Europe in the 1920s and 1930s – a continent licks its wounds after the devastation of WWI. In this fertile breeding ground for dissent, authoritarian regimes are on the rise.
The Abyss: Rise And Fall Of The Nazis takes a fresh look at the Third Reich from a global and current perspective. It tells us how the Nazis managed to conquer Germany and then half of Europe within a few years. How could that be, with the horrors of World War I still so fresh? Why did it take so long before they were stopped?
A combination of previously unpublished archive material, historic sources and an international team of experts paint a new picture of Hitler’s regime. The series unpicks the complex sequence of events that boosted a new regime, allowing violence and brutality to unfold on an unbelievable scale.
Series One, Episode Six: Up In Flames (1936-1940) Sunday, 6 March at 5.30pm
At the end of 1939, the German ‘Wehrmacht’ has invaded Poland. The army is followed closely by the SS (Schutzstaffel) task forces, which have only one mission – to murder the Polish intelligence to fulfill Hitler’s idea of a ‘hard national struggle without legal bindings’. Thousands of people fell victim to them. It is wrong to imagine that the Nazi war of extermination started in the Soviet Union. However, was it possible to prevent WWII?
The Abyss: Rise And Fall Of The Nazis – New Episodes/From Sunday, 5 March at 5.30pm on SBS and SBS on Demand (10 Parts)
