before digitization, so it was done by telephone and mail. we did it in it weeks. professor woodward submitted. six weeks later i'm of the president resigned. watcht something i ate -- sunday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span's q&a. cathxt, military historian al nolan chronicled the parents and warsaw uprising's in august of 1994. he was later joined by the museum's historian for a conversation about those events. good evening, ladies and gentlemen. i am the senior director of research and history here at the national world war ii museum. with the institute for the study

of war and democracy. it is great to see you all here, and to have our friends at c-span sharing this wonderful content with their feelings. -- to their viewers. to those watching on our livestream at home, welcome. i would like to take a moment to recognize some individuals. first off, to we have any world war ii veterans or home front workers in our crowd tonight? [applause] >> do we have any veterans of any other era? please stand. [applause] and do we have many members of our board of trustee? thank you all for your service.

summer, we here at museum have been busy commemorating the 75th anniversary of major events in world war ii, the biggest of which was june 6 for d-day, invasion at normandy. some other recent major anniversaries include last month , on july 20, the assassination in the bunker.er landings, the dragoon in southern france took place. this week marks the 75th anniversary of one of the most glorious moments of the war, when the city of light, paris, w as liberated after four years of german occupation. on the eastern front, following

the massive summer soviet offensive, the red army approached the river and warsaw, the capital of poland, where the war in europe had begun in 1939. this led to the her relic but tragic -- to the heroic but tragic warsaw uprising. we have two premier military historians tonight to share their insights and studies on these last two monumental events. our guest scholar, dr. cathal j. nolan, was here for our international conference on world war two. dr. nolan is associate professor of history and executive director of the international history institute, boston university. he is an award-winning teacher and scholar of military and international history.

his 2017 work, allure of battle, a history of how wars are won and lost, received the lehrman prize for military history. the $50,000 prize is cosponsored by the guilder lehrman institute of american history and the new york historical society. it recognizes the best book on military history in the english speaking world, distinguished by its scholarship, its contribution to literature, and to appeal to both a general and economic audience. his other books include, a two-volume concise history of world war ii, wars of the age of louis the 14th, and a two-volume study, the age of the wars of

religion. he consults on military history to the pbs history series nova and other documents or films. he's currently writing "decency, mercy and honor in war," for the oxford university press. joining him is the museum's own samuel zemurray stone, senior historian and our executive director for the institute of war and democracy, dr. robert m. citino. dr. citino is the author of 10 books are primarily focusing on the german military. he is widely known from the museum's various public programs, and is one of our featured tour historians. give adr. nolan will brief presentation before joining dr. citino in conversation.

so now it is my pleasure to call and dr.tage dr. citino nolan. welcome, gentlemen. [applause] >> good evening and thank you for the imitation. we are gathered together in a place that remembers ordinary men and women as well, who did many extraordinary things over days and of years of courage and duty and devotion. my words tonight will not do them justice. so let me instead reach out to

you with the quiet words of the poet, the englishman john dunn, who meditated this in 1624. it will be familiar to most of you. meditated on the common mortality that they shared in world war ii, and at the end of the day, we all share. no man is an island, entire of itself. every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. if a clod be washed away by the sea, europe is the less as well as if a promontory were, as well if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. any man's death diminishes me. because i am involved in mankind. and therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls. it tolls for thee. tonight i will talk about two signature events of world war ii and then engage conversation with you all. the liberation of paris and the

destruction of warsaw. for they are connected in time. there connected by purpose on both sides. and they tell us much about how the war ended in triumph for some, but in misery for tens of millions of others. they were part of the long end game of an immense world war already by the summer of 1944. we are in the end game of world war two. where everyone is jockeying for position at the coming negotiation table. world war ii, the worst, most destructive, most slaughter filled conflict in all of human history. at least, so far. the war started, as you know, in poor, pitiable poland in 1939, where it was invaded not once, but twice in 17 days.

first by hitler, and then by stalin. it squatted, the war did, and poland for the next five years, in its worst imaginable form. ss death camps, gestapo police, mass murders at war with each other on both sides of the nation. mass murder in poland's cities and all around. it took five years of colossal effort and sacrifice to get to the tipping point summer of 1944. five years of fighting and suffering and death, in africa and southeast asia. in china, in the philippines, in the philippines, in the baltic and the balkans, on and under all of the oceans, in the lethal skies overhead. the price was so high that words lose meaning, numbers lose meaning, even death loses much of its meaning. we are here trying to comprehend

and we will all fail. the western allies, and this place commemorates, broke through the outer wall hitler's fortress europe in a truly complex and heroic endeavor. but i remind you, it was also a multinational one. americans assaulted just two of the five d-day beaches. in the first 20 minutes of saving private ryan, you saw the fake deaths. i've not done an actual count, but i will guesstimate 120 men, roughly. that is just enough by the film makers to leave it personal, but also to remind us of the wider carnage of the war. as you know, as this place to commemorates, getting off just one end of omaha took four hours and cost many hundreds of lives

more than that, and left hundreds of men, ultimately several thousands, terribly body, in mind, even in soul. there were former beaches on normandy's contested coast that day. bloody omaha was the worst. for more strips of wet sand were fighting hand-to-hand and from distance by shot and shell at the same time. the fight for normandy did not last one day. not even the longest day, in rommel's phrase. it took three weeks to clear normandy. another four weeks to liberate just the rest of northern france. southern france took longer. and a second invasion on august 15. paris did not fall until august 25. and it came within hours of being blown apart by the germans.

before the french took it back, on their own, with the resistance uprising, and free french sherman tanks racing down with the cross of lorraine, joan of arc's symbol on their side. over the seven weeks in france, allied forces suffered 200,000 casualties. the germans lost something like 440,000 casualties. over 20,000 french civilians were killed by everyone's artillery, and by british and american bombs.

hundreds of french were killed by the gestapo and by the vossen s s, including the entire civilian population of the village of ouridour sur glen, who were herded into the village church and burned alive. during seven weeks of fighting in the northwest corner france, as you know, there was more heavy fighting to come along the rhine, in the green are and ardennes forest, in flooded soggy holland, cross northern germany, fighting in italy in the balkans, in southern germany. and more fighting, much more fighting, all down the long eastern front, from finland through the baltic states, and eastern prussia, in the woods of belarus across the amber fields of ukrainian grain. in romania, in bulgaria, in hungary and began in poland. all of that before death and justice road across germany on horseback, and yes even on camel.

the soviets used camels in 1945 to get to berlin. it road in massive t 34 soviet tank armies that germans could not even conceive of earlier in the war. my point in this place is that the war was won by the greatest generations of many nations that thought the axis powers together. the men and women who defeated hitler and fascism came from two dozen countries. they left home starting in 1939 to fight in foreign fields to free faraway peoples of whom they knew little. they came from farms and small towns in queensland, australia. they came from cities like auckland, new zealand, manitoba. from manchester and melbourne, from montreal and marseille. they came from the desert in south africa, from the niger delta, from the mountains of

kashmir, and nepal and baluchistan. they came from grassroots villages in kenya, and senegal, they came from trinidad, rio de janeiro, then iowa, and maine. fighting men bound for europe climbed onto troop ships in halifax, in madras, melbourne. wasting from mumbai and vancouver. then, 22 months after it started, they student from san diego, seattle new york, orleans, miami, new york, boston. they spoke 100 languages. they prayed to a dozen ideas of vishnu, thejesus, great spirit. they came from 140 countries aligned later as the united nations, passed in 1945 at the generation of the united nations hoped would end war for their

children and grandchildren. i say this in all humility, asking you to walk in silence in this great place of memory and trying to remember them all, not just the framed photographic tragedy of the 18-year-old from iowa, the 19-year-old from arizona, or the 20-year-old from nova scotia, who never came home. tens of millions who never came home did not even need to leave home to find the war. the war found them. it burned villages and homes, it killed parents and children, it raped the land. poles, yugoslavs, filipinos, chinese, malays, many many more peoples. by the end,and italians, germans and japanese all found the war found them. they were fed into a meatgrinder of industrial war until the butcher's bill reached 75 million. of whom 40 million were killed

in the east alone. that is 28,500 lives lost every day in the east, 10 omaha's every day for 1400 consecutive days. we cannot comprehend that. when so many are dying, what is the loss of one or a hundred or a mere 10,000? and leaders thought in those terms. they had to. raw numbers overwhelmed all personal tragedy. this is the key difference between history and literature, between war and shakespeare. allyet, in the midst of of war, the mayhem

young men and women discovered heroism, sacrifice, moral and physical endurance. that is what i want to turn to now. two examples maybe less well-known to most american audiences. the examples of sacrifice of the french to liberate their capital, and the poles who tried to liberate theirs. on each side of germany, in the summer of 1944, soviet and western armies were advancing at great speed. the war had broken wide open. germany was being pummeled on both sides, and to a lesser degree, also coming up from the south. in the west it was called overlord, you know it well. in the east, it was in operation named for a dead russian general to stop in 1812, trying another invasion of the homeland. the operation smashed and overran the greatest force of the armyn army in

group center. smashed through it in belarus and headed for poland and parts west. the fight for paris back in the west began while general eisenhower was still busy. eisenhower did not want to enter paris at all, although he was undergoing pressure to take the city for political reasons. eisenhower despised city fighting. he despised the idea of attrition. he rightly feared getting trapped in a series of western stalingrads. he what do it. -- he wouldn't do it. the german army was literally cases not, in many able to run because it'd been so modernized by aircraft and allied material superiority that the german units had to sit in place and were destroyed in place. it is collapsing. in the west, it was running right past pass, -- right past

paris, heading for the rhine, belgium, netherlands and onto the rhine. the road to the french capital was wide open by the middle of august. eisenhower chose not to take it. but the city would not wait. it rose on its own. starting with the general strike called by the resistance leadership. a general strike, not a term most americans are familiar with, but a long historical tradition in european politics, where the entire working class is supposed to go out on a general strike for political, not economic reasons. it began when the metro and postal workers walked out. then the police walked out. and government in paris stopped. it was important in paris, as it is also the same month in warsaw that two proud nations lay down some claim to self liberation. this is what it was all about. and did they understand this

would be a marker laid in blood? yes, they did. they needed to assert in arms, blood, and sacrifice their right to decide their own futures. the poles and the french. four days after the general strike began, the ffi, the free french resistance forces inside france, rose in arms. they began attacking key german garrison and government buildings. german armor was moving to the city, trying to get past the city and to the north. it was attacked, it was ambushed. molotov cocktails were the primary weapon of choice because the resistance was so poorly armed. but the ssi lay in ambush. it sniped. i t threw molotov cocktails from high windows into passing half tracks and burned and attacked fuel trucks. germans burned. and therefore they retaliated with their usual cruelty.

germans were raging at losing in 1944. and they were losing everywhere. in the sky, in italy. in the east, in the west. so the order was given, direct from berlin, destroy paris. the engineers mined all the great buildings. they were to be brought down, reduced to rubble if the allies reached the city. let me name them -- notre dame, the louvre, the historic bridges built by the louis's, the arc de triomphe, the great iron tower was going to come down. so the barricades went up in the grand french tradition of resistance. the barricades went up, cobblestones torn out of the street, piled in cars and trucks made into barricades. recalling the revolution of 1789, but more recently recalling the french resistance against the prussians in 1870. hitler ordered maximum damage done to the city. a week of fighting ensued.

during that week of fighting, the best estimates are that somewhere between 800 and 1000 french resistance fighters gave their lives. churchill pleaded with eisenhower. but ike would not come. in on the 24th of august, french general leclair disobeyed his immediate american superiors and sent in a fast patrol of armored scouts that reached the city's outskirts. german general dietrich ow uprders from hitler, bl paris. he hesitated. he was in negotiations with resistance. his motive seems to be primarily to spare the lives of his own men, not the city. by all accounts, except his own, he was prepared to carry out the destruction order. but he did not in the end.

the next day, as dawn broke, august 25, which we remember as the day of the liberation of paris, the main body of leclair's armor division second raced into the city's center. when the french civilians first saw the sherman tanks they thought they were americans or british. they went wild with joy. and what happened to leclair's division over the next two weeks, is what eisenhower feared. in the liberation of wine and sex it disappeared from battle for the next period. the same thing happened when the allied armies were liberating the provinces of burgundy and champagne. it did. the wine cellars were liberated. we liberated the hell out of that place. the french actually took over 300 casualties. the french second armored took over 300 casualties. there was significant fighting in the street of paris. german snipers were in the buildings, german mortar teams, german tanks were still in the

city. they lost 35 shermans, the french did, and 1100 more military vehicles on that day. the french general de gaulle spoke in the late afternoon. he was waiting and ready for this. you have to quote de gaulle on this. "paris outraged. paris broken. paris martyred. but paris liberated. liberated by itself. liberated by its people, with the help of french armies. with the support and the help of all of france, of fighting france. the only france. the real france. eternal france." he is the french churchill. or churchill is the english de gaulle. the point is, even liberation war is a continuation of politics by other means.

french and allied politics, american politics, british and german politics. it is best to know this. on the others of europe, at the same time, 50,000 man polish home army chose to strike a blow for its country's honor and its country's politics, deciding it was necessary politically -- not militarily. poland was going to be liberated. this is not a military necessary decision. it is a politically necessary decision. they needed to rise. to lose, to sacrifice, to die. to be seen to be fighting for their own liberation, lest they be excluded from the victors table when the negotiations come. we now know there were no negotiations essentially over poland, they were excluded from the table. but they rose. to strike a blow for politics and for honor, not to wait for

their liberators to ride inside red army tanks into warsaw. they timed the rising to the advance of the red army, which as i said earlier was racing across eastern europe and was racing into poland. although it was getting close to the end of its tether after a 300 mile advance. it is extraordinary by more to standards -- by world war ii standards. it is amazing considering how the germans broke down and the soviets sped through belarus and poland. the where marked was also retreating, which was was a factor in the polish decision to rise. but the red army was also fighting serious battles south of warsaw. and it stopped at the vistula. we will talk about that during the question period. this is the great controversy of the warsaw rising. i should mention this is the second warsaw rising. the first rising in warsaw took

place a year earlier in the ghetto in 1943. it was dealt with with absolute savagery and brutality. and the last inhabitants, the jewish inhabitants of the ghetto, were wiped out down to just a few hundred survivors, out of 40,000 when it began. germans turned back. germans returned to the city in force. they began to level it in an act of pure and murderous revenge. the home army fought bitterly. it fought to the death. in a city that was cut off, by rivers and the enemy, for 63 days. the battle went on from the first of august until the 14th of september. the poles managed to kill 2000 germans -- this is the new consensus figure -- and wounded 9000 germans. the poles in turn suffered perhaps as many as 200,000 dead.

mostly civilians, but many tens of thousands of fighters as well. only 25,000 wounded polish survived. a lopsided ratio which tells you what germans did to wounded poles. like everything else, when you compare the western front to the eastern front, the east was so much worse, it seems like it is two separate wars. and in many respects, it was. it is not clear why stalin stopped the red army. he did allow some armed polish vistula, but he had many more ethnic polish in soviet red army divisions that were ethnically polish that could have crossed. he wanted to cross. there was an attempt to cross, the germans repelled it. getting across a river is a damned hard thing to do.

mostly, as you know, and as the controversy contends, stalin sat and watched as hitler's forces wiped out the resistance of the polish nation. in a country where both tyrants conspired together in 1939 to make that nation extinct. did he do it on purpose? it is stalin. he was capable of it. had the thought. he may have done it on purpose. we do not have definitive evidence that he did. we have some. but it is not completely definitive, enough that the controversy remains. i think it is worth remembering that whatever stalin intended, the red army was exhausted by a wasmile advance, and it needing to rest, rearm, refit, tanks, fix the

trucks, advance with the fuel. they are using camels. churchill pleaded with the poles. he was refused. also pleaded with franklin roosevelt and was refused. this is often forgotten. he sent 200 british and commonwealth aircraft in a desperate one-way effort to drop supplies to the polish people, 500 tons we think. half of it at least landed behind german lines. it was a complete failed effort, 300 air crew were killed. south african, canadian, british. and 41 aircraft lost where the soviets refused to cooperate. warsaw was not paris. hitler and himmler sent in s s death battalions. that's what they were called. and an entire brigade which had been recruited from murderers and rapists in the german prisons. the poles were pushed out of the

buildings, then murdered in the streets. on august 8, in a single warsaw suburb, 40,000 civilians were butchered, may have been more. butchered. without regard for age or gender. there's nothing like this in paris. there's nothing like this. the atrocity stiffened polish resolve. all tragedy stiffens polish resolve, it is their history. the panzers advanced to the streets, using polish civilians as human shields. poles fought on anyway, and the wer macht discovered again that fighting in the city was not something it was capable of doing well. the red army began to resume its advance in september, south of the city and out tacking across the vistula as well.

ultimately, it is the red army got forced the germans to leave warsaw, to abandon warsaw. before they pulled out and as they pulled out, they methodically destroyed every major building, every key cultural site. they tried to obliterate polish culture with the same means with which they were denying their own. i have only been to warsaw once, 1994, and i flew into the city and had an overwhelmingly sense of historic tragedy. i mean this with no disrespect to the poles whatsoever. they have changed. they are rebuilding warsaw based on historical photographs and blueprints. when i was there 1994, it was one of the ugliest cities i had ever seen. because it was destroyed by the germans and rebuilt by the russians. we should remember, too, that in april 1945, hitler turned against the germans as well.

he ordered everything in germany destroyed. everything needed to survive the coming winter. it is called his gotterdammerung order, twilight of the gods, bring it all down. what did it mean? did the twin risings, did the war save the french and polish national honor or make the world safe for democracy? did it secure a brave new order or restore a system that had been smashed by the worst war in history? no, it did not. not even the whole war did that. but it was absolutely necessary to fight that war all the same. for what the war did, it stopped the permanent victory of the axis powers. all that duty, all that courage and sacrifice did not remake the world into an ideal place. but it prevented it from into aing -- descending protracted fascist nightmare.

the war, the paris rising, even the failed warsaw rising insurance hitler's promise, that the nazi empire would last a thousand years, was denied, denied and denied. it lasted only 12. and that was that bad enough. thank you. [applause] >> i could listen to you speak all night. if i am speaking for people in the audience. dr. nolan: if we got to dinner, you probably will. wonderful talk. dr. citino: so many questions going through my mind. you look at these two key historical events, doing what historians do, the comparative perspective helps bring both, each one into a sharper focus. you started by talking about ordinary people, quoting john dunn. at one point in your talk, you

said these are peoples deciding their own futures. tell us more about how important that was to the rebels, both in paris and warsaw. dr. nolan: this is the great war of nations. this is a great war the nation, the second world war. it does a disservice to our understanding and to the war itself if we stop with the leaders, with churchill or orsevelt or hitler or stalin the generals. and we overcompensate by going down to the saving private ryan level. there is a middle level, and that is the nations. the idea of nationhood, means to be french for what it means to be polish. the french were not going to have americans come into the center of their capital and liberate them. as it is, americans do not do that. and they still claimed that they did. how may times have you heard jokes, we saved you not once, but twice. it is aggravating. dr. citino: the other is that patton's troops liberated,

which is a double fault. dr. nolan: hemingway liberated a bar. he actually put a gun on the holster on his side and went into a bar on the ritz and said i am here to liberate it from germans. and they said, they have all left, sir. we do not allow guns in here. it was a farce, it was hemingway. dr. citino: as i look at these events and your marvelous description, the german response in each one was very different. you quoted some statistics that 800 to 1000 french died in the paris uprising. but that probably 200,000 polish, more or less the number we give now, why was the german response in warsaw so much more brutal, so much more intense than the uprising in paris?

dr. nolan: the germans in the second world war, unlike the first world war. the guiding concept is race war, they actually had a word for it. the polish ranked lower down on their racial category, they are categorized racially by the germans. they are more ancient and historic enemy than the french are more modern enemy. the polish go back to the teutonic knights and the fighting that goes back 100 years. andpoles were truly hated, they hated the germans as well. the level of hate was higher in the east. war produces, it is not usually starts in hate, but it produces hate. and the killing level is so high. absolute destructiveness in the sense that tomorrow one was going to die. the soviets changed one of their classic slogans. the original bolshevik, workers of the world unite. in world war two, that became , comrade, kill your german.

they're reverting to core nationalism. dr. citino: ehrenberg the great soviet journalist, kill, kill, kill. dr. nolan: and i'm going to explore this in the next book on decency. dr. citino: decency and war might be a very thin book. dr. nolan: it is, sadly. i think that may be one of the larger parts of the explanation. you had cholwitz, who was not a noble or heroic figure, but he turned out to be a more normal or traditional, or we can say dr. citino: modell the german commander who destroyed the city there's a quote from hitler, who said he trusted them to get the job done but we never want to serve under him. i'm happy to say that at the end

of the war he walked into a forest and shot himself blew his brains out. he is on record as saying he advocates the complete destruction of warsaw for thousand meters on either side of the main highway, just level it, maybe a couple of miles. and they wound up doing much more than that. dr. nolan: there's a phrase from medieval warfare they called it havoc radius, how wide on the side of your calorie attack could you destroy everything. think of sherman going south. was that 80 miles, 40 miles on either side of the railways. dr. citino: in mechanized war it could get worse than that. dr. nolan: iron horses take you farther.

dr. citino: you alluded to the controversy of the warsaw uprising. i've a couple questions you're my friend i'm going to put you on the spot. i'm going to let love doing this in front of c-span and millions of people. here so i learned in grad school the russians got to the vista lot and sat there and let the rebels inside warsaw be destroyed. the vistula is a mississippi style river is not an easy crossing. i will put you on the spot. is that true? you gave in on the one hand, on the other hand. dr. nolan: david lanza came out since we were in graduate school - david glanz a specialist in the history of the red army. he came out and said no the red army was exhausted they could not get across. he dismissed the idea that stalin had this in mind. we do not know. but it is stalin.

this is certainly what he contemplated, was capable of. so as a historian i cannot say we definitively know he did this. but i think you can say i do not criticize anyone who assumes that stalin did. we cannot prove it but it is partly reasonable to think that he did that for this reason. dr. citino: you mention politics and you quoted klausen, the continuation of politics by other means. dr. nolan: the rebels in warsaw were non-communist, they were loyal to the london government the polish government in exile in london, loyal to the prewar polish or republican form of government. here is stalin, perhaps desiring to see the non-communist poland. dr. citino: there's no question, that is white is all about politics too, the allies were already breaking down. pulling was going to be a major topic of discussion in any postwar settlement -- poland was going to be a major topic.

churchill recognizing the london polish government in exile from 1939. stalin was setting up an alternative, the lublin poles. and i want to say some guy don't i've hurt anyone else and i do not want to be misunderstood. in some way it does not matter whether stalin left the germans to kill the polish because this is stalin. had he taken the city, within six months he would have killed them. dr. nolan: you're right, he was going to wipe out polish arms resistance. i think he would've come and wiped out the polish national resistance even had the germans not been able to. the great british historian

norman davies wrote a book on the warsaw uprising. i like your comment per he says what is happening on both sides of the line in poland is that secret place are executing hundreds of thousands of people. that is the gestapo on one side and the soviet nkbd on the other. dr. citino: this is why the east was so different than the west. you have the two, if we throw in mao, let's leave him out of the conversation for now, the two greatest mass murderers not just of the 20th century, but of history. dr. nolan: two great tyrants, neither of whom cares at all for the lives of their own people. hitler did not care about the german people. stalin did not care about the lives of the soviet population. everyone else is trapped between the pair you have mass murders behind you. mass murderers in front of you. they're coming at each other with two of the greatest mechanized military forces we have seen in modern times. and 40 million died.

dr. citino: one of the books on this part of the world in world war ii and after is known as blood lands of eastern europe. dr. nolan: some of my colleagues do not like the thesis. i tend to agree that is what it was. i cannot give any other place, few other places where i would not want to be for a few days. but i cannot think of any other place where i would not want to be in the whole human history than the eastern front between 1941 and 1945. dr. citino: you talk about eastern history. dr. nolan: there are number of

patients other kind history of suffering, i think they dupe it i was born in dublin. and if i have to hear one more time about the poor, suffering irish. dr. citino: i heard the brogue come out for a second. dr. nolan: there is a competition we have competitive suffering. they're often nationalist historians not international historians, they are competing and who has got the worst, we suffered under the british, the british it is nothing, the atlantic slave trade, and then the holocaust and we go on and on. it is vulgar reduction of massive human tragedy, to almost sports contest in which one scores higher or lower than the next. and it is done all the time. did you know boston erected a statue of a potato? dr. citino: for the famine? dr. nolan: yes.

not ireland, boston. not a statue to the slave trade which helped found boston. dr. citino: i grew up on the west side of cleveland and know all about the irish tragedy. let's move west now to paris. a couple of questions and we will throw it open to the audience. paris. the uprising. we know the movie, the phrase, is paris burning? but probably from a staff officer yodell, is paris burning? phone call. you said by all accounts, the generals probably worried about his own men, his own account. painting himself differently. dr. nolan: he did carry out the orders to mine the buildings. he did go ahead with the physical preparations for

destruction. at the very end of the day, he balked. but he balked because by the time he was also in direct negotiations with resistance. and by that point, representatives of leclair's armored force was joining the negotiations, trying to coax him into a surrender. sartre shifted from do not blow up two, look, you're going to get overrun and you're going to have to negotiate a surrender for your men anyway. if you block paris is going to go very badly for you. if you do not blow up paris we can have kind of a traditional military surrender. dr. citino: you think he was maybe a decentish german? can we say he was transactional, maybe there was something to be saved, that my life, the life of my men. dr. citino: he just wanted to negotiate.

it is usually transactional in a traditional sense. in most of the rest of the german army we are knocking to have transitional negotiation, it is going to be a fight to the death and suicide trips. in the same thing without can happen in the pacific. dr. citino: there's one for my mind as i read the complexities of the situation in paris. one big question, who would you-to whom would you give credit for the liberation of paris? you described a complex story. i heard ordinary workers, french forces of the interior, general leclair, general de gaulle, the americans showed up. have at it. dr. nolan: in order of importance as a historian, i would say the leadership of the fsi, the free french resistance. secondly, leclair who had the guts to disobey his superior. his immediate superior the name escapes me and then eisenhower, and the whole political

leadership of the western alliance. i do not give de gaulle, general de gaulle is pushing for this but he is actually not all that welcome by the leadership of the fsi. he is not a unifying figure for the french. there is a long controversy within the french resistance as to whether they are gauls or not. half the french resistance is communist, the other half largely catholic. the two groups you are used to clandestine organization historically. dr. citino: right [laughter] dr. nolan: within the context of french history. and the communist were active in the french resistance since that nazis were coming to kill them from the first day of the war. this is paris, life and limb, not the majority. they would do what most sense

for people dead, they would hide in the cellar. but there were many thousands of who came out, many young women included. this is captured on film. a molotov cocktail takes out a german half track and the german soldiers sniped at the street and is wounded but not dead. and it is 21 or 20-year-old french girl who runs over and picks up his rifle because they do not have rifles. they are taking the weapons off the dead germans at the kill them to continue the fight. dr. citino: and there is perhaps at least a sane german commander who is willing to do the transactional analysis. dr. nolan: you want to know about the americans. because the americans were involved. the main attack down the champs elysees was the french second armored vision. they were supported by the u.s. division on the flank which was in flank support, a classic allied operation. the thing you take away from that is that the liberation of normandy, the liberation of france, liberation of paris, liberation of europe was an allied operation. this is a complex, multinational

compact among the decent nations. to liberate the city. there were also the british 30th command was also in the city at the time. allies. dr. citino: let me end before we go to the audience with one last question. i have read allure of battle. i hope a lot of you in the audience do and buy a copy immediately and should have him sign it. national capitals were falling like dominoes in august. warsaw, paris, bucharest. dr. nolan: rome. dr. citino: a lot of stuff in that summer. despite the rosy outlook of that summer, wise the war in europe not end in 1944. a lot of very smart people in the allied high command thought it was going to. why did it have to go on for another eight months of grinding attrition and an ocean of

bloodshed? dr. nolan: because the germans would not quit. because the allies outran their supplies, the issue of supply is critical to understanding the outcome and the waging of war. it just is. there is a classic line, amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics. the allied fuel, all the problems they do not resolve on the day, the breaking of one of the day, the breaking of one of the harbors, the failure to take cherbourg intact, the failure to use the brittany ports the way they thought would result. then the montgomery's failure to take calais-not calais, the shelf estuary. which of course the canadian army's logs to the netherlands and suffered terribly to that

winter of 194445. all of that -- 1944-1945. the russians stopped at the vistula, the allies stopped before they got to the rhine for the same reason. they had overextended. the tank treads were wearing out. you cannot just fight for week after week, month after month, people are exhausted. the equipment gets exhausted. and men get exhausted. or is as much about moral commitment and endurance as it is about material. you have to match the two together. which is one of the reasons i think americans consistently underestimate how great a general montgomery was. who is not leading american armies, which had an abundance of material, and not been in the war as long as everyone else peered the british by this time where their six-year. they were exhausted. they were cannibalizing divisions. uncovering with the perfect commander for an army that knew there were no more men in the supply line, whose troops were exhausted. he was cautious, he was careful about the lives of his men. patton could have taken a lesson from that. dr. citino: i do not know what to add to that. we will end on that note. [applause]

dr. citino: we will open it up to your questions and just one moment. [applause] >> the first question is in the center. >> dr. nolan, you mentioned the 21-year-old girl who came out to fight against the germans. yet i have read that there were 80,000-100,000 german french babies born during the occupation of paris. dr. nolan: in france, not just in paris. >> and after the liberation, they went through the streets shaving the heads of women and marking them. dr. nolan: they also shot 20,000 of their own people.

>> where did that go in terms of getting families and people back together, because these were ordinary women, not brothels. dr. nolan: they're ostracized, they were maltreated, some were killed. the general response of the resistance, the ugly side of the french resistance, the ugly side of the liberation, is that resistance, the french resistance, the fsi and the resistance generally on and it was a hodgepodge of associations it was not a single organization. began to set up resistance courts. they had basically drum head trials and kangaroo court. the men they convicted they usually shot. the women they shaved, sometimes shot. more often humiliated, ostracized, expelled from the village and so forth. it was a special charge to be brought against women, i'm not making this up. it was called horizontal collaboration. [laughter] dr. nolan: and that sounds, you

know. but let's try to put a little humanity into this. what happens over four years of german occupation of france? what is the german occupation of france? in many ways it is the gestapo and all kinds of horrible things and deportation of a jews. it but it is also a 19-year-old german guard in a french village who happens to see a 17-year-old girl and they meet each other and they talk to each other and nature takes its course and they have sex and she has a baby and then she gets humiliated or killed or whatever. there is a very ugly side to what happened. that was true in every single country that was liberated at the end of world war two. they turned on their own and they killed their own. because of how vicious the war was how vicious the fascists and the germans were. in direct proportion to the viciousness of the occupation, the resistance turned vicious against his own people. it is human nature. >> i think there was a gendered retaliation.

the men can collaborate with the germans in all sorts of ways, but there something seen as particularly demonic about a woman and a young woman and a young man at letting us use say nature take its course. dr. nolan: but it is partly normal and prickly natural. and today i suspect the european union might encourage it but that is another story. >> i wanted to follow on to your suggestion the decent-ish german general. i thought his career exemplified the dichotomy of racial war you spoke to. as i recall, he was the butcher of sebastopol. and had actually been brought by the german high command to paris, on the theory he had a stiff enough backbone to deal with the problematic population. dr. citino: if you don't mind i will take that one. holtiz was arrested and taken prisoner by allied forces.

the allied were listening to all the german generals conversations. they were all tapped for use in later war crimes. as historians we have been swimming in those waters nicely you have all these records. holtiz said repeatedly, when i was in crimea, sebastopol you said, i carried out the fuhrer's orders about the jewish question to the ultimate detail. i followed them in exquisite detail. he said let's be honest, that is what we all did in the east. it brings to light the point that this was two different wars. there is a horrible racial war which would seem like the outmost barbarism. in the west police the war tended -- the germans tended to

treat the war in a much more transactional contests of strategy. >> it is one reason why rommel has an inappropriately elevated reputation for morality and decency and so on. rommel's career in fact was directly tied. isa metaphor many are cries. then i realized meters do not rise. his career was directly attached to hitler's from the days of the polish invasion. heller promoted him. he became one of hitler's favorites. most german generals do not regard rommel as a general -- a great general because he did not fight in the east. had he fought in the east, there might've been moral compromise. another, kesselring. has the reputation as a strategist. had he fought in the east, there would have been moral copper -- moral compromise. he was bad enough in italy. dr. citino: it was standard her policy to kill and discriminate lay. he attacked the german convoy or snipe a german soldier and managed to kill two or three they came into the next village, took the first 300 people and killed them.

it is pretty hard to resist. >> the next question comes from one of our bigger online viewers, david. i have heard claims the warsaw population failed to coordinate adequately with any of the allies, such as through their government in exile in britain. how did the commonwealth supply mission come about? dr. nolan: it seems to exclusively have been churchill's direct intervention. he could do that. he was usually restrained by alan brooke. churchill had 10 ideas before breakfast, two of them good. dr. citino: everyday. dr. nolan: he was in many ways erratic. this is one of churchill's long-term interest.

this goes back to world war i. he is thinking postwar. he wanted to have a free polish government in poland because he is already thinking of containment of the soviet union. this is a postwar policy. in the end he went ahead and authorized the mission with the agreement of the british air troops. and it was a disaster. >> a written in question. what about southern france? dr. nolan: by the time of dragoon, the 75th anniversary on the 15th of august, by the time those landings took place the german army in france was in full-scale retreat in the north. they had begun to run from the southern cities as well. so they fell fairly rapidly. i'm talking about toulon, marseilles. the city so rapidly. there was still fighting. there were terrible efforts -- episodes where the maquille

rose against the germans. were six to 500 young men and women who had run away and run a mountaintop. they thought the british were flying in paratroops applies, it turns out they were germans who landed and began to slaughter thousands. the south was a different campaign. it was fluid, mobile, tanks and trains. the germans were running. it was a joint french and american invasion. it was the french army alongside the american army. they went up to the south and france, they got across from germany and turned. the other ones who went into southern germany and headed to munich and czechoslovakia and east. >> i know a brilliant young jenna -- graduate student who is

writing an article on that. ike didn't want the liberation of paris. he did not want to have to seize the city and then be responsible for it. what would have happened in the war if those resources had gone monty andton and pushing east? >> i am not in operations expert. me that the american army and the allied forces were reaching the end. they were running out of supplies. the decision.e most historians think it was correct.

at this point the war is so , i am not sure the turning points are this fine. eisenhower did not want to take paris. there is an american way of war. been.ionally it has they are not interested in territory. where is the enemy army? i want to smash it. the other political stuff will take care of itself. this is why churchill tore out what little hair he had left. he thought the americans are being incredibly naive. the war has become not to defeat germany.

the war was now about positioning for peace. that meant, what are we going to do about stalin? >> question from the audience and i think that will wrap it up? what do you feel about the american and soviet position for the following year for the product uprising -- prague uprising? >> i am more civilian with the soviets and the american. prague.icans can reach they pull back and let the soviets go there instead because roosevelt and the americans are committed to the idea that we have party made a deal with stalin. churchill does not think it will work out. don't rock the boat. trust but verify. >> the united nations will take care of all of this.

>> if you want to be really critical, you can say this is american geopolitical naivete at its worst. but the results are still the same as in warsaw. >> had the americans taken terms of the the existing agreement, they would've had to hand it over to the russians. lives if youerican are the commander when you will have to give it to the russians anyway? people were very concerned about the red army charging through germany one way. we are heading for germany the other way. two massive armies that are going to collide with language, cultural differences. we can have all kinds of friendly fire problems. there were some. it could have been colossal. they were very concerned about that.

the americans, when they stopped , they started turning back whoan refugees at gunpoint were told no, you do not come to our side. you stay over there and surrendered to the russians. i would like to toss in a little plug for the museum. we have an educational travel program. you can see the sights of the liberation of paris. we also have a rise and fall of hitler's germany tour. we visit the many sites that are crucial to this uprising of which you have heard so much tonight. always wearing a salesman's cap. >> i would recommend that you go to the liberation of paris. gentlemen, let's thank our moderator. [applause]

thank you very much. >> this is american history tv, exploring our nations past. next, on our weekly series the civil war, a look at the battle of dranesville. knownnflict is not well but it was the first victory for the union after several defeats early in the war. at 8:00 p.m. eastern, it is lectures in history. loyola -- visit the university classroom to hear a lecture on 1970's and 1980's deindustrialization in the

united states now popular culture and musicians like bruce springsteen and devo reflected these economic changes. , a film about a senate campaign in connecticut. an anti-vietnam war activist won the democratic primary but lost the general election to a republican. that is what is coming up here on american history good evening, everyone. it is my pleasure to introduce the first speaker of the evening and that is ryan quint. his book "determined to stand was published as part of the emerging civil war series in 2017. having wor