(GUNFIRE, BOMBS WHISTLING)
In June 1944, the Allies landed on the D-Day beaches.
In the heat of the summer, they fought through Normandy.
In the autumn, they struggled to liberate France and Holland.
And now in January 1945, the Allies were beginning to fight their way into Germany.
And as they did so and prepared for the battle to reach the heart of the Nazi Reich,
they talked of the Europe they wanted to create once the war was over.
The British and Americans were fighting for a new Europe,
an end to dictatorship.
(WOMAN) It was a moral war.
There was a strong feeling that it was a fight for freedom and for democracy
and against cruelty and tyranny.
How could it be amid the Allies' victorious advance
that this dream of a democratic, post-war Europe would crumble...
..and that it was a leading Nazi who predicted the catastrophe
that would divide Europe for almost 50 years?
(HEAVY GUNFIRE)
It was very ferocious. They were driven, ordered, threatened, whatever.
But they were fighting like their life depended on it.
In January '45, the Western Allies were fighting the Germans in the woody Ardennes.
It was almost the last gasp of German resistance in the west.
The German soldiers had managed to punch a 50-mile hole in the American lines,
but now they were in retreat.
They were masters at retreating.
So although we had cut them off, they were still retreating back,
taking a lot of their equipment and their arms and their specialised units with them
and they were fit to fight another day.
Hitler had staked a huge amount on the Ardennes offensive.
But his gamble had failed. The front had fallen.
Managing the German retreat was Field Marshal Walter Model.
Model was one of Hitler's most competent officers.
He was a tough operator who had been successful on the eastern front.
(MAN SPEAKS GERMAN)
(TRANSLATOR) He was an officer who obeyed and followed every order.
(SPEAKS GERMAN)
(TRANSLATOR) He considered himself to be Hitler's favourite.
And so he did everything Hitler told him to do - to the letter.
Even Model was forced to admit that this campaign would fail.
He could no longer hold back the Allies.
He fell back to new positions along the River Rhine.
But if Model thought this great barrier would deter the Allies, he was wrong.
The Allies were intent on unconditional surrender.
There would be no negotiation.
The Nazis had to be destroyed.
In World War I they were beaten, but yet here we were, they had come back and so forth.
And we felt they had to be thoroughly, totally beaten,
so they would never come back at us again.
But for many Germans, unconditional surrender was simply unacceptable.
(TRANSLATOR) Unconditional surrender meant no one knew what would happen to us.
Would we be treated reasonably? Yes or no?
And this word ''unconditional'' was, of course, a great terror for the troops.
(TRANSLATOR) This question of an unconditional surrender
strengthened the German resistance.
We had to win. Otherwise, there would be a terrible end.
In Berlin, Hitler and the Nazi leadership were planning the final defence of Germany.
Increasingly prominent among the leading figures of the Third Reich was Josef Goebbels,
Hitler's loyal Propaganda Minister.
(SPEAKS GERMAN)
(BARON VON LORINGHOVEN SPEAKS GERMAN)
(TRANSLATOR) He was just a brilliant man in this area. Terrible, actually, but so imaginative.
And through his strict control of the media,
he was able to force his ideas through to every part of society.
For the Allies, unconditional surrender was a matter of principle.
They were not going to have any truck with the Nazis.
But for Goebbels, this stance was a propaganda gift.
Goebbels argued that it confirmed what the Nazis had said all along -
that the Allies wanted to destroy the German people completely.
And for many Germans, evidence that Goebbels spoke the truth lay all around them.
(WOMEN SPEAKS GERMAN)
(TRANSLATOR) It wasn't only the attacks. The whole of life was mixed up with it.
When you came home, there wasn't any light or electricity. You couldn't cook any soup.
(NEW SPEAKER) The first thing when you opened the paper was all the crosses.
And the pages became fuller and fuller.
As well as dropping bombs from the air,
the Western Allies also dropped leaflets telling Germans,
''Peace with Germans - yes. Peace with Hitler - never. ''
But it was a distinction many Germans failed to grasp.
For as Goebbels told them a few months previously,
a senior member of the American government, Henry Morgenthau,
had devised a plan to deprive Germany of all its industry once the war was over.
(SPEAKS GERMAN)
In reality, the Morgenthau plan was abandoned by the Allies as early as September 1944.
But Goebbels used it as a valuable piece of propaganda.
(TRANSLATOR) We were told if we didn't fight, we would have to live off the land.
The whole country and everyone living in it would be destitute.
But another plan for the future of Germany was about to be concocted.
And this one would not be abandoned.
It would have consequences for the Germans and the Allies that few would foresee.
Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met at the Yalta Conference on 4th February, 1945.
They were to agree on the division of Germany
with the establishment of four zones of occupation when the war ended.
The communique issued at the end of the conference
called for the people's liberation from the domination of Nazi Germany
and their ability to create their own democratic institutions.
It was the most important document from our point of view of the Yalta Conference.
Far more important than anything else, really.
Morally, at any rate.
And that...the main point of that was that the countries
which had been liberated by the Allies - Soviet and American, British -
should have free, unfettered, supervised elections.
And so at Yalta, the Allies hoped they had laid the foundation of a new European order,
one of democracy and freedom.
But Churchill had his doubts.
(AMERICAN ACCENT) Churchill was more realistic about Stalin
and Soviet intentions in Europe than Roosevelt.
Roosevelt remained optimistic that he could handle Stalin
and that he could work things out with him.
As he left Yalta, a contented Roosevelt told Stalin with a broad grin,
''We will meet again soon in Berlin. ''
Roosevelt and Churchill had made Stalin a promise
that they would help his advance into Germany.
But back in Berlin, Goebbels had guessed what this would amount to,
as he confided to his press secretary, Wilfred von Oven.
On 13th February, just days after Yalta,
two waves of RAF Lancaster bombers filled the night sky over Dresden.
We were told that Dresden was a very important supply centre for the Russian front,
and we were bombing it at the specific request of the Russians.
RAF pilot Freddy Hewlance was in the first wave of Lancaster bombers.
I remember my rear-gunner getting very excited,
saying he'd never seen fires like it before.
And suggesting I change course
to see the target fires for myself.
One of the eyewitnesses was Erica Wollams who was living in the city.
The dreadful, powerful mines
which was exploding and putting this phosphor everywhere, splashing it.
It was like a snowstorm, this fire.
Everything, if you wasn't prepared for it,
immediately started to burn you and your clothes.
And this fire sucked you in. There was no escape.
The bombing was so concentrated that it caused a firestorm
that covered 12 square miles.
We were in the cellar.
And in the cellar that was a dramatic thing I will never forget
because we thought that was the end of our life.
The bombardment of that, three-quarters of an hour. It was hell on earth.
More than 30,000 people died in the raid on Dresden.
Germans were not allowed in the town to see how bad things were.
The devastation was enough to marvel at
without noticing what appeared to be logs, these charred logs. These were people.
Prisoners of war were made to bury the dead in the following days.
Kurt Vonnegut was one of them.
Then we were sent to work cleaning out cellars.
We would get into a cellar
and people would be sitting there as if on a streetcar,
waiting for the next stop.
And I guess it was carbon monoxide which had killed them.
(ENGLISH ACCENT) It was just another target which was bombed successfully.
I don't remember any feeling...
of remorse.
If anything, I thought of myself
as shortening the war, rather than taking lives.
The Allies were prepared to do whatever was necessary
to end the war as decisively as possible.
As Roosevelt said.
''Every person in Germany should realise that this time Germany is a defeated nation.
''The fact that they are a defeated nation, collectively and individually,
''must be so impressed upon them that they will hesitate to start any new war.''
What made the casualties in Dresden so large was that at the time of the raids,
the population of the city had been swelled by huge numbers of refugees fleeing the Red Army.
Goebbels had lost no time in telling people why.
(GERMAN NEWSREEL)
(SPEAKS GERMAN)
(TRANSLATOR) We knew that the Russians were raping women and shooting people,
so it wasn't advisable for us to stay.
So we decided to leave.
Rosemarie Arndt was a 16-year-old farmer's daughter from East Prussia
who in January 1945 was captured by the advancing Red Army.
(TRANSLATOR) We had to lie down, and whoever refused was hit straight away with a rifle butt.
Then the soldiers raped us all night long.
Most of them were drunk and the rooms stank.
It was dreadful.
She was kept prisoner for 14 days and raped again and again.
After this terrible ordeal, Rosemarie was sent to a Soviet labour camp in Baku
where she was to stay until November 1948.
All this confirmed the very fears Goebbels had sought to plant in the minds of the Germans.
His officers were busy plastering slogans, ''Victory or Siberia'',
on the walls of German towns.
To Goebbels, the Western Allies were naive.
If Germany was to fall to the Soviets, there would be a new world order.
Warning the German people in ''Das Reich'', the party weekly bulletin,
of the vision he had for post-war Europe,
Goebbels used a phrase that later became famous in the mouth of someone very different.
With many German cities including Dresden destroyed,
the Allies turned their attention to Berlin.
And in the capital of the Reich, Goebbels was preparing for a last stand.
He now turned to the Volkssturm,
a compulsory militia made up of old men and Hitler Youth.
Visiting the Oder front, he impressed on the makeshift troops to give their utmost
for Fuhrer and fatherland.
(MAN SPEAKS GERMAN)
(TRANSLATOR) Volkssturm, as far as us soldiers were concerned, was pitiful.
A hopeless exercise.
The raw recruits of the Volkssturm scarcely stood a chance,
and the Allied forces ranged against them were mounting day by day.
In the east, the Soviets were gathered at the Oder.
They were only 40 miles away from Hitler's capital.
In the west, the Allies were poised to cross the Rhine.
On March 4th, General Model, now positioned at Rimbach-on-the-Sieg,
was warned of the possibility of an Allied breakthrough along the Rhine.
The only real barrier between all our forces and Berlin was the Rhine river.
On 23rd March, Field Marshal Montgomery launched Operation Plunder,
his long-awaited, blitz-like offensive on the Rhine near Wesel.
This would be the largest military operation in the west since D-Day.
One British soldier, Jim McCarthy, wrote in his diary.
''For some time now, units of one commando brigade
''have been sauntering about unconcerned, but they're ready to go.
''For that matter, so are we.
''Dusk and a dramatic increase in artillery barrage.
''The commandos cross over.''
There was this tremendous barrage that went on.
The barrage from all the 2nd British Army was concentrated on the Rhine.
The noise was tremendous.
We came from the assembly area,
went forward under this umbrella of noise and searchlights.
''Monty's moonlight,'' as they called it, bouncing off the clouds,
helping to let you see where you were going.
(NEW SPEAKER) Once we'd got to the bank, the infantry jumped ashore
and a lot of the poor lads landed on ''shoe mines''
and they would blow feet off and legs off.
There were some very nasty casualties.
Following the night-time crossing, paratroopers were dropped on the east bank of the Rhine,
right on the German defence line.
We looked upon the Rhine as the last major barrier to get over.
We felt that once that was done, things couldn't last much longer.
On March 27th, both British 2nd and U.S. 9th Armies had crossed the Rhine
under the operational command of Montgomery.
The Americans had a major bridgehead at Remagen
while General Patton had another between Mainz and Oppenheim.
Berlin, the prize, was now clearly in the Allies' sights.
As far as getting to Berlin,
we all hoped or wished that we could be part of that
because we felt that was the ultimate, the final battle.
(SHOUTS IN GERMAN)
As the Western Allies advanced further into Germany, opposition melted.
Everywhere, the soldiers witnessed symptoms of the German collapse.
(TOM RENOUF) By this time, the German army was very disorganised.
Even the hard core were beginning to have doubts.
They were beginning to think that it was a useless fight.
It was a useless loss of life.
(SOLDIER) Right, off with this!
(AMERICAN ACCENT) As you'd go through villages and towns,
the white flags were just popping out all the time - sheets, whatever.
And, of course, there were no Nazis left.
They had all gotten rid of their uniforms and they were farmers all of a sudden.
When news of mass German surrender reached Goebbels,
he warned Berliners how he would treat such behaviour,
as recorded by Rudolf Semmler on Goebbels' staff.
With the Allies across the Rhine,
the Nazi leadership knew the war was entering its final phase.
Hitler wanted all his armies around him to fight to the bitter end in the capital,
including his loyal commander Walter Model.
Rolf Munninger on Model's staff received a direct order from Hitler.
Model was to take his troops to Berlin.
(MAN SPEAKS GERMAN)
(TRANSLATOR) I found this order to be senseless
because we had no channel through which we could instruct the troops to carry out this order.
Model knew Hitler's request was impossible.
By now, American forces had surrounded his troops in the Ruhr
and for Model, there was only one way out.
He refused to consider American surrender proposals.
Instead, he issued orders sending his troops home and finally disbanded his army group.
(TRANSLATOR) I went to the barracks where Model was.
I can still see him to this day, pacing the floor like a tiger, to and fro, to and fro.
He was in despair. He could see no way out any more.
Rather than give himself up, Model walked out into a wood and shot himself.
''A German Field Marshal, '' he declared, ''does not become a prisoner. ''
(SHOUTS)
Come with me!
In the clean-up operation, the Allies captured 325,000 prisoners of the dying Reich.
It was the largest mass surrender of the war.
And the road to Berlin was now wide open for the Allies.
Stay alert, stay secure!
(DISTANT GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS)
With the Western Allies across the Rhine,
Monty, in charge of three armies, assumed that he would be the one pressing on to Berlin.
Then, on April 11th, the American 9th Army under Simpson reached the Elbe river.
They were now only 50 miles from the capital.
Their Soviet allies hadn't moved from the Oder.
Eisenhower's armies seemed almost as well placed as Stalin's to take Berlin.
(SPEAKS GERMAN)
(TRANSLATOR) In Berlin, we were desperate not to fall into the hands of the Russians.
We prayed that the Americans and the British would come.
But this was not to be.
Two weeks previously, Eisenhower had sent a telegram to Stalin,
telling him that the Red Army was free to take Berlin.
Churchill was horrified.
But he and Monty could do nothing,
even though many Allied soldiers shared their conviction
that Eisenhower had made the wrong decision.
We should have gone to Berlin.
Our corps at that time had two armoured divisions, the 4th and the 6th, the best,
four infantry divisions and a regimental... cavalry regiment which was practically an army.
We were on an autobahn. We could have gone right into Berlin.
But Eisenhower had his own reasons for leaving Berlin to the Soviets.
Berlin was very clearly within the Soviet zone,
so when the possibility arose that Eisenhower could move toward Berlin
and many people were urging him to move to Berlin, Ike demurred.
He saw no reason for risking a great many American casualties
by pushing well into the Soviet zone, only to have to turn around and back out.
So, Berlin, the heart of the Reich, would be left to the Red Army.
One and a half million men were massed in front of the Oder river.
(WOMAN SPEAKS RUSSIAN)
(TRANSLATOR) Of course, this was very prestigious
to finish such a terrible, such a devastating war in Berlin.
This war had required so much self-sacrifice and heroism.
As Allied bombers pulverised Berlin, the people waited in terror for the end.
(EXPLOSION)
(TRANSLATOR) We looked towards the Elbe where the Americans and British did not move.
And on the other side, we saw the steamroller of the Red Army.
(WOMAN SPEAKS GERMAN)
(TRANSLATOR) There was such a tiredness and helplessness and fatalism at the end.
The main desire of everybody was if it would just stop at long last.
Goebbels believed that he had to fight fear with fear
and coerce Berliners to carry on fighting by the most brutal means possible.
SS men hunted down deserters and shirkers.
(TRANSLATOR) It looked awful. They had used electric cords to hang him from a lamp-post.
He had a sign around his neck which said,
''I, Otto Meyer, was too cowardly to defend women and children.''
On April 16th, thousands of Soviet guns and mortars began a huge bombardment
of the approaches to Berlin.
(MAN SPEAKS RUSSIAN)
(TRANSLATOR) Many soldiers and officers who were with us in Berlin and the suburbs
had lost their families,
and, I'll be honest, many of them wanted to take revenge
for all that they had been through, for all their sorrow.
The excitement was high. Dayosh Berlin! It is in our hands. It was clear that we are taking it.
(MAN SPEAKS GERMAN)
(TRANSLATOR) The defence forces in Berlin were far too weak.
They were a group that had simply been thrown together.
I remember that the supply corps officer for the commander of Berlin was with me once
and he complained that he had 70 different types of rifles for his troops
and he had to find ammunition for these 70 different rifles.
Despite being ill-equipped, some of the fiercest resistance in Berlin came from the Hitler Youth,
a bloody testament to the success of Goebbels'propaganda.
(MAN SPEAKS GERMAN)
(TRANSLATOR) I got a clear impression of the Hitler Youth.
The westerly suburbs towards Spandau were only defended by the Hitler Youth,
boys of 15, 16 or younger, just children.
It seemed to me they were passionate. They felt that they were soldiers.
With the Soviets destroying Berlin,
it looked like Goebbels' grim predictions were coming true.
Many people wrote their wills and thousands turned to suicide.
Helmut Altner saw an old couple jumping into a river from a bridge in Berlin.
(TRANSLATOR) They jumped in. I couldn't save them. They wanted to be swept away.
The woman surfaced once and her husband pushed her back under. They both went down.
She had an old-fashioned little hat and it floated on the surface until the current swept it away.
With the Russians so close, even Goebbels began to think the unthinkable.
On 22nd April, he and his family packed up their belongings
and moved into the Reichs Chancellery bunker with Hitler.
Freytag von Loringhoven on Hitler's staff was in the bunker in those final days.
(FREYTAG VON LORINGHOVEN SPEAKS GERMAN)
(TRANSLATOR) I saw Frau Goebbels and her children coming down the steps into the bunker
and I have never forgotten seeing these children.
They were wearing dark coats and you could see their white, frightened faces.
Beneath eight metres of concrete,
the occupants of the Fuhrerbunker were waiting for the end.
(TRANSLATOR) People didn't have anything to do there.
Hitler himself wandered around the bunker. He was a wreck.
And always a main topic of conversation was how will I kill myself when the Russians come?
Should I shoot myself or should I take the cyanide capsules
which everyone had been given?
# Kalinka, kalinka, kalinka, moya Vsadu yagoda malinka... #
On the 25th of April, with the Red Army surrounding the city,
Soviet and American troops finally met up at Torgau on the Elbe.
It was nice to see them. I was happy to see them. That's the confirmation, that's the end.
(AMERICAN ACCENT) I couldn't get over the fact that every Russian soldier seemed to know
how to play either an accordion or a harmonica.
They had these choruses and they started singing.
They were all playing. It was one of the grand scenes of my life.
It appeared there was only one last person standing in the way of the joint moral vision
worked out at Yalta.
Five days later, with the Soviets no more than 100 metres away from the Reichstag,
that obstacle was removed.
Hitler committed suicide.
His body was burned and as the flames shot up, his staff stood to attention
and gave their leader a final Nazi salute.
Goebbels was next.
Hitler had offered that his children be flown out of Berlin to safety,
but Goebbels had refused.
His six children were poisoned
and he and his wife Magda committed suicide.
(SPEAKS GERMAN)
(TRANSLATOR) He had blind faith right until the end, and he proved it with his death.
Now other Berliners capitulated and awaited their fate.
(TRANSLATOR) I can only say I was totally empty.
I wasn't afraid.
I was empty, finished and didn't think of anything.
I was an object.
I just remember how we stumbled through this dreadful Berlin.
I saw dead horses lying around and dead people, dirt.
And Berlin stank of this dreadful Russian petrol.
At 5 p.m. on Sunday, 6th May,
the German Chief of Staff, Alfred August Jodl, arrived at Rheims
where Eisenhower had established his headquarters.
He was there to negotiate the end to hostilities.
Eisenhower refused to attend and stayed in his office upstairs.
He did not want to have to shake hands with a Nazi.
But then came the first hint of problems to come.
- Are you prepared to surrender on all fronts? - We are...
That's totally unacceptable. You must surrender on all fronts.
Unconditionally.
You tell them that 48 hours from midnight tonight,
I will close down my lines on the Western front, so no more Germans can get through,
whether they sign or not, no matter how much time they take.
But Jodl had managed to buy 48 hours
and in that time several thousand German troops were able to flee from the Soviets
and surrender to the British and Americans.
We were surprised at the soldiers trying desperately to surrender to us,
constantly in our direction.
We were at a total loss for this, we were surprised.
We thought the Russians were our allies. We really had no idea.
But they were desperate to surrender to us.
By midnight on 7th May, it was finally all over.
Jodl was ready to surrender.
But treating the defeated Germans with generosity was hard for the Allies
in the face of what they had learnt about the regime.
As Jodl left Rheims, he was presented with a copy of ''Stars and Stripes'',
containing pictures taken in Buchenwald concentration camp.
As well as Buchenwald, the Western Allies had liberated several other camps in Germany,
including Dachau and Belsen.
It was terrible.
I mean, the number of dead there...
You couldn't look anywhere, but there were dead bodies, people dying.
I went and looked. I didn't go into the hut. I just couldn't.
We'd been trained for battle injuries. That was one thing.
In this case, to see all the dead there when we got there
and for us not to be able to do anything for them because of the situation they were in,
I mean, it was terrible, and, er...
..that upset a lot of...
Cut, please...
The existence of the camps was considered sufficiently important
for General Eisenhower and his top commanders, General Patton and Bradley,
to see for themselves.
As Eisenhower said after the discovery of the camps.
''We're told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for.
''Now at least he will know what he is fighting against.''
On 8th May, the war in Europe was finally over.
The formula of unconditional surrender that the Allies had insisted on had now been achieved.
Europeans could put the horrors of the last five years behind them
and celebrate what was to come.
We suddenly realised that it was all over.
That you could hear the birds singing instead of listening for mortar bombs.
That you could smell the flowers
instead of smelling dying bodies and cordite.
That you didn't have to gear everything to trying to survive.
It was like being born again, as it were.
Like a death sentence had been lifted and you were so happy that you had survived.
Across Europe, ordinary Soviet, American and British soldiers partied.
They had finally seen off Hitler.
(TRANSLATOR) And of course we were expecting the war to end, but it was so sudden.
We were so excited.
We didn't exchange a single word.
Each of us was thinking our own thoughts.
But not everyone was celebrating.
On V.E. night,
I had a number of people from different central European countries in my troop,
and everybody was making whoopee, but they weren't.
And I sat with them, there were about 15 of us, and they were as miserable as anything
because they said, ''This place is going to crumble now.
''You don't understand what the Russians are going to do. You're too naive.''
And soon, there were beginning to be serious doubts
as to whether the declarations of Yalta would ever be implemented.
We in the map room were receiving reports from American observers,
military liaison officers in Eastern Europe
about the behaviour of the Soviets toward prisoners,
toward the civilian population, toward the prospective governments
which were supposed to be freely and democratically elected.
(ENGLISH ACCENT) We had gone to war originally to protect Poland,
to defy German aggression against Poland,
and we were ending the war with a Poland
which was virtually occupied by the Russians
and where the preponderant power in Europe was that of the Soviet Union.
To defeat one dictator, Hitler,
Churchill and Roosevelt had been obliged to make common cause with another, Stalin.
In the days following after the fall,
the bonds forged in war and around the conference table would begin to collapse
in the ruins of Berlin.
At the beginning of July, American and British troops finally marched into Berlin.
It should have been a moment of triumph,
the grand alliance together in the capital of Hitler's Reich.
But it had been the Red Army who had captured the German capital.
The Nazi slogans on the walls had gone, but they had been replaced by Soviet ones.
As you went through the gate into the eastern zone, which we were allowed to do at that time,
the first thing you saw was a picture of Stalin.
It was Stalin, Stalin, Stalin everywhere.
The Allies found a city in chaos.
The Red Army had embarked on an orgy of looting and raping.
Thousands of women had been raped in the capital alone.
I slept with a revolver under my pillow
because in the very first few days in Berlin, there were Russian soldiers everywhere,
apparently quite out of control, going up and down our street.
And they were just shooting off,
the way victorious troops customarily sort of just fire off into the air and shout and sing,
and they were all absolutely as drunk as lords.
The Western Allies began to realise
that their idealistic dream of a new European order was not to be.
The government view was coming to be
that the Russians were no longer our best friends and our close allies
to whom we owed everything, but they were still allies,
but people that we had to be extremely wary of, people who were not to be trusted
and who would spy on us and that we had to be extremely careful of.
(BILL BELLAMY) I remember meeting these Russian soldiers in the park
and they were carrying a sack and when they opened it with great pride, it was full of silver.
And I was horrified because it was obviously looted,
to which the young officer turned round and said, ''We fought this bloody war,
''we won Berlin and captured it.
''You can do what you like, but you'll be the next people we'll fight.''
He said it very viciously and we felt very uncomfortable,
but we smiled, parted and felt that we were all watching our backs as we left them.
The Western Allies had dreamt of a new European order
to be built after the defeat of the Nazis.
They thought they were united in a common cause, but they had reckoned without Stalin,
who had chosen to turn his back on promises he had made at Yalta.
With Western hopes in tatters,
it fell to Britain's war leader, Winston Churchill, to unwittingly echo Goebbels' words
as he described the parlous state of post-war Europe.
From Stettin in the Baltic
to Trieste in the Adriatic,
an iron curtain has descended across the continent.
This is certainly not the liberated Europe we fought to build up.
Nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace.