The Last Days of World War II (History Channel)
The Last Days of World War IIis actually three separate and outstanding History Channel documentaries about the horrifying, surreal violence that marked the decisive months of the war in Europe. The first film begins with Hitler's declaration that the Third Reich would last 1,000 years, yet by 1945 Germany was losing on every major battlefront. Still, tens of thousands of civilian and military lives would be lost before fighting ceased: in the Battle of the Bulge, pitting 600,000 Allied troops against a Nazi surge in Belgium; in Dresden, where Allied bombers spent days fire-bombing women and children; in the subway tunnels of Berlin, where refugees were drowned when a paranoid, sleepless Hitler ordered them flooded to stave off Russian soldiers. Plentiful interviews with former officers on all sides of the war, commentary by historians, and remarkable footage of battles, concentration camps, and the Nuremberg trials make this a compelling narrative rich with enlightening details.A second disc includes a superb piece about the destruction of a U.S. Navy submarine-chaser off the coast of Maine, and a strategic cover-up that denied, for more than 60 years, that the ship was torpedoed by a German U-Boat. Finally, the story of the German-Japanese alliance, and the role of a geography professor named Karl Haushofer (who coined the phrase "geopolitics") in a number of key wartime events, make a fascinating subject for the final production.--Tom Keogh