World War II: Behind Closed Doors

After the Battle of Poland, Stalin and Hitler devised the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, assuring non-aggression between the two nations. But 1941 saw the start of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. What changed in the relationship between Hitler and Stalin? This landmark documentary uses recently unearthed archive material and dramatic reconstruction to reveal what happened.

In 1941, having been betrayed by Hitler, Stalin switched his allegiance to Britain and America. This alliance was purely based on military pragmatism. Churchill despised only Nazism above Communism, while the Soviet leader knew the Red Army was ill equipped to cope with the Nazi onslaught alone. A fragile and unlikely agreement between the nations would ultimately lead to Hitler’s downfall.

The personal animosity between Churchill and Stalin, based on more than just political differences, threatened their first meeting in August 1942. Having already been betrayed by Hitler, the Soviet leader deeply mistrusted his new allies. New evidence and testimony show the extraordinary lengths he attempted to hide war crimes from them, plus his desire to regain lost Polish land.

This is the extraordinary story of the first meeting between the 'Big Three', Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, at Tehran. Records of secret meetings reveal the British prime minister thought he could persuade the Soviets to allow an independent government in Poland, the nation that the UK had gone into the war to protect. But efforts to play politics threatened the integrity of the alliance.

The alliance between Britain, America and the USSR was starting to collapse as the Second World War entered its final stages. As Stalin's Red Army began to make progress against the Nazis in Poland and Hungary, the key questions was whether they were liberators or occupiers. With preparations for the peacetime redrawing of Europe's borders, new evidence shows Churchill losing patience.

At the end of the war, the Soviets were denying millions of Europeans the freedoms which many in the West thought they’d been fighting to protect. The once-vital ally, the USSR, soon became the enemy, as the people of Eastern Europe swapped one tyranny for another. Archive material reveals how the Soviet Union began using a notorious Nazi concentration camp for its own prisoners.