Best German war series

Five young German friends promise to meet again after WW2 ends, but soon their naive wishes of peace and happiness will become a long and tragic nightmare.

An inexperienced U-boat crew has to survive a secret mission and a young German woman is torn between loyalty for her home country and the French resistance in the WWII drama.

Based on an autobiographical novel by German World War II photographer Lothar-Guenther Buchheim, Das Boot follows the lives of a fearless U-Boat captain (Jurgen Prochnow) and his inexperienced crew as they patrol the Atlantic and Mediterranean in search of Allied vessels, taking turns as hunter and prey.

Two Americans and their allies form a scrappy rescue operation in 1940 Marseilles to help artists, writers and other refugees fleeing Europe during WWII. Transatlantic is a historical drama television miniseries created by Anna Winger and Daniel Hendler, based on the 2019 novel The Flight Portfolio by Julie Orringer. The novel explores the historic Emergency Rescue Committee that operated in Marseilles, Spain, and Portugal in 1940 after the fall of France. The series includes or refers to well-known artists or scholars of the time who were saved by the Committee or interacted with it. The series closed the 2023 Series Mania festival in March, ahead of its Netflix premiere on 7 April 2023.

After a defector is murdered, British agent Fielding Scott is assigned to track down a mole in his own ranks in 1961 Berlin. His investigation leads him into a deadly web of crime, betrayal and paranoia. Who can Scott trust in the city of spies?

Cold War, the seventies. Lars is a Romeo agent from East Germany: he must go to the West side and seduce and spy on Western women who work in government or defense institutions.

Summer 1944. Walter Proska is about to return to the Eastern Front when his train is blown up by partisans. Together with a scattered bunch of German soldiers, cut off from the front, he awaits certain death while the commands of his superior Willi Stehauf are becoming more and more senseless and inhuman.

Bonn depicts the rise of the young West Germany, a country struggling to break free from the terrors and legacies of World War II and longing for a 'normal' life. Into this heady and volatile mix steps Toni, a young woman determined to seize every opportunity, overcome every obstacle and make her own way in what is still a very male-dominated society. But what at first appears to be only an entry-level office job at one of the country's two competing secret services soon sucks her ever deeper into a clandestine world of suspicion

The Battle of Stalingrad, which cost the lives of at least a million German soldiers, Red Army troops and Soviet civilians, was the bloodiest of the decisive battles in the "war of extermination" which Hitler had unleashed. This three-part documentary, employing previously unreleased film footage and brutally frank statements from survivors on both sides, explains exactly how the catastrophe came about and describes the gruesome consequences of the battle for the soldiers and the inhabitants of the city.

This documentary series delves into the battleships, submarines and aircraft carriers that have changed the history of modern warfare.

The two-part documentary Crime in Post-War Germany shows how strained life was between 1945 and 1949 in the four occupied zones. Using the example of individual, particularly serious criminal cases, like in Dresden where a wood collector comes across the severed legs of a person or in Hamburg, where the so-called rubble murders terrify the whole city.

When war broke out in Europe in 1914, most people thought the conflict would be over by Christmas; they could not imagine how wrong they were. An attack in Sarajevo ended up becoming a snowball that swept the world: a new kind of warfare had begun, waged with techniques and means never seen before. By November 1918, ten million people had died and the political map of the planet had been redrawn.

Explores the Third Reich from a contemporary perspective to investigate how the Nazis managed to conquer Germany and then half of Europe in the wake of World War I.

ZERV" tells of the first years after the fall of the Wall, the breaks in life courses, of completely different biographies and of the successful coming together in the common fight against crime, which knows no East and West. ZERV stands for the Central Investigation Office for Government and Association Crime, founded in Berlin in 1991 by decision of the federal government.

"Löwengrube – Die Grandauers und ihre Zeit" is a German television series first aired between 1989 and 1992, created by Willy Purucker and directed by Rainer Wolffhardt. It is set in Munich and follows the lives of Ludwig Grandauer and his son Karl, both policemen, covering the years from 1897 to 1954. The TV show is based on Purucker's radio play series Die Grandauers und ihre Zeit (‘The Grandauers and their time’). The series’ main title "Löwengrube", meaning ‘Lions’ Den’, refers to the address of the Munich Police Headquarters inaugurated in 1913.

The First World War - carnage on a scale never-before seen. But how did it all start? And how did some key figures of WWII fare in the earlier war?

They were U.S. paratroopers, Norwegian operatives, and British Commandos, Allied teams leading high-risk operations throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia to fight Hitler and turn the tide of the war. WWII's Most Daring Raids puts you in the heart of the action, giving you a minute-by-minute account of the most astonishing surprise attacks against the Third Reich. We forensically examine how exactly these assaults played out, through expert analysis and testimonies from the brave men who carried them out.

The People’s Republic of China now plays a central role in global politics, economics and diplomacy – more than it ever has before. Its president, Xi Jinping openly espouses the model forged by former Chairman, Mao Zedong, known as the Great Helmsman. But what do we really know about Mao? And how does his legacy relate to Xi’s ‘China Dream’? This 3-part documentary series explores Mao Zedong, his beliefs and his methods. It shows how these have shaped Xi’s philosophy and the reality of today’s China. Mao had set China on the road to true sovereignty, freeing it from the humiliation of foreign domination. Xi is now completing that journey towards the strong Middle Kingdom and cultural predominance that Mao aimed for – while sweeping under the carpet the unthinkable victims and costs of Mao’s rule. The story arc of Mao’s astonishing biography provides varied and profound insights into the ideals, strategies and ambitions of today’s People’s Republic and its position in the next decade.

In 1944 many Germans in Eastern Prussia believed like Lena von Mahlenberg, daughter of a local aristocrat, that Hitler would surrender and spare them from being invaded by the vengeful Russian Red Army. He didn't and they had to flee.

Centers around 35-year-old Alexander Jaromin, who for 20 years has been living with his mother in Athens under assumed identities in the witness protection program of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) after his father and sister were killed in a terrorist attack. Tormented by the unknown, Alexander begins a desperate search to uncover the truth and soon finds himself under the close watch of the Federal Intelligence Service, with his life in danger as he ends up in a race against time in which he must do whatever it takes to uncover the truth.

When Julia, a young trainee police officer, meets the secretive stranger Nick, she finds herself falling for him almost instantly. But after their first night together, she is shocked to see that Nick has a huge swastika tattoo on his back. Despite all the advice to forget the guy immediately, she decides to investigate the right-wing extremist scene for herself. She follows a trail deep into the forests of the Eifel to the abandoned bunkers of Hitler’s Siegfried Line. In this old World War II defense facility, the young police officer finds the hideout of a terrorist with whom she has more in common than she ever could have imagined.

When World War II breaks out in 1939, several people from different countries and social backgrounds must decide which cause they want to defend.

A look back at a cruel conflict, the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), which changed the political geography of Europe and sowed the seeds of a deep antagonism between France and Germany that culminated in two world wars. Excerpts from the diaries of the witnesses, photographs and painted panoramas tell the truth about a forgotten war.

Helpless, the young convent student Richard has to watch as his mother Sarazenin Zobeida is condemned by the inquisitor Heinrich Institoris as a witch and burned at the stake. From then on, Richard swears revenge on Institoris for what he did to his family. He can escape and is taken by the merchant Jakob Fugger. He wants to teach him not only to seek blind revenge, but to manipulate people like puppets and thus to reach his goals. The two travel from Florence to Rome to influence the upcoming election of the pope and to witness the power struggle between the Medicis and the Borgias up close.

An investigation into the nature, details and reasons for the collaboration, from 1940 to 1944, during World War II, between the Vichy regime, established in the south of France and headed by Marshal Pétain, and Nazi Germany.

This series takes viewers deep into the heart of battle, to reveal the critical turning points in some of WWII's most decisive confrontations.

The person Adolf Hitler shaped the 20th century like no other. This series documents the Hitler's life using unpublished material.

The Battle of the Rhineland was one of the largest WW2 battles the Allies fought on German soil and part of the critical final campaign against Nazi Germany on the western front.The Battle for the Rhineland was a series of operations in early 1945, the dramatic finale of the Allied advance from the coast of Normandy to the borders of the Reich. The desperate German forces had managed to form a last line of defence with their backs to the Rhine – the famous river that stood between the Allies and the heart of the German Reich.

During the Cold War, the superpowers mobilized thousands of spies and spotters to lift the enemy’s secrets. The three-part program The Spying Game takes a close look at this era of rising tensions between East and West.

On 1 September 1939, Hitler started the most fatal war in world history – a war waged to plunder, dispossess, enslave and eliminate entire ethnic groups. This German-Polish series reconstructs how Hitler triggered a chain of events that sparked a global conflagration and the intense suffering of the Polish people, the first victims of the war.

A reassessment of the role Albert Speer played in the Third Reich. Speer, who was ultimately convicted at the Nuremburg trials and served a 20-year prison sentence, was known for designing many of the Third Reich's buildings and for being Hitler's minister for war production.

When the Second World War breaks out, it is at first largely a war between one side of totalitarian aggressors against a portion of the democratic countries of the world defending other totalitarian states. From the first day of the war in Poland, as it already is in China, this will be a war against humanity.

Bundestag member Eva Blumenthal is forced to resign due to political intrigue. Because of this, he changes jobs; she is hired by a lobbying agency. The more he proves his innocence, the more he deviates from his own morals. It must prove that there is an even more complex network of manipulation and corruption behind the intrigues.Her former lover, Economy Minister Bertram Kaiser, is found dead in the Spree River. It is unclear whether he was killed or committed suicide. is his death connected to a conspiracy?

In 1990 the head of the Treuhand, Hans-Georg Dahlmann, was targeted by the RAF. When he made Sandra Wellmann, mother of one son, his assistant, he had no idea what additional danger he was exposing himself to. Because Wellmann is doing common cause with RAF members Bettina Pohlmann and Klaus Gelfert and is supposed to provide them with information for the planned attack on Dahlmann.

In 2002, Munich born Maurice Philip Remy produced a three-part documentary film, Mythos Rommel ('The Rommel Myth'), for German TV with a book of the same name, chipping away at the Rommel legend dramatically.In the manner of Jeremy Isaacs' award-winning World at War series of 1973, Remy's exhaustive 'Mythos Rommel', later released with with an english-language soundtrack, relies on much pre-war and wartime newsreel footage of Rommel, skillfully weaving in interviews with surviving members of the Field Marshal's staff including Heinz Werner Schmidt; his nurse in North Africa; soldiers who fought for and against him, including Field Marshal Lord Carver; one of Churchill's former secretaries; the unrelated but intriguingly named Italian soldier Mario Rommel and both his grandson and granddaughter Helen and Joseph Pan, and Erwin's son Manfred also are making important contributions.Field Marshall Erwin Rommel was the most famous and celebrated German military commander of the Second World War. He was revered by the Germans, respected by the Allies and nicknamed 'The Desert Fox' for his tactics in the Western Desert - and yet he would die in secret disgrace.Rommel is the most detailed film biography of the German commander ever made. It follows his military career through the Great War to his daring tank assaults during the Blitzkreig of 1940, which brought him to the attention of the Nazi leaders. Goebbels thought him an ideal subject for propaganda, and the German public thrilled to his initial victories in North Africa with the Afrika Korps. However, as the war dragged on, Rommel became ever more tired and disillusioned. The darling of the German newsreels realised that the Nazis could not win the war. Discovering the horrors of the Holocaust, he called his senior command 'tragically filthy'...and started to realise that something had to be done about Adolf Hitler.The story of this fascinating, complex and tormented man is told through original wartime archive film, newsreels and exclusive interviews. Members of his own wartime staff, his son, his driver and veterans from the Afrika Korps and the 8th Army all offer revealing insights into the 'Desert Fox' - and provide a vivid portrait of a man torn between his military values and loyalties and the Nazi regime he served.

It is customary to give every new government 100 days to draw an initial summary of its work, its successes, its failures, its prospects. A “grace period” that also applied to Chancellor Adolf Hitler. However, he uses them more radically for his goals than anyone before him. This is what this series tells about – as a canon of contemporary voices. Diary entries from all over Germany document different perspectives, perceptions and very private things. How can a civilized country, a democratic state, turn into a brutal dictatorship in just a few weeks?

During the darkest days of the Third Reich, the most dreaded sound was a knock at the door after dark. Everyone who lived under Nazi rule lived in fear of the secretive agents known colloquially as "V-Men". Hitler called them his "deadliest weapon", and without them the Fuhrer's ambition could never have been realized.

This outstanding and sensitive drama series tells a young and family audience the stories of children who lived through a most difficult era in recent history - and who grew with its challenges.

A story about German resistance group fighting SS units during WWII.

Feuerdrachen is a German television series.

Based on the book by Kirst, this is the story of the investigation concerning the death of a young lieutenant at a German school for officers. The story takes place in the last year of WW2 and shows the intrigue and machinations between men and "wolves".

Ambitious 11-part docudrama of the life, teaching, and work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. This series was produced by East-German television. The series shows important points in the life and political development of these immense figures, from Marx's birth in 1818 until Engel's death in 1895.

Shortly before the outbreak of World War II: Leopold Trepper, a colonel in the Red Army, travels to Belgium under a false name and sets up a spy ring there. Together with his employees Viktor Sukulow-Gurewitsch, Johann Wenzel, Hillel Katz and Michail Makarow, he succeeds in establishing a spy network throughout Belgium and France in a very short time. With the help of his cover companies - a chain of raincoat shops and later the import-export company Simexco ”- Trepper can collect information from the economy and the Wehrmacht, about Atlantic Wall construction sites and railway lines, and send it to Moscow. The agents also get help from patriots who want to free their countries from the occupation by the Germans.

The story of a group of Berlin youths from the post-war period to the post-reunification era. A gripping story of friendship, love and betrayal against a global political backdrop, told in a three-part documentary drama. Friends Kurt, Lotte, Jakob, Silke and Bernd experience everyday life together in post-war Berlin in 1948: between rubble women and the black market, rival youth gangs and first love. Thirteen years later, as the flow of refugees to the West increases, they try to hold on to their friendship. But the estrangement becomes ever more apparent and the gang members lose sight of each other. Only after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 do the former friends finally find each other again and have to ask themselves whether they are still bound by the vow they once made: "Nothing can separate us, not even death"...

The Second World War depicted through the eyes of a German platoon on the Eastern Front.

When American troops started their final invasion of Nazi Germany in February 1945, cameramen were at their side and complied over a thousand reels covering 12 weeks in Germany until the ultimate collapse of the Third Reich including stories on the road from the Bulge over the Remagen Bridge to the Eagle’s Nest. Michael Kloft has selected the most striking scenes for his two-part documentary.

End of Innocence is a two-part television film that focuses on the work of the German Uranium Association during World War II.At Farm Hall in England, the ten German nuclear scientists interned there as part of Operation Epsilon learn of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945. In flashbacks, the development of the German uranium project is recapitulated chronologically from the discovery of nuclear fission by Otto Hahn to the work of Kurt Diebner at the Heereswaffenamt to the experiments of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics under Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker at the Haigerloch research reactor in spring 1945.

Ambitious 11-part docudrama of the life, teaching, and work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. This series was produced by East-German television. The series shows important points in the life and political development of these immense figures, from Marx's birth in 1818 until Engel's death in 1895.

"Operation Valkyrie" was the name of an official alarm plan during the Second World War. With the help of this plan, the conspirators around Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg wanted to bring about the overthrow of Germany on July 20, 1944. The events are well known: Stauffenberg's assassination attempt failed, Adolf Hitler remained alive. In addition to the purely scenic reconstruction, this two-part, documentary-style film consists of interspersed interviews and reports with eyewitnesses and survivors who were directly involved. Everything that is available in the way of authentic testimony about July 20, 1944 is examined and documented with the highest degree of realism.

"Die Kinder der Flucht" is a three-part German docudrama that portrays the harrowing experiences of children and young people during the final months of World War II and its aftermath in Eastern Europe. The series weaves together dramatized reenactments, archival footage, and poignant interviews with real-life survivors to tell three distinct yet interconnected stories of displacement, survival, and resilience.

A collection of thoughts about the notion of decadence regarding Western philosophy, faith, and culture.

The person Adolf Hitler shaped the 20th century like no other. This series documents the Hitler's life using unpublished material.