WWII: Operation Barbarossa

PBS: UK PREMIERE Starts Wednesday 30 July at 8.15pm

In June 1941, after a series of easy victories in western Europe, German troops prepared to leave for a secret operation in the East, sure that they would be back home before Christmas. How could they have imagined they were about to embark on a campaign of unprecedented violence, which would claim six million lives in the space of a few months?

Under the code name ‘Barbarossa’, Nazi Germany invaded the USSR, breaking the non-aggression pact signed two years earlier and sealing the combatants’ fate.

Soldiers and civilians, on both sides, recorded their experiences in the form of amateur films, letters and diaries. Countering official accounts and state propaganda, they reveal another side of the conflict, on a human scale.