- 2 days ago
For educational purposes
"THE WAR BEHIND THE LINES"
Featuring some amazing archive footage, this episode highlights the importance of the organised civilian groups "Partisans".
They fought military actions or performed acts of espionage, sabotage, disruption and protest against occupying forces. Many risked their lives on a daily basis.
This episode looks at the French Resistance, and asks searching questions about its effectiveness, while seeking to separate the myths from the facts.
Other perhaps less well-documented groups which fall under the spotlight include the successful partisans of Yugoslavia, commanded by Tito and the resistance groups of Russia.
Leading historians and military experts bring the latest theories to this episode, which also includes interviews with those that organised and fought the war
"THE WAR BEHIND THE LINES"
Featuring some amazing archive footage, this episode highlights the importance of the organised civilian groups "Partisans".
They fought military actions or performed acts of espionage, sabotage, disruption and protest against occupying forces. Many risked their lives on a daily basis.
This episode looks at the French Resistance, and asks searching questions about its effectiveness, while seeking to separate the myths from the facts.
Other perhaps less well-documented groups which fall under the spotlight include the successful partisans of Yugoslavia, commanded by Tito and the resistance groups of Russia.
Leading historians and military experts bring the latest theories to this episode, which also includes interviews with those that organised and fought the war
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LearningTranscript
00:06Hidden in many of the territories occupied by the Nazis during World War II was an effective
00:12opposition force. That force inspired a greater level of fear in the individual soldier than any
00:19other. This enemy moved with impunity, struck fast and disappeared. Its greatest advantage was its
00:28invisibility. Indistinguishable from the civilian but as deadly as any individual infantry unit,
00:36the infamous partisan was common to every theatre of World War II.
01:09The Civil War II
01:09The Civil War II
01:09The Civil War II
01:30The shock of the German Blitzkrieg was sudden, terrifying and complete.
01:36In less than a year, the unstoppable panzers had rolled over Poland, Denmark, Norway,
01:41Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and France.
01:44By the end of June 1940, Germany was the virtual master of Europe.
01:52In the July of 1940, as the Battle of Britain dogfights began over the beaches and fields of England,
01:58Churchill created the Special Operations Executive, the SOE,
02:03to coordinate resistance in the occupied countries, ordering them to set Europe ablaze.
02:09But after the German onslaught, there was little left to coordinate.
02:27Over the channel in Europe, the Germans tightened their grip over a shocked and stunned population.
02:34Nazi propaganda warned that resistance was useless, and so it seemed.
02:39The swastika and the death's head emblem became a common sight.
02:44Potential troublemakers were rounded up.
02:46The SS identified Jews and anyone else thought undesirable
02:50and dragged them off to the cattle trucks en route to the slave labour camps.
02:55In the aftermath of the collapse of France in 1940, there was almost a feeling of shock, understandably,
03:04throughout the whole country.
03:05This was further complicated by the fact that France was effectively split into two separate countries
03:12with the emergence of the Vichy regime.
03:14So, initially, there was very little resistance to the Nazi regime, and it's no surprise that that should be the
03:21case.
03:22There certainly was a degree of passive resistance, but not the sort of passive resistance
03:28which might in any way have caused any serious inconvenience.
03:32Starting January, February 1943, it starts to acquire more serious proportions.
03:37Now, the first acts of resistance against the occupying power, which fall into a serious category,
03:45would be assassinations of individual Germans in Paris and other urban areas in June, July 1941,
03:54by members of the French Communist Party.
03:57In the early stages of the war in France, as in the West in general,
04:02it was very complicated by the fact that we had the phony war,
04:04what the French call the drĂ´le de guerre, a kind of long period before any activity took place.
04:10And it was also complicated by the fact that the most anti-Nazi forces in France,
04:15the communists in the left, were actually against resistance in the early stages,
04:20because the Nazi-Soviet pact had been signed in 1939,
04:23and the official position was that they should not get involved in the war at all at that stage.
04:33It looked hopeless, but against such odds as their resentment festered,
04:38a resistance movement did begin to grow.
04:53Those governments that survived in the occupied countries also resisted.
04:58Hitler fully expected Luxembourg to fall in line with the Reich.
05:02The country was German-speaking after all.
05:06However, of all the territories occupied, it had the smallest percentage of collaborators.
05:11In October 1940, a pro-Nazi plebiscite organized by Gauleiter Simon was thwarted when 97% abstained.
05:20Berlin simply looked foolish.
05:23Germany responded with might by introducing compulsory labor,
05:26and recruited by force 80,000 Luxemburgers into the Wehrmacht armies.
05:32This prompted many to join the developing French and Belgian resistance.
05:39B for victory graffiti began appearing all over Europe,
05:43including the occupied British Channel Islands after British appeals over the radio.
05:49Despite carrying the death sentence, many tuned in to London Calling,
05:53their only contact with a friendly nation.
05:56Later, the radio was used to pass code words to occupied Europe.
06:01Despite these successes, however, the resistance movement found it difficult to get started.
06:07It was a steep learning curve.
06:10Many mistakes were made, and early groups were riddled with traitors.
06:14Betrayal was commonplace. Recruiting and organization was problematic.
06:18To cap it all, the SOE bungled a lot of early operations.
06:23This changed, though, on June the 22nd, 1941.
06:33The French resistance never became a terribly effective organization.
06:39It really did begin to play a part after the Allied invasion in Normandy.
06:45But even if it hadn't existed, there's no doubt that by then the Germans would have been defeated anyway.
06:50The resistance in France never ever became as effective as it did, for example, in Russia,
06:56where the partisan bands held a real terror for the Germans,
07:00or in the Balkans, where there was almost an all-out war between the Wehrmacht and the Partisans.
07:12The End
07:12The End
07:13The End
07:14The End
07:18The End
07:42Hitler broke his non-aggression pact with Russia, and launched Operation Barbarossa,
07:47unleashing the terror of the Blitzkrieg onto an unprepared and unsuspecting Russia.
07:56As Hitler's war of extermination carved up the East, everything changed in the West.
08:03The communist state of the Soviet Union was no longer allied to Nazi Germany, but at war with the fascists.
08:09This created a major shift in the politics of Europe.
08:13Suddenly, the communists in the occupied countries were no longer torn between loyalty for their own country and their ideals.
08:21For once, communism and patriotism coincided.
08:26Individuals had been joining resistance groups before this event,
08:30but now the communist organizations committed themselves to resist,
08:34and these groups had years of experience as an underground movement.
08:46The Germans blamed the communists for every act of sabotage, even when the truth was very different.
08:52This was part of a greater propaganda war against the Bolsheviks.
08:56But perversely, the campaign identified the communist resistance groups as the ones to join.
09:03This enabled the resistance to get organized.
09:11These groups, communist and non-communist alike, were organized from 64 Baker Street, the base of the SOE.
09:20These Baker Street Irregulars, as they became known, had had a section for each country.
09:26The F section was responsible for France and worked independently from the leader of the Free French, General Charles de
09:33Gaulle,
09:33as the British were rightly worried about the effectiveness of his security.
09:38When de Gaulle discovered his exclusion, the SOE had to create a parallel French section, RF, to work with the
09:46Gaullists.
09:52The SOE ran both French sections in parallel until the 10th of October 1941,
09:57when an arrangement was reached with General de Gaulle.
10:02The Bureau Centrale des Renseignements et d'Action, the Central Intelligence and Operations Agency,
10:08was created to act independently, but cooperate with the British SOE.
10:15There were two organizations essentially trying to organize the resistance in France from abroad.
10:20One was de Gaulle and the Free French, and the other was the British Special Operations Executive.
10:26And as people know, the history of those two organizations is that they spend as much time fighting each other
10:32as they did the Germans, according to some myths.
10:34Each of them trying to control the resistance, de Gaulle to have an independent French force ready for the liberation,
10:44and the Special Operations in order to have something effective to back up British and allied operations.
10:52And I suppose the time at which resistance is most effective and most organized is around the time of D
10:58-Day,
10:59when SOE and the Free French kind of get together, organize the resistance to harass the Germans,
11:05to make their lines of communication difficult, to blow up railway lines and bridges, and to assist with the D
11:12-Day landings.
11:15Great Britain was winning the propaganda war.
11:19Despite a huge expenditure, Goebbels could not convince the conquered populations that Germany meant them well.
11:26Trust the German soldiers, his posters said.
11:29But these very soldiers were imposing compulsory labor, keeping the French prisoners of war in camps.
11:35The Vichy militia in unoccupied France was arresting and deporting Jews.
11:41Action speak louder than words, and people flocked to the cause of the resistance.
11:47There were two more major developments to the French underground.
11:51First, in November 1942, the Germans finally dispensed with the Vichy government of Marshal PĂ©tain,
11:58whose influence had been steadily fading and took direct control.
12:03France became fully occupied, and the Vichy army was disbanded.
12:08French soldiers were no longer bound by the armistice agreement made as France collapsed,
12:13and so they felt they were morally free to join the underground.
12:17Control of the French resistance now came under the Cancel National de la RĂ©sistance under General de Gaulle himself.
12:25Second, when North Africa was liberated and General de Gaulle beat General Girard in a leadership struggle,
12:32there was an obvious free French government in exile.
12:36Control of the resistance shifted again to the Comité Francaise de Libération Nationale.
12:42All these reorganizations increased the effectiveness of the French underground.
12:48Other countries were less lucky.
12:51In all of the countries in Nazi-occupied Europe, there was resistance to a greater or a lesser extent.
12:58It was probably least organized and least effective in Denmark, but there was resistance in Holland.
13:05And in Norway, the resistance movement played a large part, for example, in thwarting the Nazi atomic bomb program.
13:14So there was resistance in Northern Europe. It was organized and it did play a part.
13:19In Holland, geography and topography do not lend themselves to establishing a resistance movement of any sort.
13:27It's a small country, very flat, no hills, no mountain ranges, very few woods, and large urban areas.
13:37So a proper guerrilla movement doesn't stand a chance to begin with.
13:42A fairly promising attempt at establishing a resistance movement was nipped in the butt in 1942, 1943,
13:51both by German countermeasures and a crass incompetence on the side of the British Special Operations Executive,
13:58which allowed many of its operatives to be compromised and basically gave the Germans the possibility to break up the
14:07organization from different.
14:09In Denmark and Holland and to some extent in Norway, particularly countries where the governments have fled,
14:18and you have governments in exile like you do for Norway, governments in London.
14:22London is full of governments, of course, during the war, from exiled governments from all over Europe.
14:28They become a focus of resistance, and resistance within the country becomes part of a kind of inner political conflict
14:36between those who accept the Germans. It becomes almost a kind of suppressed civil war,
14:40that not only is resistance fighting the Germans, it's fighting parts of their own population who support the Germans.
14:48And German occupation covers a kind of civil war, a miniature civil war.
14:53But again, the rule tends to apply that in all countries that the weaker the German hold gets,
15:00the more active the resistance becomes as they're about to leave.
15:04And that was certainly true in those smaller countries, the German invasion forces got weaker.
15:10Once their hold got weaker, the population became more active in resisting them.
15:29Field Marshal Rommel in North Africa wrote in his diary on September the 16th, 1941,
15:34there is nothing so unpleasant as partisan warfare.
15:39It is perhaps very important not to make reprisals on hostages at the first outbreak of partisan warfare,
15:46for these only create feelings of revenge and serve to strengthen the Franc-Tiroes.
15:52It is better to allow an incident to go unavenged than to hit back at the innocent.
15:57It only agitates the whole neighborhood, and hostages easily become martyrs.
16:04Rommel's army was the only one of the Third Reich to be mercifully free of the Nazi Party fanatics, the
16:10SS and Gestapo.
16:13He fought a clean war, and was relatively free from the partisan problem, but he was the rare exception.
16:21Elsewhere in the Third Reich, reprisals, torture and terror tactics were the norm.
16:25The Gestapo, which existed to crush any resistance, reacted to partisan activity with horrifying acts.
16:48In the Balkans, of course, the terrain is very, very well suited to this type of warfare.
16:55And also in the Balkans, we saw a tremendously large number of people in arms resisting the German forces.
17:02They even got to the extent where they were captured in German tanks and using them against the Germans.
17:08It was a tremendously effective force, and it was a complete thorn in the side of the Wehrmacht for the
17:15whole course of the Second World War.
17:17In Serbia, the Germans managed to impose what you might call the peace of the graveyard, and managed to maintain
17:32this well into 1944.
17:35On the whole, the Germans were not inconvenient in a serious way in Serbia.
17:42Now, in Greece, Italian occupation very soon led to a flaring of serious resistance.
17:52And by the end of 1942, wide areas of the country were under partisan or other irregular control.
18:02Now, within the independent state of Croatia, a mixture of genocidal policies on the side of the Croat government,
18:12Italian incompetence and German reluctance to get properly involved in time led to a situation where, again, by late 1942,
18:23about a third of the country was controlled by the partisan, that is, communist movement.
18:29Partisan warfare was not just against the Germans. It was a kind of suppressed civil war, particularly within countries like
18:37Yugoslavia, and ultimately Greece, which were polarised between fascists and anti-fascists, particularly between fascists and communists.
18:49And the partisans in Yugoslavia in particular were fighting not only against German occupiers but against their fascist sympathisers,
19:01defending themselves against what had been extensive atrocities committed by other Yugoslavs, by Croats against Serbs in particular in the
19:12early stages of the war.
19:13So the partisan war takes on this extra aspect of civil war.
19:18Its effectiveness is such that even though its communist dominated under Marshal Tito,
19:27it's recognised in London that the Titoite partisans are the biggest opposition to distract Germany in that part of the
19:39world.
19:39So for a brief period of time you have that curious period where Churchill, under the urging of some of
19:47his underlings in the eastern Mediterranean and elsewhere,
19:51actually starts supplying Tito and the partisans before Stalin does.
19:57Stalin is a little afraid of alternative communist movements to some extent and he's trying to keep them under control.
20:10In the spring of 1944, Chief Petty Officer G.E. Fowler was sent to Bosnia and Yugoslavia to discover the
20:18situation there.
20:19He filmed this footage.
20:21The Yugoslavians used a technique called pokret, which was a rapid evacuation of a village when the Germans approached.
20:29There were supply drops and the women made bandages out of the parachute silk, as well as their head scarves.
20:36He even had time to film a soccer match between the partisans and an Anglo-American team of ten British
20:42and one American.
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21:15It turned and the Allies landed on the Italian mainland.
21:18These groups hindered the fascists.
21:21Eventually, after the Allies had fought a difficult,
21:24snail-paced campaign north, the Italians surrendered.
21:29Germany occupied Italy to continue the struggle.
21:33The Italian soldiers, faced with disarmament
21:36and the labor camps, headed for the hills.
21:39This partisan army numbered a million by the end of the war
21:42and were successful in denying whole areas
21:45that became independent kingdoms and republics
21:48from the Third Reich.
21:50The partisan movement in Italy sprang to life in 1943
21:56when Italy changed sides in the war.
21:58That gave the Italians, who had, many of them,
22:02obviously been very anti-Mussolini, particularly the Communists,
22:05that gave them the cue to really spring to arms
22:08and begin to take the war to the Germans.
22:10And throughout 1944 and 1945, there's a very bitter and savage war
22:17which is fought in the north of Italy,
22:19which involves the Partisans on one side
22:22and the Leipstendarte Division,
22:26this battle-hardened, brutal SS Division,
22:29who make it their job to stamp out a lot of the Partisan activity.
22:34And there are a number, as you would imagine,
22:36a number of atrocities that are committed in that vicious little fight
22:41that goes on between those two forces.
22:43Well, Italy was the one Western country that had a large Partisan
22:48as opposed to resistance movement,
22:51to the extent that it also had larger groups of people,
22:56hundreds, sometimes thousands, hidden away in the hills,
22:59reasonably well-equipped, living in liberated zones, if you like,
23:04and harassing the Germans and having their own sort of independent mini-states.
23:13The reason for this is, in part, that as opposed to other countries in Western Europe,
23:20where resistance was a national cause.
23:24In Italy, of course, resistance began even before the German occupation,
23:28because they'd had a native fascist regime there installed since the early 1920s.
23:34So there, as much as anywhere,
23:38Partisan warfare takes on the aspect of a left-right struggle.
23:42The Communist Party is the backbone of that Partisan movement by 1943,
23:51when the Allies begin to invade.
23:54But it's also joined by socialists and liberals,
23:57and others who were anti-Musolini and anti-fascist.
24:00In other words, anti-fascist before they were anti-German.
24:04The national element is different in the Italian case.
24:08So what you have in Italy is a kind of suppressed civil war,
24:11rather like the Spanish Civil War, but on a smaller scale.
24:15In comparing Italian resistance with, for instance, French resistance,
24:20one has to keep in mind that opportunity is also part of this equation.
24:29For instance, even though the French resistance was arguably less effective
24:36and operated on a smaller scale than the Italian resistance,
24:39and its particular contribution to the anti-Axis struggle was probably more important,
24:49for the simple reason that the Normandy landings afforded the French resistance
24:54a unique opportunity to actually materially contribute to a battle,
25:00which was of war-winning importance.
25:02The Italian resistance movement, through no fault of its own,
25:07never had a comparable opportunity.
25:11Mussolini was deposed and put under arrest by the Italian government,
25:15which itself had to flee the Germans in a corvette.
25:19SS Captain Otto Scarface Scorseni was given the task of liberating Hitler's ally.
25:28With a team of 90 Waffen SS, Scorseni crashed a glider into the hotel
25:33where the deposed dictator was being held.
25:36It was a daring raid, and they rescued Mussolini without a shot being fired.
25:45When Hitler restored Mussolini to power in northern Italy,
25:49an area grandly called the Italian Social Republic,
25:52it was not a tenable position.
26:00The Allies continued their advance,
26:03and the partisan armies continued to resist.
26:06It was one such underground group that finally caught up with Mussolini,
26:10as he tried to escape to the Alps with his mistress, Clara.
26:14On April the 25th, 1945, after being held for two days,
26:19a communist partisan, Walter Audizio, took them away and shot them.
26:24Their bodies were displayed in Milan,
26:27in front of a garage in Piazzale Loreto,
26:30where Mussolini had executed Italian partisans in a reprisal a year earlier.
26:35They were hung up by their ankles to be ridiculed.
26:40One mother shot Mussolini five times,
26:43once for each son she had lost.
26:49Now
26:59As the German Wehrmacht drove east conquering vast swathes of the Soviet Union,
27:06great numbers of Russians found themselves far behind enemy lines.
27:10In places, the peasants welcomed the invaders, hoping that they were finally free from Stalin's tyranny.
27:18It soon became clear, as the SS extermination squads moved in, that this was a war they would have to
27:25fight.
27:41And when I was killed by a Ukrainer, we were not there as enemies.
27:53We had a good relationship to the population.
28:00Especially the Ukrainer, who felt attacked by the Russians, who were forced into the U.S.S.S.S.S
28:10.S.S.S.S.S.
28:13They saw some freedom.
28:15Partisans came about because a gigantic army of millions of people was broken up within the first two or three
28:22weeks of the German attack in June 1941.
28:25So the Partisans are very, very different.
28:28That army breaks up. The majority of it is taken prisoner.
28:31Some of it melts into the local population.
28:34But many soldiers who are cut off from retreat because the Germans are advancing faster than they can advance, hide
28:41out in the woods.
28:42Some of them turn into simple bandit groups, but others become the core of the Partisans.
28:47So the difference is here, these are trained soldiers.
28:50They've got, in many cases, taken their weapons with them.
28:53They've often got ammunition with them.
28:56They're reasonably well armed.
28:57In the early stages, the Partisan groups tended to be fairly independent.
29:03They were larger and more coordinated in the sense there were more of them in any one given spot, and
29:09they were larger military units than in the West.
29:12But they were not coordinated with each other because there was such a panic in Moscow.
29:17The German army was advancing.
29:20Partisans were beyond reach.
29:21It was only really after the Battle of Stalingrad, by the end of 1942, and particularly in 1943, that the
29:31army commanders in Moscow began to realize that they got quite a useful asset in terms of the partisan groupings
29:37and the partisan bands.
29:38Russian Partisans, administratively, came under the political administration of the Red Army, and thus should be seen as an extension
29:46of the regular armed forces of the Soviet state.
29:50Thus, they tended to operate in conjunction and under the direct orders of the Soviet general staff.
29:58What with the German strategic situation, what it was in mid-1944, and the numerical strength of the partisan movement,
30:06they should have been in a position to cause a complete collapse of German rear areas.
30:12This, however, was never the case. It was never accomplished.
30:19In December 1941, there were 30,000 Russian Partisans. Six months later, this figure had risen five-fold to 150
30:28,000.
30:30Groups operated in the forests of Belarusia, the borders of Poland, and the Ukraine.
30:36In the early days, as with other occupied countries, they were betrayed by their fellow countrymen.
30:41But soon, the whole population was behind the partisans.
30:49This war was particularly brutal, even by Nazi standards, and a captured partisan was getting off lightly if he or
30:56she was merely publicly hanged.
30:58Most were tortured or maimed before being shot.
31:06Villages thought to be helping the partisans were annihilated, but this did not act as any sort of deterrent.
31:12The German execution squads had taken to accusing villages of helping the partisans, even when they were completely innocent, as
31:20an excuse to destroy those they saw as the Untermenschen, the subhumans.
31:26It was a war of genocide, and the Russians could do nothing except fight or die. And fight they did.
31:38The nature of the war between the partisans and the German forces was absolutely unforgiving.
31:45It had slipped beneath the veneer of a civilised society.
31:49This was a no-holds-barred war, where horrible atrocities were committed on both sides, where prisoners were shot out
31:56of hand, and where absolutely no rules of warfare were applied.
32:01We really have reached the bottom level of savagery with this war that's fought between the Germans and the Russian
32:08partisans.
32:08The Germans, it must be said, acted with great ruthlessness, reacted with great ruthlessness to the partisan threat, and more
32:18often than not would take it out on the civilian population,
32:23whom they suspected, rightly or wrongly, of supporting, harbouring, or being in cahoots with the partisans.
32:31At the same time, many encirclement operations, more often than not, would just end up with a huge tally of
32:41dead civilians and very few dead partisans.
32:45The partisans, whenever they felt that it was necessary, used terror and coercion against the civilian population in much the
32:54same way as the Germans would.
32:56After all, the partisans saw themselves as representatives of the legitimate Soviet state and felt that the civilian population owed
33:06them loyalty and allegiance.
33:09Presumed and actual factual collaborators were singled out and dealt with very severely.
33:21The Russian partisans took an oath.
33:24I, a citizen of the Soviet Union, a faithful son of the Russian people, swear that I shall not lay
33:30down my arms until the very last fascist on our land is destroyed.
33:34For the burned villages and cities, for the death of our children, for tortures and violence, for mockery over my
33:41people, I swear to take vengeance on the enemy without mercy and without rest.
33:47Blood for blood, death for death.
33:51I swear that I would rather die fighting the enemy than surrender myself, my family or my people into slavery.
34:03We think of what happened to the village of Ledice in Czechoslovakia after the assassination of Heydrich.
34:08It was simply laid to the ground.
34:11Similarly, Orador-sur-Glan near Limoges is a symbol in France of the most extreme elements of German atrocities.
34:20But this was going on all the time on the Eastern Front.
34:23There were dozens and dozens of equivalents of Ledice where villages were wiped out.
34:27Where the Germans would just burn villages because they suspected that partisans were in the area.
34:35And they would just drive ordinary villages out into the woods as well.
34:39Now, of course, this was very, very difficult and terrible for the villages involved.
34:46But it also was in part a very good recruiting method for the partisans themselves.
34:53Because the young active men in those villages would be pushed out to go and join the resistance, to go
35:01and join the partisans.
35:02The alternative was probably going to be either being taken hostage or deported.
35:10And again, the deportations of Russians were much more vicious than the deportations from Western Europe.
35:18I mean, many Russians who were deported were turned into slaves.
35:23There were the camps, the racist deportations.
35:27Most of the death camps were on the East.
35:29I mean, the war in the East was absolutely, absolutely horrifying.
35:33Many of the Jews who died in Auschwitz were, as well as being Jews, were also Soviet citizens.
35:39So the whole war was very barbarous.
35:42And the war against the partisans was a particularly vicious and barbarous aspect of it, as I say, on both
35:50sides.
35:51Any German who fell into the hands of the partisans couldn't expect any mercy.
35:58And no partisan who fell in the hands of the Germans could expect any mercy.
36:01No quarter was asked and none was given.
36:03Links und rechts liegt im Schnee eingefroren eine ĂĽberraschte, zerschlagene deutsche Fahrzeugkolonne.
36:11Ăśberall nackte Tote, ausgezogen wegen der Uniform fĂĽr Partisanen.
36:16Das kann unser Schicksal auch noch werden.
36:19Aber wir mĂĽssen weiter und ĂĽberholen.
36:22Das ist dann eben, dass in deutschen Uniformen Parisanen sich zwischenmischten.
36:27Und das ist der heimtĂĽckische Krieg gewesen.
36:34These days, they attacked the Germans with any weapons they could find.
36:38They'd appear from the sewers with their Molotov cocktails.
36:41They'd hide in special dugouts to shoot the advancing Germans after they'd passed.
36:46They'd down telegraph lines and then wait to ambush the repair crews.
37:07Most of the partisans' equipment was captured from the Germans,
37:11and these they turned against their former owners with a vengeance.
37:19In July 1943, after the Red Army had turned the tide at Stalingrad,
37:24the partisans began the Battle of the Rails to smash the German supply lines.
37:30They destroyed thousands of rails as well as 72 railway bridges,
37:35crippling the Germans' ability to fight off.
37:41All the Germans could do in response was to wipe out whole villages in retaliation.
37:46which served only to stiffen the resolve and bring more flocking to the cause.
37:52Numbers rose to half a million partisans.
37:58The peak of their effectiveness, I think, comes with the Battle of Kursk in 1943.
38:04Through careful intelligence, both of their own Soviet origin and also through shared intelligence from Britain,
38:13the Soviet authorities knew the order of battle of the Germans.
38:16They knew when they were planning to attack, they knew the units, they had all the information they needed.
38:20They were able to use that to get the partisans to work for maximum effectiveness behind German lines,
38:28blowing up communications, breaking the railway lines, blowing up bridges, harassing key logistical operations and so on.
38:39The Soviet Union was aided in their attempts to cut the German supply lines by the Polish resistance.
38:46However, Moscow would not recognize Poland's territorial claims.
38:51It must be remembered that Russia invaded Poland with the Germans in 1939 and started the Second World War.
38:59The Soviet Union created a Polish government in exile and sent agents into Poland during 1942 to create the Workers'
39:07Party
39:08and a partisan army called the People's Guard.
39:18Norway's Millorg Secret Army consisted of 32,000 men, which led the Germans to believe in a possible invasion of
39:26Europe from Norway.
39:27To counter this threat, the German occupation force was increased to 17 divisions,
39:32a huge force that was far too far away from Normandy when the invasion came.
39:46Denmark had 20,000 in its secret army, Belgium 50,000, France 100,000.
39:55All the secret armies of Western Europe were preparing for one day, D-Day.
40:29The French house painter, René Duchesze,
40:32was given the task by the Germans of redecorating a major's office in Caen.
40:37The office belonged to the Tote Military Construction Group,
40:41and inside there was a map of the Atlantic Wall,
40:44a blueprint of Hitler's fortress in Europe.
40:48Duchesne, who was a courier for the Century Network in Normandy,
40:51stole it, hiding it behind a mirror, before taking it to Moreau.
40:56Moreau was really Marcel Girard, the regional head of the resistance.
41:01Duchesne handed over this vital document in a crowded bar full of German soldiers.
41:06The document was finally taken to London by trawler, hidden inside a biscuit tin.
41:14The two-metre-long map showed a vital 200-kilometre section from Le Havre to Cherbourg
41:20and was immensely useful in planning the Normandy landings.
41:28The French Marquis were ready, and in the two months preceding the D-Day landings,
41:33they committed numerous acts of sabotage, including the destruction of 1,800 railway engines.
41:44On the evening before D-Day, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt noted in his situation report
41:51the increase in resistance activity.
41:54He finished with these sentences.
41:57For the first time, members of the secret army are seen in uniform wearing tricolor badges.
42:04We prepare countermeasures with adequate forces.
42:08It was too late.
42:10Elements of the Allied Operation Overlord were already at sea.
42:21General de Gaulle feared a communist uprising in France when the communist organized French
42:26forces of the interior, or simply the FFI, began the liberation of Paris.
42:32He tried to persuade General Eisenhower, who wanted to bypass Paris, to release troops to
42:38rush to the rescue of the French capital.
42:41Eisenhower refused, so de Gaulle forced the American Supreme Commander's hand by raising
42:46a force of 17 tanks and 10 armored cars in Normandy and setting off.
42:54The FFI was attached to General Eisenhower's GHQ and was under the overall command of General
43:01Koenig, but the leader of the FFI in Paris was Henri Tanguy, known as Colonel Rohe.
43:07It was Colonel Rohe who gave the order Ox Barricades, and more than 400 barricades were constructed
43:15from sandbags, felled trees, and even the cobblestones from the streets.
43:21Players were considered to be the part of German Western Union, the Ku Klux Klan team, which
43:25Therefore, the U.S. German Republic, and the Ku Klux Klan team appeared to enter the
43:34new forces of the military forces, and to return the East Sea from the쉬, the
43:35U.S. German Republic, and a former, Ku Klux Klan team, one of the few, and the
43:38Soviet Union men had dedicated their allies to the Cubans.
43:39The U.S. German Republic, and a former Union Republic, would mean the European Union,
43:42and of the two, and the deutlich more than 400 barricades.
43:47The U.S. German Republic, is now the United States, France and the United States and the
43:49same Cuba, the United States and the United States.
43:49American Republic, and the United States, country and the United States,
43:49military party together, and the United States.
43:51The next day, rival Gaulist units liberated the police headquarters.
43:55The battle against the trapped German 7th Army lasted five days and five nights.
44:04Hitler, literally foaming at the mouth, had ordered Major General Dietrich von Choltitz,
44:10the commander of Fortress Paris, to leave the city a field of ruins.
44:15Nothing was to be left standing, no church, no artistic monument.
44:19Nothing. Even the water supply was to be cut off to leave the city prey to epidemics.
44:26As the street fighting continued, the FĂĽhrer kept demanding to know if Paris was burning.
44:32His Major General, now back in Paris, hesitated to carry out the FĂĽhrer's orders.
44:37His experience in Hitler's headquarters had convinced him that the German leader was mad.
44:44Even so, he was a loyal soldier, and though he wouldn't destroy Paris,
44:48he would defend it.
44:50The Allies would have to fight their way in.
44:53There were German tanks on the streets and snipers everywhere.
44:57Running battles were fought through the boulevards and squares.
45:01Gradually, the FFI gained the upper hand.
45:04The Nazis sued for surrender, and then treacherously made a final stand in the Hotel de Ville,
45:11the town hall, and in other historic buildings like Notre Dame.
45:16The French resistance, after such a long struggle, prevailed.
45:28The resistance captured 20,000 prisoners.
45:32When the 1st French Armored Division arrived, followed by the American 4th Infantry,
45:37they were greeted by scenes of joyous celebration, punctuated with short, tense moments,
45:43as the Parisians ducked from the sporadic sniper fire.
45:47General Charles de Gaulle himself reached Paris, dodging bullets, and greeted the cheering people.
45:54One of his first acts was to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
45:59In total, around 150,000 men and women lost their lives in France, defying the German occupation.
46:10Finally, General de Gaulle held a victory parade for the rejoicing citizens.
46:15He marched from the Arc de Triomphe down the Champs-Élysées to the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
46:21There was the occasional sniper fire down the length of the procession.
46:26Shooting even broke out inside the cathedral, but the general was unperturbed.
46:31Paris was in the last throes of occupation.
46:36This was the only one of the first acts that the
46:37was in the last part of the
46:37the first part of the
46:37the first part of the
47:16Despite the continuing danger, the people were happy.
47:20There were still battles to be fought.
47:23The Second World War was far from over.
47:25But after four horrendous years, the resistance movement had won its war.
47:29The partisans were no longer a secret army.
47:34They had set Europe ablaze.
48:23The Fourth World War was far from over.
48:23The United Kingdom of the United States has won its war.
48:25The Final World War
48:27You
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