Apocalypse: The Second World War - Season 1, Episode 03: Origins of the Holocaust (1940-41)

Prague. Copenhagen. Paris. 1941. The Germans now occupy several capital cities in Europe. After the Germans defeat France, Nazi soldiers are sent to Paris for rest and recreation while Polish prisoners and Jews are forced into slave labour to complete Nazi building projects. The Italian army is in disarray so Hitler dispatches one of his best generals to Libya. The Afrika Korps fry eggs on the surfaces of their tanks amidst the blistering desert sands of North Africa. Shock includes vivid colourised footage of the battle for the Soviet Union as the Germans struggle toward Moscow in the brutal Russian winter. Russian civilians are forced to burn their homes and fields so as to leave nothing behind for the Germans to salvage. No longer able to wash or to change their clothes and suffering from dysentery and typhus, German troops are just 30 kilometres from Moscow, when they are finally pushed back by the Red Army. Moscow is saved – but the USSR has been ravaged. Two days after Hitler’s first, major defeat, Japan launches a surprise attack on the United States at Pearl Harbour and the war officially becomes a “World War.”