Watch Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution

In the 1990s, following the collapse of communism and other geopolitical shifts, British television documentary- makers were able to produce a remarkable series of programmes. Cold War, People’s Century, The Death of Yugoslavia, The Second Russian Revolution and The Fifty Years War were all built on the model of the classic ITV series The World at War. Intended not just for a Sunday evening audience but also for the consideration of posterity, they featured a compelling mixture of archive footage and interviews with wrinkled key players.

In this unacknowledged golden age, one series stood above all the rest. The Nazis: A Warning from History (1997) dragged before the camera many unreconstructed old acolytes of the Führer who explained just how things did (and sometimes didn’t) work inside the Third Reich. It was made by Laurence Rees. Fuelled by success, he went on to make War of the Century (1999), about the German invasion of the Soviet Union; Horror in the East (2001), about Japanese atrocities and the atom bomb; and Auschwitz (2005). Seen by millions at transmission, they are all used as study aids in schools and universities. It’s not going too far to state that much of what most viewers know about the war, they know because Rees has told them.

He returns this month with yet another lapidary consideration of the second world war in Behind Closed Doors, which tells the story of how and why Britain and America got into bed with the Soviet Union. It is the kind of television nobody else makes any more. These days, unfortunately, neither do we. Rees is more or less the only one who gets such series onto terrestrial television, and the bad news is that he is leaving the BBC. Armed with a two-book deal, he will continue his investigation of the war in print. From now on, he will be pitching ideas to the BBC on the back of a pre-existing book project. The tables have turned.

To understand how this has happened, it is necessary to unpick the elements that go into the composition of a historical documentary. The chief glory of Rees’s series has been the testimony of eyewitnesses, but most are now dead. Take two talking heads in Behind Closed Doors. The man whom Stalin ordered to destroy the Soviet oilfields or face death, one of the last people alive who regularly had meetings with him, finally met his maker not long after the interview he gave Rees two years ago. And a vivid account of Hitler’s reaction to the Molotov–Pact was dredged up from footage, unused in The Nazis, featuring a Nazi retainer who died 10 years ago. It’s symptomatic of the way things are going that the British diplomat Frank Roberts, who in The Nazis personally recalled the negotiations at Yalta, now crops up as an acted character when Churchill visits the Kremlin in 1942.

Once upon a time, Rees was the foremost opponent of dramatic reconstruction. “I was as dead set against it as a human being could be,” he says. As editor of the history strand Timewatch in the 1990s, he went so far as to ban it. For The Nazis, there was no need to re-enact scenes: the interviews and archive covered all the bases. Rees started to feel the constraints of his self-imposed ban only when, in making Horror in the East, he tried to get to the bottom of meetings attended by Hirohito or Roosevelt for which there were no useful eyewitnesses. “And because there was no archive, I felt there was no way I could tell the story.” His first involvement with dramatic reconstruction came as executive producer on Pyramid, in which the story of the building was recounted through CGI and nonspeaking actors. “And suddenly, a whole load of people we’d never met wanted to invest in us.”

By the time Auschwitz came around, Rees had to allow dramatisation into a documentary of his own making. It was not, he insists, to lure a younger audience and get away from black and white. “I was doing it entirely because the story that now interested me, I couldn’t tell any other way.” In Behind Closed Doors, the carefully drafted reconstructions of important meetings, vetted by countless historians from Britain, America and Russia, are the least toe-curling in the short history of a bastard genre. The account of the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact is compelling, as is the scene in which Churchill asks Stalin what the Soviet government did with the kulaks. “We killed them,” comes the reply (in Russian).

It helps that the actors are genuinely good. Though on the tall side, Stalin, in particular, is brilliantly played by a Russian Michael Gambon. Viewers may also recognise the actor playing Ribbentrop from the film Downfall. The problem is that actors increase the cost dramatically. Rees admits: “There’s a reason really good actors are paid a lot of money. They’re the ones who can act.”

Nor is archive footage getting any cheaper. “A viewer once wrote to complain about ‘using all this black-and-white footage to save money’. I’d save a lot more money if I didn’t use it, because it’s very expensive.” Some archives charge more than others. The national archive in America makes key material available for free. Russian archive film can come relatively cheap, too. A minute’s archive footage from Russia — of, say, Anthony Eden inspecting a trenchful of Wehrmacht corpses in the snow — would cost £500 a minute to show once in the UK. But to secure rights to show it worldwide and on DVD would cost closer to £4,000.

The Bundesarchiv in Germany charges exponentially more for material shot by the Nazis. “It’s not dodgy in the sense that you’re paying the government, not a private guy, but you might argue that it’s of historical value. The German position is, ‘We’ve got it, and you want it.’” One piece of footage is worth every penny, though. Newsreel shows a bird’s- eye view of bombs raining down on Stalingrad. Over the sound of the newscaster come the martial strains of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. (So director Francis Ford Coppola didn’t get there first: there was an apocalypse then, too.)

But the really insuperable new problem for the historical documentary is access to written archives in Russia. “When I started on War of the Century, you got this stupendous access to all these archives — and now you cannot get into a whole load of them. They never actually tell you why you can’t get in — ‘It’s just not possible at the minute.’” If nothing else, this reversion to type is indicative of another geopolitical shift. One of Rees’s contacts, who encountered similar obstruction from the Soviets when working in the British military mission in Moscow during the war, called it “the cotton-wool treatment”. To deal with the Soviet mass murder of thousands of Polish officers at Katyn (and elsewhere), Rees had to fall back on the detailed notes of scholars and military prosecutors who had managed to gain access before the archive closed.

In other words, the historical documentary is not immune to the forces of history. Behind Closed Doors ends in 1989, which is also when the television historians were really able to start telling the Soviet story. Hence that golden age of the 1990s. Now those doors are closing again. Could it be that the making of Behind Closed Doors provides another warning from history? What seems incontrovertible is that, for the foreseeable future, the historical documentary is a thing of the past. Unless, of course, someone can get Al-Qaeda to talk.

World War II — Behind Closed Doors begins on BBC2 on Nov 10

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