Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1261 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-08-24
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Box set, Black & White, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 11
• Running time: 1357 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
Sir Jeremy Isaacs highly deserves the numerous awards for documentaries he has earned: the Royal Television Society's Desmond Davis Award, l'Ordre National du Mérit, an Emmy, and a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II. His epic The World at War remains unsurpassed as the definitive visual history of World War II.

The Second World War was different from other wars in thousands of ways, one of which was the unparalleled scope of visual documents kept by the Axis and Allies of all their activities. As a result, this war is understood as much through written histories as it is through its powerful images. The Nazis were particularly thorough in documenting even the most abhorrent of the atrocities they were committing--in a surprising amount of color footage. The World at War was one of the first television documentaries that exploited these resources so completely, giving viewers an unbelievable visual guide to the greatest event in the 20th century. This is to say nothing of the excellent, comprehensible narrative. Some highlights:

• A New Germany 1933-39: early German and Nazi documentation of Hitler's rise to power through the impending attack on Poland
• Whirlwind: the early British losses in the blitz in the skies over Britain and in North Africa
• Stalingrad: the turning point of the war and Germany's first defeat
• Inside the Reich--Germany 1940-44: one of the most fascinating documentaries that exists on life inside Nazi Germany, from Lebensborn to the Hitler Youth
• Morning: prior to Saving Private Ryan, one of the only unromanticized views of the Normandy invasion
• Genocide: this film is one of the most widely shown introductions to the Holocaust
• Japan 1941-45: although The World at War is decidedly focused more on the European theater, this is an important look into wartime Japan and its expansion--early 20th-century history that lead to Japan's role in World War II is superficial
• The bomb: another widely shown documentary of the Manhattan Project, the Enola Gay, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki

The World at War will remain the definitive visual history of World War II, analogous to Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. No serious historian should be missing The World at War in a collection, and no student should leave school without having seen at least some of its salient episodes. Rarely is film so essential. --Erik J. Macki

Customer Reviews

The authoritative series on The Second World War
The World at War Series is the authoritative review of the Second World War to which all other series must measure up to. It is by far the best!

The definitive account of the worst war in history
I mentioned to one of my friends when I ordered this series that I wanted to learn more about World War II. I had always known that World War II was terrible, but watching The World at War, I realised that I had not known the extent of how terrible it truly was. This experience has had a significant impact on me, and is not one that I will forget quickly.

The scale of World War II was staggering. 50 million people lost their lives, including 20 million Russians. At least 14 million Jews, Poles, Slavs, gypsies, homosexuals, political dissidents and others were murdered by the SS and their supporters, most in the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Dachau and the like, names which have become synonymous with unspeakable horror and infamy. Whole cities (or large parts thereof), such as Warsaw, Stalingrad, Nagasaki and Hamburg, to name just a few, were razed, acts that involved the indiscriminate slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians. The World at War covers the devastation waged on these, and other, cities.

One thing I always remember from when I first watched this series, as a young boy in the 70s, is the opening music by Carl Davis, which is perfectly suited to the subject matter. Another thing I always remember about the opening is the very effective use of the various human faces fading into each other, and being engulfed by flames. I especially remember the face of the little boy.

Some of the episodes I found the most gripping include the following: The Final Solution Parts 1 and 2; Warrior; Morning: June - August 1944 (about the Allied invasion of Normandy); Occupation: Holland 1940 - 1944; and Hitler's Germany: Total War 1939 - 1945. Of these, the episodes I found the most disturbing were The Final Solution Parts 1 and 2, about the Holocaust, and Warrior, an episode about soldiers and battle, which includes uncompromising and confronting archival footage, such as a scene showing a group of European soldiers unceremoniously tossing a comrade's corpse onto a stretcher and then into an open grave, and footage of the flame throwers the US soldiers used. I remember thinking when I watched the movie Saving Private Ryan, which also depicts the use of these weapons, that most people would be hesitant to use such cruel measures on a nest of cockroaches, let alone other human beings. I also found the images at the beginning of disc 5 particularly chilling, such as a young girl in Holland standing under an anti-Semitic sign reading `Voor Joden verboden' - `Prohibited for Jews'.

One of the most notable aspects of the series is the inclusion of many fascinating, and unbiased, interviews with people from both the Allied and Axis nations, including the following:

- Interviews with Traudl Junge, Hitler's secretary

- An interview with Richard Boch, an apparently reluctant SS officer, in which he recounts a conversation he had with a colleague whilst witnessing children who were hiding under piles of clothing being flung into the `showers' during a late-night gassing: `argh, I'm going to be sick, I can't stand this. Oh my', I said, `Karl, I've never seen anything like it in my life, it's absolutely terrible'. His friend later replied `you do get used to anything in time'.

- An interview with Lord Avon, Foreign Minister of the British parliament at the time, in which he comments on the persecution of the Jews: `as the war progressed, some horrifying reports began to come out, and at first, it was very difficult naturally, to assess their accuracy, and they were indeed so horrible that it was hard to believe they could be true'.

- An interview with a German translator, Hildegard Wortmann, in which she talks about hearing of Hitler's suicide: `I was so disappointed that he was such a lousy, such a rotten coward, he had started the war, millions of dead people, everything was lost, in ruins, then he wanted to give up all responsibility and he just committed suicide, just like his mouthpiece Goebbels, I still hear Goebbels in my ears, do you want the total war, the yelling'.

I have only a few minor criticisms of the series, for example, I was somewhat surprised that Josef Mengele, the despicable Nazi `doctor' responsible for performing monstrous experiments on sets of twins, was never specifically mentioned. However, the series overall is so brilliant that any minor criticisms cannot detract from the 5-star rating it so manifestly deserves. It is undoubtedly the definitive documentary of World War II, and you could most definitely not buy any other Word War II documentary and acquire a solid knowledge of the events that unfolded. It is the most expensive item I have purchased on Amazon to date, but it was worth every cent.

The dark nightmare that was World War II embodied the most ghastly evil and blackest period that mankind has ever known, a reality accentuated by every episode of The World at War. The extremes of carnage, destruction and human suffering that the War entailed must never be forgotten, not in 50 years, not in 100 years, not in 500 years. The Holocaust, in particular, was utterly demonic, and although the ovens of Auschwitz, the most notorious death camp of all, are forever silenced, its physical entity remains as the Russians found it in January 1945, a reminder to the world of the depraved brutality that racism and bigotry can ultimately lead to. This can be summed up no better than by the powerful and indelible words which end The Final Solution - Part 2: `The ruins of Auschwitz are more than a memorial. As long as there is political intolerance, religious bigotry, racial prejudice, they are a warning. A warning that we all have a responsibility to see - that no-one builds another Auschwitz'.

Not detailed
This is a pretty good history of the Word War II period, and a very good compilation of contemporary films. But it's not up to the level of a serious history of the military or political aspects of the conflict. By comparison, the 1994 television series "Battlefield: World War II" is a lot more intelligent and provides better detail of the actual military campaigns.