Countdown to Surrender – The Last 100 Days, review: a WW2 series told from the German perspective

Countdown to Surrender – The Last 100 Days (PBS America) is an excellent documentary series about the end of the Second World War. The unusual thing is that the story is told from the German perspective. It is made by a German production company and most of the contributors are German historians (Antony Beevor was a notable exception).

This means that, to a British audience, the content feels different to what we’ve seen before. It was Dominic Sandbrook who wrote, not so many years ago, that “the military history of the Second World War has become crushingly, exhaustingly overfamiliar”.

The framing is methodical: a countdown from January 28, 1945. By the time this first episode finished, there were still 66 days to go until the war’s end. We were taken through the military manoeuvres and Hitler losing his grip, but we also gained insight into civilian lives.

Even with just 100 days to go, ordinary Germans were largely ignorant of what was happening, thanks to the Third Reich’s propaganda machine. “The population is not yet aware of the strength of the advancing troops,” read one military report. A young man serving in the Luftwaffe must have known more, yet still wrote to his wife: “I am consumed with joy and tears fill my eyes with gratitude that we have our Führer, who raises us so high above all.”

Of course, this can only be a partial history, compressed into three hours. But, as with the best history books, events were brought to life by the inclusion of individual stories. For example: we learned that a US air assault on Berlin in February 1945 killed Roland Freisler, a “fanatical” Nazi judge who had sent 2,600 people to their deaths including the 21-year-old resistance fighter Sophie Scholl.

The programme was as dispassionate as it could be, both in reporting the Dresden bombing and the brutality of the Red Army. A historian suggested that the Russian peasant soldiers were motivated by fury at finding Germany to be a country of relative comforts. “They have porcelain and curtains… what in God’s name do they want from us?” one soldier wrote.

There was one bit of mischief: a repeat of the anecdote written by Field Marshal Alanbrooke in his diaries that Churchill urinated on the Siegfried Line. But in a TV landscape where so many history documentaries take a headline-grabbing position, the series felt like a serious piece of work. It continues tonight and tomorrow.