This year marks the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I, a conflagration whose causes most people probably don't understand. This week, NHK will present a series of German documentaries, "Doomsday World War I," on its BS1 channel that attempt to explain the so-called war to end all wars, with colorized film shot at the time as well as dramatizations. All programs start at midnight.
"Fall of Man" (Mon.) attempts to show how the war widened from the regional Sarajevo Incident to encompass all of Europe, and discusses the advent of modern weaponry that made mass killing the hallmark of the war.
"Purgatory" (Tues.) takes on the matter of unlimited war, wherein 700,000 people were killed on a 700-km-long front in northern France that never budged: The horror of trench warfare.