World War II - Behind Closed Doors

"What were Stalin's secret promises to the Nazis? How did Churchill work with one tyrant to defeat another? How did Roosevelt earn the trust of a suspicious Stalin? Laurence Rees (Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution), an award-winning documentarian, has created another acclaimed film that explodes myths, and uncovers remarkable, rare facts regarding the supreme leader of the Soviet Union and his unlikely relationships with Allied leaders. Watch history being made as this fascinating and often disturbing docudrama penetrates the gauzy veil of history. A BBC production as seen on PBS, starring Bob Gunton as FDR, Alexei Petrenko as Stalin and Paul Humpoletz as Churchill.

Episode 1 - This episode tells a history of secret allegiances with the Nazis that Stalin wanted to hide. Before he was allied with Churchill and Roosevelt, Stalin offered help to Hitler and the Nazis.
In 1939, less than two weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War, the foreign minister of Nazi Germany, Joachim von Ribbentrop, visited the Soviet Union to negotiate an agreement with Stalin.
The signing of a non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union surprised many - Soviet Communists and German Fascists alike. Though the two nations were careful to convey to the world that they had merely signed a pact, they were allies in all but name.
After waging war on Poland, Ribbentrop and Stalin would meet again and it was in this meeting that Stalin made a statement that remained a secret until it was discovered in the Nineties. He promised to support the Germans and not to allow their defeat, which went well beyond anything that the Soviet Union later admitted had been said at these meetings.
In a bid to keep his secret ally happy, Stalin allowed the Nazis a base in a remote part of the North of the Soviet Union and helped them with a clandestine Naval voyage to the Pacific.
Only in June 1941, when reality hit, and the Soviet Union was betrayed by the Nazis, did Stalin turn his attention to a new ally, Winston Churchill.

Episode 2 - The beginnings of Stalin's unlikely allegiance with Churchill and Roosevelt, following his betrayal by the Nazis, is investigated in this episode.
In 1941, the Soviets were struggling to repel a Nazi invasion. The Red Army was simply too ill-trained and too ill-equipped to stop the Germans. In just seven days, the Soviets had lost over 100,000 soldiers.
Stalin was now at his weakest and he thought his new allies, the British, weren't doing much to help. Churchill was in two minds about the Soviet Union. He despised Communism, but he also valued anyone who fought against the Nazis.
Stalin knew he needed all the allies he could get. And he was about to gain another much more powerful one in America, when Germany and Japan joined forces. Having been betrayed by his first ally, as the war progressed, Stalin was convinced that the British and the Americans might be almost as duplicitous.

Episode 3 - On 12 August 1942, Stalin finally came face-to-face in Moscow with his wartime ally, Winston Churchill. However, despite the upbeat newsreels of the time, it was hardly a meeting of minds. As one of Churchill's generals later remarked: "We were going into the lion's den and we weren't going to feed him."
The Western leaders knew Stalin was a tyrant who had ordered the death of hundreds of his own citizens. The problem was, just how were they to work with one tyrant to defeat another?
Stalin had a deep mistrust of the West and believed the Western Allies were betraying him - not least by failing to launch D-Day as early as he thought they had promised (in order to help relieve the pressure on the Eastern front). He also had a hatred of Poles, and designs on regaining Polish territory that he had gained as a result of his pact with the Nazis in 1939 but subsequently lost to the advancing German army in 1941.
Featuring exclusive interviews with surviving Russian, Polish, American and British veterans, and based in part on unique and extensive research in recently opened Russian archives, this episode illustrates the tenuous, and often perilous, bond that dogged the alliance between the West and Stalin. This bond was shaken to its core by the German army's very public discovery, in 1943, of the mass graves of Polish officers massacred by Stalin at Katyn in 1940; a crime which Stalin went to quite extraordinary lengths to cover up from his Western Allies.

Episode 4 - In 1944, the Soviets were beginning to recapture the territory in Eastern Poland that they had last occupied three years before.
This episode examines how the Western Allies dealt with Stalin over the future of Poland. As records from secret meetings reveal, it was a test of the integrity of the whole alliance - not least because Poland was the very country the British had gone to war to protect.
The British were playing what they hoped were clever politics. By letting Stalin have the territory in Eastern Poland he wanted, Churchill thought he would then be more co-operative over allowing an independent government for the new Poland.
But with more Soviet atrocities coming to light by the day, contrary to what many in Britain and America wanted to believe, Stalin was as ruthless as ever.

Episode 5 - Using unique archive material only available since the fall of Communism, this episode reveals just how and why the Western alliance began to fall apart as the Allies began their final push to victory.
Late in 1944, the Allies may have been about to win the war in Europe, but as confidential documents detailing war-time meetings show, the fight was just beginning "behind closed doors". British Prime Minister Winston Churchill began to lose patience with the Polish government in exile and pressed them to do a deal with Stalin; a deal that would mean Polish borders would have to shift more than a hundred miles west, and millions of lives would be changed for ever.
As French troops marched down the Champs Elysees, on the Eastern Front, Stalin's Red Army was also making progress against the Nazis in Poland, Hungary and Budapest. The key question was: were they liberators or occupiers?

Episode 6 - This episode looks at how, by the end of the War, much of Europe simply swapped the rule of one tyrant for that of another.
As World War II came to an end, the Soviets took over a notorious Nazi concentration camp and began imprisoning their enemies.
Minutes of confidential meetings reveal the Western Allies' alarm as much of Eastern Europe fell under Stalin's control.
The Soviets were denying millions of Europeans the freedoms which many in the West thought the War had been fought to protect. Was the Soviet Union, the wartime ally of the West, becoming the new enemy?

Written by Laurence Rees
Directed by Laurence Rees, Andrew Williams
Produced by Laurence Rees
Original Music by Alasdair Reid
Cinematography by Jacek Petrycki
Film Editing by Alan Lygo
Costume Design by Andrzej Szenajch

"...fascinating ... a valuable insight into a less familiar area of modern history." David Chater, The Times

"Almost certainly the documentary event of the autumn and a Bafta contender..." Victoria Segal and Edward Porter, Sunday Times

"Anything bearing the imprimatur of Laurence Rees, the creative director of BBC television history, deserves a mass audience, but this series ... will not please a casual viewer. Every bit as absorbing as Rees's previous output, it will, however, reward those prepared to put down what they are doing and pay attention." Victoria Segal, Helen Stewart and Sarah Dempster, Sunday Times

"This new BBC six-parter deploys recently released archive material, interviews with survivors of the era, and convincing dramatic reconstructions, to illuminate the diplomatic back-story. Excellent." Andrew Mueller, Guardian

"... true to form, he [Laurence Rees] has unearthed some remarkable material, showing that the Soviet Union collaborated with the Nazi war machine to a far greater extent than had been supposed during the non-aggression pact." Brian Viner, Independent

"Every schoolchild used to learn about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact but that treaty contained many secret clauses that have only come to light since the fall of Communism. Few people realise, for example, that as Germany marched into Poland from the West, Russian did the same from the East - the two nations co-operating and swapping intelligence. Later on, Russian ice-breakers enabled a covert German attack ship to sail around the Arctic Circle into the Pacific, where it sank Allied vessels. It's hard to know who wore the trousers in this relationship - it's a fair bet that, however many speeches Stalin and Hitler made, neither side really trusted the other." Matt Baylis, Daily Express

"...Laurence Rees's superlative historical documentary series..." Mike Bradley, Observer

"...this wonderful series, another feather in the cap of Laurence Rees, the field-marshal of factual programming about the Second World War, has found plenty of people to give authoritative eye-witness accounts, none more moving than that offered last night by an elderly Hungarian woman called Agnes Karlik, who wept as she described how Red Army soldiers, ‘liberating' her home in Budapest in 1945, raped her and her sister, aged 14 and 16 ... It was an extraordinarily powerful sequence, and, along with the feather in Rees's cap, one in the eye for all those who sneer that despite, or perhaps because of the proliferation of channels, there is bugger all of quality to watch on TV any more. Moreover, despite considerable reservations about dramatised documentaries, I have been won over by the use of actors to represent Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt and other major players ... it was shocking last night to hear him [Stalin], moments after Agnes Karlik's testimony, and having been presented himself with evidence that Red Army soldiers were pillaging and raping their way across Europe, defending their right to take ‘some trifles' as they went. Even more shocking, though, was seeing Churchill (Paul Humpoletz) scribbling on a scrap of paper, and handing it to Stalin, his vision of a post-war Europe, carving up influence between Russia and Britain. Documentaries as meticulously researched as this show that war is never a case of goodies vs baddies." Brian Viner, Independent

"Another fascinating film in this landmark series, this time concentrating on Joseph Stalin, the mass-murderer ... Interestingly, a Polish interviewee reveals that Winston Churchill was seen in similar terms when he carved up Poland's borders and shifted the country westwards by 100 miles." Critics' Choice, Sunday Times

"...this fascinating, often disturbing docu-drama..." Anna Lowman, Guardian

During filming, producer Laurence Rees and his team visited places that no western film crew had been before, notably the area north of Murmansk, the place in which the German Navy received top secret assistance from the Soviets during the war.

• BBC History Website
• BBC History Website: feature by researcher Sally Chick
• BBC History Website: feature by Laurence Rees