Part 06 - Adolf Hitler - Chronology of Events in 1939

The life stages of Adolf Hitler are shown in 17 chapters. Through the descriptions of Hitler's contemporaries and the presentation of his career, the picture of the man who shaped the 20th century like no other is put together.

How was it possible that so many well-educated people, people from completely normal families, fell for the reign of the Nazi's? Their children try to answer this question.

During the Nazi regime, a Berlin Jewish family is persecuted, with mobs smashing windows and Storm troopers beating their innocent victims.

Wilhelm Franz Canaris was a German admiral, head of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, from 1935 to 1944 and a member of the German Resistance.

A documentary on the fierce battles that were fought between the Royal Navy and the Kreigsmarine in the Atlantic Ocean during the Second World War. Includes submarine attacks on the shipping convoys, hunting the submarine packs, R.A.F Coastal Command and battleship versus battleship warfare.

Under the guidance of Simon Wiesenthal, documents the year-long process leading up to 'the Final Solution' using newly accessible Eastern European archives, first-hand eyewitness accounts and world renowned historians.

Archival footage of an American Nazi rally that attracted 20,000 people at Madison Square Garden in 1939, shortly before the beginning of World War II.

Propaganda short film depicting the rise of Nazism in Germany and how political propaganda is similarly used in the United States to recruit Nazi sympathizers from the ranks of American racists.

The Protectorate was a non-independent political entity fully controlled from Berlin, and German dominance was evident everywhere. When war broke out, the Nazi terror became more and more apparent.

Sixty-five years later, five Holocaust survivors tell their amazing story, about the secret journal VEDEM created by a group of teenage boys right beneath the noses of their Nazi captors in a concentration camp. Seattle's Music of Remembrance and the Northwest Boychoir have united to give new voice, through music, to those boys' inspiring lives and words. But first the boys in the choir must come to know the 'boys of Terezin,' and learn the price of those boys' courageous resistance to their oppressors. Poignant, warm-hearted and profound, the film chronicles a unique legacy's passage to a new generation, through the power of music.

In March 1939, Hitler's army marched into Prague, Czecha. Jan Bodon, a young captain in the Czech Army - who also happened to be blond-haired, blue-eyed and fluent in German - was "asked" to join the Nazis. He promptly fled and joined the Czech Resistance Movement instead. In this powerful documentary directed by Jan's son, Jean Bodon uncovers the truth not only about Jan's wartime experiences, but also discovers that his father was secretly a Jew in a country which underwent one of the largest extermination campaigns of the war.

This Nazi propaganda film shows a parade in Berlin, Germany, in honor of the 50th birthday of Adolf Hitler.

Portrait of the Head of Health of the Third Reich, originally from Lugano.

Why did the Germans, the most advanced scientific nation, fail to build a nuclear bomb during the War? In late 1938 a Berlin scientist, Otto Hahn, discovered nuclear fission. Werner Heisenberg, the chief scientist of Germany's wartime nuclear project, pioneered quantum mechanics and won the Nobel Prize. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 Heisenberg friends begged him to leave Germany, knowing he would be asked to work on nuclear research for Hitler but he refused. The focus of the story is a famous meeting in Copenhagen in 1941 between Niels Bohr and Heisenberg where Heisenberg appealed to world physicists, via Bohr, to desist from or slow down nuclear research. But Hans Bethe, a contemporary of Heisenberg has another version of events.

The Path to Nuclear Fission is about a brilliant Jewish woman, Lise Meitner. In 1907, Meitner came to Berlin as a shy physics student from Vienna, and met the worldly Otto Hahn. They became close friends and colleagues, and they would make scientific history when they discovered nuclear fission in 1938. It was a discovery that lead to the invention of the atomic bomb, much to the horror of Meitner and Hahn. Hahn helped Meitner to flee from Nazi Germany to Sweden, but he would never credit her contribution when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1945. This film, narrated by renowned actress Linda Hunt, tells her story for the first time.

Encouraged by Leo Szilard and galvanized by German success in achieving nuclear fission, the United States embarks on a crash program to build a nuclear bomb. Aided by many Jewish scientists who had fled Nazi Germany the project team successfully constructs three fuel production lines using different technologies and assembles three bombs. One bomb was tested in New Mexico and the others deployed against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The incredible story of how an international group of female prisoners pulled off one of the most extraordinary rescues in Nazi concentration camp history, saving 63 young Catholic Polish women, nicknamed the Rabbits, who had been maimed by horrific Nazi medical experimental surgeries on their legs and slated for execution. The history and the stories that inspired the NYT bestseller Lilac Girls, told by the women who lived it.

The film explores the only known case in the history of post-WWII era of concentration camp survivors helping the SS Commandant of the Auschwitz and Ravensbruck camps to escape prison and justice in Nazi trial.

The ship St. Louis left Nazi Germany on May 13, 1939, with 937 German Jews bound for Cuba. Most had sold all their belongings to book passage, pay off corrupt German officials, and buy visas to Cuba. Hope turned to despair when Havana suddenly barred their entry. For thirty excruciating days, the St. Louis wandered the seas and was refused haven by every country in the Americas. Finally, they returned to Europe, where the refugees were accepted by Holland, France, Belgium, and England. Four months later, World War II began and many of the passengers died in Nazi death camps. Includes archival footage, photographs, interviews with nine survivors, and readings from the diary of the ship's captain.

Hitler admired Mussolini, then he acted as his equal, and at last overpowered and used him.

The Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 after the Battle of Poland through the planning and start of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union (1941).

Chronicle of the diplomatic fiasco that lead to the pact between Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR

A thoughtful, detailed exposition of how and why the end of the Great War led inevitably to the Second World War, the most horrific in human history. Narrated by the great journalist Eric Sevareid.