To some women in Britain in 1939, the future seemed promising.
Jean Riesco was brought up in a country mansion,
her emergence into womanhood recorded in home movies shot by her father.
I think women sort of came into their own, as it were.
They started, really, to take charge of so many things, which they hadn't done before the war.
For some women in Germany too, the future looked idyllic.
Renate Teller, like many of her compatriots, believed the Nazi Party
would give the nation back its pride, and lead it on to new heights.
SHE SPEAKS GERMAN
TRANSLATOR: 'This must have been the biggest change in the life of women.
'They had woken up.'
Over the next few years,
amateur film was to record women's lives in Britain and in Germany
as a war began that was to transform those lives.
Amateur footage in both countries, some of it shot by women, provides
a unique record of the way that the war involved women,
sometimes in roles they had never dreamt of, in their work,
their play, their role as mothers, their most intimate relationships.
The Second World War was to bring a massive change in the lives of women
in Britain and in Germany, much of that change recorded by amateur film-makers,
like insurance broker James Riesco, who lived in some style in Croydon.
At her 21st birthday party in 1936, his daughter Jean had little inkling
of the scale of that change.
That is my mother getting ready for my birthday party.
Yes, that is out the back with the fountains going.
And I suppose it was one of the last big parties that we had.
We had a firework display...
that was really something lovely to look back on.
My father, of course, always took his films, and he was the chief warden in the district,
and he had to think about having a shelter.
We had two shelters made, one for us, and one for my father.
And he was very comfortable.
I was very apprehensive about a war.
I had a young man at the time,
and...we got married.
We didn't tell anybody. We didn't even tell my parents.
Well, why not? If there was going to be a war, and you thought you were going to get killed,
you thought you might just... I mean, you might just as well, if you've got a nice young man,
you might just as well get married and set up house,
with a bit of luck, and start a family.
There was a spate of weddings in 1939 in Britain and in Germany,
and the number of couples getting married rose throughout the war.
Thousands of women in Britain and Germany would lose their husbands for the duration of the war,
and many feared they would lose them forever.
While James Riesco in Croydon was proudly filming his daughter Jean's baby,
a German amateur film-maker, Elizabeth Wilms, was meticulously
recording life in the bakery she and her husband ran in Dortmund.
One film showed how the bakery made its Christmas speciality, the Stollen cake.
Another reflected the spirit of the time.
Its hero was in the Lutfwaffe, the perfect catch for
a patriotic young German woman.
Though a foster mother as well as a baker, Elizabeth Wilms crafted
her films with as much care as many professional film-makers of the time.
Other amateur film-makers in Germany seized the chance
to record the prevailing atmosphere of high excitement.
Renate Teller gave up her plans to work in agriculture overseas,
and rushed back to her parents' farm in Saxony.
TRANSLATOR: 'Our enthusiasm stemmed from our upbringing.
'We were caught up in it.
'All the teaching was geared up to make us into patriots.
'Heroism was drilled into us, and the best way to prove heroism is in war.
'And we went into war with great enthusiasm.'
WOMAN: The Nazi Party saw the role of women as being wives, mothers and home-makers.
Young girls should be prepared for motherhood, for domesticity.
But it wasn't the women who made the policy about women.
It was the men who made the policy about women. It was Hitler.
Hitler had really a very traditional view of women's place...
in the home, with children, with lots of children.
A home-movie maker in Stuttgart was able to film a scoop,
the visit of the most senior Nazi woman.
There was a women's leadership within the party,
and the Reich women's leader was Gertrud Scholtz-Klink.
But she did not make policy of any kind.
Her task was to implement the will of the party,
which meant the will of the party's male leadership, as regards women.
She was fairly decorative, I suppose.
She was the mother of 11 children,
so she was a model for women to emulate.
It is part of the collectivist mentality that the individual is nothing.
The collective is all.
As the Nazi leadership said, the age of liberal individualism is past.
Amateur film-makers recorded the return of German troops
from its series of conquests in the early years of the war,
and many German women were caught up in the prevailing mood of triumphalism.
Renate Teller saw the war as one to defend the fatherland.
TRANSLATOR: 'War, that's how we were brought up.
'The fatherland above all else.
'And now the men were off to war to defend the fatherland.'
Ilse Rohde, at school in Berlin,
was also caught up in the spirit of the age.
Her father, an engineer, was a Nazi Party member,
and she too was a keen member of the BDM, the Nazi girls' organisation.
TRANSLATOR: 'So we were told about Hitler.
'All the good things he was doing for us.
'And that war was necessary, because we had no living space in the world
'and everyone was against Germany.
'And we were great enough to defeat them all.'
TRANSLATOR: 'There were about 12 million German women
'in various organisations run by the Nazi Party.
'That's a third of female population, a very high number.
'What made the Nazi Party distinctive, of course,
'was that it was underpinned by a particular racist ideology,
'so it becomes impossible, really, to talk about attitudes to women as a whole.
'They were divided up into Aryan, racially-healthy women,
'politically responsible women, and the women
'who were not to be relied upon, like Jewish women or,
'in the Second World War, the Polish and Russian women.'
Jews often found themselves the targets of public ridicule,
and discriminatory laws against them were sharply increased after the war broke out.
Esther Bejarano was 15 at the time, and her father was a Cantor,
a key figure in the synagogue at Saarbrucken, where Esther grew up.
TRANSLATOR: 'It wasn't easy for Jewish families to live there,
'because we were forbidden to do all sorts of things.
'My father was arrested by stormtroopers,
'and we were puzzled by the actions of the German people.
'Our neighbours, with whom we'd got on pretty well, didn't concern themselves with what was going on.
'They looked from behind the curtains and watched what was happening,
'but no-one intervened.
'There was no civic courage.'
Film targeting Jews in Germany was usually shot professionally for Nazi propaganda purposes.
But much of the most illuminating footage of Britain, on the home front,
was shot by amateur film-maker Rosie Newman.
Her father was a wealthy banker of German descent, and she had
been used to the high society lifestyle, flying all over Europe.
But during the war, she filmed the effect it had on volunteer soldiers, and on ordinary people.
When we talk about amateur footage, I think it gives us an insight into
just the minutiae of daily life
and how ordinary lives were lived in extraordinary times,
and that's what home movies give us, I think.
Many home movie-makers filmed the impact of the war on mothers and children.
With German bombing expected imminently,
the government urged mothers in the cities to say goodbye to their children for the duration of the war.
The main project at the start of the war was to get the children away
from places which were imagined would be targets for bombs.
You know, big cities, industrial centres, this sort of thing.
There was never any compulsion. You didn't have to send your children.
But there was very, very strong moral persuasion.
I think a lot of parents were very torn.
They were being advised by government propaganda that
their children would be in danger if they stayed at home.
On the other hand, they were very reluctant to be parted from them.
There was very much the feeling of, "If we die, we'll all die together."
For women without children, life continued much as before.
Anne Richmond was a student at Cambridge at the time.
It was very odd that nothing happened to begin with.
We were always enjoying ourselves somehow.
I mean, in the first year of war there was a lot of...
I used to go dancing on a Saturday morning in the Dorothy Cafe,
where they had coffee and dancing.
I mean, any chance of dancing, one would dance all day, really, if it arose.
A fellow student made a film record of life there.
No, everybody had fun all the time.
Partly in the spirit of, you know, we may never have any fun again...
have it while it's going.
I mean, once the war had begun in that summer of 1940,
anybody who left there would be killed quite soon.
You know, there was a good deal of feeling of we shall never meet again, so...
But it was complicated by the fact that you really didn't sleep with your boyfriend,
so that the emotions got very high and tangled up,
and I think, you know, it would probably have been easier if one had, really.
It wouldn't have been quite so desperate.
The party was over for Anne's boyfriend, David Piper.
He volunteered to join the services, and was later sent off to the Far East with the British army.
But many of his contemporaries at Cambridge had misgivings about the war,
following the line taken by the Soviet Union and the British Communist Party at this stage,
that it was an imperialist war.
Other women took a pacifist position, opposing war under any circumstances.
Anne Richmond supported the war,
especially after her boyfriend became a prisoner of war.
She decided to join the Land Army.
I joined the Land Army in Worcestershire,
and I went to work for a rather rich family who had a big estate,
and there were only six girls and two Land Army schoolmistresses to look after us.
And most of us worked, we worked in the fields and on the farm.
I certainly felt Communist leanings at that point,
because they seemed to be... the rich seemed to be untouched.
I mean, they were still eating their breakfast on the terrace, while we were ploughing away,
having been up since 7am, and they'd roll down at 9am and have their breakfast.
Although there was some resentment about exploitation and low pay rates,
the Land Girls soon became a vital part of the war effort.
By 1941, it was becoming clear that whilst the nation now had
the workers it needed on the land - some 23,000 women had volunteered -
not enough were choosing to serve in the armed services and the armaments industry.
Many women had had to give up their children and their men folk.
They were reluctant to give up their freedom of choice as well.
Britain was the first country in the world to conscript women,
and it happened, of course, because there was a manpower shortage
and voluntarism hadn't worked.
There were an enormous amount of appeals for women to go to war-work and into the factories
and into the forces, but not enough came forward. Ernie Bevin,
the Minister of Labour, introduced regulations that women between the ages of 20 and 30
had to register for war-work or to go into the forces.
If a woman didn't want to go into the forces, refused to do that,
then she could be sent to a munitions factory or something like that.
But it was a scheme of compulsion.
Rosie Newman filmed women at work on aircraft.
And the owner of an armaments factory, another amateur film-maker,
Jack Evans, seized his chance when his factory moved from bomb-threatened Portsmouth to Frome,
and recruited local women for the first time.
His scoop was the arrival of a queen.
Queen Mary was sent out on visits intended to emphasise
the importance of those who were serving on the home front.
The Nazis too used VIP visits to boost morale.
Joseph Goebbels, in charge of propaganda, wanted more women to join the workforce,
though this presented problems for other Nazi ideologues.
Ilse Rohde was more than happy to do her bit.
TRANSLATOR: 'We began our direct war service in Bromberg.
'My first job was as a tram conductor in the school holidays.
'In those days you had trams with bell pulls on top, and so on.
'It was very exciting, really good, except you had to start at 5am.
'I didn't find THAT much fun, but it was part of the job.
'You felt you were being taken seriously. You were very important.
'And then, in the next holidays, it wasn't voluntary any more.
'It was made compulsory.
'The only excuse not to go was if you were ill.
'And, as a young German girl, who wants to be ill?'
Renate Teller, too, was an enthusiastic volunteer.
'I worked as a nurse, as a way to be part of the war effort.
'You were drafted and off you went.
'Suddenly, you were part of the armed forces support
'and under the laws and conditions of the military.
'The work gave me tremendous joy, and I thought, much later,
'we were supporting the war in a humane way.
'The soldiers were all so happy to see us girls when they arrived at the hospital.
'We were all still so young, and at last feminine hands were caring for them.
'We laughed a lot with the soldiers.
'We were very companionable.
'But we were sometimes very sad when they left and new men arrived.
'I can see them having so much fun here, and it was the same with us.'
Women in traditional roles were accepted by the Nazis,
but total war was now forcing them to rethink their reluctance to see women at work in factories.
'You have to see both sides of it.
'On the one hand, there's this sort of motherhood image, which we've seen in the cult of the mother,
'as in the birth premiums, that your debts could be reduced if you had lots of children.
'That was certainly the case in the early days of the Nazi Party.
'But then you can see the Nazis appreciated the demand on the employment was growing.
And they said, "We need a policy to increase the availability of munitions.
'"We need men and women."'
With most German men now serving in the armed forces,
the immediate labour shortage was solved by moving thousands of Slav women,
the "Untermenschen", the so-called sub-humans, into German factories.
Eventually, even Aryan women, the so-called valuable, were recruited into the labour force too.
Ilse Rohde was one of them.
'I started work in a munitions factory,
'together with Polish and Russian women who had come from the East.
'We weren't allowed to speak to them.
'We were given very precise instructions.
'We were not allowed to speak with them, because they were "Untermenschen".
'But work, they were allowed to do that.'
By the time Britain's Ministry of Information had completed its film on women in armaments factories,
they could be compelled to take up unfamiliar jobs and work unfamiliar hours.
Nevertheless, the film aimed to persuade them
that there was a positive side to working all through the night.
VOICEOVER ON FILM: 'It seems funny at first, turning night into day.
'But you soon get used to it.
'You feel you're really pulling your weight, because you're working while other people are asleep in bed.'
The voice of the woman narrator provided by the Ministry of Information was quite unlike that of
the workers from Newport in South Wales, where the film was shot.
Mind it doesn't go off. I'd rather be firing them than making them any day.
Iris Watts featured prominently in the Night Shift film.
It was the noise I couldn't...
you know, it was terrific, the noise as you went in.
All you did was go to work, come home, sleep, back in work.
That's all we ever did.
But that was life, wasn't it?
You just concentrated on what you had to do, and that was it.
Iris had been a tailor's assistant in Newport, but now roared up to her job in the factory on her motorbike.
She was given a speaking part in the film, borrowing a comb from a friend.
Lend us your comb, Val. It's about time you bought one of your own, isn't it?
OK, OK.
'But this is bringing it all back now.'
It was either the forces or munitions. You didn't have any choice, did you?
What are you trying to do? Win the war on your own? Get out.
You need a man about the place. We don't.
'It wore you down towards the end.
'It was a 12-hour shift night and day, so it was very, very tiring, mind.'
But it had to be done, didn't it?
Iris also had to put up with the pain of separation.
Immediately after she got married, her husband was sent to India with the British army.
Women like her now had to face the bombing of Britain on their own.
Throughout 1940 and much of 1941,
the German air force was attempting to bomb Britain into submission,
and amateur film-maker Rosie Newman managed to get astonishing access
to the impact of the Blitz on London.
When a suspicious policeman asked to see her papers, she filmed him too.
And Rosie Newman wasn't alone.
In other cities, too, amateur film-makers were pointing their cameras at the war's impact.
Some women, like Pat Venn, one of six sisters living in Bristol, took it in their stride.
A bricklayer's daughter, she was working in an army laundry at the time.
We could see this huge, red glow.
Bristol was alight.
But we didn't go in the shelters.
We just carried on.
We didn't seem to worry much about it.
But much of central Bristol had been flattened.
And a local home-movie maker filmed the aftermath of a daylight raid.
It was terrible.
Terrible shock.
In the daytime was the worst.
We saw them coming over the day they bombed Filton
and all the girls got buried in the shelter.
And I remember my mother pulling us all in the house.
But we never went in the shelter.
They seemed to think that we'd be all right in the house.
It could have come down on top of us.
I was sitting up in the bedroom,
and this aeroplane suddenly appeared over the trees.
They couldn't see what they were bombing,
but they liked to get rid of their shells before they went home,
so they bombed anything they could find.
My mother was in the rose garden and could see the pilot,
and I looked out of the window and I could see him too.
And he just went off, bombed the horses, the cows in the field,
because they were the only things that he could see.
And it was better than bombing nothing.
The RAF planes,
the bombers, we used to watch go out,
and with a bit of luck the same amount would come back.
British women were relieved to see the RAF bombers returning.
But they were causing devastation to women in Germany.
Elizabeth Wilms, who had once filmed in her bakery in Dortmund,
now focused on the impact of the bomb attacks on her home town,
defying the Nazis in order to do so.
Now, even Renate Teller's hospital came under attack.
TRANSLATOR: 'To begin with, it almost felt like a big adventure,
until the first bombs dropped on our hospital.
'I can remember being in the main men's ward.
'All the nurses moved into the wards to be with the patients.
'Then a sudden crash and the windows blew out.
'I fell onto one of the beds, and the patient caught me.
'The old man said, in a north German dialect, "You could be my daughter."
'Well, I cuddled up to him, and that's how I got over the shock.'
The attacks on civilian areas of major cities were even more ferocious in Germany than in Britain.
But here, too, many women,
already parted from husbands and children, were losing their homes as well.
There were plenty of women serving in their traditional role of nurses,
but shortage of manpower meant that they were now becoming active members
of the fighting services, to the fascination of film-makers like Rosie Newman.
Women were even recruited into a service once considered an exclusively male preserve, the RAF.
Freydis Sharland had begun the war as a nurse, but,
with pre-war flying experience, wanted to spread her wings.
The people I was working for all said,
"No, she's much too useful here, you know.
"We want her to do this, that and the other."
But anyway, they did insist
and I insisted that the only thing I really wanted to do was fly.
And so I joined ATA.
The ATA was the Air Transport Auxiliary,
which transported aircraft within Britain as and when required by the RAF.
It was only professional film-makers that were allowed to get into the air alongside the new pilots.
The Spitfire was a very easy thing, you see, Spitfires and Hurricanes.
But they were, like all fighters really, very simple to fly.
You just pointed it somewhere and opened the throttle and off you went.
You had a little bag with maps of the whole of the British Isles beside you.
I used to work out my course, as to where I was to go,
and you got to know England pretty well.
I enjoyed flying Spitfires,
and, as I say, I was flying one last year.
The Sultan of Oman very kindly lets me fly his.
This is the joystick, here's throttle.
And it's matter really of just opening the throttle
and then to take off.
Newly-wed Betty Hockey from Bournemouth
decided to give her war service in a rather more down-to-earth way.
All these army camps had sprung up, and I thought,
"Why shouldn't I start a concert party?"
Never done anything like it in my life before.
Didn't dance, didn't do anything.
I turned out in the end to be the can-can dancer!
The boys were terrific.
The noisier they were, the more they were enjoying it. We realised that.
Oh, yes, the seven veils.
Well, that of course had to follow the can-can, didn't it?
But it was difficult and we had to shelve it in the end,
because we couldn't get enough material for the veils.
We'd just tear up anything. Doesn't matter what it was,
but of course gradually it got impossible, so of course I couldn't do that one.
The boys were disappointed. They liked that.
Because I gradually disposed of the veils, and then it was timed.
All lights out and I could scarper.
But...
In Germany, the fighting forces only permitted women to serve in very limited roles.
But by now, many who had previously been pro-Nazi
were becoming aware of what the regime was capable of.
Ilse Rohde's family had moved to Poland.
TRANSLATOR: 'Things were quite blatant there.
'For example, Poles weren't allowed to walk on the pavements.
'They had to go along the street,
'and they weren't allowed to talk to us.
'We were taught to be suspicious of the Poles,
'that they only wished bad for us.
'One thing bothered me,
'as we moved into our four-bedroom apartment in Bromberg,
'it was well-positioned and so on.
'And I asked my mother,
'"Who lived here before?"
'There was a housing shortage and there weren't many apartments available.
'And my mother replied, "A dentist and his family."
'"And where are they now?"
' "They were Jews. They've been deported."'
Some shots of deported Jews were filmed on Gestapo orders
by Rudolf Breslauer, one of those being deported.
Esther Bejarano was another.
TRANSLATOR: 'We were put into cattle trucks from Berlin.
'First of all, the journey in these cattle trucks was dreadful, terrible.
'There was nowhere to sit down. We had to sit on the floor.
'In one truck, there were 70, 80, maybe even more people,
'who were crushed in together.
Travelling back to Germany from her nurse duties in Eastern Europe during the war,
Renate Teller had a chance encounter with a train travelling in the opposite direction.
'Once, on the journey home, as we pulled out,
'another train passed ours.
'I looked out of the window, and there was a sort of little window
'left open on this cattle truck, and I saw a woman.
'She was lifting herself up and embracing a younger woman,
'who was sobbing, and she said, "It's over."
'And I thought, who could this be?
'Who are they, these women?'
'Not all, but many died in these trucks.
'The ones that died, we put them to one side
'so we didn't have to climb all over them.
'That was so terrible.'
NEWSREEL: 'Londoners in their thousands turned out
'to cheer 300 representatives of Uncle Sam's armed forces -
'soldiers, airmen and marines - march through the capital.'
After the attack on Pearl Harbour, America joined the Allied war effort,
and in 1942 its GIs came marching in.
Amateur film-makers were as excited as the newsreel producers,
and it was a huge boost to national morale,
especially the morale of British women.
It did have a big impact, and of course all our lads, they were very jealous of them.
Because they were well dressed, well fed, and ours weren't.
Well, suddenly there was lots of things to do,
and food.
They always seemed to have plenty of ice cream and food at their dances and parties,
and we were short of food, so that was a bonus.
And they always seemed to be able to take you somewhere
in the back of a lorry, to a dance or a show.
There seemed to be lots of entertainment.
One of the black GIs based in Bristol, Louie Edmead, had begun to take a keen interest in Pat.
Well, we went to this dance, local dance,
and I went with my sister, she was younger than me.
And I knew this man, I'd seen him there,
but I wasn't interested in him.
But he was very persistent, and then I got to know him,
and like him. He was a very nice man.
I was a very lucky girl.
With many dance halls bombed out, some cities organised open-air dance sessions.
Life was better when the war came.
There was always something to do.
Whereas life before the war was quiet and a bit boring.
So we were looking forward to having some fun.
But the fun was over in Germany.
With the addition of American planes to bombing raids,
the carnage there had multiplied.
Support for the war was draining away, especially amongst German women,
some of whom had now lost everything.
Official footage did not record the devastation,
but that of amateurs, like Elizabeth Wilms, did. Remarkably,
they also filmed the hostile response to collections for Nazi causes.
The war was a catastrophe for women.
Large numbers of women lost family members during the war.
At least 3 million German men, and it might have been a lot more, died.
Husbands, fathers, sons, brothers.
And if anybody thinks that women were obsessed
with Nazi policy,
including Nazi racial policy, during the war,
they might ponder on the fact that an awful lot of German women
had other things to think about, such as bereavement.
And that's before you mention rationing or bombing or anything else.
A lot of women lost their homes.
I can't see the war as being anything other than a catastrophe for women.
♪ Vor der Kaserne
♪ Vor dem grossen Tor
♪ Stand eine Laterne
♪ Und steht sie noch davor
♪ Dort wollen wir uns wiedersehen
♪ Bei der Laterne
♪ Wollen wir stehen
♪ Wie einst, Lili Marleen... ♪
For a time, the song Lili Marlene was banned in Germany because of its pessimistic tone.
Disillusioned nurse, Renate Teller, was one of the millions now coping with the sense of loss it expressed.
Her brother had been killed in action.
'Our Germany. What had happened to our Germany?
'The returning soldiers told their stories less enthusiastically than in the beginning.
'All enthusiasm was gone.'
By 1944, Britain was gearing itself up for the liberation of Europe,
and the long-awaited second front.
Betty Hockey and her Non-Stops concert party
had the job of performing at a joint American-British base on the night before D-Day.
There was a runway on one side,
and there were all the tanks and trucks rolling along on the other.
It was terribly noisy, it really was.
Of course, the crews were coming and going all night.
So we just kept coming and going, going over the whole thing
about three times, I think, all the way round.
And there was something eerie about it.
I can't really describe it.
We knew there was something on,
but we didn't really know to what extent was on.
Little now remains of the base at Holmsley in the New Forest where Betty Hockey performed that night.
You began to realise, good heavens, what are we doing here?
Why are we entertaining the boys?
Where are they going? What for?
At the show there were about half and half, Americans and Brits.
And, um...we would just sing our anthem,
and then the Star Spangled Banner.
And those lads just stood up, and they took it away from us.
They just sang and sang and they sang.
♪ ..Gave proof through the night
♪ That our flag was still there... ♪
We all had a sense of thank God, something's happened.
And it's going to change our lives.
Which it did, of course, eventually.
♪ O'er the land of the free
♪ And the home of the brave! ♪
By the time the Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy,
the Nazis' final solution was well under way.
Esther Bejarano's train had arrived at Auschwitz,
and she was about to be examined by the notorious Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele.
'I had to take my clothes off and walk naked past him.
'What did he look like?
'He was a good-looking man, yes.
'But what does that mean?
'He was a beast.
'I was very afraid.
'I had a vitamin deficiency
'and my whole body was covered in sores because of the poor diet.
'And I was afraid that, when he saw that,
'he wouldn't let me through.
'That he would send me straight into the gas chambers.
'I was shaking, but he let me through.'
Little film exists to record Nazi brutality.
Esther Bejarano realised that the only way she could survive Auschwitz
was by becoming a member of its orchestra.
'I had to get out of the hard labour section, so I told a lie.
I said, "I can play accordion,
'"but I haven't played for a long time.
'"I'd need to practise a bit."
'And she knew for sure that I'd never played the accordion before.
'But she did notice I was musical,
'and I suppose she thought maybe I could learn.
'So she took me into the orchestra.'
Those now arriving at Auschwitz were about to be faced with a grotesque deception.
'The Jewish people that came in the trains, they came in passenger trains.
'The windows were open. They heard that we were playing.
'Sometimes they waved to us.
'Maybe they thought, "If music is being played, it can't be so terrible."
'They wanted the people to go quietly
'and without any kind of opposition into the gas chambers.
'The people didn't know where they were going, but we knew.
'The tears were pouring down our cheeks, but we had to play.
'It was terrible.'
By late 1944, it was clear that the advance of the Allies
through France was costing far more casualties than had been anticipated.
Amateur film-maker Rosie Newman filmed the wounded as they were brought home.
Ironically, the song that had been banned in Germany now caught the mood of many women in Britain.
♪ We will create a world for two
♪ I'll wait for you
♪ The whole night through
♪ For you, Lily Marlene
♪ For you, Lily Marlene. ♪
Spitfire pilot Freydis Sharland had lost her brother in action.
It was just sad when people got killed, as they often did,
particularly flying people.
And my brother, of course, that was very sad.
When they all went out in the evening,
you know, there was a great roar as they went away.
It was quite...difficult that, really, to cope with,
but you had to go on and not worry about it.
Most of the American troops in Britain had by now been moved out of their bases,
some to the south coast, some to France.
Their departure from Britain altogether was now imminent.
You knew one day they would have to go away.
So really, although it was a selfish thing, you didn't want the war to end.
Because you knew they'd be going.
By the spring of 1945, the Russians were advancing rapidly from the east,
and the SS now began moving its concentration camp prisoners west.
To those prisoners, the Russians were potential liberators.
To Ilse Rohde, they were feared conquerors.
She joined the exodus of Germans from Poland.
'We stayed until the night of the 20th or the 21st of January 1945,
'and then we fled.
'We were told, when the Russians come, it would be all over for us.
'The women will be raped before they're killed,
'and the men will all be shot. So we fled.'
Then, one May morning, concentration camp prisoner Esther Bejarano
witnessed the convergence of the American and Russian armies.
'When the Russians arrived, they said, "Hitler's dead.
'"The war is over." That was on the 8th of May.
'It was unbelievable.
'I wasn't just liberated.
'I was born again.
'I could start living again.'
Immediately after the war, Renate Teller had work clearing up war rubble.
'How did I experience it?
'As a punishment.
'Gradually, over time, I came to realise
'that we had been responsible for the war.'
For Ilse Rohde, the issue of responsibility took a time to sink through.
'I only started thinking about how things really were much later.
'Just after the war, we were too busy fighting to survive.'
It was just relief.
We had huge bonfires everywhere.
But I don't remember, except for the bonfire, that we had any particular excitement.
Just thorough relief that it was over.
I felt then terribly sad,
with everybody dancing and jumping about and things.
I suddenly realised all the people we'd lost, and that wouldn't be celebrating with us.
I just felt terribly sad.
It was a poignant moment for Pat Venn, too.
By the time the British troops came home, her GI lover Louie had gone back to America.
I couldn't quite believe it. It was awful.
Really sad time.
Lots of people used to say to me - they were quite nasty, really -
"Oh, you won't see him again."
There was a sense of relief, of course, that you knew
you weren't going to be bombed,
and that you weren't going to be hurt in any way.
But at the same time, there was a void, of "where do we go from here?"
In the end, my husband met another woman,
but it was happening all around.
I mean, the lads were away for so long...
at times that it had to happen, I suppose.
The separation caused by the war ended the marriages of both Betty Hockey and Jean Riesco.
But Iris Watts and her husband were happily reunited.
Anne Richmond's boyfriend, David Piper,
returned safely from his prisoner of war camp for a wedding in 1945.
Now a widow, she was married for 45 years.
Esther Bejarano's sister, mother and father
never came back.
They had been murdered in Nazi concentration camps.
In 1945, Esther Bejarano moved to Palestine to begin a new life.
At victory parades throughout the country, women marched shoulder-to-shoulder with the men.
But many were now reluctant to be slotted back into their pre-war roles.
The thing was that if you wrote up for jobs, you know, nobody wanted you.
They'd rather have a man
because, you know, they wouldn't be having babies and stopping
and wanting maternity leave and things like that.
Some women who had briefly dreamed of a totally new way of life
refused to let their dreams go.
It was the terrible winter of 1947.
My poor mother couldn't get any food or potatoes.
She was trying hard to keep it going,
and we were all pretty fed up. My dad had died.
It was February the 15th,
and I went to bed.
And then I heard the stones at the window.
And I opened the window and there was Louie.
And he had a bag on his back.
And I opened the window and I said, "Don't go away."
And he said, "I've come 15,000 miles. I'm not going anywhere."
And that was it.
I still get upset about it. It's silly.
♪ Some day
♪ When I'm awfully low
♪ When the world is cold
♪ I will feel a glow
♪ Just thinking of you
♪ And the way you look
♪ Tonight
♪ Just the way you look
♪ Tonight. ♪
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd