Rare color footage shot by Hollywood director George Stevens carries this episode through the last weeks of the war in Europe. American forces push deeper into Germany, and the film includes footage of the liberation of concentration camps, shown without the usual black-and-white distance that softens it elsewhere. The centerpiece is the meeting of American and Soviet troops on the Elbe River, the moment that split Germany in two before the war had even ended, captured in the same color stock that makes the ruined towns and columns of soldiers feel closer to the present than archival footage usually does. Narration threads the advance together, tracking specific units and dates rather than staying general, and lets the Stevens footage do the heavy work of showing what collapse actually looked like on the ground. Part of a series on the war's final weeks, this episode focuses on the American front and its collision with the Soviets, a handshake that set the terms for the decades after.