Loved Ones: Channel 4, Sunday, April 30, 1.15pm. The first in a week-long series of personal testimonies from people who lost friends or relatives in the war, including a Welsh teacher whose father died in the merchant navy when he was nine years old, and who subsequently reconciled himself to the loss by getting to know the family of the U-boat captain responsible for the sinking in which he died.
Hitler’s Death The Final Report: BBC1, Sunday, April 30, 9.05pm. In February 1946 Stalin ordered a definitive investigation into the final days and death of Adolf Hitler and the evidence gathered remained hidden in a Moscow archive until the collapse of the Communist regime. This documentary records how a Soviet counter-intelligence unit found and secretly buried Hitler’s body and how those present in Hitler’s bunker in the final days of the war were brought to Moscow for interrogation to ensure that Hitler, and not a double, had really died. Parts of Hitler’s skull, showing a bullet hole, remained unburied and were brought to Moscow where, the programme shows, they are still kept in a state archive in a brown paper bag.
Rewind: BBC1, Monday, May 1, 5.35pm. A history series for children which takes young viewers back in time to May 1945 and the days leading up to VE Day. Adults recall their own experiences of VE Day as children, showing how it felt. The programme will run at this time every day this week and will include the memories of people who were children in wartime Britain, German and occupied Europe.
News ‘45: BBC1, Tuesday, May 2, 9.50pm. Sue Lawley presents six daily programmes, beginning today, reporting on the war’s closing days, using the format of a news programme. Newsreel, radio reports and press stories are combined to tell the day’s events from 50 years ago, using reports from today’s BBC news correspondents.
Timewatch Hitler’s Secret Weapon: BBC2, Wednesday, May 3, 7pm. In London alone more than 25,000 homes were destroyed by V-bombs, pilotless rockets that were sent over the Channel to crash indiscriminately into centres of population. This documentary shows the scientific ingenuity and destruction wreaked by the V1 and V2 bombs the first rockets to travel faster than the speed of sound.
VE Day 50: BBC1, Friday, May 5, 11.05am. A mix of documentaries, outside broadcasts and special reports make up 10 hours of VE Day television, including coverage of the commemorative events in Hyde Park.
When Men Refuse to Fight: BBC2, Friday, May 5, 8pm. There were 60,000 conscientious objectors in Britain during the Second World War and this programme reports on their experience as pacifists during war. Many were imprisoned and one recalls how he volunteered to be a human guinea pig, being used for medical research. This included regularly having his leg cut open, stitched up and then cut open again, to study the process of healing.
