Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4363 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-04-25
• Rating: Exempt
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 12
• Running time: 999 minutes

Synopsis
This 12-disc box set contains the following volumes
The Nazis: A Warning from History (2 Discs)
The Road to War (1 Disc)
The ideology and murderous excesses of the Nazi Party's 12-year reign of terror is examined in "The Nazis: A Warning from History". "The Road to War" considers the build-up to the conflict and explains how the major nations found confrontation inevitable.

Dunkirk (1 Disc)
War of the Century - When Hitler Fought Stalin (1 disc)
Battle of the Atlantic (1 Disc)
The drama-documentary "Dunkirk" tells the stories of the miraculous evacuation of thousands of servicemen from France, while "War of the Century: When Hitler Fought Stalin" reveals the true horrors of the war on the Eastern Front and "Battle of the Atlantic" details German U-boats' attempts to starve Britain into submission.

Horror in the East (1 Disc)
Battlefields (1 Disc)
D-Day (1 Disc)
The 'barbaric' psychology of the Japanese forces is examined in "Horror in the East" and the inimitable Professor Richard Holmes uncovers the conflict's major campaigns in "Battlefields", while dramatic reconstructions and personal testimony of the Allied invasion make up the compelling D-Day.

D-Day to Berlin (1 Disc)
Auschwitz - The Nazis and 'The Final Solution' (2 Discs)
"D-Day to Berlin" documents 'Operation Market Garden', 'The Battle of the Bulge' and the discovery of the concentration camps, a horror analysed in detail by the acclaimed documentary "Auschwitz: The Nazis and 'The Final Solution'".

Customer Reviews

A top quality selection of BBC documentaries
This selection of BBC documentaries, which have all been shown as individual separate TV series, provide thoughtful intelligent insight into several of the major pivotal events throughout WW2, which were instrumental in shaping its final outcome.
The standard of the individual programs is up to the usual high professional quality you would expect from BBC productions, being well researched and delivering on the whole an impartial and balanced overview of the subject matter.
Using actual film footage - much of which has not been seen before, these varied presentations combine many in depth, personal eyewitness accounts with excellent narrative and in some cases dramatic reconstructions.
The overall effect is to present the viewer with a selection of several quite separate, informative and entertaining series of individual presentations which span many theatres of operation and help create a greater and deeper understanding of the main events which changed the 20th century.
If you are a history buff then this series is for you, whilst several of the individual series are available separately, such as "The Nazis - A warning from history" many such as the outstanding 4 part "Battlefields" (presented by Richard Holmes) and "Battle of the Atlantic" never were until now.
In short this is an excellent collection that will provide you with many hours of top quality viewing to be enjoyed time and time again.
The only one drawback is the massive price, which would tend to put many potential buyers off - or at least make them look elsewhere for a better offer.

Solid but not complete
A solid collection of some of the best series the BBC have produced on this subject matter.

Disappointing in that the excellent 'The Road To War' series, written by the incisive Charles Wheeler (eminent former stalwart of Newsnight,) only includes four of the eight episodes from that series.

The episodes relating to Great Britain, Japan, Italy and the USA are here, but four episodes which are somewhat critical in the broader insight given by this series are arbitrarily and perplexingly omitted. Namely those concerning Germany, Russia and France and the final episode devoted to a summation and overview of the couple of years prior to the outbreak of war.

Top notch
BBC at its best. With quite a number of WW2 DVD's out there BBC always stands out from the rest. Unlike The World at War (Thames Television) or The Great War (BBC) this isn't one complete show but several series collected togeather. Therefore they lack uniformity and complete overview but individually they stand out and stay quite focused. The two best Series are Nazis a Warning from History - an account of how can humans become monsters and The War in the Atlantic - a superb series that give such a terrific overview and understanding of the war in the North Atlantic.

Some of the shows mix newly made acted recreations of events that bring the subjesct to life mixed in with WW2 footage and interviews with veteran's. And it is the veteran's that are the strongest part of all the shows. Men from privates to majors, from comercial sailors to U-boat Captains, telling tales of first hand experience. Most of the series where made around the year 2000 and every year more and more of the people that lived through the war pass away. And soon we will no longer have series such as these...

The price is high but with around 26 hours of quality television programming - you get you pennies worth.