World War II: Up Close and Personal

The horrors of Nazi Germany are one hallmark of World War II; pondering how ordinary German citizens find themselves participating in such heinous events; going inside the propaganda machine of Hitler's Germany; seeing how it targets the youth.

The origins of World War II lie in Asia in 1931; tracing the invasion of 1937 and the Rape of Nanjing; witnessing the events through the eyes of a Chinese soldier and a Japanese journalist, young men who bear witness to the flesh and blood of battle.

In addition to the story of people, World War II is the story of technology; perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than the tanks Germany uses to barrel across Poland and France in "lightning warfare"; how new technology defeats the old ways of war.

Wartime Warsaw offers a gateway to the darkest events of the war; bearing witness as the city's Jews are rounded up and put in the ghetto, where the specter of disease and starvation always looms; stories from several of the ghetto's inhabitants.

In Nazi-occupied France, informants create an environment of paranoia and fear, yet some people offer resistance in ways big and small; revisiting the legacy of the French Resistance to experience life under the Nazi boot.

Shifting one's attention across the English Channel, where Britain faces the Nazi war machine alone; tracing the war in London through the eyes of a Jewish child in the East End, a bureaucrat performing unglamorous duties and a young Oxford student.