I find that opening, and especially the music, to be incredibly haunting. I have the whole series on DVD.
I was a WW2 buff when I was a little kid. I watched the whole “World at War” series when it was on PBS back in the seventies and I agree, that opening theme is very haunting and evocative.
I have rewatched most of this episodes in the last few years. It is really amazing to me now for a couple of reasons. First, it’s absolute lack of PC. The documentarians are brutally honest about how bad the Germans and Japanese really were. Second are the interviews with the folks who made the decisions. Many of those guys were still alive and quite coherent in the early seventies. I found it fascinating when they would show a picture of someone from wartime and then cut to an actual interview with that guy. They had an interview with Karl Doenitz which I thought was amazing.
Many of the episodes are on youtube and are shown periodically on the American Heroes channel. Very compelling if you are a WW2 history guy. Also the episodes are jam packed with information. They don’t rehash everything that they have already presented after every commercial break like most of the cable shows do now.