
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
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
For more Warfare content, subscribe to our Warfare newsletter here.
If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store
4.4
512512 ratings
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
For more Warfare content, subscribe to our Warfare newsletter here.
If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store
3,217 Listeners
3,970 Listeners
1,227 Listeners
4,780 Listeners
1,363 Listeners
574 Listeners
110 Listeners
3,153 Listeners
410 Listeners
914 Listeners
1,824 Listeners
2,024 Listeners
177 Listeners
1,305 Listeners
331 Listeners
1,509 Listeners
722 Listeners
1,026 Listeners
97 Listeners