
End of the War in Color: Visions of Hell (Episode 3)
By the end of April 1945, Nuremberg, the city Hitler built for his Reich Party rallies, has fallen after brutal house-to-house fighting, and the ruins become a favorite location for the camera crews of the German Wehrmacht's Special Film Project 186. The episode then follows Hollywood director George Stevens, working for the US Army Signal Corps, as his team enters Dachau concentration camp to film the evidence of Nazi extermination policy and one of the evacuation transports moving prisoners out of the death camps in the east. Stevens describes the scene as walking through Dante's visions of hell, and the color footage he shot backs up the comparison. The film closes as photojournalists reach Obersalzberg, Hitler's mountain retreat in the Alps, days before the war in Europe ends. Built from restored color archival footage with narration tying the locations and dates together, this is one episode in a series tracking the war's final collapse through the cameramen who recorded it.