Liberation of Paris after Four Years of Nazi Occupation (June to August 1944)

May 26, 2023 | This is an excerpt from the film "The Spirit of Liberation": click here. Between the 19th and 25th August 1944 during the Second World War and in the course of Operation Overlord, the liberation of Paris took place. The capital of France had been occupied by German troops since June 1940. In mid-August 1944, a general strike set in motion the events of the eventual liberation, and an open revolt by French resistance fighters followed from 19th August. Allied formations advanced towards Paris in support, and soon the German city commander Dietrich von Choltitz capitulated in defiance of explicit orders from Adolf Hitler.

Channel Islands, 1940: When the Nazis Invaded England | Hitler's England | Timeline

Apr 7, 2022 • Hitler's England tells the story of the British Channel Islands under German occupation from 1940 to 1945. There was collaboration and resistance, heroism and infamy, repression and violence, denunciation and deportation. But, there was also the everyday life between the conquerors and the conquered. The story that emerges is complex, heart-rending and enthralling. It is the story of ordinary people, many of whom became extraordinary as they lived through the harsh and bitter years of the German Occupation.

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The Nazi Occupation of Jersey - Radio Discussion, 2013

On the 1st July 1940, Jersey was occupied by German forces. Some called it "the Model Occupation" - a taster of what might actually happen across the country if Hitler was successful in his plans to invade Britain.

Churchill's government had decided the Channel islands of Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark, were of no strategic importance and would be very difficult to defend and so, just a couple of weeks before, all troops had been withdrawn from the islands. The islanders were instructed to surrender to the German army. Hitler's forces were in occupation from July 1940 until the war ended in May 1945.

These were hard years for both the occupiers and the occupied. Food was scarce and, although acts of resistance were limited, the justice was harsh when it was meted out. Those who lived on the island were faced with a complex crisis of conscience - how should they live with the enemy?

In this edition of The Reunion, Sue MacGregor reunites a group of Jersey people who endured that difficult time, finding out how they look back on it seventy years on: Bob Le Sueur, a young insurance clerk at the time, who helped Russian prisoners hide from their German Captors; Leo Harris, a teenager at the beginning of the war, who carried out acts of 'boys own' resistance; Michael Ginns, who found himself in an internment camp in Bavaria; Hazel Lakeman, who was also taken off the island and interned in terrible conditions; and John Floyd, one of the few Jersey residents who actually managed to escape from the island.