All language subtitles for World War II With Tom Hanks S01E16 Resistance 720p NOW WEB-DL AAC2 0 H 264-RAWR.eng.nohi

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.

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.

Since the fall of France,
the BBC has broadcast

daily radio programming
to occupied Europe.

Embedded within the broadcasts
are coded messages.

The night before D-Day,
the Allied invasion

of Western Europe,

the broadcast to occupied France

includes a line from a poem
by Paul Verlaine.

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.

All of their planning,

all of their networking
now goes into action

to slow the German response

so that the Allies
can win the race

to build up and break out.

So many men and women
throughout France

have risked so
much to get to this night

and the beginning of
their country's liberation.

After the
fall of France in 1940,

there are two Frances.

There's the France
that is directly occupied by

the Germans, including Paris,

and there is a puppet regime
with its capital at Vichy.

So resistance
groups form in each one.

From the start, the
inspiration for French resistance

to Germany
was embodied by one man.

A veteran of the Great War,

General Charles De Gaulle.

Charles De Gaulle

fought all the way
through the German invasion

of France in 1940.

Rather than
surrender to the Germans,

rather than go along
with the French government,

he arrives in Britain by himself

and just says, "By the way,

I'm now
the leader of the Free French."

He's self-appointed.

Churchill goes,
"Eh, he might be useful."

He gives him an office,
gives him a radio,

lets him do some broadcasts.

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."

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.

There are
aristocratic Catholics,

Communists, Republicans.

There are all different
groups jockeying for position

between themselves
and fighting against

the Germans as well.

A cross-section
of French citizens,

teachers, lawyers,
farmers, factory workers,

take part in the resistance.

Women play a substantial role.

One of the
most important activities

of the resistance was
a network of agents

and secret codes
and safe houses

that helped smuggle downed
Allied 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.

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?"

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."

Three-man teams

who parachute into occupied

an American, a British,
and a French agent.

They
bring weapons with them.

They'd bring a radio set
so they could communicate.

They coordinate activities,

and they inform the groups
what the Allies are up to.

The Jedburghs have an ultimate
goal, and that is to

ease the invasion plan
for June, 1944.

Once the Allies
land in June 6th,

the resistance
becomes emboldened.

But many pay a grievous
price for their courage.

Germans, with the help
of French collaborators,

hunt down anyone
assisting the Allies.

The 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.

The Gestapo
carryout reprisals.

"For every one of
our soldiers killed,

we will kill 50
resistance fighters."

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.

They take all the men and they

shove them into
a bunch of barns,

shoot them,
and set the barns on fire.

They take all the
women and children

and put them in a church

and then burn the church
to the ground,

shooting anyone
who tries to climb out.

Collective vengeance
for the act of resistance.

On July 25th,
the Americans launch

a massive air and ground attack:

Operation Cobra.

After a month
and a half of combat

among the hedgerows
of Normandy,

the Allies now break through

the German defensive perimeter.

Paris is the center
of the German occupying force.

But the Allies were not
super interested in Paris.

Cities are an enormous
military problem.

Do you go into Paris
knowing that you could

end up fighting an urban battle
that you don't want to fight?

The streets narrow
your ability to maneuver.

So fighting inside a city
is nobody's idea

of what you want to do.

Of course, if you're French, the
situation is completely different.

The French people are
thinking that the Allies are

just a few hundred
kilometers from the city of Paris,

and they believe
that Paris will be next

in the great capitals of
Europe to be liberated

from Nazi fascism.

To the French, Paris
is not just the capital of France.

It is the most important,
most symbolic city

that you're going to liberate.

And the man who thinks
he's going to take control

of all of this is
Charles De Gaulle.

Throughout the war,

he builds up Free French
forces in London and in Africa.

French soldiers
flock to his colors.

And, by D-Day,
he has something of

a Free French armed force.

And De Gaulle is astonished
and appalled

to hear that the Allies are not

focusing on Paris
as a key objective.

Paris is like the beating
heart of the French republic.

There is no France
without Paris.

And De Gaulle said,
"If you're not going, I'm going."

Allied forces
advance across France

to force the Wehrmacht's retreat
to the Rhine and beyond.

Liberating Paris
from German occupation

is not their main
strategic concern.

But Parisians have other ideas.

The problem
for Paris is that,

when the Normandy invasion
happens,

it cuts the city off from
its principal food supply.

And the Germans are
trying to take everything

that they can out of the city.

So it's a very, very unstable,
very insecure place.

And so there is the beginnings

of popular uprising in Paris.

A lot of that is being driven
by the communist resistance.

De Gaulle is quite
keen to get to Paris,

because what he doesn't
is Paris to

become liberated by
the communist resistance.

He does not want
to liberate France

only for it to fall into
the hands of communism.

To ensure that
French troops liberate Paris,

General De Gaulle
requires the support

of the Supreme
Allied Commander:

General Dwight Eisenhower.

De Gaulle
didn't have that many cards

to play in 1944,

but he played them
as skillfully as anybody.

There is a French unit,
the 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."

As Winston
Churchill would say,

he tends to love to bite
the hand that feeds him.

You have to give
him credit, though,

for he has his eye on one thing,

and that's a free France.

Shortly after D-Day,
in coordination with

their Western allies,
the Soviets throw

the massed might of the Red
Army against the Germans.

Operation Bagration is

the gigantic Soviet offensive

in summer of 1944.

Roughly timed to coincide

with the Allies
landing in Normandy.

It is just
a monstrous offensive.

About two and a half million

Soviets are thrown into battle.

Half a million Germans are killed,
wounded, or captured.

It erased an entire
German army group from the map,

the entire central portion of
the German front in the east.

Now the Soviet army
is moving in to Poland,

and you've gotta remember that,
of course,

Poland was the reason
the war started.

In the fall of 1939,
Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin

agreed to divide Poland.

When Hitler took Poland,

he treated it like the laboratory
for his racial ideas,

his plans to annihilate
the Jewish people

and to treat the
Eastern Slavic people

as essentially a slave
race to work to death.

Poland has been
stained in blood and killing,

crushed beneath
the German jackboot,

its soil watered with the blood of

vast numbers of its
Jewish community.

The Poles have been
living through hell for 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 it is sending orders
to a home army,

a sort of
secret army of underground

resistance fighters in Poland.

The Polish Home Army
was formed really

immediately after
the Germans invaded.

There was a real sense,

in amongst the Polish community,

and especially the young
people: "We're 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.

The Home Army is
led by a former cavalry officer

who has been fighting
the Germans since 1939...

General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski.

On July 29th, 1944,

as the Allies are
slicing through France,

the Soviets reach
the outskirts of Warsaw.

The Polish Home Army
is waiting for the moment

when the Germans
are about to retreat

and just before
the Soviets arrive.

Because that is the opportunity

to reassert Polish independence,
the Polish state.

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.

The Polish Home Army
and General Bór-Komorowski

have long planned
for this moment.

There are weapons caches,
command structures.

There are instructions
coming from senior officers

based in London.
There is a plan.

Tens of thousands
of Home Army troops

will go all over the city

and go for the
most important things:

the airports, the bridges,

the main focal
points of Nazi power.

It was a moment where
timing was everything.

If they did it too soon,
the Germans would crush them.

If they did it too late,
the Soviets would conquer them.

The Red Army was coming.

It looked as if there
was just this juggernaut

that was gonna force
the Germans out of the city.

Outside Warsaw,
the Germans regroup

on the banks of the Vistula River.

The Poles hear
the sounds of fighting,

think the Red Army's gonna win,

and they're about to
come into Warsaw.

General Bór-Komorowski
gives the order

to begin the uprising.

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.

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.

Civilians
are thrilled, they're jubilant.

For the first time since 1939,

they can sing
the national anthem.

They push trams over,
they build barricades,

and they make it very,
very difficult

for the Germans to fight there.

It's a heroic moment,
an exciting moment.

Poland is rising like a phoenix
out of the ashes.

But the attack does
not go as well as it was hoped.

They do manage to
seize the Post Office,

they manage to seize
an important German arsenal,

but they don't manage
to secure the airportS.

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.

The Polish Home Army
expected the Germans

controlling Warsaw
to be in retreat.

Instead, the Wehrmacht attacks
the Red Army at the Vistula...

...and retains their
grip on Warsaw.

Adolf Hitler meets
with Heinrich Himmler,

head of the Nazi SS.

On the night
of 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.

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.

The Germans
poured in ruthless shock troops

with the express purpose
of destroying them.

The Home Army used up
their caches of weapons very fast.

The Poles
think the Red Army is coming.

The whole thing
depended upon the idea

that Germans were either leaving

or could not reinforce

their existing troops within Warsaw.

Neither of those two things
turned out to be true.

The Germans weren't leaving

and the Soviets weren't coming.

Stalin says,
to everyone's surprise:

"Halt the army."

They can see across the river:
Warsaw is burning.

Although the Soviets
are right across the river,

they make no effort to support

the resistance in its uprising
against the Germans.

Rather, they sit across the river

and watch the Germans
crush the uprising.

Stalin
doesn't just do nothing;

he actively interferes
with the Allies' attempt

to help the Home Army,
the Polish uprising.

From their air bases in Italy,

the British and Americans try
to drop supplies to the Poles.

Churchill asks permission:

"Can Allied planes carrying supplies
use Soviet bases

to refuel and carry out repairs?"

Stalin says no.

Stalin has always hated

the Polish government in London,

which he regards as bourgeois,
imperialist, capitalist.

He has a small
Polish communist group.

He is always planning
to parachute them

in to Poland as his government.

And so Stalin is
content to watch the Germans

utterly destroy
the Polish Home Army,

destroy the population of Warsaw,

and destroy the city itself.

Stalin
wants to conquer Poland,

but he wants to make sure

that it's then turned into
a communist vassal client state.

He wants to wait
until the Nazis have

destroyed the Polish underground

before he enters Warsaw.

Let them do his work for him.

Hitler sends in his
most psychopathic crews

of murderous, grotesque sadists.

Some of them
are the most brutal murderers

of the entire Nazi regime.

Like Oskar Dirlewanger.

Even the SS doesn't
wanna work with him.

They go through
building after building,

and they round these
people up by the thousands

and then mow those people down.

When 5,000,
6,000 bodies are lying there,

then they bring in 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.

The Polish Home Army
surrenders.

General Bór-Komorowski
is imprisoned by the Nazis.

By the end of
the Warsaw Uprising,

about 200,000
civilians have been killed.

Then the remaining population

are sent to camps like Auschwitz.

Some are sent as slave laborers
into the Reich.

So the destruction of Warsaw is

unique in the destruction of cities

in the Second World War in Europe.

In Warsaw, tragically,

the Germans chose
to meet that desire

for Polish independence
with overwhelming force...

...To kill and smash
and eradicate Polish culture.

To say, "No,
you will not liberate yourselves.

In fact,
you have condemned yourselves."

August, 1944.

The Germans are in
full retreat across France.

They begin to evacuate Paris.

Parisians sense a chance
to recapture their city.

But they need a spark.

On the 15th of August,
the Parisian police,

which was 20,000 strong
and had been

collaborating with the Germans
up to that moment,

actually switches sides

and raises the flag
on their building,

giving the sign to
the rest of the city

and, of course,
to the partisans,

that this was the moment
the uprising needed to start.

And so the streets of
Paris become a battlefield.

The French resistance has
been preparing for this moment

for a very long time.

And they act against
the Germans quite rapidly

and quite successfully.

As this happened,

Charles De Gaulle shows up
to Supreme Allied Commander

Eisenhower's headquarters

and go, "We have
to march on Paris."

The Allies
don't particularly like De Gaulle,

but see De Gaulle as a bulwark
against communism.

Eisenhower
is smart enough to know

that it would look really,
really good

if the first troops to enter
Paris were the Free French.

Eisenhower decides
to allow the Free French forces

to send one division into the city

and to help the insurgents
to free the city.

Supported by the
American Fourth Division,

General De Gaulle
orders the French

Second Armored Division into Paris.

Toward the bitter end,

Adolf Hitler
issues instructions

to General 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."

Instead,
he negotiates a surrender.

It is the officers
and men of that

Second French Armored
Division who first enter Paris.

So De Gaulle can claim
that the French have

liberated their own capital.

And not just any old French,
not the communist French,

not the resis...
HIS French army.

He is the one
leading the parade

through the streets of Paris,

presenting himself as the legitimate
leader of the French government.

Everyone in
the city has come out now

because they feel that their
moment of liberation is on them.

But there are still
German soldiers in Paris.

General De
Gaulle walked straight ahead

into what appeared to me
to be a hail of fire.

But he went straight ahead
without hesitation,

his shoulders flung back.

Most Germans
have surrendered or fled.

The last are tracked down,

along with French collaborators.

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.

However, let's say,

the Allied presence in the region

also played a major role in

convincing the Germans
that it was time to go.

France will
enter this post-war period

with pride and with confidence.

It's difficult to imagine
how that would've happened

if not for the efforts of all
of the resistance groups

that fought against
Nazi aggression.

But, in Warsaw,
the outcome is different.

The city is razed by the Nazis.

And what remains is captured

and controlled by the Soviets.

Paris, the city of light,
is saved.

Warsaw, and the hope of
the Polish people,

is destroyed.

Resistance is important

for the people of a nation

who do not want
to be subjugated.

While the French and the Poles

rise up against the Germans

within the extermination
camps at Auschwitz and others,

there is also this
spirit of resistance.

The deliberate
killing of Jews by the Nazis

began with bullets.

Shortly after the Germans

invaded the Soviet Union
in June, 1941...

...they started to shoot Jewish
children, women, and men...

...and bury them in
ravines and forests.

But eventually the Nazis
required

a more systematic method
of murder.

There were tens of
thousands of the camps

by the end of the war.
It's a huge infrastructure.

But there were a very
small number of death camps

within this enormous system.

Six death camps.

Chelmno,
which is the original death camp,

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka,

and then Auschwitz-Birkenau

and Majdanek.

As the Red Army
pushes into Poland,

the Nazis attempt to
hide their great crime

by dismantling
the killing centers.

They destroyed documents.

They destroyed
the major death camps

at Belzec, Sobibor,
and Treblinka.

They get rid of 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.

At Auschwitz-Birkenau,
there are prisoners

determined to
document the Nazi murders.

The extermination
camp system

includes the sorting of people.

Some of them are left alive

because they looked as if they
were young or fit or healthy enough.

Those people work in something
called a Sonderkommando.

They are supposed
to sort the clothing,

sort the hair that's
been cut off people,

to move the corpses,
all these terrible,

terrible jobs
that they're given.

In 1944 in
Auschwitz-Birkenau,

members of the resistance movement

manage 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.

One prisoner
manages to photograph the horror.

Four images of hell.

The really
extraordinary thing about them

is that the images
themselves are framed

from within the doorway

of the gas chamber building itself.

So the images testify
to the bravery

of what this man was doing

and the appalling depravity

of the process at that stage.

And what we see
within these images

are the burning of bodies
outside the crematoria.

And we see people being undressed,

waiting to be brought
into the gas chamber.

The film 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.

The Jews fought back from 1933

to the end of the war.

There are escapes.

There are individual killings
of guards by prisoners.

The Jews are fighting
back this entire time.

Resistance is what
gives us testimony

of what happened
in those places.

In the fall of 1944,

Nazi Germany is retreating
on all fronts...

except one:

their war against the Jews.

Auschwitz-Birkenau
is now the front line.

Killing Jews is not
a secondary by-product

of their military goals:
It is their military goal.

From Hitler's
perspective, it's worth

apportioning resources to it

despite what's
happening elsewhere.

In fact, they accelerate
the process of mass murder.

In 1944,
the Nazis decide to

exterminate the Hungarian
Jewish population.

So a special train line is
built into Auschwitz-Birkenau,

and hundreds of thousands of

Hungarian Jews are rounded up,

and many of them are murdered

within a few hours of
their arriving at the camp.

1944 is
when Auschwitz hits

its terrible, appalling peak

in terms of the number
of people killed.

Requests start to
come to the U.S. government

to bomb either the rail lines,

the gas chambers at Auschwitz,
the crematoria,

the bridges leading
to these camps.

The idea of
bombing death camps

is difficult operationally
and it's difficult morally.

You're going to kill the very people

that you're trying to rescue.

Churchill and
Roosevelt's perspective:

humanitarian concerns
were always secondary

to winning the war.
They would say:

"The best thing that we
can do to help these people

is to bring the war to an
end as quickly as possible."

Prisoners at
Auschwitz-Birkenau cannot

afford to wait for the war to end.

They want to survive,
they want to escape,

and they want to
stop the killing.

From the beginning,
there has been

an underground of resistance
at Auschwitz-Birkenau

made up of various
groups of prisoners,

including the 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."

So they started to
look at ways they could resist.

They might die trying,

there's a very good chance

that they'll die trying, but

at least they can
give themselves a chance.

Because they're determined
to do whatever they can

to meet the moment
on their own terms.

Auschwitz is
a death camp,

and it's also a forced
labor facility.

And so there were women

who were working in the armaments

factories nearby Auschwitz

who had access to gunpowder.

One member
of the underground

is part of a slave labor unit
that sorts the clothing

of the dead: 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.

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.

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.

At a certain moment,
an individual takes

an improvised weapon and
launches at a member of the SS,

and that kick-starts
the whole thing.

There's smoke,
there's noise, there's shouting,

and there's gunfire.

The resistors
end up blowing up, in part,

one of the crematoria,
Crematoria IV.

It's put permanently
out of commission.

So the Sonderkommando
would've considered

that to be a success.

And in another crematory building,
the Sonderkommando

force some the guards
into one of the ovens alive.

Some prisoners escape,

but are quickly
caught and executed.

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.

In December,
the Red Army advances

on Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The SS forced prisoners
on marches into Germany.

Thousands die.

On January 27th, 1945,

Soviet soldiers arrive at the
gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Auschwitz
really became the center

of the mass murder of Europe's
Jews quite late in the war.

The important thing to
know is that 80%

of the Jews murdered
in the Holocaust

were not murdered at Auschwitz,

but elsewhere in places
that are either

forgotten or largely overlooked.

The Nazis
and their collaborators

murder six million Jews
during the war.

Millions of others
die at their hands.

But in the face of
unimaginable conditions

and inconceivable cruelty...

...some find a way to resist.

Resistance
takes so many forms.

There's armed
resistance and uprising,

and that happens
throughout Europe.

There is spiritual resistance.

Just the idea that
you are not going to die

just because
the Nazis want you to,

you are going to try to survive.

You are going to document

what is happening,
write letters, write diaries,

bury them in the ground

so that someday we will be able to

talk about what
you went through.

The nature of tyranny
becomes evident in World War II.

The Nazis and the Japanese

imperialists
are invading their neighbors,

kidnapping, slave laborers,

murdering those
who disagree with them.

It was a natural reaction

on the part of
the occupied peoples

to organize some
form of resistance.

And it happens
all over the world in World War II.

After surviving
Auschwitz and Buchenwald,

Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel said:

"We must always take sides.

Neutrality helps the oppressor,
never the victim.

Silence encourages the tormentor,

never the tormented.

Sometimes we must interfere."

In the Pacific, President
Franklin Roosevelt,

General Douglas MacArthur,
and Admiral Chester Nimitz

meet in Pearl Harbor to draw
a plan for the final defeat

- of Imperial Japan.
- Subtitles by Sky Access Services