Transcript of Resistance

The History Channel original podcast. By the summer of 1944, the terror and tyranny of the Nazi Third Reich shrouds most of Europe. Occupied countries resist as they can. But with the advance of Soviet forces in the east and the success of the Normandy invasion in the west, two of the world's great cities organize 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.

Ici Londres.

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 Verlaine. Mon âme mange nos bonbons verts.

Wound my heart with a monotonous languor.

The French Resistance is waiting, and when when the BBC announces, "Wound my heart with a monotonous languor," 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, to ambush German patrols, and 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 and the beginning of their country's liberation.

After the fall of France in 1940, there are two Frances. There's the France that is directly occupied by the Germans, including Paris, and there is a puppet regime with its capital at Vichy. 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 de Gaulle.

Charles de Gaulle 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, 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, you might be useful. He gives him an office, gives him a radio, lets him do some broadcasts.

Honor commands all Frenchmen to continue the war at the side of their allies.

He's going to announce the Vichy 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 French men 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, Republicans. There are all different groups jockeying for position between themselves and fighting against the Germans as well.

A cross-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 downed Allied fliers out of France and back to safety in Britain. This underground railroad helped about 5,000 Allied fliers make it to free freedom in the course of the war.

It's the potential of the Allied invasion eventually reaching France that caused volunteers to flock to the Resistance. They're gathering equipment, supplies, weapons, because they think, eventually we will be freed. How do we help accelerate that?

The night before D-Day, dozens of Allied agents are dropped behind German lines to coordinate with groups of the French Resistance, so-called Jedburgh teams.

3-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 Jedburghs have an ultimate goal, and that is to ease the invasion planned for June 1944. Once the Allies land on June 6th, the resistance becomes emboldened.

But many pay a grievous price for their courage. Germans, with the help of French collaborators, hunt down anyone assisting the Allies.

The cost 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, hung, oftentimes without trial and in public as a deterrence to everyone else.

The Gestapo carry out reprisals. For every one of our soldiers killed, we will kill 50 resistance fighters.

4 days after the invasion, near the village of Oradour-sur-Glane, 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 25th, the Americans launch a massive air and ground attack, Operation Cobra. After a month and a half of combat among the hedgerows 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 you're 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 will be next in the, in the great capitals 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 liberate. And the man who thinks 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 colors. And by D-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 Wehrmacht's 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 to Paris, 'cause 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. There is a French unit, the 2nd Armored Division, controlled by General Philippe Leclerc, 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 2nd Armored Division toward the city.

He gave General Leclerc 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 give him credit though, for he has his eye on one thing, and that's a free France.

Shortly after D-Day, in coordination with their Western allies, the Soviets throw the massed might of the Red Army against the Germans.

Operation Bagration is the gigantic Soviet offensive in summer of 1944. Roughly timed to coincide with the Allies landing in Normandy.

It is just a monstrous offensive. About 2.5 million Soviets are thrown into battle. Half a million Germans are 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, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin agreed to divide Poland.

When Hitler took Poland, he treated 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, its soil watered with the blood of vast numbers of its Jewish community.

The Poles have been living through hell for 5 years. If you're a resident of Warsaw, you're one of the most unlucky people ever to have lived. Throughout this horror show that has 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, a sort of secret army of underground resistance fighters in Poland.

The Polish Home Army was formed really immediately after the Germans invaded There was a real sense in amongst the Polish community, and especially the young people, "We're going to fight." It was always set up as a formal military organization. It wasn't just an ad hoc bunch of partisans. They 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 has been fighting the Germans since 1939. General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski. On July 29th, 1944, as the Allies are slicing through France, the Soviets reach the outskirts of Warsaw.

The Polish Home Army is waiting for the 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 have it replaced with a Soviet dictatorship.

The Polish Home Army and General Bór Komorowski have long planned for this moment.

There are weapons caches, command 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 that had forced the Germans out of the city.

Outside Warsaw, the Germans regroup on the banks of the Vistula River.

The Poles hear the sounds of fighting, think the Red Army's going to win, and they're about to come into Warsaw.

General Borkomorovsky gives the order to begin the uprising.

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The Poles have been resisting the Germans for almost 5 years. Now, with the Soviets on the other side of the Vistula, the Polish Home Army seizes its opportunity.

Because of the Red Army coming so quickly up to the gates of Warsaw, General Bór Komorowski 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 streets, out of the cellars, and they raise the flag of rebellion.

Civilians are thrilled, they're jubilant. For the first time since 1939, 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 Wehrmacht attacks the Red Army at the Vistula and retains their grip on Warsaw. Adolf Hitler meets with Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi SS.

On the night of August 1st, 1944, Himmler goes up to the Wolfsschanze, sees Hitler, and Hitler's raging around. And Himmler goes, you know, "Mein 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 cost of defying me. But the other reason is you want to destroy Poland as a national identity. Every combatant is to be killed, all men and women and children, civilians, are to be killed, and then the city is to be looted, and then Glat rasiert, that means razed to the ground.

The Germans poured in ruthless shock troops with the express purpose of destroying them. The Home Army used up their caches of weapons very fast.

The Poles think the Red Army is coming. The whole thing depended upon the idea that Germans were 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, halt the army. They can see across the river Warsaw is burning.

Although the Soviets are right across the river, they make no effort to support the resistance in 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 try to drop supplies to the Poles.

Churchill asks permission. Can Allied planes carrying supplies use Soviet bases to refuel? And carry out repairs. Stalin says no.

Stalin has always hated the Polish government in London, which he regards as bourgeois imperialist capitalist. He has a small Polish communist group. He is always planning to parachute them into Poland as his government.

And so Stalin is content to watch the Germans utterly 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 vassal 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 sadists.

Some of them are the most brutal murderers of the entire Nazi regime, like Oskar Dirlewanger. Even the SS doesn't want to work with him. They go through building after building, and they round these people up by the thousands and then mow those people down. When 5,000, 6,000 bodies are lying there, then they bring in a Verbrennungskommando, these burning commanders, to burn the bodies. Specialists from places like Treblinka who've 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 Bór Komorowski is imprisoned by the Nazis.

By the end of the Warsaw Uprising, about 200,000 civilians have been killed. Then the remaining population are sent to camps like Auschwitz. Some are sent as slave laborers into the Reich. 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 and 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 switches 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 become a 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 de Gaulle, but see de Gaulle as a bulwark 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 4th Division, General de Gaulle orders the French 2nd Armored Division into Paris.

Toward the bitter end, Adolf Hitler issues instructions to General von Choltitz, who was in control of Paris. To destroy the city. Hitler, during a phone call with von Choltitz, asks, 'Is Paris burning?' And von Choltitz tells him, 'Yes, my Führer, we burned the city.' Instead, he negotiates a surrender.

It is the officers and men of that 2nd French Armored Division who first enter Paris, so de Gaulle can claim that the French have liberated their own capital. And not just any old French, not the Communist French, not the—

his French army. He's the one leading the parade through the streets of Paris, presenting himself as the legitimate leader of the French government.

Everyone in 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.

General de Gaulle walked straight ahead into what appeared to me to be a hail of fire, but he went straight ahead without hesitation, his shoulders flung back.

Most Germans have surrendered or fled. The last are tracked down. Along with French collaborators.

Paris. Paris outragée. Paris. Paris outraged. Paris broken. Paris martyred. 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.

De la vraie France! With the support of the real France, of the eternal 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 post-war 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 razed 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, He is destroyed.

Resistance is important for the people of a nation who do not want to be subjugated. While the French and the Poles rise up against the Germans, within the extermination camps 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. It's a huge infrastructure. But there were a very small number of death camps within this enormous system. 6 death camps. Chelmno, which was the original death camp, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and then Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek.

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 at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. They get rid of vast majority 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-Birkenau, 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 work in something called a Sonderkommando. 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-Birkenau, members of the resistance movement managed to smuggle a camera into the camp. The Sonderkommando, who were witnessing all of these things on a day-to-day basis, secure this camera, and their ambition is to use this camera to record images of what's happening within the camp, and in order for those pictures to stir the world to respond.

One prisoner manages to photograph the horror. 4 images of hell.

The really extraordinary thing about them is that the images themselves are framed from within the doorway of the gas chamber building itself. So the images testify to the bravery of, of what this man was doing and the appalling depravity of the process at that stage. And what we see within these images are the burning of bodies outside the crematoria, and we see people being undressed, waiting to be brought into the gas chamber.

The film was 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.

The Jews fought back from 1933 to the end of the war. There are escapes. 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, it's worth apportioning resources to it despite what's happening elsewhere. In fact, they accelerate the process of mass murder.

In 1944, the Nazis decide to exterminate the Hungarian Jewish population, so a special train line is built into Auschwitz-Birkenau, and hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews are rounded 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.

Requests start to come to the US 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.

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From the beginning, there has been an underground of resistance at Auschwitz-Birkenau, made up of various groups of prisoners, including the Sonderkommando.

The Sonderkommando 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.

And so they started to look at ways 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 whatever 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 a slave labor unit that sorts the clothing of the dead: Rosa Robota. She makes contact with the Sonderkommando. They form a plan to destroy the crematoria, provoke a wider uprising, and attempt to escape. Robota enlists Jewish women working at the munitions factory to smuggle gunpowder. Alle Gürtner, Regina Sapperstein and Esther Weissblum.

So they secured these explosives at enormous risk, and they're smuggled in through 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 Sonderkommando, who are going to use it to try to blow up the crematory where they're working.

At a certain moment, an individual takes an improvised weapon and launches at a member of the SS, and that kickstarts the whole thing. There's smoke, there's noise, there's shouting, there's gunfire.

The resistors end up blowing up in part one of the crematoria.

Crematoria 4 is put permanently out of commission, so The Sonderkommando would have considered that to be a success. And in another crematory building, the Sonderkommando force some of the guards into one of the ovens alive.

Some prisoners escape, but are quickly caught and executed.

The 3 women who have been stealing the gunpowder, plus Ruzsa Robotna, are to be hanged. And just as the noose is put around her neck, She yells out to the group of prisoners assembled, "Vengeance," or "Sisters, avenge." It's a passionate message of resilience, resistance, and continue the fight.

In December, the Red Army advances on Auschwitz-Birkenau. The SS force prisoners on marches into Germany. Thousands die. On January 27th, 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 know is that 80% of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust were not murdered at Auschwitz, but elsewhere in places that are either forgotten or largely overlooked.

The Nazis and their collaborators murder 6 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, an 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, write letters, write 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 Elie Wiesel said, "We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere." In the Pacific, President Franklin Roosevelt, General Douglas MacArthur, and Admiral Chester Nimitz meet in Pearl Harbor to draw a plan for— for the final defeat of Imperial Japan.

World War II with Tom Hanks is produced by A&E Factual Studios, Newtopia Limited, Playtone Productions, and Back Pocket 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 Lehrer and Liv Fidler. For Playtone, executive producers are Tom Hanks and Gary Getzman. For Back Pocket Studios, our executive producer is Ben Dickstein.