1939-1945

Discover the hidden secrets of World War II. What if Hitler had the A-bomb? Why did Japan's sneak attack on Pearl Harbor fail? Could the kamikazes have turned the tide of the war in the Pacific?.

After one of the most notorious sneak attacks in military history, join national Geographic for an exploration of the still unsolved mysteries and startling true stories behind the "day of infamy" that plunged the United States into World War II!.

Hitler's Reich spawned a welter of organizations that conducted espionage and counterespionage. As was often the case in the Nazi bureaucracy, these secret services rarely cooperated with one another and frequently worked at cross-purposes. The leaders of these clandestine organizations were complex, ambitious men who vied for power, scarcely hesitating to discredit a rival in the Machiavellian struggle for supremacy in the German shadow world.

In the waning months of the war, German measures against the Dutch grew more and more harsh. Raids increased in frequency and ferocity. House-to-house searches flushed out suspected Resistance members, who were deported to work camps or shot. The Nazis starting mining the nation's remaining dikes in preparation for a last ditch stand. In April they blew up the great polder of Wieringermeer, rendering thousands of people homeless.

The battered Axis survivors who escaped the Allied net in North Africa withdrew across 100 miles of water to Sicily, where they dug in to wait for their enemy. The Mediterranean was now an Allied sea, and the Anglo-American forces were massing a mighty, battle-hardened armada to spearhead a new campaign against the Axis in its home territory - Italy.

Examines the groundbreaking Nuremberg Trials. Beginning with Vietnam's My Lai Massacre , the video reviews the disputed conviction of Lt. William Calley, then explores the heated trial of concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk.

On November 8, 1942, Nazi soldiers rounded up the Jews living in a shtetl, a small village, in Bransk, Poland, and ordered the town's farmers to provide horse wagons to transport them to a nearby train station. Within 24 hours, 2500 Jews from Bransk died in Treblinka's gas chambers. Their shtetl died with them. A haunting account of the tragedy and its legacy emerges as townspeople from Bransk and Polish Americans, both Jew and Gentile, share their pohotographs and stories. Today in Bransk there are no Jews and many residents choose to forget. Interviews in America with immigrants from Bransk create a vivid portrait of a lost community and continuing conflict over who should take responsibility.

In 1941, the German army invaded the small town of Eishyshok, Poland (now Lithuania) and brutally murdered nearly all 3,500 Jewish residents. Fifty-six years after the massacre, There Once Was a Town chronicles the remarkable journey of four of the town's survivors and their families as they return home.

Over half a century after their imprisonment, veteran Allied P.O.Ws (as well as some of their German guards) return to Colditz to reveal the daring schemes and ingenius devices that helped over 300 prisoners attempt breakouts.

Testimonies - some of the earliest ever recorded - and rare archival footage reveal the Nazi era through the memories of those who were there: a Hitler youth, a Jesuit priest, resistance fighters, death camp survivors, American POW's, liberators.