Genre: Factual

Format: 1 x 60

Produced for: History Television Canada

Distributed by: Breakthrough Entertainment Inc.

Today Europe is prosperous, an island of peace. Industry and high technology thrive. Tourists flock to the beaches of the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Baltic. Capital cities such as Paris, Brussels, Rome and Berlin glitter with wealth.

Few would recall the individual acts of heroism that led to a prosperous postwar Europe. It was not so long ago that horror ruled in Europe: barbed wire, watchtowers, crematoria, concentration camps and the planned murder of millions of Jews, Gypsies, Russians, Poles, Resistance fighters and homosexuals.

Fewer still would know that many of these heroic men and women—liberators of Europe—were Canadian. The Secret Liberators is a one-hour documentary program about individual acts of courage in the common fight to liberate Europe from Nazi and Fascist tyranny. In the style of the two acclaimed series, “For King & Empire” and “For King & Country,” we return with Canadian historian Norm Christie to the battlefields, monuments, cities and resistance hideouts of Europe to tell the stories of Canadians whose individual acts of courage led to a greater victory. Christie takes us behind today’s façade of freedom and prosperity to discover how, during the Second World War, Canadian Resistance fighters—men such as Guy Bieler, Frank Pickersgill and Allyre Sirois—were sent into Nazi-occupied France and played a crucial, and largely unknown, role in the liberation of Europe.