Berlin in the early 1930s looks less like the capital of a coming catastrophe than Europe's most liberal, freewheeling city, even as the Great Depression tightens its grip worldwide. This six-part series traces the war from that unstable peace to the ruins of 1945, using only footage shot at the time by war correspondents, soldiers, resistance fighters, and ordinary civilians, all of it colorized to strip away the distance black-and-white can create. Newsreels and rarely seen private films follow Hitler's rise and his bluffing diplomacy against French, British, and Soviet leaders who kept hesitating to confront him until confrontation was no longer optional. The series ends where it must, with the Red Army tearing across Eastern Europe and the Allies closing in from the west as Berlin falls. One deliberate exception breaks the visual style: Holocaust footage stays in its original black and white, a choice that keeps those scenes from being softened by the same process that makes everything else feel closer. The colorization is the reason to watch; the restraint around it is why the film earns trust.