Orders to Kill

World War Two: A Timewatch Guide

Professor Saul David uses the BBC archive to chart the history of the world's most destructive war, by chronicling how the story of the battle has changed. As new information has come to light, and forgotten stories are remembered, the history of World War Two evolves. The BBC has followed that evolution, and this programme examines the most important stories, and how our understanding of them has been re-defined since the war ended over 70 years ago.

Benito Mussolini: Anatomy of a Dictator

The English Patient

In the 1930s, Count Almásy is a Hungarian map maker employed by the Royal Geographical Society to chart the vast expanses of the Sahara Desert along with several other prominent explorers. As World War II unfolds, Almásy enters into a world of love, betrayal, and politics.

The Pianist

The true story of pianist Władysław Szpilman's experiences in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation. When the Jews of the city find themselves forced into a ghetto, Szpilman finds work playing in a café; and when his family is deported in 1942, he stays behind, works for a while as a laborer, and eventually goes into hiding in the ruins of the war-torn city.

Schindler's List

The true story of how businessman Oskar Schindler saved over a thousand Jewish lives from the Nazis while they worked as slaves in his factory during World War II.

Drei Tage im April

Shortly before the end of the war in 1945, the Allies can already be heard in Nesselbühl in Swabia when three freight cars are uncoupled at the station. The screams of the starving concentration camp prisoners inside can be heard throughout the village, but nobody dares to help them. Only the innkeeper's daughter Anna takes heart...

Rome, Open City

During the Nazi occupation of 1944 Rome, Resistance leader Giorgio Manfredi is pursued by the Nazis as he seeks refuge and a means of escape.

Casablanca

In Casablanca, Morocco in December 1941, a cynical American expatriate meets a former lover, with unforeseen complications.

1944: Should We Bomb Auschwitz?

In 1944, two prisoners miraculously escaped from Auschwitz. They told the world of the horror of the Holocaust and raised one of the greatest moral questions of the 20th century.

Das Boot

A German submarine hunts allied ships during the Second World War, but it soon becomes the hunted. The crew tries to survive below the surface, while stretching both the boat and themselves to their limits.

Freud's Last Session

On the eve of the Second World War, two of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud converge for their own personal battle over the existence of God. The film interweaves the lives of Freud and Lewis, past, present, and through fantasy, bursting from the confines of Freud’s study on a dynamic journey.

Ford at Pearl

A look at the recently discovered fascinating behind the scenes footage shot by the legendary Hollywood director John Ford at Pearl Harbor in 1942 while filming his popular World War II documentaries December 7th and The Battle of Midway.

The Diary of Anne Frank

The true, harrowing story of a young Jewish girl who, with her family and their friends, is forced into hiding in an attic in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.

Monsieur Batignole

In 1942, in an occupied Paris, the apolitical grocer Edmond Batignole lives with his wife and daughter in a small apartment in the building of his grocery. When his future son-in-law and collaborator of the German Pierre-Jean Lamour calls the Nazis to arrest the Jewish Bernstein family, they move to the confiscated apartment. Some days later, the young Simon Bernstein escapes from the Germans and comes to his former home. When Batignole finds him, he feels sorry for the boy and lodges him, hiding Simon from Pierre-Jean and also from his wife. Later, two cousins of Simon meet him in the cellar of the grocery. When Pierre-Jean finds the children, Batignole decides to travel with the children to Switzerland.

Jakob the Liar

In 1944 Poland, a Jewish shop keeper named Jakob is summoned to ghetto headquarters after being caught out after curfew. While waiting for the German Kommondant, Jakob overhears a German radio broadcast about Russian troop movements. Returned to the ghetto, the shopkeeper shares his information with a friend and then rumors fly that there is a secret radio within the ghetto.

God Does Not Believe in Us Anymore

After his father is murdered by the Nazis in 1938, a young Viennese Jew named Ferry Tobler flees to Prague, where he joins forces with another expatriate and a sympathetic Czech relief worker. Together with other Jewish refugees, the three make their way to Paris, and, after spending time in a French prison camp, eventually escape to Marseille, from where they hope to sail to a safe port.

Leningrad

When in 1941 Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, their troops quickly besieged Leningrad. Foreign journalists are evacuated but one of them, Kate Davies, is presumed dead and misses the plane. Alone in the city she is helped by Nina Tsvetnova a young and idealist police officer and together they will fight for their own survival and the survival of the people in the besieged Leningrad.

Nuremberg

In postwar Germany, an American psychiatrist must determine whether Nazi prisoners are fit to go on trial for war crimes, and finds himself in a complex battle of intellect and ethics with Hermann Göring, Hitler's right-hand man.

Alan & Naomi

When Naomi, a young refugee from Nazi-occupied Paris, moves into Alan Silverman’s building in New York, he does his best to avoid her. But despite Naomi's strange behavior and the language barrier, they slowly develop a deep and touching friendship.

Steps Through the Mist

After breaking the enemy's rings, a partisan batch is left only with three wounded and two healthy fighters. Through his binoculars, the German captain Anders monitors the surviving soldiers who are walking through the fog in an effort to reach their brigade. Anders quietly starts a manhunt on wounded while anticipating their physical and mental exhaustion.