Narrator Berlin in the summer of 1940 welcomed victory beyond belief. The soldiers of the Third Reich came home after only a year of war. They had conquered France; Central and Northern Europe had fallen too. These crowds were delirious with exhalation and relief. They turned to their Fuhrer in a frenzy of gratitude. They had not fancied war, they had feared defeat. Now they thought the war was over, and they rejoiced.
Episode Sixteen: Inside the Reich: Germany
Narrator Along with Geography and the rest, Nazi schools were obliged to add a special subject; children were taught, with pictures and measurements, the dimensions of a healthy aryan race. Official films prepared the public for the consequences of keeping the race pure. The mentally incurable, condemned as the "bad seed", went to experimental gas chambers.
Narrator (describing the Volkssturm preparing to defend Berlin): They went towards the Russians, keeping their thoughts to themselves.
Episode Seventeen: Morning
Narrator On a different stage, another American, General Dwight David Eisenhower, appointed by Roosevelt, Overlord Supreme Commander. Eisenhower had commanded the Allied North African expedition in 1942. As well as generalship, he would need the finesse of a diplomat, as he was now to lead a huge multinational force.
Narrator Many men were afraid that night. They were storming Hitler's vaunted Festung Europa, Fortress Europe. Across the water the Germans waited, not knowing when or where the blow would fall.
Narrator At 5:30 the Armada was off the French coast. After a massive air attack, a devastating naval bombardment.
Narrator Some units landed in the wrong areas. Some met unexpectedly light resistance, others were cut down almost on the shoreline. The Americans got the worst of it.
Narrator Only the insistence of Eisenhower and the King himself had stopped Churchill from coming over on D-Day. Now, within days of the landings, he was there to see how things were going.
Episode Nineteen: Pincers
BHBrian Horrocks
Then they came to me and they said, “Do you want Kleve taking out?” By taking out they meant the whole of the heavy bombers putting on to Kleve. Now, I knew that Kleve was a very fine old historical German town. Anne of Cleves, one of Henry VIII’s wives came from there. I knew that there were a lot of civilians in Kleve, men, women and children. If I said no, they would live. If I said yes, they would die. A terrible decision you’ve got to take. But everything depended on getting a high piece of ground at Materborn. The German reserves would have to come through Kleve, and we would have to breach the Siegfried Line and get there. And your own lives, your own troops, must come first, so I said yes, I did want it taking out. But when all those bombers went over, the night just before zero hour, to take out Kleve, I felt a murderer. And after the war I had an awful lot of nightmares. It was always Kleve.
Episode Twenty: Genocide
DPDov Paisikowic
What we went through will be difficult to understand, even for our contemporaries, and much more even for the generations who already have no personal experience from those days
Rivka Yosselevska (describing her survival of a massacre): My daughter was in my arms the whole time - somehow I found the strength to carry her. She was so close to me that I couldn't undress - she wouldn't let me. She said, "Let's run away! They're killing us! Why do we just stand here? Why do people stand and not run away? Why are they standing?" I said to her...I could not really speak. I think I said, "Where are we going to run to?"
Episode Twenty Two: Japan
Man and woman, boy and girl, the survivors prepared to defend their homeland, to drive the invaders back into the sea with wooden rifles, bows and arrows, bamboo spears. But the end, when it came, was to be from the sky - irresistible, unimaginable, mushroom-shaped.
Episode Twenty Three: Pacific
Richard Coleman (describing his opinion of Japanese soldiers): I was always taught to hate them, in the Marine Corps, to detest them and that they were animals. We were the men, they were the animals. By the same token, we were taught that they would die for the Emperor and we weren't taught to die for our President. And to fight, or to come up against an individual who wants to die, or who doesn't care about dying, is a tough thing to combat in your mind. We wanted to live, we wanted to kill him, and we wanted to survive.
Narrator This tiny island, less than one square mile, cost more than four thousand lives. This is Tarawa, typical of some of the most concentrated fighting of the war as the Americans pushed the Japanese back island by island, across the Pacific.
Episode Twenty Four: The Bomb
The greatest thing in history.
These quotes come from Wikiquote's The World at War pages and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.