This is World War II in Britain and Germany as it has rarely been seen,
through the lens of home movie-makers.
Some were soldiers who took their cameras to the front line
and filmed men at war.
Others were ordinary families,
who recorded everyday life on the home front.
At first, they filmed the novelty of war.
We were just exuberant, because we thought it was fun, you know,
lights going off, aircraft going over and real big bangs suddenly.
To boys that's fun. And if you're born into it, that's all you know.
But they did more.
German and British home-movie makers continued to film,
even when death and destruction came to their own doorsteps.
TRANSLATION: Today, when I look at the films
my father made during the war,
I'm often surprised to see how bad things looked
because the memories I have from my childhood aren't that bad at all.
These remarkable amateur films
and the stories of the children in them take us into the heart
of their wartime experiences
and show us how they survived these extraordinary times.
CHAMBERLAIN: This morning, the British ambassador in Berlin
handed the German government a final note,
stating that unless we heard from them by them eleven o'clock that they
were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland,
a state of war would exist between us.
September 3rd, 1939. Children with their parents holidaying
in Cornwall stopped to listen to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain.
This dramatic moment when peace became war
was captured on a home-movie camera.
I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received
and that consequently, this country is at war with Germany.
Families and friends have discovered these films,
and they've started to bring them in in great numbers.
I think what's extraordinary is something like this captured those
intimate moments of wartime domestic history,
reflecting everything that was going around in a community or in a home,
from what the children were wearing
to how the streets were looking, the architecture,
all those aspects of life during wartime that government films
and propaganda weren't concentrating on.
I know we think we've got sort of small cameras now,
but, you know, it's all in here. So film, wound up,
no batteries, simple winding mechanism,
very straightforward lens and viewer and off you go.
And armed with their cameras,
off went some parents to film the novelty of war.
Gas masks had been issued in 1938.
There's a woman called Kathleen Lockwood,
and she shot in black and white
children in her village putting on their gas masks.
This would have been done for a number of different reasons.
One to capture that actual moment, but two to project it back as,
in terms of, not exactly propaganda,
but that way of moulding together a community and saying,
"Look, our children are doing this.
What are we doing for the war effort?"
Oh, it's a real one! Ah, child-size.
Oh, I remember that smell.
Oh, God, that brings it back.
That smell. Smell of rubber. Suppose people pay for that these days.
You can cut that!
Bob Barling was seven years old and living in North London
when his mother gave him his mask.
They come out with this idea of a Mickey Mouse gas mask.
The American ones were shaped like Mickey Mouse,
natural with ears and everything.
Our ones was done a sort of surreal way.
But this was a Mickey Mouse gas mask, so you weren't scared.
But I used to love wearing it when you go up to get the chickens.
You used to go up to the chickens to get eggs.
Painting the past is Bob's way of recalling those childhood days.
They're all events from the war in the wartime years that I experienced.
It's nice to get them down as paintings.
There is a naivety about it, which I like to keep.
Because I want to keep it back into that childlike state,
where everything's nice and everything's safe.
It's a child's playground, the war, actually.
Because if you're born into it, you don't know the fear.
This one, this is the Anderson shelter, the outside shelter.
And we all used to cram in there.
There's little Gran with her pot,
because there were no outside toilets in the shelters.
And that's where we used to spend the nights
if the bombing was particularly bad.
Anderson air raid shelters were another pre-war novelty,
though only those with a garden could have one.
Families were charged £7 for these rough and ready affairs,
though if you were poor they were free.
Like fitting a gas mask,
building the air raid shelter was a must for the film camera.
And in Germany, home movie-makers were doing pretty much the same -
filming families as they prepared for war.
This is air raid shelter construction on a truly grand scale.
It was filmed by Willy Fritz,
a home movie enthusiast who lived in Stuttgart,
and these are his two sons, then and now.
TRANSLATION: This is the old projector
that he showed his films on.
It's a really old piece from before the war, a very stable mechanism.
This is the lens.
You can turn this and alter this.
It's very practical.
You can fold it together and carry the projector around.
TRANSLATION: He was a member of an amateur film club in Stuttgart.
In our eyes,
he learned to make his films look professional.
My mother was pleased my father had this as a hobby.
She was delighted and she advised him as to what to film,
how he could best go about filming particular scenes.
And Willy Fritz followed his wife's advice.
He wanted to keep a record of important events and activities
in his home town during the coming war.
TRANSLATION: He was very much involved
in building the air raid shelter.
He was responsible for the installation of the electrics.
The air raid shelters that Willy filmed were a local initiative.
There was no central plan to protect people.
The National Socialists
were convinced that Germany wouldn't be attacked.
TRANSLATION: So he was able to capture the building
of the shelter on film, piece by piece.
He thought it would be valuable to document the process, to show the way
these air raid shelters were built,
How they were designed to protect not only our lives,
but the lives of other people
from the surrounding streets and neighbourhood.
We used to watch the films my father made during the war years for hours
on end, and it was always exciting for us children.
It was great, because we didn't have to go to bed so early.
Yes, that's why I've got pleasant memories of those films.
Further north in Hamburg, another amateur film-maker, Georg Benecke,
was busy filming his children.
His daughter, Ilse, was five years old, her brother Rolf almost three.
TRANSLATION: I found being a film star really exciting.
"Go there, come back here, run towards me."
It made me feel really important.
My father was a watchmaker. He had a jewellery business in Hamburg.
He began filming soon after I was born.
He filmed on 16-mm, which was the normal size then.
The films were sent away to be developed, and when they came back,
then we were allowed to look at them.
TRANSLATION: Oh, yes, I remember the procedure
setting up the projector, everything went dark, the screen was pulled up.
It was a big event.
When you compare it with today, putting a DVD in,
you just don't have the same feeling.
Back then, it really was an experience.
Watching the films in the old-fashioned way
is an experience an English amateur film-maker Eric Powell still enjoys.
He began making films in the 1930s.
It really started when I was a very small lad
and my parents bought me a toy cinematograph projector,
which was absolutely magic to me, the magic of the movies, I suppose.
One of the stars of Eric's wartime movies was his mum, Mrs Powell.
Another was a young girl, Marian Newland.
The seven-year-old had been evacuated from London to Eric's
home town in Wiltshire on the weekend that war was declared.
We were sent to a hall where people came to pick us.
I was standing there in the line very miserable,
and Mrs Powell picked me, who was the billeting officer.
And I was taken back to her house, and she said,
"Well, before you come in, we've got a dog."
Now, I hadn't been used to a dog.
So she said, "But if you give him a piece of chocolate,
"then he will be your friend for life."
So, gingerly, I put out the piece of chocolate and Rex took it,
and after that we were the best of pals.
She was a conscientious girl, slightly religious.
Now I seemed as though I had a sister and Mother had another...
had a little daughter, and we settled down very well together.
Mother used to take her shopping,
and if you look carefully in those shots,
you'll see they're both carrying their gas masks.
She was lovely.
I used to sit on her lap and she'd give me a cuddle,
and she used to say, "You're too affectionate."
But perhaps that's what I was craving for
from being away from home.
I can remember crying in bed,
and crying for me nanny and me granddad and my mum and dad.
I had to leave when I was called up into the Royal Signals.
I think it helped Mother to have Marian there,
because Mother had someone else there to comfort her
and be comforted by.
And Eric Powell wasn't the only person
filming this first major episode of World War II in Britain.
Gosh, that was early on, wasn't it?
The 1st of September. That was... before the outbreak of war.
This is the evacuees arriving in Malton,
the old bus in the distance there.
It's lovely there how they play up
for the camera a little bit, don't they?
They look directly into the lens. Yes.
The camera belonged to Follyatt Ward, a Yorkshire solicitor.
As well as organising the reception for the evacuees
in his home town,
he managed to find the time to film the drama
and emotion of that weekend.
His daughter Heather was just eight years old.
We got three from a Middlesbrough school,
from up in Saltburn and Redcar.
They were older than us. They were 13, 14 when they came.
He filmed in colour from quite early, didn't he?
Yes, he used colour film quite early.
I think he was very fortunate to be able to do that.
I think he took a lot of pride in getting things right.
He would pay more money than he could afford
to be able to do it, really.
I like seeing myself, even, on the film. You know, you looked so funny.
You didn't know what you looked like, really, except in a mirror.
And actually moving and doing things.
This is where my father was involved placing them into
their various houses and homes for the time they were here.
Do you think he had any sway over who went where? I don't know.
We had such lovely girls with us that maybe he did! Who knows?
Are you suspicious he picked the good ones? Yes.
This is the girl evacuees playing netball
at the school where they were.
And so they joined in the school. They went to the local school?
They went to the local school up the road from where we lived,
and joined all the local girls and boys.
Those children who hoped that war would mean a long holiday
from school were in for a disappointment.
Schools stayed open,
and with evacuees, classes swelled to bursting point.
This one in Cheshire was typical.
Veronica Kirk taught the infants.
On that Sunday, in 1939,
we had loads of evacuees come
and we were all called in, teachers were.
And we had the Liverpool evacuees, all crying for their mother.
I started off with 20 children,
but of course by the time I'd finished,
I'd got 80 in the class, which was pretty awful.
I taught with children on my knee on occasions, you know,
because they were so upset.
The head teacher, Arthur Hume, decided to make a film of life
in the school in wartime.
And he shot it in black and white and colour.
I think the film was made initially
to show to parents and to the parents of the evacuees,
to illustrate that the schools were involved in wartime initiatives.
We had a school garden.
There were cucumbers and marrows, tomatoes, mushrooms.
And the mushrooms in particular,
they seemed like dinner plates to a little lad like me.
And then, of course, there was the air raid shelters.
You rang the bell and the children all lined up
in their different forms.
They were ready for marching anywhere, our kids were.
We went down, across the road, we'd got a shelter.
I'm in one of the shots,
coming across towards the entrance of the air raid shelter.
I'm a sort of lanky, little lad in a brownish suit.
I'm carrying some sort of roll or blanket under my arm
and looking very, very serious and worried.
You recognise me because of me red hair.
I was a pin-up girl then, of course. Everybody liked me.
Tall, slim, very attractive lady.
I really fell in love, I think, with Mrs Ellwood,
or Miss Kirk as she was then.
I haven't changed much, actually!
Inside the shelters, we were rather crowded,
but there was certainly a sense of excitement about it
and we did pride ourselves in
getting there in record time.
Huge trenches were dug into the playgrounds
and these concrete pre-fabricated structures were sunk
into the ground. It's reinforced concrete with steel in,
with the curved roof to give it strength.
There's probably another 20 inches of concrete
on the top surface, just underneath the playground itself.
So it would be very, very strong
and the lessons would carry on in the shelter.
We did a bit of work.
You could sort of recite tables
and do a bit of mental arithmetic and things like that.
But often it was singing, you know.
Children accept anything. They're marvellous.
They are. They're very adaptable.
We expected to be bombed to buggery really, but we weren't.
There's a sequence at the end of the film,
where there's a formalised waste paper collection.
There was an incentive to collect waste paper, which Mr Hume devised.
If you collected a certain quantity, you became a corporal.
If you collected more, you became a sergeant, and so on.
And it was just the same in Germany.
TRANSLATION: We had to busy ourselves collecting lots of fruit.
They used it to make medicine for the soldiers.
And I remember my grandmother knitting socks for soldiers.
But schools in Germany did more
and those that had cameras filmed children being taught
the special role of young people in the Third Reich.
We had to stand in line at school, in rows.
There were three blocks and the head teacher was in the middle.
He had a swastika on his upper arm, and he'd give us a fiery speech.
I can't remember what he said,
but I do remember my right arm felt pretty heavy.
Because I had to hold it up for such a long time,
I used my other arm and others did that as well.
Hitler had come to power in a bitterly divided Germany in 1933.
Although he had many enemies, the euphoria
that greeted his visit to a small Austrian town in 1938
was captured on film by an English woman on holiday.
Thousands of children fell under Hitler's spell,
and he made sure that their enthusiasm
was channelled through Nazi youth organisations,
organisations like the Young Girls Group,
the Bund Deutscher Maedel, the BDM.
TRANSLATION: On the one hand, they did comparatively harmless things
like going on trips, camping, singing together
and doing handiwork as well as sports.
But they were also subliminally taught about Nazi ideology
in relation to racial hygiene and racial studies.
But not all children were included.
This is a home movie of a school in Berlin
that was for Jewish children only.
One of its pupils was Inge Deutschkron.
She had been in a traditional school.
TRANSLATION: We had a class teacher who, like all the teachers,
had to give the Heil Hitler greeting when they came into a room.
But this teacher always had both her hands full
so that she couldn't raise her arm to give the Hitler greeting.
That told me she was a decent person.
Things were really good for us in this school
and then came those Nuremberg laws, those race laws.
From 1935 onwards, Inge, along with all other German Jews,
found herself increasingly marginalised.
We children were no longer allowed to play
with other non-Jewish children, or allowed to do sports.
Finally my father said,
"This is pointless," and that I should go to a Jewish school.
Along with many more Jewish children,
Inge crowded into this school in the Grosse Hamburger Strasse.
There were often 60 children in the class,
and the noise was unbelievable.
They did everything they could to help us,
but something wasn't quite right and the teachers were nervous as well.
To National Socialists, Jews, including children,
were seen as the enemy within.
They weren't allowed to join the National Socialist organisations.
They were presented as racially valueless.
They only cost money and were unnecessary consumers of food.
They were seen as a danger to the public and the state.
We weren't allowed to go into cinemas, to concerts.
We weren't allowed to the theatre, into the woods. Not even to a cafe.
That was cancelled.
Youth was cancelled.
In April 1942, the Nazis closed the school,
and most of the children and their families
were transported to concentration camps.
56,000 Berlin Jews died.
Inge went into hiding and was one of the very few to survive the war.
On May 10th 1940, a German soldier filmed children racing alongside
as the army left the country for the invasion of France.
As Britain prepared for attack,
Winston Churchill became Prime Minister.
CHURCHILL: It must be remembered that we are in the preliminary stage
of one of the greatest battles in history,
and that many preparations have to be made here at home.
My father was very inspired by Churchill.
Any time Mr Churchill was on the radio we were hush, hush,
you know, stop talking, you know.
We had to be quiet and listen.
He used to get very angry with us if we made any sort of noise,
do this sort of thing - "I'm listening".
I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.
I felt he was very important, and I think we got confidence
that the war would not harm us as children.
It is to wage war by sea, land and air with all our might,
with all the strength that God can give us,
to wage war against a monstrous tyranny
never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime.
That is our policy.
On June the 25th 1940, France capitulated.
And on July 10th, the Battle of Britain began.
A home movie-maker filmed the aftermath
of a daylight raid on the city of Bristol.
Hundreds, including many children, were killed.
Lots of people left the city for the safety of the countryside.
One of them, Ernest Spiller, took his film camera with him.
Here I am, and my cousins are here,
with the village pond behind us, and the farm.
In the villages,
you had this warm relationship with everybody.
And this is how I remember the village -
everybody pulling together,
everybody doing something to help somebody else.
Violet lived with her two brothers and Primrose, her sister,
in a village that seemed a world away
from the horrors of the Blitz. Then one day, Primrose became anxious.
At teatime, she said to my mother,
"Mummy, I'm not going to bed tonight."
And my mother said,
"What do you mean you're not going to bed tonight?"
"No, I'm not going to bed tonight."
She said, "Jerry's going to bomb us."
My mother said, "Don't be silly," like you do.
She kept on and on all evening.
And then my mother said to her, "Well, for tonight, you go into
"Jeff and Reggie's bedroom, and I'll have Violet in with me.
"But tomorrow we'll put all the beds into our bedroom,
"then we'll all be together."
But of course, tomorrow never came, not for them.
Bombs hit us. My mother and I never had a scratch on us. Not a scratch.
Jeffrey, he was killed instantly. And then Reggie, he was killed instantly.
They got Primrose out,
but as soon as they got her into the ambulance,
she was dead.
My mother, she had the three of them buried together.
She wouldn't have them separated.
And isn't it silly? Anyway, she had them buried together,
and of course everyone in the village turned out.
I can't go on.
I didn't realise perhaps how serious it was, with the war going on.
I suppose I was quite excited, in a way, rather than upset.
Eight year old Heather Reynolds was blissfully enjoying the friendships
she'd made with her family's evacuees.
But by the winter of 1941, they had been living away
from their families for more than two years.
Pat was nervous. Pat was a bit homesick.
I'm not sure about the others.
Pat certainly was. I remember my mother comforting her.
Pat Burns. She was absolutely lovely, and my mother adored her,
and she was from quite a poor background with several siblings.
And we met her family and they were lovely.
I think probably Vera was from quite a nice background - Vera Horn.
They'd be shown, you know,
the pictures that Daddy had taken of us out in the countryside
and in the garden, and they were a but fearful of him, the evacuees.
He was quite an austere sort of man, very strict with all of us.
We weren't allowed to speak unless we were spoken to almost.
My mother enjoyed having them, although it was hard work.
I loved it, because they used to look after me as a young sister.
So I really did get a lot of attention from them.
But by the autumn of 1942, they had gone.
Obviously their parents felt it was safe for them to go back to the
Middlesbrough area, though I can't believe it really was that safe.
But they must have missed them and wanted them home.
I missed my new playmates and new friends and new sisters,
as they almost became.
What was happening to Heather's playmates was typical.
The bombing had relented and lots of evacuees were drifting back home.
Nine-year-old Eric Brady was one of them.
I was born in south-east London, Catford.
I had an older sister, who was about five years older than me,
and a younger brother who was born in June 1939.
Eric and his sister Kitty had been evacuated to South Wales.
After we had been away for nearly three years in September 1942,
the bombing had died down to some extent
and so my parents decided to have Kitty and I back home.
The films shot by home movie-makers across the country
show just how much those homes had changed.
When I arrived in London, I saw bomb damage around.
I was more intrigued by it.
I think my sister was more shocked, because of course she was older
and could understand more about bombing and death and injuries.
But to me it was more exciting.
The bombed houses, you'd just go in there
and just run about and smash up things, because boys do that.
"Ooh look, this house has been smashed up.
"Let's smash it up some more."
We'd make guns out of anything and fire and jump about.
We'd play Beau Geste, the French Foreign Legion, because
we saw it on the movies, on Saturday morning pictures.
So you'd play the movies more than the actual war.
Companies like Woolworths saw the opportunity and would sell small
tinplate steel helmets like this for little boys to play war games with.
Very, very popular and it wasn't just happening here.
On the other side of the North Sea, young German children were playing
exactly the same kinds of war games, but wearing their German helmets.
Life seemed to be returning to normal
and Eric and his sister Kitty went back to their school in Catford.
It was January 1943.
We were having our sandwiches and I vaguely remember
my friends and I were discussing
which was the best bit of shrapnel that we'd got,
when suddenly I heard a sound of a distant siren. Just a bit of it.
And then the noise of aero engines very,
very close, and then the teachers shouting, "Get under the tables."
Kitty had come running towards me.
I shouted to my friends to make room for her and then
that section of the school came cascading down
onto the dining area burying us under the rubble.
Remarkably a news camera managed to capture the devastation.
When this picture was taken, I would have been about there,
because that's where the dining area was located,
where the bomb hit straight above and brought it all down.
The bomb was dropped at about 12.30, soon after midday.
I was buried under the rubble until about seven o'clock at night.
It wasn't realised that my left hand was pinned down.
As they pulled him out of the wreckage,
the rescuers badly damaged his elbow and spine.
His left arm was paralysed.
My right side was uninjured.
For years I had thought that was because
I was half under the trestle table.
Subsequently, my brother told me that in fact Kitty was found
lying on my right hand side, shielding me from the rubble.
If it hadn't been for her, I'd have been dead.
In saving Eric's life, Kitty had lost her own.
His parents kept her death from him,
fearing he would be further traumatised.
When he asked about his sister from his hospital bed,
his mother said that children couldn't visit
for fear of disrupting the ward.
She came to see me almost every day,
and I said the boy across the ward had had a girl come
younger than Kitty, so if you ask Sister very nicely, she CAN come.
And then my mother walked out and I...
I could see her through the big window in the Sister's office
and she was telling the Sister - so she told me later -
that she just couldn't go on any longer. She had to tell me.
I can remember two doctors coming in and talking to other patients
and Sister coming in with my mother.
And then my mother told me that Kitty was dead.
And...
Sorry.
Kitty was buried alongside 30 of her schoolfriends.
This shot shows my father and mother in the front of the mourners.
What was a particular climax for her
was that she was at Kitty's grave one day
when her foster parents from Wales came.
The foster mother screamed at my mother as having had Kitty home
and killing her, and my mother had a complete breakdown.
Just like Eric's mother,
other parents naturally shielded their children from the conflict.
It was about not moving away.
It was about the whole "make do and mend," about getting on with it,
about communities coming together
and celebrating the fact that they WERE all together.
And that's where children
came in to it in a big way.
They were still being encouraged to do some of those normal events.
So, for example, with the young children doing their fancy dress,
and there are some great shots there of a very reluctant small boy
who obviously isn't keen on being there,
and his over-zealous mother has provided him with a costume!
But the rest of the children are used to being filmed.
They're used to those events.
And I think that's what gives these films an absolute pertinence
and an emotional connection with the audience
that professionally made films don't have.
It was just freedom, really. You could dress up as what you wanted.
But, of course,
they didn't dress up as Germans.
There was nothing in that category.
It was the highlight, sometimes, of the year. It was good fun.
I think the art with sack-racing was
that you had to get your feet in the corners,
and if you got your feet in the corners,
then you could move quite well.
But if you didn't get your feet in the corners,
then you were likely to tumble.
When people had so much darkness,
it was lovely to have something, you know, light, to enjoy.
CAMERA WHIRRS
Films of German children shot by their parents
portray similar sentiments, trying to make life as normal as possible,
in what were fast becoming impossible circumstances.
TRANSLATION: I can remember growing up being very protected.
I only knew my father in uniform.
He was fascinated by film,
and not only films but absolutely anything technical.
Jurgen's family lived close to the huge coal and steel plants
near Dortmund, in the valley of the River Ruhr,
a prime target for Allied bombers.
And in May 1943 came the first intensive bombing
of Jurgen's home town.
TRANSLATION: We had two air-raid bunkers near us.
You could feel them shaking as the bombs fell.
People tried to keep their kids happy by reading out loud
and singing.
My father wouldn't go into the shelter. He felt closed in.
He went up onto the roof and watched the planes.
He was a technology freak.
He had a microphone with him, and he'd make reports from the roof.
In the south, Stuttgart, home of Wolfgang and Rainer Fritz,
came under intensive bombing from March 1943.
The community air-raid shelter filmed by their father, Willy Fritz,
would now prove to be life-saving.
TRANSLATION: I can remember the sound of the sirens very clearly.
We'd be pulled out of our sleep and we'd run to the shelter.
There were other children there who we could play with and in one sense,
astonishingly, the memory of it isn't that terrible.
TRANSLATION: In the morning, when we came out of the air-raid shelter,
almost everything was on fire or destroyed.
The really bad memory I have is of our home when it was destroyed.
When we came into the flat,
all we could see in front of us was rubble.
Those times are like a film, going in front of my eyes,
I can't come to terms with. I can't identify with it.
It's like taking a big step back from these terrible events.
I was supposed to be right in the middle of all this.
When I see it now, I think how afraid my parents must have been for us.
They had to make sure we survived everything.
It's amazing to think how they managed to get through it all.
It's something we can hardly imagine today.
The air-raid shelter saved the brothers' lives, but not their home.
And when Willy Fritz had finished shooting the destruction
in his community, he buried the films.
I believe that if the Hitler regime had found the films,
he would have been immediately arrested.
Even worse could have happened to him.
MUSIC: "Muss I Denn"
TRANSLATION: Soon after my youngest brother was born, in early 1943,
my father said, "I've got the feeling
"that bad times are coming. I don't want you to stay in Hamburg."
So my parents rented a house in Niendorf, on the Baltic coast,
and we moved there.
Ilse's home movies of the time show just how hard
the family was trying to make life feel normal,
and with a new baby brother, the family was getting bigger.
Their parents were right to be worried.
In late July and early August,
aircraft bombed Hamburg every day and night for two weeks.
50,000 people were killed and one million made homeless.
When they returned six months later,
they didn't know if they still had a home to go to.
TRANSLATION: We saw all these ruins around us...
And our mother said...
"Don't look. Just keep walking." And she pulled us along.
"Look at your brother.
"Don't look at the houses."
But this house was still here and we closed the door behind us
and it was just like it had always been.
In war-ravaged Hamburg,
it proved impossible to cope with three children.
My father was in France at the time
and he said that my mother had a boy on each arm.
So the daughter should be the one to leave.
Ilse was sent away to stay with her grandparents.
I found the idea of being separated very difficult.
I was really homesick.
By the summer of 1944, as Germany was being attacked
from the west and east, schoolchildren were being told
about a wonder vengeance weapon that would win the war for their country.
I remember reading that the attacks on London were still going on,
and thinking, "Thank goodness for that."
We read in the newspapers that the V-2s were being fired.
I was happy, but I really had no idea what the V-2s were.
MUSIC: "Stille Nacht"
Throughout the winter of 1944,
the bombing of German cites was relentless,
yet Willy Fritz somehow managed to film Christmas at home in Stuttgart.
My mother made every effort to keep these anxieties
as far away from us children as possible.
I don't know how my parents managed it,
but somehow we always seemed to have a Christmas tree.
We had a model railway set, a Marklin.
We were only allowed to go into the Christmas room
when a little bell was sounded.
And going into the Christmas room
is still a very moving experience for us.
A Father Christmas came to visit us in the bunker
and before he left told me, in front of everyone,
"Don't suck your thumb."
He made me feel really small.
I've never sucked my thumb since then.
Anyway, a bit later when the all-clear was sounded,
we children came out of the bunker and I saw this Father Christmas.
He was lying on the ground,
dead.
The grown-ups thought he'd been shot by a low-flying aircraft.
But all I can remember thinking was, "Serves you right."
By the spring of 1945, many in Germany were disillusioned.
There was an oven in the kitchen.
All the pictures were taken off the walls.
I can remember Adolf Hitler's picture on the kitchen wall.
They were all burned, along with the flags.
There was a terrible stink in that kitchen.
I can remember how difficult it was for us at the time.
We had very little to eat.
My parents had to sell our toys for food, for bread and butter -
the essentials, really.
And I can remember really well
they even had to sell the model railway just to survive,
and that railway was really special for me.
I've often thought what would have happened to me
if we, the Germans, had won the war.
When I was 20 or 30 and looked at the pictures,
all the uniforms and hullabaloo...
..maybe I would have become one of them.
Who knows?
♪ It's a lovely day tomorrow... ♪
The war in Europe ended on May 8th 1945.
In Britain, some children celebrated.
Somebody dragged a piano out in the street
and there was singing and dancing. It was a joyous occasion.
I knew something was up that was good.
But you think, "Is this going to happen every day?"
Right outside our house, these big railway sleepers started to appear
onto this bonfire and it got higher and higher
until it was practically as high as the house.
It was fun, staying up all night, dancing around bonfires.
It's a childhood dream, isn't it?
♪ Just forget your troubles and learn to say
♪ Tomorrow is a lovely day. ♪
While Bob had spent most of the war in London with his parents,
Marian Newland had been separated from her parents,
living for five years with Mrs Powell in Wiltshire.
You grow to love children, don't you,
when you've had them two, three, four years?
And she said, "Would you like me to adopt you?"
But I said, "Well, no, I love my mum and dad."
But I did like her very, very much as well.
When we did get home, I can remember being very, very lonely
and wishing I was back at Calne.
My mother said they didn't want to send us away,
but it was to save our lives in case anything happened.
She had the feeling I resented being sent away,
but I never thought those thoughts at all.
I do sometimes wonder
what my life would have been like
if I'd had brothers and sisters.
Sometimes we'll say, "Let's just go up and see the grave."
And we like to put flowers on there that grow, really,
so that they last a lot longer than just putting bunches of flowers on.
You've had an awful experience
but you just get on with life, don't you?
That's how I look at it, anyway.
And for children, life goes on, doesn't it?
TRANSLATION: You can change the speed here
and make the film go backwards and forwards.
So the people are walking backwards.
That was the most interesting thing for us children!
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk