Resistance

By the summer of 1944, the terror and tyranny of the Nazi-third-rikes shrouds most of Europe.

“Occupied countries resist as they can, but with the advance of Soviet forces in the yeast and the success”

of the Normandy invasion in the West, two of the world's great cities organized in force and fight back. Even in the place of greatest horror, there is resistance. This is World War II with Tom Hanks, episode 16, resistance. Easy, no. This is London calling. French people speaking to the French. Since the fall of France, the BBC has broadcast daily radio programming to occupied Europe.

Embedded within the broadcasts are coded messages.

Please listen now to personal messages. The night before D-Day, the Allied invasion of Western Europe.

The broadcast to occupied France includes a line from a poem by Paul Verlade. Wounded my heart with a monotonous linger. The French resistance is waiting, and when the BBC announces, wound my heart with a monotonous linger, this is the word that they have been waiting to hear the invasion is on. The Allies want that resistance movement to rise up. To blow up German railroads,

ambush German patrols that to disrupt the Germans in any way they can. All of their planning, all of their networking now goes into action to slow the German response

so that the Allies can win the race to build up and break out. So many men and women throughout France

have risked so much to get to this night. In the beginning of their country's liberation. After the fall of France in 1940, there are two frances. The France that is directly occupied by the Germans, including Paris, and there is a puppet regime with its capital at V-sheet. So resistance groups form in each one. From the start, the inspiration for French resistance to Germany was embodied by one man, a veteran of the Great War, General Charles Degall.

Charles Degall fought all the way through the German invasion of France in 1940. Rather than surrender to the Germans, rather than go along with the French government, and he arrives in Britain by himself and just says, "By the way, I'm now the leader of the free French." He's self-appointed. Churchill goes, "Yeah, he might be useful. He gets my office, he's my radio, that's into some broadcasts."

Honour commands all Frenchmen to continue the war at the side of their allies. He's got an out. The V-sheet government is illegitimate. Anybody who's in France should come over to England and we're going to start to put together

“an army that's going to liberate ourselves. If you can't get here, you should start resisting”

while you're there. This was an extremely important event in galvanizing the French people. Up to that point, they'd been in a state of despondency at the rapid defeat at the hands of the Germans. Now, here was a voice, one of their own offering them hope. He says, "The flame of French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished. These are words that Frenchmen and women were longing to hear.

It's not only the beginning of the resistance, it's the beginning of the rise of Charles de Gaulle to political power in France." Resistance pops up all over the country, but these groups aren't connected and they all stand for different things. There are aristocratic Catholics, communists, or Republicans. There are all different groups jogging for position between themselves and fighting against the Germans as well.

Across section of French citizens, teachers, lawyers, farmers, factory workers, take part in the resistance. Women play a substantial role.

“One of the most important activities of the resistance was a network of agents and”

secret codes and safe houses that helped smuggle down Allied flyers out of France and back to safety in Britain. This underrun railroad helped about 5,000 Allied flyers make it to freedom in the course of the war. It's the potential of the Allied invasion eventually reaching France that cause volunteers to flock to the resistance, their gathering, equipment, supplies, weapons,

The night before D-Day, dozens of Allied agents are dropped behind German lines

“to coordinate with groups of the French resistance, so called Jedberg teams.”

Three man teams who parachute into occupied France, an American, a British and a French agent. They bring weapons with them, they bring a radio set so they could communicate. They coordinate activities and they inform the groups what the Allies are up to. The Jedbergs have an ultimate goal and that is to ease the invasion plan for June 1944. Once the Allies land in June 6, the resistance becomes emboldened.

But many pay a grievous price for their courage.

Germans were the help of French collaborators, hunt down anyone, assisting the Allies.

The costs of being in the resistance or around the resistance are incredibly high.

“They could be arrested and put in jail, they could be sent to a labor camp, a hung oftentimes”

without trial and in public as it's turned to everyone else. The Gestapo Cariote reprisals. For every one of our soldiers killed, we will kill 50 resistance fighters. Four days after the invasion, near the village of Orridor Cirglant, the local resistance kills an SS battalion commander. Nazi retribution is swift and merciless. They take all the men and they shove them into a bunch of barns, shoot them and set the barns on fire.

They take all the women and children and put them in a church and then burn the church to the ground.

Shooting anyone who tries to climb out. Collective vengeance for the act of resistance. On July 25, the Americans launch a massive airing-ground attack, Operation Cobra. After a month and a half of combat among the hedgeros of Normandy, the Allies now break through the German defensive perimeter.

Paris is the center of the German occupying force, but the Allies were not super interested in Paris. Cities are an enormous military problem. Do you go into Paris knowing that you could end up fighting an urban battle that you don't want to fight? The streets narrow your ability to maneuver, so fighting inside a city is nobody's idea of what you want to do. Of course, if your French the situation is completely different. The French people are thinking that the Allies

are just a few hundred kilometers from the city of Paris and they believe that Paris would be next in the great capital of Europe to be liberated from Nazi fascism.

“To the French Paris is not just the capital of France, it is the most important, most symbolic”

city that you're going to live with. And the many things he's going to take control of all of this is Charles de Gaulle. Throughout the war, he builds up free French forces in London and in Africa. French soldiers flock to his colours. And by the day he has something of a free French armed force. And De Gaulle is astonished and appalled to hear that the Allies are not focusing on Paris as a key objective. Paris is like the beating heart of the French

Republic. There is no France without Paris. And De Gaulle said, "If you're not going, I'm going." Allied forces advance across France to force the Germans retreat to the Rhine and beyond. Liberating Paris from German occupation is not their main strategic concern, but Parisians have other ideas. The problem for Paris is that when the Normandy invasion happens, it cuts the city off from its principal food supply. And the Germans are trying to take everything

that they can out of the city, so it's a very, very unstable, very insecure place. And so there is the beginnings of popular uprising in Paris. A lot of that is being driven by the communist resistance. De Gaulle is quite keen to get the Paris because what he doesn't want is Paris to become liberated by the communist resistance. He does not want to liberate France only for it to fall into the hands of communism. To ensure that French troops liberate Paris,

General De Gaulle requires the support of the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower. De Gaulle didn't have that many cards to play in 1944, but he played them as skillfully as anybody.

that has been disobeying American orders to get closer and closer and closer to the city, so that it could go into Paris if it had to. And so De Gaulle became very aggressive about

steering the Second Armored Division toward the city. He gave General Le Clarek, specific instructions

to no matter what these Americans tell you, I need you to get to Paris. As Winston Churchill would say, he tends to love to bite the hand that feeds him. You have to get him credit, though, for he has his eye on one thing, and that's a free France. Shortly after De De, in coordination with their western allies, the Soviets throw the mastmite of their red army against the Germans. Operation Bagration is the gigantic Soviet offensive

in summer of 1944, roughly time to coincide with the Allies landing in Normandy. It is just a

monstrous offensive. About two and a half million Soviets have thrown into battle,

half a million Germans, a killed, wounded or captured. It erased an entire German army group from the map. The entire central portion of the German front in the east.

“Now the Soviet army is moving into Poland, and you've got to remember that, of course,”

Poland was the reason the war started. In the fall of 1939, Edolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin agreed to divide Poland. When Hitler took Poland, he traced it like the laboratory for his racial ideas, his plans to annihilate the Jewish people, and to treat the Eastern Slavic people as essentially a slave race to work to death. Poland has been stained in blood and killing, crushed beneath the German jackboot. It's soil watered with the blood of vast numbers of his Jewish community.

The poles have been living through hell for five years. If you're a resident of Warsaw, you're the most unlucky people ever to have lived. Throughout this horror show, there's been inflicted upon the poles. They have maintained a shadow government, a kind of national cohesion. They have a government in exile in London, and it is sending orders to a home

“army out of his secret army of underground resistance fighters in Poland. The Polish army was formed”

really immediately after the Germans invaded. There was a real sense in amongst the Polish community,

and especially the young people were going to fight. It was always set up as a formal military

organization. It wasn't just an ad hoc bunch of partisans. The undertook intelligence gatherings of troop movements. They gathered information about the camps, about Auschwitz and others. The home army is led by a former cavalry officer who's been fighting the Germans since 1939. General today, Ushborko Morowski. And July 29, 1944, as the allies are slicing through France. The Soviets reach the

outskirts of Warsaw. The Polish army is waiting for a moment when the Germans are about to retreat and just before the Soviets arrive. Because that is the opportunity to reassert Polish independence of the Polish state. They wanted to prove to the world that they stood on their own feet, that they fought to liberate their own country. They don't want to give up the Nazi dictatorship and just to have it replaced with a Soviet dictatorship.

The Polish home army and General Borkomorowski have long planned for this moment. There are weapons, caches, common structures. There are instructions coming from senior officers based in London. There is a plan. Tens of thousands of home army troops will go all over the city

“and go for the most important things airports, the bridges, the main focal points of Nazi power.”

It was a moment where timing was everything. If they did it too soon, the Germans would crush them. If they did it too late, the Soviets would conquer them. The Red Army was coming. It looked as if there was just this juggernaut going to force the Germans out of the city. Outside Warsaw, the Germans regroup on the banks of the Vistula River. The Poles, the sounds of fighting, think the Red Army is going to win and they're about to come

into Warsaw. General Borkomorowski gives the order to begin the uprising.

test of the time of the war. Sometimes his story ends in the sun. But what shouldn't suck is

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side of the Vistula, the Polish home army ceases its opportunity. Because of the Red Army coming so quickly up to the gates of Warsaw, General Borkomorowski gives the order to start the uprising, the Polish home army think this is the right moment. The Russians are approaching the Germans are clearly preparing to evacuate and the poles appear out of the sewers, out of the back street, out of the sewers, and they raise the flag of rebellion. Civilians are thrilled are jubilant

for the first time since 1930, and they can sing the National Anthem. They push trams over,

they build barricades, and they make it very, very difficult for the Germans to fight there. It's a heroic moment, an exciting moment. Poland is rising like a phoenix out of the ashes. But the attack does not go as well as it was hoped. They do manage to seize the post office,

“they manage to seize an important German arsenal, but they don't manage to secure the airport,”

so it's up for grabs by the end of that day. You get this sort of twisted patchwork of Polish and German control, which ensures that there is going to be the mother of all street fights. The Polish home army expected the Germans controlling Warsaw to be in retreat. Instead, the very marked attacks the Red Army at the Vistula and retains their grip on Warsaw. It off Hitler meets with Henry Kimler, head of the Nazi SS.

On the night of the first of August 1944, Hitler goes up to the Wolfshansich, sees Hitler,

and Hitler's raging around, and Hitler goes, you know, "Mind Führer, let's use this as a moment to erase Warsaw from the map." Because this wretched city stood in our way of German expansion

“to the east for hundreds of years, so let's just do it. So that evening they give what's called”

the order for Warsaw. The Germans have a plan to wipe Poland, literally, from the face of the earth. One, you want to send a message to everybody else that this is the cause of defying me, but the other reason is you want to destroy Poland as a national identity. Every competent is to be killed, all men and women and children's civilians are to be killed, and then the city is to be looted, and then gladresier, that means race to the ground.

The Germans poured in roofless shop troops with the express purpose of destroying them. The home army used up their caches of weapons very fast. The polls think the red army is coming. The whole thing depended upon the idea of Germans where either leaving or could not reinforce their existing troops within Warsaw. Neither of those two things turned out to be true. The Germans weren't leaving, and the Soviets weren't coming.

Stalin says to everyone's surprise, "Holt the army." They can see across the river, wool soar is burning. Although the Soviets are right across the river, they make no effort to support the resistance and its uprising against the Germans. Rather, they sit across the river and watch the Germans crush the uprising. Stalin doesn't just do nothing, he actively interferes with the Allies attempt to help the home army,

the Polish uprising. From their air bases in Italy, the British and Americans tried to drop supplies to the polls. Churchill asks permission can Allied planes carrying supplies use Soviet-based refuel and carry out repairs. Stalin says no.

Stalin has always hated the Polish government in London,

which he regards as bourgeois imperialist capitalists. He has a small Polish communist group.

And so Stalin is content to watch the Germans actually destroy the Polish home army,

“destroy the population of Warsaw, and destroy the city itself.”

Stalin wants to conquer Poland, but he wants to make sure that it's then turned into a communist, fassal client state. He wants to wait until the Nazis have destroyed the Polish underground before he enters Warsaw. Let them do his work for him. Hitler sends in his most psychopathic crews of murderous, grotesque sedists. Some of them are the most brutal murders of the entire Nazi regime,

like Oscar Durlevanger, even the SS doesn't want to work with him. They go through building after building, the naked brown, these people out by the thousands, and then mow those people down. When 5,000,000 bodies are lying there, then they bring in if a brain-homes to abandon these burning commanders to burn the bodies.

“Specialists from places like Trublinga, who now become specialists at burning human flesh.”

They loot the entire city and then they destroy it. Building by building, libraries, museums, everything is destroyed. The Polish home army surrenders. General Borcomorowski is imprisoned by the Nazis. By the end of the Warsaw, rising about 200,000 civilians have been killed. Then, the remaining population are sent to camps like Auschwitz, Samo sent a slave laborers into the right, so the destruction of Warsaw is unique in the

destruction of cities in the Second World War in Europe. In Warsaw, tragically,

the Germans chose to meet that desire for Polish independence with overwhelming force. To kill and smash an eradicate Polish culture. To say no, you will not liberate yourselves in fact you have condemned yourselves.

“August 1944, the Germans are in full retreat across France.”

They begin to evacuate Paris. Parisians sense a chance to recapture their city. But they need a spark. On the 15th of August, the Parisian police, which was 20,000 strong and had been collaborating with the Germans up to that moment, actually switch sides and raises the flag on their building, giving the sign to the rest of the city and of course to the partisans that this was the moment the uprising needed to start.

And so, the streets of Paris began my battlefield. The French resistance has been preparing for this moment for a very long time. And they act against the Germans quite rapidly and quite successfully. As this happened, Charles de Gaulle shows up to Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower's headquarters to go, we have to march on Paris. The Allies don't particularly like to go,

but see the Gaulle's a bull work against communism. And Eisenhower's smart enough to know that

it would look really, really good if the first troops to enter Paris were the free French.

Eisenhower decides to allow the free French forces to send one division into the city and to help the insurgents to free the city. Supported by the American Fourth Division, General De Gaulle orders the French second armored division into Paris. Toward the bitter end, Adolf Hitler issues instructions to general from Coltitz, who was in control of Paris,

to destroy the city. Hitler, during a phone call with from Coltitz, asks, "Is Paris burning?" And of uncoltitz, tells him, "Yes, my dear, we're burned the city." Instead, he negotiates a surrender.

It is the officers and men of that second French armored division who first enter Paris.

So the Gaulle can claim that the French have liberated during capital, and not any old French, not the communist French, not the result, his French army. He is the one leading the parade through the streets of Paris, presenting himself as the legitimate leader of the French government. Everyone of the city has come out now because they feel that their moment of liberation is on them.

But there are still German soldiers in Paris.

but he went straight ahead without hesitation, he showed us long back.

“Most Germans have surrendered or fled. The last are trapped down,”

along with French collaborators. Paris, Paris Outraged, Paris Broken, Paris Motted, but Paris liberated. Liberated by itself. Liberated by its people. He presents the liberation of Paris as a story of self-liberation. A Paris that was able to free itself from the yoke of the German occupation without the help of the Allies. With the support of the real France of the Tunnel France.

However, let's say the Allied presence in the region also played a major role in

convincing the Germans that it was time to go.

France will enter this postwar period with pride and with confidence. It's difficult to imagine how that would have happened if not for the efforts of all of the resistance groups that fought against Nazi aggression. But in Warsaw, the outcome is different. The city is raised by the Nazis, and what remains is captured and controlled by the Soviets.

Paris, the city of light is saved, Warsaw, and the hope of the Polish people is destroyed.

“Resistance is important for the people of a nation who do not want to be subjugated.”

Well, the French and the pulse rise up against the Germans. Within the extermination

counts at Auschwitz and others, there is also the spirit of resistance. The deliberate killing of Jews by the Nazis began with bullets. Shortly after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, they started to shoot Jewish children, women, and men, and bury them in ravines and forests. But eventually the Nazis required a more systematic method of murder.

There were tens of thousands of the camps by the end of the war's huge infrastructure, but there were a very small number of death camps within this enormous system six death camps,

“how low, which is the original death camp. Belgium's Soviet war was tripling up and then”

Auschwitz became now and Mydonic. As the Red Army pushes into Poland, the Nazis attempt to hide their great crime by dismantling the killing centers. They destroyed documents, they destroyed the major death camps. The soldiers still were in Treblinka. They get rid of false controversy of the buildings, they cover them over, they create farmhouses on the site to conceal everything they've done, and then as the camps come into the path of invading Allied armies,

they evacuate them. At Auschwitz Birkenhau, there are prisoners determined to document the Nazi murders. The extermination camp system includes the sorting of people, some of them are left alive, because they looked as if they were young or fit or healthy enough. Those people working something called a Sonder Commandant. They are supposed to sort the clothing, sort the hair that's been cut off people, to move the corpses, all these terrible terrible jobs

that they're given. In 1944 in Auschwitz Birkenhau, we mentioned the resistance movement managed to smuggle a camera into the camp. The Sonder Commandant, who were with the single of these things on a day-stay basis, secured this camera, and their ambition is to use this camera to record images of what's happening within the camp, any of those pictures to stir the world to respond. One prisoner manages to photograph the horror. Four images of hell.

The really extraordinary thing about them is that the images themselves are frightened from within the doorway of the gas chamber building itself, so the images testify to the bravery of what this man was doing and the appalling to gravity of the process of that stage. And what we see within these images are the burning of bodies outside the crematorium, and we see people being undressed wearing to be bought into the gas chamber.

The film is put into a tube of toothpaste and then smuggled out to the Polish home army. This is perhaps the single most valuable photographic evidence to emerge from Auschwitz.

There are individual killings of guards by prisoners. The Jews are fighting back this entire time.

“Resistance is what gives us testimony of what happened in those places.”

In the fall of 1944, Nazi Germany is retreating on all fronts, except one. Their war against the Jews. Auschwitz Birkenau is now the front line. Killing Jews is not a secondary byproduct of their military goals. It is their military goal. From Hitler's perspective, this worth the portioning resources to it, despite what's happening elsewhere. In fact, they accelerate the process of mass murder.

In 1944, the Nazis decided to exterminate the Hungarian Jewish population, so a special train line was built into Auschwitz Birkenau, and hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews around it up, and many of them are murdered within a few hours of their arriving at the camp. 1944 is when Auschwitz hits its terrible, appalling peak in terms of the number of people killed. Request start to come to the U.S. government to bomb either the rail lines, the gas chambers,

at Auschwitz, the Crematoria, the bridges leading to these camps. The idea of bombing death camps is difficult operationally, and it's difficult morally. You're going to kill the very people that you're trying to rescue.

Churchill and Roosevelt's perspective humanitarian concerns were always secondary to winning the war.

“They would say the best thing that we can do to help these people is to bring the war”

to an end as quickly as possible. Prisoners at Auschwitz Birkenau cannot afford to wait for the war to end. They want to survive. They want to escape, and they want to stop the killing. From the beginning, there has been an underground of resistance at Auschwitz Birkenau. Made up of various groups of prisoners, including the Sonder Comando.

The Sonder Comando starts to realize that there are fewer and fewer of these transports

coming from Hungary. The extermination process is finishing. Our time is coming, and if we don't

act quickly, we're going to be killed. So, they started to look at where they could resist. They might die trying.

“There's a very good chance that they'll die trying, but at least they can give themselves a chance”

because they're determined to do wherever they can to meet the moment on their own terms. Auschwitz is a death camp, and it's also a forced labor facility. And so there were women who were working in the armaments factories nearby Auschwitz, who had access to gunpowder. One member of the underground is part of the slave labor unit that sorts the clothing of the dead.

Rosa Raboda. She makes contact with the Sonder Comando. They formed a plan to destroy the crematoria, provoke a wider uprising, and attempt to escape. Raboda enlists Jewish women working in the munitions factory to smuggle gunpowder. Aligurtener, Regina Safferstein, and Esther Weissblum. So, they secure these explosives, so enormous risk. And they're smuggled in three of the various kind of ingenious means.

They create little packets of fabric that they hide them in and they get them through. The women are collecting the gunpowder to hand them off to their friend Rosa. She is going to get the gunpowder into the hands of the Sonder Comando. We're going to use it to try to blow up the crematoria where they're working. So, a moment an individual takes an improvised weapon and launches at a member of the SS.

And that kick starts the whole thing. There's smoke, there's noise, there's shouting, and there's gunfire. The resistors end up blowing up in part one of the crematoria crematoria for it. It's permanently out of commission, so the Sonder Comando would have considered that to be a success. And in another crematoria building, it's Sonder Comando force some of the guards into one of the ovens, alive.

Some prisoners escape that are quickly caught and executed. The three women who have been stealing the gunpowder, plus a Rosa robotna, are to be hanged and just as the news put around her neck, she yells out the group of prisoners assembled, vengeance or sisters avenge,

In December, the Red Army advances on Auschwitz Birkenau.

The SS force prisoners on marches into Germany. Thousands died. On January 27, 1945, Soviet soldiers arrive at the gates of Auschwitz Birkenau. Auschwitz really became the center of the mass murder of Europe's Jews quite late in the war.

“The important thing to note is that 80% of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust were not murdered”

their Auschwitz, but elsewhere in places that are either forgotten or largely overlooked.

The Nazis and their collaborators murder six million Jews during the war.

Millions of others die at their hands, but in the face of unimaginable conditions and inconceivable cruelty, some find a way to resist. Resistance takes so many forms.

“There's armed resistance and uprising, and that happens throughout Europe. There is spiritual resistance.”

Just the idea that you are not going to die just because the Nazis want you to. You are going to try to survive. You are going to document what is happening. Right letters, right diaries bury them in the ground. So that someday we will be able to talk about what you went through. The nature of tyranny becomes evident in World War II. The Nazis and the Japanese imperialists

“are invading their neighbors, kidnapping, slave laborers murdering those who disagree with them.”

It was a natural reaction on the part of the occupied peoples to organize some form of resistance and it happens all over the world in World War II. After surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Nobel laureate L. E. V. Zell said,

"We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor never the victim.

Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormentor. Sometimes we must interfere." In the Pacific, President Franklin Roosevelt, General Douglas MacArthur, an admiral chesteren in its beat in Pearl Harbor, to draw a plan for the final defeat of Imperial Japan. World War II, with Tom Hanks, is produced by A&E Factual Studios, Neutopia Limited, Play Term Productions, and Backpocket Studios in association with Motion Entertainment

for the History Channel. This episode was narrated by Tom Hanks and mixed by John Lloyd, additional voicing provided by me, Jeremy Reagan. From the History Channel, our executive producers are Eli Lera and Live Fidler. For Play Tone, executive producers are Tom Hanks and Gary Getsman. For Backpocket Studios, our executive producer is Ben Dixiting.