By early 1945 Germany is beaten but not yet occupied: the Red Army has reached the Oder while Allied forces in the west are still grinding forward. The film opens as American camera crews finally get access behind the front, starting at the railway bridge at Remagen, already legendary after American troops seized it intact and used it to pour men across the Rhine. Colorized footage follows the evacuated residents of Cologne trudging back into a city reduced to rubble, their faces caught in close, unflinching shots. Cameramen from the US Army's Special Film Project 186, working alongside Hollywood director George Stevens, track advancing troops through the Westerwald toward Thuringia, recording burned-out villages, columns of prisoners, and the collapse of German resistance in real time. The color restoration is what makes the material land differently from familiar black-and-white newsreels; ruined streets and defeated crowds stop looking like distant history. This is the opening episode of a series charting the final collapse of the Third Reich through original wartime camera footage.