Resistance

In the summer of 1944, as the Allied invasion of Normandy succeeded and Soviet forces pushed from the east, two European capitals faced very different fates. Paris would be liberated, its occupiers driven out by a combination of popular uprising and Free French forces. Warsaw would be systematically destroyed, its population massacred, while the Red Army watched from across the river. Both cities rose up against Nazi occupation. The outcomes could not have been more different—and the difference was shaped as much by politics as by military reality.

The French Resistance and the Liberation of Paris

After France fell in 1940, the country split into two: the directly occupied north including Paris, and the puppet Vichy regime in the south. Resistance groups formed in both zones, but they were fragmented—aristocratic Catholics, communists, republicans, all jockeying for position against each other as well as against the Germans. The inspiration for French resistance came from one man: General Charles de Gaulle, who fled to Britain after the surrender and, as the episode describes, "self-appointed" himself as the voice of Free France. Churchill gave him an office and a radio, and de Gaulle broadcast to the French people: "The flame of French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished."