Berlin, Warsaw, and Dresden lie in rubble when the guns finally fall silent in 1945, and this two-part film tracks what comes next for a continent with no functioning governments, no currency worth trusting, and millions of people who cannot go home. Displaced persons camps hold refugees, former slave laborers, and concentration camp survivors with nowhere to return to, while Allied administrators try to feed cities that have lost their farmland, factories, and railways in the same bombing campaigns that won the war. Investigators and occupation courts hunt Nazi officials who have gone underground, some making it to South America before they can be tried. Archival footage of rubble-clearing, ration lines, and the early Nuremberg proceedings carries much of the story, alongside newsreel material tracking how quickly wartime allies Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union start dividing Germany and Europe into opposing camps. By the film's end the postwar settlement looks less like peace than the opening move of the Cold War.