4 real historical locations · Germany, Poland, Ukraine
A German miniseries following five young Berlin friends who go their separate ways at the start of Operation Barbarossa — to the Eastern Front, to the resistance, to the stage — gradually losing everything they believed in. A sweeping, controversial portrait of ordinary Germans in extraordinary times.
CinemaMapped has mapped 4 real historical locations where the story takes place, spanning Germany, Poland, Ukraine.
Five friends say farewell at a Berlin apartment in summer 1941 — believing the war in the East will be over by Christmas.
In summer 1941, most Germans believed Operation Barbarossa would be finished in weeks. German propaganda portrayed the Soviet Union as a paper tiger. The Wehrmacht had conquered France in six weeks; few imagined the S...
View location →Wilhelm and Friedhelm serve as Wehrmacht officers on the Eastern Front — advancing, retreating, and brutalising as the war of annihilation unfolds.
The German invasion of the Soviet Union was explicitly a war of annihilation. Wehrmacht orders instructed soldiers to shoot Communist Party members and to treat the civilian population with extreme harshness. Approxim...
View location →Viktor's storyline — a Jewish man's journey through the Warsaw Ghetto, the Uprising, and the forests with Polish partisans.
Warsaw was the epicentre of Polish Jewish life — 400,000 Jews in the ghetto before deportations began. The 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the 1944 Warsaw Uprising (by the Polish Home Army) were both crushed. After th...
View location →The survivors return to a destroyed Berlin in 1945 — unrecognisable from the city they left, and changed beyond recognition themselves.
Berlin was bombed 363 times by the RAF and USAAF. The final Battle of Berlin killed 125,000 civilians and 170,000 soldiers. By May 1945, Berlin's population of 4.3 million had fallen to 2.8 million. An estimated 95,00...
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