I knew perfectly well that no-one would be able to correct my mistake if I made one.” "I felt like I was sitting on a hot frying pan. “All I had to do was to reach for the phone to raise the direct line to our top commanders but I couldn’t move. “But we knew every second of procrastination took away valuable time that the Soviet Union’s military and political leadership needed to be informed without delay. "There was no rule about how long we were allowed to think before we reported a strike. Computers changed their alerts from launch to ‘missile strike’. A minute later the siren went off again to show another missile had been launched. Petrov now recalls: “I remember just sitting there for a few seconds as the system howled and the screen showed the word ‘launch’. It took 13 years and the collapse of communism before details of the incident leaked out of Russia, in a memoir by one of his commanding officers. “It was probably 50:50 but I had a funny feeling in my gut.” Petrov’s story is told in a new drama-documentary about his life, The Man Who Saved The World, which reveals how close the world came to nuclear war on the night of September 26, 1983. Petrov took the second option and reported the incident as a false alarm.Īs the minutes ticked by his heart was racing and he could feel beads of sweat trickling down his back. He was also mistrustful of the satellite technology, which was still in its infancy.Īs the most senior man in the bunker, he faced an awful choice – follow the rules and make the call or trust his instincts and simply do nothing. He was suspicious that Soviet ground radar had not picked up the approaching missiles. The lieutenant colonel knew his call would probably trigger a retaliatory attack and a devastating nuclear war could ensue. Paul von Hartmann obtains a leaked document that proves a meticulously planned war of destruction. He wants to pass it on to the British in order to prevent the Munich Agreement and stop Hitler.Īt the conference, the two young men try to deliver the document and convince Chamberlain.However, he hesitated. Years later, von Hartmann is a German diplomat who translates the foreign press for Hitler, while Legat, Chamberlain’s private secretary, helps the British head of government write speeches. The two meet as Oxford students in the 1930s. Set in historical context, the adaptation of a novel by Robert Harris tells the fictional story of two young men, Paul von Hartmann (Jannis Niewöhner) and Hugh Legat (Georg MacKay). This is exactly where Munich: The Edge of War begins.
#The man who stopped world war iii revealed series#
The film by German director Christian Schwochow (who also directed various episodes of the series The Crown) therefore leads to the question: What would have happened if the Western powers at the time had not let Hitler get away with invading the Sudetenland - the beginning of a megalomaniac war of extermination that cost millions of lives? But I could do nothing, since the English and French in Munich accepted all my demands.” He had actually been envisioning war, as he revealed in 1945 in a series of final statements - monologues known as the Bormann dictations: “From the military point of view, we were interested in starting it a year earlier. Hoping to prevent an international conflict, the Western powers therefore aimed to take the wind out of Hitler’s sails with their policy of “appeasement.”Įven though the Munich Agreement awarded Germany the territories it coveted, Hitler grudgingly signed the pact. Hitler had been arming the Wehrmacht since 1933 his war machine was ready to go.įrance and Britain’s calculation was that if they let Hitler invade Czechoslovakia, they would have to defend the allied country. The annexation, agreed upon by the four Western powers without even consulting the Czechoslovaks, was the prelude to the violent expansion of Nazi Germany. The historical agreement allowed Hitler to take over the Czechoslovak Sudeten territories, inhabited by some 3 million ethnic Germans. That early attempt to stop Hitler’s devastating expansionist policy is the focus of the new Netflix film Munich: The Edge of War.Įven though viewers of the thriller already know that Chamberlain’s attempts to avoid a war with Nazi Germany will be unsuccessful, the film remains captivating thanks to clever dialogues, detailed set design and outstanding acting.Ībove all, it reflects on the power of any single individual amid a visibly insane political context the actions of the protagonists bring forth questions on how far each of us would go in such circumstances. As history later demonstrated, it was one of the worst appeasement acts: the 1938 Munich Agreement, signed by the respective heads of government of the UK, Germany, France and Italy: Neville Chamberlain, Adolf Hitler, Edouard Daladier and Benito Mussolini.
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