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Number 10, the Danish Holgadansky liquidation group.
A countdown of WWII resistance assassins and sabotage groups, from Denmark's Holger Danske to Belgium's great grid sabotage and Polish hunters of SS officers.
Key Takeaways
- Resistance groups relied on meticulous intelligence, surveillance, and planning to carry out targeted killings.
- Killing informers and collaborators was often prioritized over attacking German officers to avoid mass reprisals against civilians.
- Sabotage of infrastructure, such as the Belgian power grid, could cripple German war production on a national scale.
- The stories highlight both heroism and the severe costs, including executions, camp deaths, and the deaths of young fighters.
What the video covers
- Number 10 profiles Denmark's Holger Danske resistance group, founded in 1943 and named after a legendary sleeping hero.
- Bent Fau, nicknamed 'the Flame,' and Jørgen Haagen Schmith, 'the Lemon,' formed the group's most feared execution duo.
- The group conducted sabotage on arenas, railways, and German tank factories, and carried out roughly 200 killings of informers and collaborators.
- Both partners died in October 1944: the Flame by cyanide after a Gestapo raid, the Lemon in a firefight in Gentofte.
- Holger Danske continued operations until the German surrender in May 1945, and both men were posthumously honored, including by the US.
- Number 9 covers Belgium's Group G, which on 15 January 1944 coordinated about 110 bombings that crippled the national electrical grid.
- The Belgian operation was carried out by students from the Free University of Brussels, drawing on stolen engineering diagrams.
- The video then surveys other resistance actions, including attacks on Norwegian and Polish Nazi figures and a French partisan operation in Oradour-sur-Glane context.
- Number 1 focuses on the February 1944 Warsaw assassination of SS Brigadeführer Franz Kutera, planned from detailed surveillance of his routine.
- The Polish team used British Sten guns and fought its way out after the ambush in a central Warsaw avenue.
Chapters
- 00:00Number 10: Denmark's Holger Danske and the Flame and the Lemon
- 00:24Number 9: Belgium's Group G and the Great Power Cut
- 00:31Norwegian and Polish targets: Marthinsen and wartime reprisals
- 00:45Partisan operations and the Warsaw uprising
- 00:58Polish intelligence and Sten gun assassinations
- 01:02Number 1: The Warsaw assassination of SS Brigadeführer Franz Kutera
- 01:13Legacy of the highest-ranking resistance assassination
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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Copenhagen, the autumn of 1943.
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A young man with bright red hair sits at a table in a smoky bar.
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He is 22 years old.
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He weighs less than 70 kilos.
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He smiles at a girl across the room.
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He orders another drink.
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In his coat pocket sits a Colt pistol, loaded.
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Safety off.
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Within the hour, he will walk up to a man in the street, pull that pistol out, and shoot him through the head at point blank range.
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Then he will walk away as if nothing has happened.
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By the time the war ends, he and his partner will have killed dozens of people between them.
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The Germans will offer the highest bounty in occupied Denmark for his capture, more than for any other resistance fighter in the entire country.
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His name is Bent Fau.
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Everyone calls him the Flame because of his hair.
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He is one half of the most feared killing duo in the Danish underground, and he belongs to a group named after a sleeping giant.
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The legend says that Holger Danske, an old Danish hero, sleeps beneath the castle of Kronborg.
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When Denmark is in mortal danger, the legend says he will wake and defend his country.
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In 1943, with German jackboots on every street corner and Danish Nazis filling the police ranks, the legend looked like a cruel joke.
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Holger Danske had not woken, so a small group of fighters in Copenhagen took his name for themselves.
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If the giant would not wake, they would wake in his place.
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They started with seven men.
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By the end of the war, they had 350.
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The group's first big strike comes in August of 1943.
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They blow up the Forum Copenhagen, a massive sports arena the Germans plan to use as barracks for 10,000 troops.
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The whole building comes down in a fireball.
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From that moment on, Holgedansky becomes the most active sabotage and assassination group in Denmark.
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They blow up railway lines.
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They wreck factories making parts for German tanks.
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They bomb collaborator-owned printing presses.
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But the killings are what set them apart.
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The Germans cannot survive in occupied Denmark without informers.
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Danish citizens who recognize resistance fighters and turn them in for cash rewards.
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Danish Nazis who infiltrate underground meetings and report names to the Gestapo.
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Without these informers, the German security police are deaf and blind.
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Holgedansky decides to make being an informer the most dangerous job in Denmark.
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The Flame and his partner, Jørgen Haagen Schmith, codenamed the Lemon, become the most active executioners in the group.
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The Lemon got his nickname after sabotaging a Citroën garage and destroying six German vehicles, including a tank.
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He is 32 years old, looks like a middle-class accountant, and drives like a stunt performer.
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The Flame is the gunman, the Lemon is the driver.
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Together they carry out a long series of executions of named informers.
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All of them sentenced in advance by an underground court that reviewed the evidence and signed the verdicts.
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The two men never act on rumor.
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Every target has been condemned by a panel of resistance leaders before a single shot is fired.
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Their method is simple and terrifyingly effective.
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They study a target for days.
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They learn his daily routine, his usual cafés, his walking routes to and from work.
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When they strike, they strike fast.
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The Flame walks up, pulls the pistol, and fires.
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The Lemon waits with the car running.
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Within seconds, they are gone.
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They wear ordinary clothes.
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They look ordinary.
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They blend back into the crowds of Copenhagen with the ease of men who know every alley in the city.
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Holger Danske is responsible for around 200 such killings during the occupation.
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The vast majority are not German officers, because killing German officers brings mass reprisals against innocent Danes.
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The targets are Danish collaborators and informers whose betrayals have cost the lives of resistance comrades.
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Among them are several officers and agents working directly inside the offices of the SIPO-SD at the Shellhus building, the German security headquarters in Copenhagen.
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But the German net is closing.
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The Gestapo offers rewards.
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Doors get kicked in.
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64 members of Holger Danske will be executed during the occupation.
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Many more will be sent to concentration camps.
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The Flame and the Lemon are at the very top of the wanted list.
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On the 18th of October, 1944, the Flame is hiding in a safe house in a Copenhagen suburb.
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The Gestapo has been tipped off by a Danish informer.
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German police surround the building.
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The Flame knows what capture means.
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Torture in the cellars of Shellhus.
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Names given up under unbearable pain.
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Friends arrested.
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Comrades killed.
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He chooses not to be captured.
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He swallows a cyanide capsule before the Germans can take him alive.
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He is 23 years old.
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Three days earlier, on the 15th of October, the Lemon had already gone down fighting.
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The Gestapo had cornered him in a house in Gentofte.
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He fought for hours alone against an entire German assault force.
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He killed 11 German police and wounded many others before they set the house on fire to flush him out.
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As he ran from the burning building, they shot him down.
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He was 33 years old.
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The Lemon and the Flame had been partners for less than two years.
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In that time, they had become the most famous resistance duo in Danish history.
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The group fights on without them.
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Holgedansky continues hitting informers right up to the German surrender in May of 1945.
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The Gestapo never breaks the organization.
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The names of informers continue to appear on death lists, and the death lists continue to be carried out.
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By the time the war ends, the Danish underground has executed enough collaborators to send a message across occupied Europe.
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Informing on your neighbors could kill you faster than any Allied bombing raid.
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In 1951, President Harry Truman of the United States posthumously awards the American Medal of Freedom to both the Flame and the Lemon.
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The medal is presented to their families.
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In Denmark, statues stand for both men today.
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Children learn their stories in school.
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The bar in Copenhagen where the Flame liked to drink is still open.
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The corner where the Lemon made his final stand has a small plaque.
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The giant did wake up after all.
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He just wore the face of a red-headed boy with a pistol and a cyanide pill in his pocket.
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Number nine, the Belgian Group G sabotage and liquidation network.
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The 15th of January 1944, a frozen night in occupied Belgium.
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At 110 separate locations across the country, small teams of Belgian university students lay down their tools and disappear into the dark.
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Each team has spent weeks studying its target.
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Each team carries homemade explosives, wire cutters, and detailed engineering diagrams stolen from inside the Belgian electrical grid's own offices.
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At a coordinated signal, the bombs go off.
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Pylons collapse.
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Transformers explode.
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Power stations black out.
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By dawn, the entire industrial electrical system of Belgium has been destroyed.
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The Germans wake up to find their war factories silent.
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Trains stand frozen on the tracks because the signaling system has no power.
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Steel mills cannot smelt iron.
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Munition plants cannot operate machine tools.
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Communications networks across Belgium go dead.
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German engineers later calculate that it will take 10 million man-hours of repair work just to restore the basic grid.
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10 million man-hours that they desperately need for the coming defense against the Allied invasion they know is coming in the spring.
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The operation will be remembered in Belgian history as the Grand Coup de Courant, the great cut, and it was carried out by a group of young men nobody had ever heard of, working out of the basement laboratories of a university in Brussels.
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The Free University of Brussels had been one of the great academic institutions of pre-war Europe.
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Its faculty included some of the finest engineers, chemists, and mathematicians in the country.
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When the Germans occupied Belgium in May of 1940, the university refused to dismiss its Jewish professors.
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The Germans closed the place down in 1941.
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The students went underground, and they took their professo
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Hoffler, a senior SS officer who had previously played a role in deporting Slovak Jews to the death camps. Hoffler is sent to Slovakia in midepptember of 1944 to crush the rebellion. Under his command come the 14th and 18th Waffen SS
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divisions, the notorious 36th Darluena Grenadier Division of the SS and SS Jagged Grouper 232. Behind them comes Inat's grouper H, the death squad specifically created to murder the remaining Slovak Jews and round up suspected partisans. The Germans pour
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around 48,000 troops into the country. The Slovac insurgents are outnumbered and outgunned. The artillery is German.
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The tanks are German. The air superiority is total. On the 27th of October 1944, Banskar Bistria, the capital of the uprising, falls. The Slovak generals Yandolian and Rudolph Viest order their forces to dissolve into the mountains and continue as
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partisans. About 13,000 fighters do exactly that. The fighting continues. The Slovak partisans continue to ambush German columns. They blow up bridges.
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They mine the roads. They hit named SS officers wherever they can identify them. The German reprisals against the Slovak countryside are merciless. Inats grouper H and the dear Lewanga brigade between them. Destroy 93 Slovak villages. The largest reprisal massacres
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take place at Kremnika where 747 people are killed, mostly Slovak Jews in Roma. and at Neka where 900 people are killed.
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By the war's end, 211 mass graves will be discovered across Slovakia from those reprisal killings. 5,34 bodies will eventually be counted.
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Generals Golian and Viest are captured on the 3rd of November 1944 at Ponsky Bukov. They are sent to Berlin for interrogation. They are then transferred to Fenberg concentration camp. They are executed there before the end of the war. The German authorities
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never published the date of their deaths. The exact circumstances of their executions remain disputed even today.
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But the Slovac partisan tribunals had set a precedent that mattered. Over the 60 days of the uprising, hundreds of SSH and Hinka Guard personnel had been captured, tried and shot by Slovak Partisan justice. The names of those officers were entered into partisan
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records and after the war the records were used by Czechoslovak prosecutors to confirm exactly what had happened during the uprising. For 60 days ordinary Slovaks had put the SS in the dock and the SS had paid. The biggest structural
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defeat of the uprising could not erase that fact. In the mountain villages where the trials had been held, the people remembered. They told their children and grandchildren. They built memorials at the squares where the executions had taken place. The names of
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the executed SS men were not put on those memorials, but the dates were and the dates told the story. Number five, the Norwegian Resistance and the killing of Carl Marthnson. The morning of the 8th of February, 1945.
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a frozen Oslo, a residential street in the Blinden district 3 months before the German surrender. Behind a wood pile 50 meters from the front door of a comfortable suburban house, four men wait in heavy coats. They have been in
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position since before dawn. They are members of Melg, the Norwegian military organization, the largest resistance force in occupied Norway. They are armed with British Sten submachine guns smuggled into Norway by Royal Air Force drops. They are looking through a small
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gap in the wood pile at the driveway of Blindenvia number 74. They have orders from the Norwegian government in exile in London. The orders are to kill the man who lives in that house. The man's name is Carl Alfred Nikolai Marinson.
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Marthnson is 48 years old. E is the chief of the Norwegian state police. The stats pitier, the Norwegian collaborator police force that operates under direct Siker Heights control. He had joined Vidcon's fascist Nazel Sambling Party in 1933, one of its earliest members. He
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had risen through the ranks during the occupation to become the most powerful Norwegian collaborator in the country with a general's rank and command over both the state police and the Sahets's polit.
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He had played a central role in implementing the Holocaust in Norway. More than 700 Norwegian Jews had been deported to Awitz on his watch. Of those, only 37 would come home.
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Marthnson had personally tolerated and encouraged torture by his officers. He had signed off on the executions of Norwegian resistance fighters at the Akashuse fortress. He was, in the words of the postwar Norwegian government, the single most important Norwegian Nazi.
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after quizzling himself. The operation to kill him is given the code name operation buzzard. It has been planned for months. London has approved it personally. The Norwegian government in exile knows that killing Marinson will trigger massive German reprisals, but
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they have made a calculation. With the war approaching its end, removing the man who has signed the deportation orders will save lives going forward.
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The deportations of remaining Norwegian Jews and resistance fighters will be disrupted. The state police itself will be thrown into chaos. At about 9:00 in the morning, Marthinson's car comes out of his driveway. He sits in the passenger seat. His driver is at the
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wheel. The car has barely begun to move when the four men behind the wood pile open fire. The Sten guns spray bullets through the car windows. Marthinson is hit several times in the head and chest.
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He is killed instantly in his seat. The driver is likely wounded. The shooters drop their weapons and disappear down a back street toward a waiting bicycle. By the time German police arrive at the scene, the Milog team is already in a
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safe house several kilometers away. None of them will be captured. The German reprisal is exactly what the Norwegian government in exile expected. The very next day, the 9th of February 1945, the SS executes 34 Norwegian resistance prisoners at Akasus Fortress, including
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Carl Ferdinand, Gradram, Harken, Sarthri, K Sunbeby, and John Vizley. 20 more Norwegian hostages are shot in the days that follow. The bodies of some of the executed men are lowered into the Oslo fjord without burial. The German occupation authorities issue a public
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proclamation warning that any further attacks will be met with the execution of 100 Norwegian hostages for each German or Norwegian Nazi official killed. But the Norwegian underground does not stop. Carl Martinsson's killing is only one operation in a long milorg
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campaign against named collaborators and Castapo officers. 2 months earlier on the 11th of December 1944, Milorg fighters had cornered and killed Ivar Grande in the city of Allison. Grande was the second in command of Sondereptile Lola, the notorious
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independent Gustapo unit led by Henry Renan that had infiltrated the Norwegian resistance in the Trondime region.
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Grande had been responsible for breaking several major Melog networks through infiltration. He had survived at least three earlier assassination attempts. On the fourth attempt in Allison, the Melogue team got him. He died in the street. Two local Melogue members had
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been shot in earlier failed tries on his life. The fourth team made sure the job got done. The man Grande worked for, Henry Renan himself, was the most hated Norwegian collaborator of the entire war after Quizzling and Marinson. Renan,
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only 5' 3 in tall, had run his ring of about 50 Norwegian informers from a headquarters in Tronheim known to the resistance as Bandicloster, the gang's monastery. His operation had directly resulted in over 1,000 resistance arrests and at least 100 Norwegian
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deaths. Milorg tried to kill Renan multiple times during the war and failed each time. He always slipped away.
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Norwegian justice would catch up with him only after the German surrender. He was arrested in May of 1945 and executed by firing squad at Christianston Fortress on the 1st of February 1947. He was 31 years old. 12 of his men were
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sentenced to death along with him. But the Marinson operation remained the high water mark of Norwegian underground killings. It removed the most senior Norwegian collaborator in the country.
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It threw the state police into permanent disarray during the last 3 months of the war and it was carried out in broad daylight in the capital city by four men with British submachine guns and the calm of professionals. Norwegian
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children today walk past the spot where Marthinson's car was shot up. There is no plaque. The street looks like any other quiet Oslo suburban street, but the men who did the shooting are remembered in Melog records and the
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operation is studied in Norwegian militarymies as one of the cleanest assassinations of the entire war. Number four, SS Sturman Ernst Waffles and the women of Pyak Warsaw. The 1st of October 1943, a man in a Sichidstein uniform walks
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through the door of a small cafe near the corner of Marshallovska Street. He has just come off duty at the Pyak prison, the German political prison in the heart of occupied Warsaw. His name is Ernst Waffles and he holds the rank
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of SS Sturman. He is in charge of the women's section of Pawiaak, the wing of the prison that houses Polish female political prisoners. Many of those women are members of the Polish home army.
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Many of them are scout leaders, teachers, students, mothers. Many of them have been tortured under Waffles's personal supervision. Some have been raped. Some have not survived their interrogations. Waffles is a man with a particular reputation among the female
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inmates of Pawiaak. They call him names in their cells at night. They write his name on the prison walls. They mark him for death even though they have no way to deliver the verdict themselves. On this October morning, the verdict is
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about to be delivered for them. Pavia prison was the heart of the German terror system in occupied Warsaw. About 37,000 prisoners passed through it during the occupation. Around 60,000 prisoners were eventually deported from Pawak to concentration camps. Thousands
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more were taken from its cells out to the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto and shot in mass executions. The prison was run by the situ. Its commonant in early 1943 was a man called France Burke who we will meet in just a moment. Further down
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this countdown underneath Burkel was Ernst Waffles, the head of the women's wing, the Serbia section. Named after an older prison wing that had once housed Serbian inmates during the first world war. Waffles was not a senior officer.
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SS Sturman was a junior rank, the SS equivalent of a corporal. But his job gave him absolute power over hundreds of female prisoners. He decided who got food. He decided who got punished. He decided who was sent to be interrogated
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at Allayia Suta, the Siker Heights Dequarters in Warsaw, where the sellers were used for torture. The women who came back from suture never came back the same. Some did not come back at all.
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The reason Wessffles became a priority target for the Polish underground in the autumn of 1943 was not in the end primarily his cruelty. It was something more practical. The Polish home army had built a remarkable smuggling network inside Pawiaak prison. Letters, food
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parcels, instructions, sometimes even small weapons all flowed in and out of the prison, hidden in the laundry, in the food deliveries, in the medical supplies. The smuggling was made possible by the cooperation of Polish hospital staff who worked inside the
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prison infirmary. Through them, prisoners could communicate with the outside world. Through them, plans for escape and resistance could be developed. The smuggling network had saved an unknown number of lives. It had given hope to prisoners who otherwise had none. In the late summer of 1943,
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Ernst Waffles began to suspect that something was going on. A female prisoner had broken under interrogation and given up partial information about the smuggling. Wessles began his own investigation separate from Burkels. He started focusing his attention on the
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hospital staff. He started reading every piece of correspondence that came in or went out. He was getting close. Polish home army intelligence officers inside the prison reported that within a matter of weeks would identify the key Polish nurses and doctors who were keeping the
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smuggling network alive. Once he had their names, he would arrest them. He would torture them. He would extract the full structure of the network. He would shut it down. Dozens of prisoners would die as a result. The home army's
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underground court, the directorate of civilian struggle, sentenced Ernst Waffles to death in midepptember of 1943. The sentence was passed to the Kdiwu, the directorate for armed sabotage, and from there to the special anti-justapo unit called Agat that had
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recently killed France Burkel on the same Marshallska street. The same unit was given the assignment. The same young Polish scouts of the gray ranks, the Sar Seri, would carry it out. the operation would be quick. Waffles did not travel
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with the kind of escort that Burkel had used. He was a lower ranking man. He moved around Warsaw with confidence, sometimes alone, sometimes with one or two German police as company. He was not afraid. Burke had been arrogant. Waffles
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was something worse. He was casual. On the 1st of October 1943, the Agat team caught up with him in the street outside the cafe. The details of the shooting were never officially published because the Polish underground deliberately kept
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operational details out of its bulletins, but the result was on the front page of the next German occupation newspaper. Ernst Waffles was dead. The bullets had been precise and quick. The team had walked away without losses.
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Within minutes, they were gone into the maze of Warsaw streets. The German reaction was, as always, savage. More Polish hostages were rounded up. More prisoners were shot in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto. The sicker heights tightened security around Pawak. The
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arrests of the hospital staff Waffles had been investigating did not in the end happen. The smuggling network survived. The female prisoners of Pawyak continued to receive letters and food and instructions from outside until the prison was finally destroyed by the
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Germans during the Warsaw uprising in August of 1944. What made the Wessel's killing significant was not its scale.
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It was not a highranking SS general. It was a man holding the rank of corporal.
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But the Polish underground had reached inside the system and removed a specific officer who was about to break a specific resistance network. They had done it surgically by court order in the middle of an occupied capital in broad
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daylight against a man wearing the uniform of the master race. The message it sent was unmistakable. There were no safe German uniforms in Warsaw. There were no ranks too low to be marked. The verdict of the underground court applied
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to every German on the prison staff who had crossed the line. The verdict would be enforced. The smuggling network the Polish underground was protecting saved an unknown number of women who otherwise would have died. Ernst Waffles paid for
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his investigation with his life. The corner where he was shot is today in the middle of a busy Warsaw shopping district. People walk past it every day and do not know. Number three, SS Sternban Fura Helmouth Camper of the Dar
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Reich Division. The 9th of June 1944, 3 days after the Allied landings at Normandy, the roads of central France are jammed with German vehicles trying to move north toward the invasion front.
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Among those vehicles is a German staff car driving along a country road 4 km east of San Leonard Denoblat in the Limizen region of central France. The carries a Sturm Banura of the Waffen SS, a 34year-old battalion commander named
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Helmet Keer. He commands the third battalion of the fourth SS Panza Grenadia regiment de Fura, one of the most experienced infantry units in the entire German army. The regiment belongs to the second SS Panza division, Das Reich. The division that within 24 hours
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will commit one of the most infamous war crimes of the entire Western Front. But on this evening of the 9th of June, Helmet Camper is alone. His staff carries only him and a driver. He is moving between command posts. He is
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fully aware that the marquee is active in this region. He has been ordered to suppress them. He is not afraid. Camper is one of the most decorated battalion commanders in his regiment. He holds the Knights Cross of the Iron Cross awarded for action on the
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Russian front the previous year. Before the war, he had been a typographer running a small printing business in Germany. He had joined the SS in 1939.
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He had risen through the ranks during the Eastern Front campaigns. He had a wife and three small children at home.
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His last name in German by a strange coincidence roughly translates to fighter. His friends in the regiment including the first battalion commander Sturm Banfura Adolf Dickman simply called him by his first name. What camper does not know on this evening is
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that he has been tracked. The Machi Du Limizan is one of the largest and most aggressive partisan organizations in occupied France. It is led by Colonel Gor Gwen, a 41-year-old former school teacher and committed communist who has built up several thousand fighters in
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the forests of the Oatvien. Guanguin is known throughout central France as Le Pre Dumaki, the prefect of the Marque.
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He runs his region almost like a parallel government. He has just had word over the previous 24 hours that the Dar Reich division is moving north and that its commanders are traveling on the local roads with minimal escort. He has
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ordered all his ambush units to be ready. A small detachment under Sergeant Gene canoe is watching the road near San Leonard Denoblat. When Campus car comes around a bend, the ambush is fast. The road is blocked. Marquee fighters with
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submachine guns close in on both sides of the vehicle. The driver is killed almost immediately. Kemper surrenders.
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He is pulled out of the car and disarmed. His captives recognize his rank from his uniform insignia. They radio Guanguin's headquarters and report that they have caught a senior SS officer. Guinguin orders them to bring the prisoner in. Campher is held
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overnight at a marquee hyde near the village of Chisu. During the night, news arrives of what is happening in nearby Tul. The Das Reich division has just hanged 99 Frenchmen from the balconies and lampposts of Tul in reprisal for a
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Machi attack on the German garrison there. 149 others have been deported to Dhau where most will die. The Marquee fighters guarding Camper hear this news in the early hours of the 10th of June.
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At dawn on the 10th of June 1944, Colonel Gorwinuin orders Helmet Camper to be executed. The exact circumstances of the killing are still disputed.
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According to one French informant, Camper was burned alive in front of partisan witnesses. According to other accounts, he was shot and his body burned afterwards. Either way, by midm morning of the 10th of June, the German officer who had been driving along that
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quiet country road the previous evening was dead. His body was discovered later by German searchers, partially burned.
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The exact location was never confirmed in writing. What followed has gone down in history as one of the worst war crimes ever committed in Western Europe.
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The German search party included men of the first battalion of the fourth SS Panza Grenadier Regiment Deura. Their commanding officer was Sturm Banfura Adolf Dickman, the personal friend of Helmet Kemper. When Deikman learned that his friend had been captured and killed,
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he began searching desperately for the killers. He was given a piece of false information by a French collaborator who told him that resistance fighters were holding a German prisoner in a village called Oridor Suglan. The prisoner was supposedly Keh himself. The information
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was wrong. Kemper was already dead. There was no German prisoner at Oridor Surglan. At midday on the 10th of June 1944, Deikman led the third company of his battalion into Oridor Surglan. The SS troops surrounded the village. They
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herded the men into barns and the women and children into the church. They machine gunned the men. They set fire to the church with the women and children inside. They burned the entire village to the ground. 643 civilians were
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killed, including 247 children. Only a handful of villagers escaped. The Oridor Sir Glain massacre remains. To this day, the worst German atrocity committed on French soil during the entire occupation. The death of Helmet Keher did not justify what followed. Nothing
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could justify what followed. But it was the marquee douly mozair that delivered the verdict on Campe himself. And the marquee followed its own logic. To them, the man in the staff car was not a fellow human being to be exchanged in
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negotiations. He was a battalion commander of the very division that was hanging Frenchmen from lamposts in Tul on the same day. He was an officer of a regiment that within hours would burn 643 civilians alive at Oridor. The
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marquee did not know that on the morning of the 10th of June, but they knew what they had been fighting. They knew what the Dar Reich division had been doing to French civilians for months, they executed the man they had captured. They
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did not negotiate. Helmet Camper is buried today at the German military cemetery at Bernoi about 170 km from Oridor Surglan. The graves at Oridor stand silent. The ruins of the village have been preserved exactly as they were on the 11th of June 1944.
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Tourists walk through the burned out shells of houses. The shells of cars stand rusting on the village streets. A new village was built next to the old one after the war by survivors and their descendants. The old village is left as
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a memorial. Helmet Camper's name appears in the histories of that village because his death was the trigger the SS commanders used to justify burning it.
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But the people who killed Camper never publicly took credit. Gorge Guangwen lived until 1995.
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He spoke about the war many times. He almost never spoke about the death of Helmet Camp in particular. The Machi had executed an SS battalion commander. They had taken responsibility for that act inside their own organization. They did
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not seek glory for it. Number two, SS Oashafura France Burke and Operation Heads. The 7th of September 1943, Warsaw, 8:45 in the morning, the corner of Marshallska Street and Latusa Street, one of the busiest intersections in the occupied Polish capital. A man steps out
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of a Gustapo command car. He is 32 years old, an SS Obashar Furer named France Burke. He is the deputy commander of the Pawyak prison and one of the most hated Germans in all of occupied Warsaw. He is
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a morphine addict, although his situ superiors do not know it. He is followed everywhere by a large German shepherd dog named Caster, which he uses to terrorize the prisoners of Pawak. He has personally murdered several dozen Polish civilians both inside the prison and
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during his trips into the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto where he shoots Jews at random for sport. He has volunteered during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising the previous spring to lead a gang of Pavia warders into the burning ghetto to hunt
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down Jewish fighters. He is one of those rare men whose cruelty stands out even among the SS in occupied Poland. What Burkel does not know is that a Polish home army intelligence cell has been tracking his every movement for weeks.
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They have learned that he walks this same route on this same morning every week. They have learned that his escort is minimal. They have learned where he stops when he speaks to friends in the street, when he buys cigarettes. They
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have learned that this corner is where he is most exposed. The Polish underground court has sentenced him to death 3 months earlier. Today the sentence will be carried out. Five young men converge on the intersection. They are members of Agat, the anti-justapo
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unit of the KDway special operations directorate of the Polish home army. Most of them are former Polish boy scouts who joined the underground military through the grey ranks organization, the SAR Seri. Their leader on this operation is a 21-year-old named
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Jersey Zarowski, cenamed Jeremy. Each man is armed with a Sten submachine gun supplied by the British Special Operations Executive and homemade hand grenades called Filipinkers. Each man knows the geography of the streets around the intersection inside out. Each
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man has memorized an escape route in case the operation goes wrong. The action takes 90 seconds. As Burkoff steps onto the pavement, Zaboroski fires the first burst. Burke is hit several times in the chest and falls back against his vehicle. The remaining four
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members of the Agat team open up with their Sten guns on the German escort.
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Within seconds, seven additional German policemen are dead or dying around the car. The body of Burkel himself slumps to the pavement. By the time German reinforcements arrive at the intersection, the Agat team is gone.
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They have crossed three side streets. They have separated. They have changed coats. They have melted back into the crowds of Warsaw. Not one of them is captured. Not one of them is wounded.
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The killing of France Burke was the first major success of a coordinated Polish underground campaign called Operation Heads in Polish Operatia Gorski. The campaign had been authorized by the Polish underground government and the home army high command in the spring
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of 1943. Its purpose was to remove the named German officials most responsible for the terror campaign against the Polish civilian population. Each target was sentenced individually by a special court of the Polish underground state.
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The evidence against each target was reviewed by underground lawyers. The decision to carry out a killing was approved at the highest levels of the resistance political leadership. The Burke operation was the second action under Operation Heads. The first attempt
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a few months earlier had failed. The killing of Burke on the 7th of September 1943 was the first major success. It proved that the Agat unit could remove a senior Gestapo officer in the heart of Warsaw without losing a single fighter. It
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proved that the underground intelligence network could track a target with absolute precision. It proved that the British supplied Sten guns, which were considered cheap and unreliable by some Allied soldiers, could in the hands of trained Polish scouts deliver perfectly
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aimed fire at pointblank range. It proved above all that the Polish underground was not just running propaganda leaflets and printing illegal newspapers. It was running a fully functional military court system with the ability to execute its verdicts. The
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German reaction was predictably savage. 20 inmates of Piaak prison were taken out and publicly executed in reprisal.
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The situ increased security around all senior Gustapo personnel. Bay. Burkel himself was given a large public funeral attended by senior SS officials from across the general government. His coffin was draped in the swastika flag.
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His killers were the subjects of an intense manhunt that never found them. Most of them survived the war. Operation Heads went on. After Burke came other killings. On the 24th of September 1943, only 17 days after Burkel's death, the
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same Agat unit killed SS Habsjura August Cretchman, commonant of the Genchovka concentration camp. On the 1st of October 1943, they killed SS Sturman Ernst Waffles of the Pawak women's section, the operation we have already covered above. Through the autumn and winter of 1943,
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named SS officers and Polish collaborators went down in Warsaw streets at a steady pace. The Polish home army was running in effect the most successful targeted assassination program of any resistance movement in occupied Europe. The killings had a real
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strategic effect that historians sometimes overlook. Senior SS personnel in Warsaw began traveling only in armored cars. Some refused to leave their offices except in convoys with multiple escorts. The cost of governing Warsaw in terms of pure security manpower went up steeply through the
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autumn of 1943. The Siker Heightstein was forced to divert resources from its primary mission, the killing of Polish Jews and the suppression of the Polish intelligencia into defensive operations to protect its own officers. Every hour an SS officer spent worrying about being
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shot in the street was an hour he was not spending on signing deportation orders. Operation Heads also did something more important than the simple numerical killing of Germans. It restored the dignity of a humiliated nation. Polish citizens who watched the
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body of France Burkel lie in the gutter of Marshallovska Street on the 7th of September 1943 learned something they had not known before. The German uniform was not invincible. The sikah heightstein was not untouchable. The Polish underground was not just hiding
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in sellers writing pamphlets. It was the legitimate recognized armed government of Poland, operating in exile inside its own occupied capital. And it had the will and the capability to enforce its laws against any German who set foot on
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Polish soil. Jerseys Baroski survived to fight in the Warsaw uprising of August 1944. He was captured by the Germans in the final days of the uprising and shot.
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He was 22 years old. The street corner where he and his four comrades had stood 90 seconds is today a busy shopping district. There is a small commemorative plaque on a nearby building. Most of the people who walk past it have no idea
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that one of the most precisely executed assassinations of the entire war happened on that pavement. Number one, SS Brigade Furer France Coera. The executioner of Warsaw. The 1st of February 1944. Warsaw. 9:00 in the morning. A black opal limousine pulls
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out of the driveway of Alle Ujazdowski number 17, the private residence of the SS and police leader of the Warsaw district. The carries an SS brigade furer on General Major Deol named France Cooera. He is 39 years old. He has been
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the senior SS officer in Warsaw for exactly 4 months and 7 days. In that short time, he has earned a nickname among the Polish population that even the Siker Heights own internal reports occasionally adopt. They call him the
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executioner of Warsaw, dear Hanker von Warshow. He has signed the orders for daily public street executions of Polish hostages. He has authorized the rounding up of approximately 400 Polish citizens every single day. Tens of thousands of Poles have been killed under his direct
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authority in just over 4 months. He drives to work every morning in his Opel along a route of less than 400 m. He does not know that this route has been studied by Polish intelligence for nearly 8 weeks. He does not know that
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today is the day his name will be entered into the casualty roles of the SS. France Kera was born in 1904 in the town of Obervtersdorf in Austria then part of the Hapsburg Empire. He joined the Austrian Nazi party in 1930. He
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joined the SS in 1931. He participated in the Anloo of 1938, the Nazi takeover of Austria. He served as deputy Goliter of Corinthia. He was promoted to SS Brigardfura in 1940. In 1942, he was sent east to take up duties in the
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German occupation of the Soviet Union. He served as SS and police leader in the Mgalev district of Bellarus, where he distinguished himself in the eyes of Hinrich Himmler by his ruthless approach to antipartisan operations. He earned a reputation as a specialist in mass
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reprisals, burning villages with their inhabitants inside, executing hostages in the dozens, treating every captured partisan as a target for immediate killing. Himmler praised him personally.
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On the 25th of September 1943, Ker was appointed SS and police leader of the Warsaw district. He arrived in Warsaw with a clear mandate. Crush the will of the Polish people to resist. do it through terror. From the day Cutterra
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arrived in Warsaw, the level of terror against the Polish population escalated to the worst it had been since the start of the war. He immediately introduced a new procedure, public street executions, in which hostages were marched out of
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Pawyak prison and shot in groups of 50 or 100 in the open streets of Warsaw with crowds of Polish civilians forced to watch as a deterrent. Lists of hostages were published every day. Any attack on a German soldier, any sabotage
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operation, any underground newspaper found in a Polish home would result in another batch of names being added to the list. Between October of 1943 and February of 1944, an estimated 5,000 Polish civilians were executed in Warsaw on Kera's direct
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orders. The streets where the executions took place still bear small plaques marking the spots. There are dozens of them. The Polish underground state responded the only way it knew how. The intelligence section of the home army's Kediv under an officer code named Riski
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began collecting information about Kera. They learned where he lived. They learned where he worked. They learned what time he left his apartment each morning. They learned that his car drove the short distance from his home at Allej Ujazdovski 17 to the SS
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headquarters at Allej Uazovski 23, only a few hundred meters up the same boulevard. They learned that despite his importance, Kucher's security arrangements were surprisingly loose for the short journey. He traveled in his own car with a driver and one or two
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bodyguards. He believed with the arrogance typical of senior SS officers that nobody would dare attack him in the open street outside his own headquarters in broad daylight. He was wrong. The Polish underground court tried Kutera in absentia in the autumn of 1943. The
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verdict was unanimous death. The order to carry out the sentence was given by Brigadier General Amil Filddorf code named Nil, the commander of Keddi. The operation was assigned to the first platoon of the parasol battalion of the home army. The same unit that had
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previously absorbed the agot team that had killed Burkel and Wiffles. The platoon commander was a young man named Bronis Petrazovvich, code name lot, meaning flight. He was 22 years old. He was a former boy scout from the grey
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ranks. He planned the operation in close consultation with the battalion commander Adam Boris, code name plug, meaning plow. The team consisted of 12 people, mostly former grey rank scouts.
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They were divided into four subgroups. One group would block Cooer's car from behind. Another would block it from the front. A third would deliver the killing fire. A fourth would provide covering fire against any German response. Three female couriers would deliver weapons to
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the assassins just before the action. Multiple escape vehicles were arranged. Several alternative routes out of the central district were memorized. Three hospitals were briefed in advance to be ready to receive wounded resistance fighters undercover identities. The first attempt was scheduled for the 28th
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of January 1944. On that morning, Kuter did not leave his home for unknown reasons. The team had to abort. They went back into hiding. They prepared to try again. One member of the original team, Yan Cordulski, was wounded by a
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German patrol while moving between safe houses and had to be replaced. His position was filled by two new fighters, Zabignuiki, code name Juno, and Stannislaw Huskovski, code name Alli. At 9:00 in the morning on the 1st of February 1944,
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a 13p person team converged on Allege Ujazovski. They were armed with submachine guns, pistols, and grenades.
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Lookouts had reported that Cuterra was leaving his apartment that morning by car. The team moved into position. 5 minutes later, the Opal limousine carrying France Cooera came out of his driveway. As the car approached the SS headquarters, a Polish team vehicle
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pulled in front of it and breaked, blocking the road. A second Polish vehicle closed in from behind. Within 2 seconds, Lot and Zadzlar Paradski, code name Krinka, opened fire on the car.
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Mikau Isayovich, code name Mish, fired the killing shots into Cooer's head and chest. The German driver was killed. The bodyguards were killed. Within a few seconds, German troops from the SS headquarters across the street began to fire back. A general firefight broke out
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in the middle of one of the main avenues of Warsaw at 9:00 in the morning. The Polish team fought their way to their escape vehicles. Lot the platoon commander was hit several times. So was a fighter cenamed Si, meaning quiet.
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Both were placed in escape cars, wounded badly. Two other fighters, cenamed Soo and Juno, returned a getaway car to its garage against orders and were intercepted on the Kieb bridge over the Vistula River by a German patrol. After
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a brief firefight in which they were trapped on the bridge, both men jumped into the river. They either drowned or were shot in the water. Their bodies were not recovered. The teams wounded faced a different ordeal. Lot and Sichi
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had been shot multiple times. They needed surgery immediately. Multiple Warsaw hospitals refused to admit them, terrified of German reprisals. The Polish underground medics moved them from one hospital to another. After five rejections, a hospital finally agreed to operate. By then, too much time had
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passed. Both men died from their wounds within 48 hours. They were 22 and 21 years old. Five members of the assassination team had died in the course of the operation. France Coacher was dead. His body was given a full SS
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funeral at the Brule Palace in Warsaw, then placed on a special train and shipped to Berlin. The German occupation authorities demanded a fine of 100 million Zelotties from the city of Warsaw as collective punishment. On the 2nd of February 1944, the day after the
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killing, the Germans publicly executed 300 Polish civilians at multiple sites across Warsaw in reprisal. It was one of the last public mass executions in the city before the Warsaw uprising began 6 months later. But the killing of France
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Cooer had achieved something far beyond the death of a single SS officer. It had stopped the daily public street executions. Within 48 hours of Cooera's death, the German occupation authorities suspended the policy of executing hostages in public. The killings
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continued, but they were moved indoors into the ruins of the ghetto away from the eyes of Warsaw. The deterrent effect of public terror that Kuter had built up over 4 months collapsed immediately. The Polish population had seen that even the
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most powerful SS commander in their capital could be shot down in broad daylight outside his own front door. The fear the Germans had spent so much blood to instill was suddenly turned the other way around. The sicker heightstein
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itself became afraid. The members of the assassination team who survived the operation continued to fight. Some of them died in the Warsaw uprising 6 months later. Others survived the war and lived long lives. The youngest survivor lived until the 21st century.
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The street corner where Kotcher was shot is today marked with a discrete plaque. The SS headquarters at Alij Ujazdowski 23 is now the residence of the Polish Episcopal Conference. Tourists walk past the spot every day on the way to the
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parks of central Warsaw. Most do not know what happened there, but every pole knows. And the date, the 1st of February 1944 is taught in every Polish history class.
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It was the day the most senior SS officer in occupied Poland, was shot dead in the open street by a group of former boy scouts armed with British submachine guns and the absolute conviction that he had to die. Of all
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the resistance assassinations of the entire war in occupied Europe, the killing of France Gutera stands as the highest ranking and most operationally daring. He was an SS brigade furer and general major derise, equivalent in rank to a major general in any army. He was
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the SS and police leader of the largest city in occupied Poland. He was killed in front of his own headquarters at 9:00 in the morning in broad daylight, surrounded by the largest concentration of armed German security forces in the
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entire general government by a team of Polish teenagers and 20somes. No other resistance organization in any other occupied country managed to remove an SS officer of equal rank under conditions of equal difficulty. The number one slot belongs to France Coachera and behind
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that name belongs the team of 13 young people who decided that the executioner of Warsaw had to die. Five resistance fighters lost their lives that morning.
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300 Polish civilians were executed the next day in reprisal, but the daily public street executions stopped. The deterrent campaign Cooera had built up collapsed. The dignity of an occupied capital was restored. The price was paid in blood on both sides of the line. The
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verdict of the Polish underground state had been carried out. The executioner of Warsaw was dead. These 10 cases, from a Warsaw street corner to a French country lane, from a Belgian electrical grid to a Bellarussian bedroom, from the
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mountains of Slovakia to the slums of Minsk and Copenhagen, share something important. None of them was a random act of vengeance. Every single killing was authorized by a court or a recognized resistance authority. Every target was an SS officer or a collaborator who had
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been judged responsible for specific crimes against specific civilians. Every operation was carried out by ordinary men and women. Most of them under 30 years old, most of them former students or scouts, all of them volunteers. They knew the reprisals would be savage. They
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acted anyway. They believed that an occupied country was not a country that should accept its fate quietly. They acted on that belief and they removed between them some of the crulest men ever to wear the SS uniform. If this
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ranking changed how you see the resistance movements of occupied Europe. Hit that like button right now. Every like tells YouTube to recommend this video to more history fans. Hit subscribe so you never miss our deep dives into the forgotten stories of the
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Second World War. Turn on notifications so the next video lands in your feed the moment it goes live. Drop a comment and tell us which of these 10 operations surprised you most. Tell us which resistance group deserves its own video
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next. Tell us where in the world you are watching from. Our community spans the entire globe and you are keeping the memory of these fighters alive just by being here. Thank you for watching.
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These 10 resistance operations deserve to be remembered for what they actually were. Acts of conscience carried out by ordinary people who refused to live in a world the SS had built for them. We will see you in the next
Topics:WWII resistanceHolger DanskeDanish resistanceBelgian sabotageGroup GSS officersWarsaw assassinationFranz KuterapartisansWorld War II history
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