World War II with Tom Hanks (2026) s01e16 Episode Script
Resistance
1
Sub extracted from file & improved by
[foreboding music]
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.
All wars change the world,
but none of them changed the world
like the Second World War did.
Japan's on the march,
Germany's on the march.
No one can imagine the nightmare
they're about to unleash.
The most destructive
war in human history.
Suddenly, the world
is turned upside down
and all hell is let loose.
The West is stunned by
the speed of the advance.
You get the Allies
led by the big three:
Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin.
Men who are dealing with
immensely complicated questions.
It's the biggest military
operation of human history.
The Allies have to come together,
not just militarily,
but industrial scale.
It's a global perspective.
They have to fight in every climate
from the Arctic to the
jungles of the Pacific,
to the deserts of Africa
and the depths of the ocean.
[dramatic music]
But there was no certainty of victory.
It was going to be a
horrific bloodbath.
We see humans at their absolute worst,
how they treat other human beings,
and we see them at their absolute best,
willing to give their lives
that others might live.
World War II was a struggle
in which there could be one victor
and one vanquished.
[dramatic music]
[sirens wail]
[dramatic music]
[broadcaster speaks French]
[Tom] Since the fall of France,
the BBC has broadcast
daily radio programming
to occupied Europe.
Embedded within the
broadcasts are coded messages.
[broadcaster speaks French]
[Tom] 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.
[broadcaster speaks French]
The French resistance is waiting,
and 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.
[Col. Douds] 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.
[Tom] So many men and
women throughout France
have risked so much
to get to this night
and the beginning of their
country's liberation.
[Robert] 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.
[Tom] 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.
[Col. Douds] 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, "Eh,
he might be useful."
He gives him an office,
gives him a radio,
lets him do some broadcasts.
[Charles speaks French]
[Col. Douds] He's gonna announce:
"The Vichy government is illegitimate."
"Anybody who's in France
should come over to England,
and we're gonna start
to put together an army
that's gonna liberate ourselves.
If you can't get here, you should
start resisting while you're there."
[Robert] This is 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.
[Dan S.] There are
aristocratic Catholics,
Communists, or Republicans.
There are all different groups
jockeying for position
between themselves
and fighting against
the Germans as well.
[Tom] A cross-section
of French citizens,
teachers, lawyers,
farmers, factory workers,
take part in the resistance.
Women play a substantial role.
[Robert] 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 flyers
out of France and back
to safety in Britain.
This underground railroad
helped about 5,000 Allied
flyers make it to freedom
in the course of the war.
[Col. Douds] It's the
potential of the Allied invasion
eventually reaching France
that cause 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?"
[broadcaster speaks French]
[Tom] 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.
[Robert] Three-man teams
who parachute into occupied France:
an American, a British,
and a French agent.
[Rebecca] They bring weapons with them.
They'd bring a radio set
so they could communicate.
[Robert] 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 plan for June, 1944.
[dramatic music]
Once the Allies land in June 6th,
the resistance becomes emboldened.
[Tom] But many pay a grievous
price for their courage.
Germans, with the help
of French collaborators,
hunt down anyone assisting the Allies.
[Col. Douds] 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,
hung oftentimes without
trial and in public
as a deterrence to everyone else.
[Robert] The Gestapo
carryout reprisals.
"For every one of our soldiers killed,
we will kill 50 resistance fighters."
[Tom] Four 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.
[Col. Douds] 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.
[Tom] On July 25th,
the Americans launch a
massive air and ground attack:
Operation Cobra.
After a month and a half of combat
among the hedge rows of Normandy,
the Allies now break through
the German defensive perimeter.
[Dan S.] 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 great capitals of
Europe to be liberated
from Nazi fascism.
[Michael] 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.
[Dan S.] 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."
[engines whirl]
[Tom] 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.
[Michael] 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
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.
[Tom] To ensure that
French troops liberate Paris,
General De Gaulle requires the support
of the Supreme Allied Commander:
General Dwight Eisenhower.
[Michael] 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
Second 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 Second 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."
[Col. Douds] 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.
[dramatic music]
[artillery fires]
[Tom] 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.
[Dan S.] It is just a
monstrous offensive.
About two and a half million
Soviets are thrown into battle.
Half a million Germans are
killed, wounded, or captured.
[Robert] 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 gotta
remember that, of course,
Poland was the reason the war started.
[Tom] In the fall of 1939,
Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin
agreed to divide Poland.
[Simon] 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.
[Dan S.] The Poles have been
living through hell for five years.
If you're a resident of Warsaw,
you are 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 that 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 gonna 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.
[Tom] The Home Army is led
by a former cavalry officer
who has been fighting
the Germans since 1939.
General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski.
[tanks rattle]
On July 29th, 1944,
as the Allies are
slicing through France,
the Soviets reach the
outskirts of Warsaw.
[guns fire]
[Simon] 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, the Polish state.
[Alexandra] They wanted to prove
to the world that they
stood on their own feet and 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.
[Tom] The Polish Home Army
and General Bór-Komorowski
have long planned for this moment.
[Dan S.] There are weapons
caches, command structures.
There are instructions coming
from senior officers based in London.
There is a plan.
[Alexandra] Tens of thousands
of Home Army troops
will go all over the city
and go for the most important things:
the airports, the bridges,
the main focal points of Nazi power.
[Simon] 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.
[guns fire]
[Alexandra] The Red Army was coming.
It looked as if there
was just this juggernaut
that was gonna force the
Germans out of the city.
[Tom] Outside Warsaw,
the Germans regroup on the
banks of the Vistula River.
[Alexandra] The Poles hear the
sounds of fighting,
think the Red Army's gonna win,
and they're about to come into Warsaw.
[Tom] General
Bór-Komorowski gives the order
to begin the uprising.
[Tom] The Poles have
been resisting the Germans
for almost five 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.
[Simon] 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 backstreets,
out of the cellars,
and they raise the flag of rebellion.
[Alexandra] 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.
[Simon] It's a heroic
moment, an exciting moment.
Poland is rising like a
phoenix out of the ashes.
[Dan S.] 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 gonna be
the mother of all street fights.
[guns fire]
[Tom] The Polish Home Army
expected the Germans controlling Warsaw
to be in retreat.
[gun fires]
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.
[Alexandra] On the night of
the 1st of August, 1944,
Himmler goes up to the
Wolfsschanze, he sees Hitler,
and Hitler's raging around.
And Himmler goes, "You
know, Mein Fuhrer,
let's use this as a moment
to erase Warsaw from the map.
Because this wretched
city has 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 wanna 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.
[Alexandra] 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, glattrasiert, that
means razed to the ground.
[missiles fire]
[Simon] 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.
[artillery fires]
[Anand] 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.
[Simon] Stalin says, to
everyone's surprise:
"Halt the army."
They can see across the
river Warsaw is burning.
[Robert] 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.
[Dan S.] Stalin doesn't
just do nothing.
He actively interferes
with the Allies' attempt
to help the Home Army,
the Polish uprising.
[Tom] From their air bases in Italy,
the British and Americans try
to drop supplies to the Poles.
[Dan S.] Churchill asks permission:
"Can Allied planes carrying supplies
use Soviet bases to refuel
and carry out repairs?"
Stalin says no.
[Simon] 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.
[Alexandra] 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.
[Simon] 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.
[Alexandra] Some of them are
the most brutal murderers
of the entire Nazi regime.
Like Oskar Dirlewanger.
Even the SS doesn't
wanna work with him.
They go through
building after building,
then 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 the
Verbrennungskommando,
these burning commandos,
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.
[dramatic music]
[Tom] The Polish Home Army surrenders.
General Bór-Komorowski is
imprisoned by the Nazis.
[Alexandra] 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.
[Dan S.] 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."
[soft plaintive music]
[dramatic music]
[Tom] 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.
[Marco] 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.
[guns fire]
And so the streets of
Paris become a battlefield.
[guns fire]
The French resistance has
been preparing for this moment
for a very long time.
[dramatic music]
And they act against the
Germans quite rapidly
and quite successfully.
[Col. Douds] As this happened,
Charles De Gaulle shows up
to Supreme Allied Commander
Eisenhower's headquarters
and go, "We have to march on Paris."
[Michael] The Allies don't
particularly like De Gaulle
but see De Gaulle as a
bulwark against communism.
[Dan S.] Eisenhower is
smart enough to know
that it would look really, really good
if the first troops to enter
Paris were the Free French.
[Marco] Eisenhower decides
to allow the Free French forces
to send one division into the city
and to help the insurgents
to free the city.
[Tom] Supported by the
American Fourth Division,
General De Gaulle orders
the French Second Armored
Division into Paris.
[Martin] 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 Fuhrer, we burned the city."
[dramatic music]
[Tom] Instead, he
negotiates a surrender.
[triumphant music]
[Dan S.] It is the officers and men
of that Second French Armored Division
who first enter Paris.
[triumphant music]
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 resis
His French army.
[triumphant music]
[Marco] He is the one
leading the parade
through the streets of Paris,
presenting himself
as the legitimate leader
of the French government.
[triumphant music]
[Martin] Everyone in the
city has come out
now because they feel that their
moment of liberation is on them.
[guns fire] [citizens scream]
[Tom] But there are still
German soldiers in Paris.
[guns fire] [foreboding music]
[Broadcaster] 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.
[guns fire]
[Tom] Most Germans
have surrendered or fled.
The last are tracked down,
along with French collaborators.
[crowd cheers]
[Charles speaks French]
[Charles speaks French]
[Marco] 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.
[Charles speaks French]
[Marco] 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.
[Michael] France will enter
this post-war period
with pride and with confidence.
It's difficult to imagine
how that would've happened
if not for the efforts of
all of the resistance groups
that fought against Nazi aggression.
[crowd applauds]
[Tom] But, in Warsaw,
the outcome is different.
The city is razed by the Nazis.
And what remains is captured
and controlled by the Soviets.
[dramatic music]
Paris, the city of light, is saved.
Warsaw and the hope of the
Polish people is destroyed.
[soft plaintive music]
[Alexandra] 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 this
spirit of resistance.
[soft plaintive music]
[Tom] 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.
Six death camps.
Chelmno, which is the
original death camp,
Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka,
and then Auschwitz-Birkenau
and Majdanek.
[Tom] As the Red Army
pushes into Poland,
the Nazis attempt to
hide their great crime
by dismantling the killing centers.
[James] They destroyed documents.
They destroyed the major death camps
at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
They get rid of the vast
majority of the buildings.
They cover them over.
They create farmhouses on the site
to conceal everything
that they've done.
And then as the camps
come into the path
of invading Allied armies,
they evacuate them.
[dramatic music]
[Tom] At Auschwitz-Birkenau,
there are prisoners
determined to document
the Nazi murders.
[Alexandra] 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.
[James] 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
in order for those pictures
to stir the world to respond.
[Tom] One prisoner manages
to photograph the horror.
[clock ticks]
[foreboding music]
Four images of hell.
[James] 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 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.
[foreboding music]
[Alexandra] 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.
[foreboding music]
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.
[dramatic music]
[Tom] In the fall of 1944,
Nazi Germany is retreating
on all fronts except one:
their war against the Jews.
Auschwitz-Birkenau
is now the frontline.
[Rebecca] Killing Jews is not
a secondary byproduct
of their military goals.
It is their military goal.
[James] 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.
[Alexandra] 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.
[James] 1944 is when Auschwitz hits its
terrible, appalling peak
in terms of the number
of people killed.
[foreboding music]
[Rebecca] Requests 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.
[Michael] 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.
[James] 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."
[Tom] 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.
[foreboding music]
[Tom] 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."
[James] 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.
[Rebecca] 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.
[Tom] One member of the underground
is part of a slave labor unit
that sorts the clothing
of the dead: Roza 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 in the munitions factory
to smuggle gunpowder:
Ala Gertner, Regina Safirsztajn,
and Esther Wajcblum.
[James] So they secured these
explosives at enormous risk,
and they're smuggling them through
various kind of ingenious means.
They create little packets of
fabric that they hide them in,
and they get them through.
[Rebecca] The women are
collecting the gunpowder
to hand them off to their friend Roza.
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 crematoria where they're working.
[James] At a certain moment,
an individual takes
an improvised weapon
and launches at a member of the SS,
and that kickstarts the whole thing.
[guns fire]
There's smoke, there's
noise, there's shouting,
and there's gunfire.
[bomb explodes]
[Alexandra] The resistors
end up blowing up, in part,
one of the crematoria, Crematoria IV.
[James] It's put
permanently out of commission.
So the Sonderkommando would've
considered that to be a a success.
And in another crematory building,
the Sonderkommando
force some the guards
into one of the ovens alive.
[Tom] Some prisoners escape
but are quickly caught and executed.
[Alexandra] The three women
who have been
stealing the gunpowder
plus Roza Robota 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 is a passionate message
of resilience, resistance,
and continue the fight.
[Tom] In December,
the Red Army advances
on Auschwitz-Birkenau.
[foreboding music]
The SS forced prisoners
on marches into Germany.
Thousands die.
[foreboding music]
On January 27th, 1945,
Soviet soldiers arrive at the
gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
[James] 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.
[foreboding music]
[Tom] 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.
[Rebecca] 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, write letters,
write diaries, bury them in the ground
so that someday we will be able
to talk about what you went through.
[Robert] 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 the final defeat of Imperial Japan.
Sub extracted from file & improved by
[foreboding music]
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.
All wars change the world,
but none of them changed the world
like the Second World War did.
Japan's on the march,
Germany's on the march.
No one can imagine the nightmare
they're about to unleash.
The most destructive
war in human history.
Suddenly, the world
is turned upside down
and all hell is let loose.
The West is stunned by
the speed of the advance.
You get the Allies
led by the big three:
Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin.
Men who are dealing with
immensely complicated questions.
It's the biggest military
operation of human history.
The Allies have to come together,
not just militarily,
but industrial scale.
It's a global perspective.
They have to fight in every climate
from the Arctic to the
jungles of the Pacific,
to the deserts of Africa
and the depths of the ocean.
[dramatic music]
But there was no certainty of victory.
It was going to be a
horrific bloodbath.
We see humans at their absolute worst,
how they treat other human beings,
and we see them at their absolute best,
willing to give their lives
that others might live.
World War II was a struggle
in which there could be one victor
and one vanquished.
[dramatic music]
[sirens wail]
[dramatic music]
[broadcaster speaks French]
[Tom] Since the fall of France,
the BBC has broadcast
daily radio programming
to occupied Europe.
Embedded within the
broadcasts are coded messages.
[broadcaster speaks French]
[Tom] 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.
[broadcaster speaks French]
The French resistance is waiting,
and 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.
[Col. Douds] 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.
[Tom] So many men and
women throughout France
have risked so much
to get to this night
and the beginning of their
country's liberation.
[Robert] 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.
[Tom] 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.
[Col. Douds] 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, "Eh,
he might be useful."
He gives him an office,
gives him a radio,
lets him do some broadcasts.
[Charles speaks French]
[Col. Douds] He's gonna announce:
"The Vichy government is illegitimate."
"Anybody who's in France
should come over to England,
and we're gonna start
to put together an army
that's gonna liberate ourselves.
If you can't get here, you should
start resisting while you're there."
[Robert] This is 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.
[Dan S.] There are
aristocratic Catholics,
Communists, or Republicans.
There are all different groups
jockeying for position
between themselves
and fighting against
the Germans as well.
[Tom] A cross-section
of French citizens,
teachers, lawyers,
farmers, factory workers,
take part in the resistance.
Women play a substantial role.
[Robert] 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 flyers
out of France and back
to safety in Britain.
This underground railroad
helped about 5,000 Allied
flyers make it to freedom
in the course of the war.
[Col. Douds] It's the
potential of the Allied invasion
eventually reaching France
that cause 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?"
[broadcaster speaks French]
[Tom] 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.
[Robert] Three-man teams
who parachute into occupied France:
an American, a British,
and a French agent.
[Rebecca] They bring weapons with them.
They'd bring a radio set
so they could communicate.
[Robert] 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 plan for June, 1944.
[dramatic music]
Once the Allies land in June 6th,
the resistance becomes emboldened.
[Tom] But many pay a grievous
price for their courage.
Germans, with the help
of French collaborators,
hunt down anyone assisting the Allies.
[Col. Douds] 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,
hung oftentimes without
trial and in public
as a deterrence to everyone else.
[Robert] The Gestapo
carryout reprisals.
"For every one of our soldiers killed,
we will kill 50 resistance fighters."
[Tom] Four 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.
[Col. Douds] 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.
[Tom] On July 25th,
the Americans launch a
massive air and ground attack:
Operation Cobra.
After a month and a half of combat
among the hedge rows of Normandy,
the Allies now break through
the German defensive perimeter.
[Dan S.] 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 great capitals of
Europe to be liberated
from Nazi fascism.
[Michael] 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.
[Dan S.] 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."
[engines whirl]
[Tom] 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.
[Michael] 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
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.
[Tom] To ensure that
French troops liberate Paris,
General De Gaulle requires the support
of the Supreme Allied Commander:
General Dwight Eisenhower.
[Michael] 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
Second 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 Second 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."
[Col. Douds] 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.
[dramatic music]
[artillery fires]
[Tom] 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.
[Dan S.] It is just a
monstrous offensive.
About two and a half million
Soviets are thrown into battle.
Half a million Germans are
killed, wounded, or captured.
[Robert] 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 gotta
remember that, of course,
Poland was the reason the war started.
[Tom] In the fall of 1939,
Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin
agreed to divide Poland.
[Simon] 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.
[Dan S.] The Poles have been
living through hell for five years.
If you're a resident of Warsaw,
you are 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 that 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 gonna 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.
[Tom] The Home Army is led
by a former cavalry officer
who has been fighting
the Germans since 1939.
General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski.
[tanks rattle]
On July 29th, 1944,
as the Allies are
slicing through France,
the Soviets reach the
outskirts of Warsaw.
[guns fire]
[Simon] 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, the Polish state.
[Alexandra] They wanted to prove
to the world that they
stood on their own feet and 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.
[Tom] The Polish Home Army
and General Bór-Komorowski
have long planned for this moment.
[Dan S.] There are weapons
caches, command structures.
There are instructions coming
from senior officers based in London.
There is a plan.
[Alexandra] Tens of thousands
of Home Army troops
will go all over the city
and go for the most important things:
the airports, the bridges,
the main focal points of Nazi power.
[Simon] 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.
[guns fire]
[Alexandra] The Red Army was coming.
It looked as if there
was just this juggernaut
that was gonna force the
Germans out of the city.
[Tom] Outside Warsaw,
the Germans regroup on the
banks of the Vistula River.
[Alexandra] The Poles hear the
sounds of fighting,
think the Red Army's gonna win,
and they're about to come into Warsaw.
[Tom] General
Bór-Komorowski gives the order
to begin the uprising.
[Tom] The Poles have
been resisting the Germans
for almost five 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.
[Simon] 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 backstreets,
out of the cellars,
and they raise the flag of rebellion.
[Alexandra] 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.
[Simon] It's a heroic
moment, an exciting moment.
Poland is rising like a
phoenix out of the ashes.
[Dan S.] 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 gonna be
the mother of all street fights.
[guns fire]
[Tom] The Polish Home Army
expected the Germans controlling Warsaw
to be in retreat.
[gun fires]
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.
[Alexandra] On the night of
the 1st of August, 1944,
Himmler goes up to the
Wolfsschanze, he sees Hitler,
and Hitler's raging around.
And Himmler goes, "You
know, Mein Fuhrer,
let's use this as a moment
to erase Warsaw from the map.
Because this wretched
city has 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 wanna 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.
[Alexandra] 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, glattrasiert, that
means razed to the ground.
[missiles fire]
[Simon] 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.
[artillery fires]
[Anand] 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.
[Simon] Stalin says, to
everyone's surprise:
"Halt the army."
They can see across the
river Warsaw is burning.
[Robert] 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.
[Dan S.] Stalin doesn't
just do nothing.
He actively interferes
with the Allies' attempt
to help the Home Army,
the Polish uprising.
[Tom] From their air bases in Italy,
the British and Americans try
to drop supplies to the Poles.
[Dan S.] Churchill asks permission:
"Can Allied planes carrying supplies
use Soviet bases to refuel
and carry out repairs?"
Stalin says no.
[Simon] 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.
[Alexandra] 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.
[Simon] 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.
[Alexandra] Some of them are
the most brutal murderers
of the entire Nazi regime.
Like Oskar Dirlewanger.
Even the SS doesn't
wanna work with him.
They go through
building after building,
then 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 the
Verbrennungskommando,
these burning commandos,
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.
[dramatic music]
[Tom] The Polish Home Army surrenders.
General Bór-Komorowski is
imprisoned by the Nazis.
[Alexandra] 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.
[Dan S.] 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."
[soft plaintive music]
[dramatic music]
[Tom] 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.
[Marco] 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.
[guns fire]
And so the streets of
Paris become a battlefield.
[guns fire]
The French resistance has
been preparing for this moment
for a very long time.
[dramatic music]
And they act against the
Germans quite rapidly
and quite successfully.
[Col. Douds] As this happened,
Charles De Gaulle shows up
to Supreme Allied Commander
Eisenhower's headquarters
and go, "We have to march on Paris."
[Michael] The Allies don't
particularly like De Gaulle
but see De Gaulle as a
bulwark against communism.
[Dan S.] Eisenhower is
smart enough to know
that it would look really, really good
if the first troops to enter
Paris were the Free French.
[Marco] Eisenhower decides
to allow the Free French forces
to send one division into the city
and to help the insurgents
to free the city.
[Tom] Supported by the
American Fourth Division,
General De Gaulle orders
the French Second Armored
Division into Paris.
[Martin] 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 Fuhrer, we burned the city."
[dramatic music]
[Tom] Instead, he
negotiates a surrender.
[triumphant music]
[Dan S.] It is the officers and men
of that Second French Armored Division
who first enter Paris.
[triumphant music]
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 resis
His French army.
[triumphant music]
[Marco] He is the one
leading the parade
through the streets of Paris,
presenting himself
as the legitimate leader
of the French government.
[triumphant music]
[Martin] Everyone in the
city has come out
now because they feel that their
moment of liberation is on them.
[guns fire] [citizens scream]
[Tom] But there are still
German soldiers in Paris.
[guns fire] [foreboding music]
[Broadcaster] 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.
[guns fire]
[Tom] Most Germans
have surrendered or fled.
The last are tracked down,
along with French collaborators.
[crowd cheers]
[Charles speaks French]
[Charles speaks French]
[Marco] 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.
[Charles speaks French]
[Marco] 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.
[Michael] France will enter
this post-war period
with pride and with confidence.
It's difficult to imagine
how that would've happened
if not for the efforts of
all of the resistance groups
that fought against Nazi aggression.
[crowd applauds]
[Tom] But, in Warsaw,
the outcome is different.
The city is razed by the Nazis.
And what remains is captured
and controlled by the Soviets.
[dramatic music]
Paris, the city of light, is saved.
Warsaw and the hope of the
Polish people is destroyed.
[soft plaintive music]
[Alexandra] 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 this
spirit of resistance.
[soft plaintive music]
[Tom] 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.
Six death camps.
Chelmno, which is the
original death camp,
Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka,
and then Auschwitz-Birkenau
and Majdanek.
[Tom] As the Red Army
pushes into Poland,
the Nazis attempt to
hide their great crime
by dismantling the killing centers.
[James] They destroyed documents.
They destroyed the major death camps
at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
They get rid of the vast
majority of the buildings.
They cover them over.
They create farmhouses on the site
to conceal everything
that they've done.
And then as the camps
come into the path
of invading Allied armies,
they evacuate them.
[dramatic music]
[Tom] At Auschwitz-Birkenau,
there are prisoners
determined to document
the Nazi murders.
[Alexandra] 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.
[James] 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
in order for those pictures
to stir the world to respond.
[Tom] One prisoner manages
to photograph the horror.
[clock ticks]
[foreboding music]
Four images of hell.
[James] 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 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.
[foreboding music]
[Alexandra] 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.
[foreboding music]
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.
[dramatic music]
[Tom] In the fall of 1944,
Nazi Germany is retreating
on all fronts except one:
their war against the Jews.
Auschwitz-Birkenau
is now the frontline.
[Rebecca] Killing Jews is not
a secondary byproduct
of their military goals.
It is their military goal.
[James] 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.
[Alexandra] 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.
[James] 1944 is when Auschwitz hits its
terrible, appalling peak
in terms of the number
of people killed.
[foreboding music]
[Rebecca] Requests 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.
[Michael] 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.
[James] 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."
[Tom] 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.
[foreboding music]
[Tom] 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."
[James] 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.
[Rebecca] 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.
[Tom] One member of the underground
is part of a slave labor unit
that sorts the clothing
of the dead: Roza 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 in the munitions factory
to smuggle gunpowder:
Ala Gertner, Regina Safirsztajn,
and Esther Wajcblum.
[James] So they secured these
explosives at enormous risk,
and they're smuggling them through
various kind of ingenious means.
They create little packets of
fabric that they hide them in,
and they get them through.
[Rebecca] The women are
collecting the gunpowder
to hand them off to their friend Roza.
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 crematoria where they're working.
[James] At a certain moment,
an individual takes
an improvised weapon
and launches at a member of the SS,
and that kickstarts the whole thing.
[guns fire]
There's smoke, there's
noise, there's shouting,
and there's gunfire.
[bomb explodes]
[Alexandra] The resistors
end up blowing up, in part,
one of the crematoria, Crematoria IV.
[James] It's put
permanently out of commission.
So the Sonderkommando would've
considered that to be a a success.
And in another crematory building,
the Sonderkommando
force some the guards
into one of the ovens alive.
[Tom] Some prisoners escape
but are quickly caught and executed.
[Alexandra] The three women
who have been
stealing the gunpowder
plus Roza Robota 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 is a passionate message
of resilience, resistance,
and continue the fight.
[Tom] In December,
the Red Army advances
on Auschwitz-Birkenau.
[foreboding music]
The SS forced prisoners
on marches into Germany.
Thousands die.
[foreboding music]
On January 27th, 1945,
Soviet soldiers arrive at the
gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
[James] 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.
[foreboding music]
[Tom] 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.
[Rebecca] 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, write letters,
write diaries, bury them in the ground
so that someday we will be able
to talk about what you went through.
[Robert] 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 the final defeat of Imperial Japan.