along the gun, and the ammunition was put on the little train and transported to the gun.
08:08The giant guns of the Calais battery are capable of sinking the largest allied ships in an invasion fleet, even before they've left port.
08:17From here, on a clear day, you can see Britain on the other side of the channel.
08:24Britain is only 36 kilometers away, and these guns could reach 30 kilometers inside Britain.
08:34Now, Dorsch and his team of engineers set about building a series of similar emplacements and fortifications around strategic Atlantic ports.
08:43Newsreels in Berlin proudly boast of their awesome firepower.
08:56And no one is following progress more avidly than 16-year-old Franz Gockel.
09:04I'd seen so much reported about the wall in the newsreel that I was sure we'd be invincible.
09:09Soon, Gockel will see the Atlantic Wall firsthand, on D-Day itself.
09:22Throughout 1942, construction of the Atlantic Wall is stepped up, even as far north as Norway.
09:30Massive amounts of men and resources are sent to defend the coast, all the way to the Arctic.
09:35Norway was very important initially because of its location.
09:41There's a lot of iron ore coming out of Sweden, and it's taken aboard ship in Norwegian ports.
09:48Iron ore is vital to the German war effort, providing the steel in Hitler's bombs, tanks and bunkers.
09:57The Norwegian supply line must be defended.
10:03One extreme solution? Move a 900-ton naval gun turret to Ã…land to protect the port of Trondheim.
10:11Astonishingly, it still survives to this day.
10:24Essentially, this is a ship built on land, built inside this mountain.
10:30A deep shaft, five levels deep, was cut into the mountain and was filled up with concrete.
10:35And the turret was placed inside that shaft.
10:39The occupying German forces in Norway use prisoners of war to dig an 11-metre deep hole through the solid rock.
10:48It has to be lined with concrete before the turret can be rebuilt inside.
10:53The guns were put in parts, 80 trainloads of parts went to Trondheim, and from Trondheim onto boats up to the island.
11:05The three guns are the only thing you can see on the outside, but the actual bunker is inside this mountain.
11:11When you look around it, it's like solid engineering everywhere.
11:29It's all separate pieces working together to make this machine going like a monster really.
11:43The black floor we see here is the actual tower from the ship.
11:47This part is really the bunker, the shaft into the mountain.
11:52This part will stand still.
11:53So this is concrete, and this is a five floor deep shaft from a natal ship.
12:00Just as when it was on a ship, a massive gun needs to rotate.
12:05The whole turret resting on these ball bearings all around us.
12:10Really very heavy, really very heavy.
12:13I guess about 40, 50 kilos.
12:16And they're all around resting in the rail around the shaft.
12:24138 steel balls carry the weight of the 900 ton gun and allow it to turn smoothly.
12:34The shell and propellant are stored five levels below the gun.
12:38We've got three different kinds of ammunition here.
12:42We've got high explosive shells, armor-piercing shells, and even shells with time fuse.
12:49To maneuver these 300 kilogram shells, the Nazi engineers devise an ingenious hydraulic lift system.
12:58The shells will come right out of the walls, the ammunition rooms, slide over here, wall onto this table, wall on further on this one.
13:13And when it finally reaches up here, you could traverse the shell up to the lift.
13:26Of course, normally it would be hydraulically operated.
13:31The ammunition is lifted five stories up to barrel level, ready to be fired.
13:37The effective range of these guns was about 37 kilometers, and that's as far as the eye can see.
13:52From the top from Norway, all the way down to the south of France, you can find the same kind of bunkers.
13:59So it's not just concrete blocks, it's massive ships on land.
14:03Alongside the heavily defended batteries at the ports of Movic, Cherbourg, Brest, and the island of Jersey, a formidable display of defense is taking shape.
14:14But Hitler realizes this is still not enough.
14:18Between the ports, vast stretches of coast remain undefended.
14:23Hitler puts out another order that 15,000 bunkers are to be built along a coastline stretching 3,000 miles, and they are to be manned by 300,000 troops.
14:37Hitler wants every meter of the 5,000 kilometer Atlantic coast defended by a continuous line of fortifications.
14:48And he wants it finished by May 1943, in just seven months' time.
14:53Hitler describes Hitler spending his evenings designing concrete bunkers.
15:01And he had locked in his desk a series of maps of the western seaboard, at which he would plot where fortifications would be.
15:08The wall now becomes his obsession.
15:13These designs ideally meet all the requirements of a frontline soldier.
15:18During this winter, with fanatical zeal, a fortress must be built, which will hold in all circumstances.
15:24The task of making Hitler's wall a reality falls to his chief engineer, Dorsch.
15:42That is the absolute maximum volume of construction we can handle.
15:47We cannot handle anymore.
15:48Dorsch might have concerns, but nobody refuses the Führer.
16:00Construction teams try and meet Hitler's demands, focusing their efforts on areas where they think the invasion might come.
16:08Such as the beaches of Wissand, closest to the British mainland.
16:18We're now standing on top of an anti-tank gun bunker.
16:24It was built here in March 1943, and it's the type 631.
16:30And the Germans designed about 500 different types of bunkers.
16:37The Atlantic Wall was not one line of bunkers, but it was made out of several strong points with open spaces in between.
16:45With the British Air Force in control of the skies, the 475 soldiers here live in constant fear of attacks.
16:57When an invasion comes, large tanks will roll up this beach.
17:02And this bunker houses the gun that can stop them.
17:06We're now in the most important room of this bunker, because this is the room where the gun used to be.
17:30The anti-tank gun, 4.7 centimeters from Czech origin.
17:33The men stationed here spent months preparing for an invasion.
17:38The firing range for every potential target was carefully practiced.
17:43This is a really cool feature in this bunker.
17:46It actually still has these numbers on the plate next to the gun.
17:49And they tell the crew, certain points in the landscape, how far they are away from the bunker.
17:59We have a church or a house near the beach, so they can measure from these points how to aim the gun.
18:06The bunker was designed to be indestructible, but there's still the risk of being buried alive by the debris of a battle.
18:15We have another exit here. It's the escape shaft.
18:21You have to get through the brick wall. You have to dig through four meters of pebbles, and then you can get out via this shaft on the side of the bunker.
18:30Walking through one of these structures today, I might as well be walking through Stonehenge, because these are very enigmatic structures.
18:44But if you were to see them operating with all the hardware, all of the guns and the men inside them, I think you'd be fairly impressed at what these things have developed into.
18:57Very, very frightening fighting machines.
19:00Only 30% of the required bunkers are finished by Hitler's deadline of May 1943.
19:11As chief engineer, Zaba Dorsch knows Hitler will blame him.
19:16We have handed over 9,671 ready to occupy bunkers.
19:21And the concrete work has been done for another 1,500.
19:26But Dorsch lacks the resources that he needs to increase production.
19:30The war has now dragged on for four years, and the Germans are running out of material, money, and men.
19:39Hitler gets very irritated when resources keep bleeding away from the western seaboard, from his Atlantic wall, to the war in the east.
19:48He puts out an edict and says, nobody moves anything or anyone from the Atlantic wall without my prior and direct permission.
19:57October 1943. Colville, Normandy.
20:06New conscript Private Franz Gockel, just 17, arrives at his section of the wall.
20:12The propaganda films that he's watched back in Germany spoke of giant fortresses and gun positions.
20:21But he's in for a shock.
20:24Imagine my surprise arriving at the beach in Normandy. There weren't any protective bunkers.
20:30Hitler believes the Allied invasion will land at Calais, the closest French port to Great Britain.
20:44That's where his Atlantic wall is at its strongest.
20:53Few eyes are on the beaches of Normandy.
20:55France Gockel's diary records happy days spent swimming and playing near the beach at Colville.
21:06A stretch of sand that will come to be known as Omaha Beach.
21:10France is a beautiful country and I see the sea every day. I don't really have that much to do.
21:21It was definitely a cushy life compared to the horrors of the Eastern Front.
21:25The men here felt very happy that they were here in France.
21:28November 1943. Events in Russia are going from bad to worse.
21:45The Germans have been forced into retreat by a powerful Soviet army.
21:49The Germans lost on average 2,000 men killed in action each day and that since June 1941.
22:02Hitler and his generals now face a crisis.
22:05They have to fight on two fronts.
22:08Millions of their soldiers tied up in the east and 5,000 kilometers of coastline to defend in the west.
22:15The Nazis have posted 300,000 soldiers to the bunkers of the Atlantic wall.
22:21But they are inexperienced troops.
22:24The crew here of the bunkers were mainly young soldiers, 17 or 18 years old or older family fathers in their late 30s.
22:33The guys in the early 20s, mid 20s, the best soldier material, as you would call it in military terms, were mainly on the eastern front.
22:41The Nazi High Command are counting on millions of tons of concrete and steel to make the difference and keep the allies at bay.
22:52You can't say that the bunkers made the soldiers better fighters.
22:57You could be a bit overweight, you could be a bit over-aged, but you could still pull the trigger on the machine gun.
23:02Bunkers might compensate for the problem of inexperienced troops.
23:13But on average, there are still only 100 German soldiers to defend each kilometer of coast.
23:19And only 50% of Hitler's impregnable war has been completed.
23:30This is hopeless.
23:33I am the greatest builder of fortifications of all time.
23:37And this is all I get.
23:38By November 1943, Hitler runs out of patience with the slow progress of war construction.
23:49He appoints a new commander to take charge.
23:54A man whose legendary toughness in battle might make up for the weaknesses of the wall.
24:00Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.
24:15Quick, quick, fall in!
24:19Rommel immediately sets about inspecting the entire length of the Atlantic wall.
24:23He's been fighting the allies in North Africa for two years.
24:36Rommel is a master of attack and defense.
24:41What he sees in Normandy shocks him.
24:44Rommel came to this place here in January 1944,
24:48and when he looked at the conditions and how the defense preparations had gone,
24:53he was very upset.
24:55He was saying, you've been here for three years and what have you done?
24:59Nothing!
25:01German planners believe that the allies are unlikely to choose it as an invasion site
25:05because it lacks a port.
25:07So, few bunkers have been built here.
25:10But Rommel sees something they can't.
25:12This beach looks similar to the Bay of Salerno in Italy that the allies invaded.
25:20It must be instantly secured against allied landings.
25:29If the British ones get a foothold on dry land, they can't be thrown out again.
25:37Rommel knows this beach needs to be defended.
25:39If the allies land here, the Nazis could lose the war.
25:48He's right to be concerned.
25:51Across the channel, 150,000 allied troops are massing in secret.
25:58The Atlantic wall is about to face the ultimate test.
26:02And at Omaha Beach, Franz Gokkel will face the full onslaught of the invasion.
26:14By January 1944, Soviet Russia is still pushing the Nazis back in the east.
26:19And in the west, Hitler's Atlantic wall is far from complete.
26:36Field Marshal Rommel faces an enormous challenge to improve the quality of the defenses.
26:40As he records in his diary.
26:44These fortifications are the work of an engineer who is neither strategically proficient, nor has any knowledge of war.
26:52Rommel's experience fighting the Allies has taught him that holding off an invasion will require meticulous planning.
27:03And he has a very clear strategy.
27:05Rommel believes that an enemy invasion has to be smashed, if not at sea, on the beach.
27:13If the enemy get off the beach, he thinks the game is over.
27:17To defend every beach, Rommel wants thousands more small bunkers for individual soldiers, armed with heavy machine guns.
27:28They will be quicker to build, but there's still the problem of manpower.
27:32As the war develops, they don't have the spare manpower within Germany.
27:36And they basically draft in the people of these countries, the Poles, the Czechs, you name it, the French, people from concentration camps, allied prisoners of war.
27:50All of which is massively inhumane.
27:57Thousands and thousands of them die in these construction projects and through bad diet and bad treatment.
28:02And it just becomes slave labor.
28:1032,000 civilians are forced into construction.
28:14A brutal but effective plan.
28:21Bunkers are being constructed along almost 5,000 kilometers of Nazi coast, clustered in groups known as WNs.
28:28A WN is a widerstands nest, which translates into English into a resistance nest.
28:35You can say it is more or less a strong point, but a series of strong points interconnected.
28:46In Normandy, Gockel and 30 of his comrades live in a strong point that still exists today.
28:51We can see here, the small room was probably for the NCOs.
28:59Here is the accommodation block for the other ranks.
29:04Amongst them was also this 18-year-old Franz Gockel.
29:08But, of course, the soldiers did not stay here all the time.
29:11They were on guard. They had to build up the constructions.
29:13There was general military training.
29:19Gockel's strong point is at the east end of a Normandy shoreline that will become infamous.
29:25Omaha Beach.
29:27To defend it, they have 13 gun positions, including two anti-tank guns and three mortars.
29:33The guns work in pairs, targeting the beach with deadly arcs of crossfire.
29:37This tactic creates an area of maximum firepower, known as a killing zone.
29:44The killing zone is basically the area where the enemy is going to bring the maximum effect from all their weapons systems in the most condensed space to inflict the maximum amount of casualties on the enemy, in this case the allies.
29:57What you've got over here is two positions.
30:00They've got machine guns, mortars, and over here, another position, machine guns, mortars, some larger caliber rounds as well.
30:05And the reason this box is here is because the allies are trying to get up that draw and off the beach.
30:13Defending this stretch of Omaha Beach is vital for the Germans to throw back an allied invasion.
30:19Gockel's job is to man a machine gun, and his position covers this kill zone.
30:25This is Gockel's position. Today, it's only a hole in the ground. Back in 1944, it had a machine gun, it was a covered position, and also had two switches for a flamethrower.
30:41Gockel's bunker is finished by May 1944, along with thousands more that protect the coast from Norway to the Spanish border.
30:55But Rommel still isn't satisfied. The bunkers alone are not enough. He also wants other types of defensive structure to help repel an allied invasion.
31:09What Rommel does, he uses the experiences he's gained in North Africa to bring about dramatic changes.
31:16And one of those involves the laying of massive minefields.
31:20He orders the laying of 50 million mines along the French coast, at sea and on the beach.
31:25And in addition, he wants the beaches filled with obstacles, row after row littering the beach, to create impenetrable layers of defence.
31:36The first line by the low tide mark are steel barriers known as Belgian gates.
31:42You've got Belgian gates put along here. The idea behind these Belgian gates is to block the landing craft infantry and tanks,
31:50and basically hold them as far back down the beach as they can.
31:53Belgian gates create a barrier to slow down infantry and tanks, giving the Germans more time to kill them.
32:01In case the Allies arrive at high tide and sail over the Belgian gates, Rommel devises another surprise.
32:08Right here is where they have the ram logs. Think about telegraph poles, cut, raised above my head, 30 degree angle, couple of other ones supporting it down here.
32:17At the end of these, you're going to have basically like saw blades, which are there to take, rip the bottom out of the landing craft if the Allies come in at high tide.
32:25But even that's not enough. The Germans use absolutely anything that might disrupt and delay the landing force.
32:32Here you have the third belt, and this is what they call Czech hedgehogs. They are basically steel structures set at angles like this, and basically to disrupt anyone that's coming up the beaches.
32:43And if the landing craft finally make it onto the beach, these are the last line of defense to stop Allied tanks in their tracks.
32:54So this is a steel-encrusted concrete tetrahedra, and this is one of the last obstacles under the obstacle plan for defending the beaches.
33:03You can imagine if there would be a whole load of these all across the breach, interlinked, you know, every five meters and five meters.
33:10The tanks are going to struggle against this, you know. It's so sturdy. It's going to turn the tank, which way is the tracks going to go, especially thin track tanks, slip off the side, you know.
33:18By June 1944, Rommel is still trying to complete German defenses along the Atlantic coast.
33:30Meanwhile, across the channel, the Allied troops are ready.
33:37Hitler's Atlantic wall has cost billions of Reichmarks and consumed millions of tons of concrete, but it's still riddled with holes.
33:46Rommel promised Hitler that he would have finished everything by May 1944, but it was still incomplete.
33:54So many of the bunkers on the Atlantic wall were lacking guns, or were lacking men, or were lacking barbed wire or minefields.
34:03The 5th of June. Gockel spends the day patrolling the cliffs above Omaha Beach.
34:12Unknown to him, just over the horizon, thousands of British, Canadian, and American troops have put out to sea to start an invasion.
34:20At 2 o'clock in the morning, on the 6th of June, the 7th Army gave the alert level 2.
34:27This was the highest alert level in the German Army.
34:29And immediately, the men from the artillery regiment, and in this case from the 1st Company, moved into their positions here at WN 62.
34:39Wake up! Get up! Get up! This is for real! The Americans are parachuting in, just 30 kilometers away!
34:54There was an alarm call, but none of us believed it. We'd had so many in the past weeks that we no longer took it seriously.
35:03You too, Gockel! Get out!
35:05We ran to our positions. Machine guns, heavy guns, and mortars were prepared.
35:15Gockel and his comrades believed the invasion would come at a major port, like Calais.
35:21Never did they imagine that it would happen here, at their beach.
35:26Has Gockel got ammunition? Well, go! Check!
35:30Get out!
35:32Hitler and a lot of others were fairly convinced that it would have to be a major port, because they would have to get their material ashore.
35:42Little did they know that the Allies had counted that. They'd come up with the Mulberry Harbors.
35:46The Allies invent an ingenious way of avoiding the heavily fortified ports.
35:51They build the world's first floating harbor, known as the Mulberry Harbor, and tow it to Normandy.
36:00Gockel, do you need ammunition? Yes. Good luck.
36:09I tried to concentrate on my weapon, to take my mind off what was happening.
36:19Gockel, do you want to know what was happening?
36:29Gockel, do you want to know what was happening?
36:32Normally a German machine gun should be manned by two soldiers.
36:35Here we had only one man per machine gun.
36:40Allied battleships begin a full-scale bombardment of the German positions.
36:53Gokkel's survival now rests on whether the reinforced concrete of his bunker is tough
36:58enough.
36:59Heavy caliber shells continue to slam into the earth, howling and hissing through the
37:04air.
37:05They hit against the concrete and ground with a thud.
37:08Gokkel's bunker withstands the onslaught, but this is just the beginning.
37:19When the Allied forces land, they're met with a hail of machine gun fire.
37:24Just 500 Germans have to defend a six-kilometer beach against 35,000 Americans.
37:31The ultimate test of the Atlantic War has begun.
37:35The Germans are firing with each weapon they've got available here, with their flamethrowers,
37:42with their machine guns, with their field guns, with their artillery from further inland.
37:46This was when German firepower was the biggest.
37:53Get him out of the beach, come on!
37:57Get him out of the beach.
38:01Omaha is just one of five invasion beaches.
38:05150,000 American, Canadian and British troops are landing along the Normandy coast.
38:11And the enormous Atlantic War is beginning to crack.
38:15160 kilometers away, the German armored reserve of tanks are waiting.
38:21If they're called up to plug the gaps, there's still a chance that the Allies can be thrown
38:25back.
38:26But there's a problem.
38:31Hitler was asleep, and no one dared to wake him up.
38:36And this was crucial because Hitler was the person who could release the armored reserves.
38:40And when he woke up, he still didn't believe it was a full invasion.
38:45The tanks remain far inland.
38:46And the only other man who can make a difference is even further away, in Germany, celebrating
38:53his wife's birthday.
38:56Rommel said the first 24 hours are crucial to defeat the Allied invasion.
39:02And on the 6th of June, he was not here.
39:05And it was only in the late afternoon that Rommel rushed back from Germany and arrived in
39:10France to coordinate the defense measures.
39:13But by that time, the Allies had already a firm grip on the beaches here.
39:20At 9 a.m., seven hours after the first shots are fired, the bunker next to Gokkel's position
39:27is destroyed.
39:29His machine gun is the last one still firing from his group of bunkers.
39:35Sand caused the belt of my machine gun to jam.
39:38I had to continue using my rifle, firing single shots.
39:57Amazingly, the Germans are holding back the Americans.
40:03Despite the months of preparation, they're running low on ammunition.
40:12The Germans were supposed to have ammunition for 48 hours on the Atlantic wall.
40:18In reality, they had only in this section, only ammunition for three and a half hours.
40:23So at 10 o'clock, the Germans were starting to run out of ammunition.
40:34As their supply of bullets is depleted, the Germans begin to struggle.
40:38And the Americans gain ground.
40:40Gokkel and his comrades are forced to fall back.
40:45I was making my way up a slope.
41:09I crawled to the top to reach my comrades.
41:12I saw three fingers on my left hand dangling by the threats.
41:35Now wounded, Gokkel retreats with the few survivors of his company.
41:45Omaha is the last of the five invasion beaches to fall.
41:54The vast Atlantic wall has taken three years to build, but is breached in a matter of hours.
42:03The Germans lose the battle and will soon lose the war.
42:08Despite all the costs, millions of Reichsmark and millions of cubic meters of concrete built
42:15into these structures, the Atlantic wall could not hold the Allied invasion force.
42:22The Atlantic wall doesn't work for a number of reasons.
42:29It's stretched too far, there are too many gaps in it.
42:34The basic policy behind it is flawed.
42:37The Germans never come up with a grand plan of how to fight this machine they've built, how
42:45they're going to take it into war.
42:48Despite the wall's failure, Zaba Dorsch remained head of the TOT organization until Germany's surrender.
43:01After the war, he had a successful engineering career until his death, aged 86.
43:12Rommel was forced to commit suicide by Hitler just four months after D-Day.
43:22Franz Gokkel survived the war, returning to Germany where he married and lived until the age of 80.
43:28He came back to Normandy several times to remember the men who died for and against the wall.
43:36I think D-Day is probably the most important event in Europe to have occurred perhaps over
43:41the last 500 years.
43:43To kick Nazi Germany back into touch and to take back control for civilization.
43:50I think it's an absolutely astounding event.
43:54And it works because the Allies got their act together and the Germans never did.
44:00It's as simple as that.
44:01It's as simple as that.
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