In August 1940, British air forces dropped the first bombs on Berlin in retaliation for the previous German air raids on England. When the Germans saw the bomb craters in the capital of the Third Reich, their own vulnerability was made clear to them for the first time since the beginning of the war: despite various blitzkrieg victories, the Luftwaffe was unable to keep the enemy units away. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill wants to prevent Hitler’s rule over Europe at all costs, otherwise “the world will sink into the abyss of a new dark age,” says Churchill. The United Kingdom is also under attack on the other side of the globe: in Southeast Asia the militaristic empire of Japan is preparing to overrun the colonies of the West. This calls another great power on the map: the United States of America sees its interests in the Pacific endangered. But at first the USA only participated indirectly in the battles on the battlefields of the war.
Documentary: On the edge of the abyss – The history of World War II – EP3: New Alliances
Directed by: Nina Adler, Hendrik Behrendt
Production: Spiegel TV
#documentary #freedocumentary #history #worldwarII #germanwesternfront #france #england #europe
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It was an informative and wonderful historical coverage documentary about air bombarded exchanges between London( Britain)and Berlin( Germany) during the early years of WW2 … Thanks for sharing
Thank you for dubbing the speakers into English! Subtitles are a no-go for me. I can still hear their voices in the background, but I can also understand them. Well done!
Neither had the German civilians been bombed during WW1. Unlike the British civilians who had been bombed by both Zeppelins and aircraft; they had also been shelled from the sea.
The Luftwaffe accidentally bombed Freiberg in May 1940 (and blamed the RAF).
The English made ir a world war
Please keep these coming!!! Love ww2 history. It’s an addiction at this point.
Hitler had no respect for England.
"There were no air raid shelters in London," this is not true. There were air raid shelters in London, both privately owned ones, such as Anderson Shelters (corrugated metal pieces assembled in back gardens to enable families to shelter in relative safety while bombing at night was going on) and shelters for the general public, with these shelters able to accommodate between 50-100 people each.
The amount of people sheltering on tube station platforms was exaggerated for propaganda reasons, and initially, the British government didn't want people to shelter in the tube, fearing that it would negatively affect the war effort. However, there was nothing the government could do to stop people buying a platform ticket and refusing to come up. In fact, only ~4% of London's population sheltered on the Tube. But even then, the Tube could sometimes be a death trap when a station had a direct hit. Bank Station for example had a bomb pierce the ticket office roof and bounce down the escalator shaft before detonating, not only killing 56 people, but causing damage to the station that wasn't repaired for nearly 2 years.
It was on the Tube that Britain's worst Civilian Disaster occurred, or rather a station that was under construction at the time. At Bethnal Green Station in East London, on 3rd March 1943, it was relatively peaceful, the area was used to bombing raids, but hadn't had the relentless day after day, night after night bombing raids from 1940-41, but on this night, the air raid sirens went off and people started to head to the unfinished tube station. All of a sudden, an unfamiliar whooshing noise caused panic amongst the population heading for the shelters. As hundreds of people piled in to the tube station, a woman carrying a child slipped at the bottom of the steps into the station and a human crush resulted. In the end, 173 people died, all of them suffocated in seconds by the crush of people trying to get in. In a tragic irony, it turned out that there wasn't an air raid by the Luftwaffe that night, they were new anti-aircraft weapons being tested at a nearby park that the public was unaware of.
At first, to not damage national morale in the war effort, the tragedy was covered up, a subsequent inquiry was published after the German surrender in April 1945
Germany was a country of only 70 million people in 1940 .
How did Germany think it was going to occupy all of Europe and Russia even if they did beat Russia ?
Russia with 140 million people could not occupy only Eastern Europe for more than 45 years .
Strategic bombing of civilians (with the possible exception of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) has never had the effect of breaking civilian morale. It just pisses people off against the aggressors.
I enjoy these documentaries because they use non-English speakers. There are many videos with American or British experts explaining these events. It's nice to have a slightly different perspective.
Let’s BE HONEST: THE FOOLISH LUFTWAFFE THOUGHT IT COULD WIN A LONG-RANGE WAR WITHOUT HEAVY BOMBERS! What idiots!
German POWs were treated better than African American soldiers 💀
I still can't fathom how my mother and her family survived being in Berlin.
Germany was the first to bomb cities in WW2, Britain was responding to Germany 's attack upon their country/cities.
Stop your bullshit, revisionist history. Tell it as it happened or not at all. You don't have to make up stories. It's called history!
The size of the British islands is so inflated in some of these maps so far I noticed, I wonder why lol