WW2: Last Letters of Resistance Fighters

Warfare

History Hit

History

4.5 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2023

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's 1943, you're part of the French resistance, and you've been sentenced to death. You're allowed to write one last letter before you're shot by the Nazis. Who do you write to? Friends? Family? Fellow comrades? How do you know if they'll even get it?

Of the 10,000 or so executions during the Second World War, only around 700 letters remain, and today's guest, Daniel Brunstetter, Professor of Political Science at the University of California Irvine, has spent the last three years trying to track them down, and working with the families to piece together their life, death, and acts of heroism.

Together, Daniel and host James Patton Rogers set the scene of occupied France, Charles de Gaulle's rallying cry to resist, and the multiple lives the letters, years after their authors were executed.

The Senior Producer was Elena Guthrie. It was edited and mixed by Aidan Lonergan.

Intro music: Ludwig van Beethoven, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Imagine the scene.
0:05.0	scene. Dawn breaks on your last morning.
0:10.0	A prison guard hands you a blank sheet of paper and a pen two hours before your execution by Nazi firing squad.
0:16.0	You knew resistance had risks. But now, well now the war will continue without you and victory. Victory is a dream you will never see.
0:25.3	Your last letter. What do you write? Who do you write it to? What do you say? Because this is your last
0:31.1	chance to say it.
0:32.8	In today's episode, we explore the last letters written by members of the French Resistance
0:37.2	penned hours before their execution by Nazi firing squad during the Second World War.
0:43.4	Love, Fear, grief, regret, courage, bitterness,
0:47.3	hope, and even joy.
0:49.2	These are the emotions at the heart of the last letters. And a last letter is unlike any other type of writing.
0:55.2	It peers into the soul of its author as the author confronts their mortality,
1:00.6	with each word time ticked second by second towards death, but with each word a piece of the
1:06.2	writer's soul lives on.
1:08.4	I'm your host James Patton Rogers.
1:10.1	This is warfare, and our guest today is Daniel Brunstetter, Professor of Political Science at the University of California Davis.
1:17.0	Daniel has spent years tracking down these letters and working with the families of those murdered to piece together their life, their death and their acts of heroism.
1:26.0	This is their story.
1:28.0	This is their history. Daniel, tell us a bit about this topic.
1:37.6	How did you go from being interested in the morality and ethics of drones and drone warfare to discovering this amazing
1:45.4	cachet of last letters of resistance fighters from the Second World War.
1:49.1	So it's actually kind of a story of chance encounters if you will I was just finishing up a book
	...

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