Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I've got an extraordinary tale of survival

and heroism on the podcast now. A tale of female French resistance fighters who in

Ravensbrook concentration camp at the end of the Second World War, the dying days of

the Second World War. They risked death daily, starvation, disease, brutality at the hands

of their SS captors. They were also terrified about the advancing red army, hearing tales

of the war crimes being committed. Terrified, they'd be caught up in the wave of sexual assault

that was coming in the tracks of the red army advance. And so they decided, well, they still could

to break out. They seized out opportunity at a moment of chaos, and the 9th is them

battled their way across Germany towards the advancing American troops. There's an extraordinary

story. There's a story told by Gwen Strauss. She's an American author living in Paris. She's

the great niece of one of the women, and it was very late in her great-tanced life that she

finally sat down and told her family members what she'd been through. Gwen was able to do some

detective work and has written an extraordinary account of these nine women, what they did during

the war and what happened to them afterwards. This is one of the most remarkable true stories that

they'll come across from the dying days of the Second World War. If you want more stories like this,

for example, a story of the Great Escape, the famous great-sale, but as we tell the real Great

Escape, an equally fascinating escape that took place during the Second World War, but far less known,

you can find all that history hit TV. So we keep all the back episodes of this podcast without the ads,

but also where we have hundreds of hours of history documentaries for true history fans.

It's like Netflix, but just for history. So please do go and check that out on history hit TV.

If you follow the link in the description for this podcast, you will get taken straight there.

You'll get two weeks free. If you check it out now. But in the meantime, here is Gwen Strauss

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