Resistance

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RESISTANCE.

GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS
CHRONOLOGICAL FACTORS
COMMON CHARACTERISTICS OF THE RESISTANCE MOVEMENTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY

"Resistance," as a category covering all forms of opposition against the new European order imposed by Nazi Germany, has no conceptual unity. It covers a variety of reactions against very different regimes imposed and different policies pursued in different countries and regions of Europe at different times of Nazi expansion, from 1938 until 1945. The form these reactions took—their means of action, their organization, their development, their political program, and even their ideology—were first of all dictated by the German aggression to which they were reacting and the intrusive policies of the occupier to transform their societies. Secondarily resistance was shaped by endogenous factors, such as the respective weight of radical political movements in the prewar political arena; traditions of insurrection and armed struggle, as well as of civil disobedience and distrust of state authority; the legitimacy of prewar political institutions; and social cohesion or the lack of it, because of social, political, or ethnic polarization. To clarify these matters, the marginal movements of dissent against national dictatorship in Germany or in Italy are not dealt with here, because they proceed from a very different dynamic and cannot be subsumed under the same analytical umbrella as the movements that emerged in the countries Germany and Italy occupied. It is not that resistance in Italy or Germany was of no importance; it is rather that the historical phenomenon that contemporaries understood as resistance was located in countries occupied by the Axis Powers.

The term resistance has been variously used to describe partisan attacks on German troop transports; military intelligence gathering for the Allied services; the killing of collaborationist "traitors"; the networks organizing the hiding and, sometimes, escape of Allied aircrew, Jews, and requisitioned workers; the printing and distribution of underground newspapers and pamphlets; the attitudes of the churches toward Nazi rule; and the preparation of postwar politics by political movements. Depending on the definition adopted, the term resistance refers to small nuclei of radicalized guerrillas; military professionals with technical expertise in intelligence gathering and transmission; large-scale networks involving the active participation of thousands of individuals and the complicity of tens if not hundreds of thousands; or even the mainstream of political opinion, including their traditional elites, in a given country during the last months of the occupation. Differences pertain both to the nature and the scale of the phenomenon, and each definition is also implicitly normative. Some more radical forms of resistance are condemned by part of the national opinion and postwar historiography as "terrorism." Other mainstream forms focused on the preparation of the postwar are similarly decried as attentisme—the tendency to wait and see—or cowardice. Measuring resistance in terms of military effectiveness is highly problematic. Defining it in terms of ideological coherence is similarly bound to failure. Not all antifascist movements were at all times anti-German, nor were all anti-German movements forcibly antifascist. The attitude of communist parties while the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact lasted illustrated the first contradiction; the precocious radical action by ultranationalist authoritarian movements in occupied countries, in Ukraine, Poland, Serbia, or Belgium, exemplify the latter.

Nevertheless, it is the merger in some occupied countries of all these various strands of "resistance" into a "home front" in the months leading to liberation that has retrospectively created the image of a united and organized movement, equally involved in the struggle against the occupier and, drawing legitimacy from this combat, in the foundation of a new postwar order. Yet, both activities were often more dissociated than glorifying narratives admit. The turmoil of war also offered a unique opportunity for political revolutions, replacing prewar political elites, forcing through radical political agendas, benefiting from wartime polarization. In its mildest form, this involved the drafting of new constitutions or political platforms for reforms to be implemented after the liberation, such as the nationalization of certain economic sectors or the reinforcement of social rights. In its more radical forms, this involved the purging of political enemies who had chosen the occupier's side through imprisonment, expulsion, or execution and/or the expropriation and expulsion by legal or by violent means of ethnic minorities, seizing on the extreme violence unleashed by Nazi population policies to settle once and for all the unresolved minority questions of the nation-states born from or reshaped by World War I. The fault lines between collaboration and resistance are much less clear here than in cases in which concrete action against the occupier is involved, simply because domestic political agendas often occupied a much higher priority. The radical nature of wartime political revolutions depended on the degree of turmoil, the level of violence, and the destruction or delegitimization of prewar political structures. Two factors are therefore crucial in outlining a typology of the war experience and the reactions it triggered: space and time.

GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS

The spatial factor derives from the fundamentally and deliberately asymmetrical nature of Nazi rule in Europe. Between the two extreme ends of the timescale on which Nazi planners projected their program—the immediate strategic contingencies of battle and the ultimate ideological goals of transforming the European continent in an imperial order destined to last one thousand years—there was an almost infinite latitude for experimentation, provisional solutions, and a very peculiar management of priorities, of a military, economic, or ideological nature. Very schematically, one can distinguish three geographical areas.

Eastern Europe

The war in eastern Europe occupied the most central place in the Nazi ideology, because this was where the Lebensraum, the vital space of colonization for the German race, was located—a space to be vacated by a war of annihilation (Vernichtungskrieg), wiping out local elites and overall decimating the indigenous population. This war of destruction was primarily waged in Poland, Ukraine, and Byelorussia and to a lesser extent in the Baltic countries. It was accompanied by large-scale murder, genocide, civil war, and ethnic cleansing. Collaboration was a desperate choice, devoid of any hope for an alternative political order, because the Nazi occupier never offered any other perspective than a brutal and planned policy of colonization, plunder, starvation, and deportation as outlined, for example, in the detailed and sinister Generalplan Ost.

The region was moreover the scene for multiple occupations and shifting front lines. The German–Soviet partition of Poland in September 1939 created waves of refugees, mostly eastward, but the anticipation of a better life in the Soviet zone was soon to be disappointed by harsh Stalinist policies. The German invasion of the USSR in June 1941 provoked new waves of evacuation and retaliatory killings. The loyalties of Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Jews to either of the occupiers of prewar Poland inevitably caused civil war fault lines to run partly along ethnic lines. Anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalists similarly initially welcomed the German army as liberators, only to discover that, apart from the recruitment of auxiliary military and police personnel, the German occupier had no wish whatsoever to create a viable Ukrainian nation. By 1943, the security situation for Ukrainian auxiliaries in the German-controlled forces was such that they deserted in droves to the Soviet partisans or the Ukrainian nationalist partisans. After having actively participated in the elimination of the local Jewish population, from 1943 onward, Polish, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian nationalists would increasingly turn on each other, trying to carve out ethnically homogeneous areas in the anticipation of a postwar settlement. While both the Polish anticommunist Home Army and the Polish communist partisans waged a heroic battle for survival against the German occupier, the prospect of a united front was never an option, as the brutal events of the autumn of 1944 illustrate, when the Red Army patiently witnessed from the outskirts of Warsaw the elimination of the nationalist insurrection by the German Army.

Southeastern Europe

Southeastern Europe, particularly the Balkans, form a second area with a distinct fate. The German invasion responded to the strategic imperative to occupy the northern shore of the Mediterranean in order to avoid a British landing rather than the implementation of any precise planning or ideological design. The winter famine in Greece in 1941 and 1942, for example, was the result of cynical neglect and contempt for the lives of the local population and not of any deliberate calculation. In Yugoslavia in particular, a country that had verged on civil war ever since its creation after World War I, extreme brutality against the civilian population combined with murderously divisive occupation policies, as practiced by the German, Italian, and Hungarian occupiers, exacerbating tensions among Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Slovenes, ethnic Hungarians, ethnic Germans, Jews, and Gypsies, degenerated into generalized internecine killing. The creation of a Croat fascist—Ustaša—State and the annexation policies in other areas were particularly nefarious in this regard.

In this context of anarchy, the tiny prewar communist parties emerged as the most efficient and credible endogenous force. Partisan republics, organizing the redistribution of land and capable of halting ethnic violence, both by offering an alternative political creed and by ruthlessly eliminating its nationalist adversaries, established the only homegrown communist regimes in Europe outside the Soviet Union, in Albania and Yugoslavia. In Greece only the intervention of twenty-two thousand British troops could avert a similar scenario. Unlike postwar France, Italy, or the German Democratic Republic, which would rhetorically proclaim to be political regimes born from resistance struggle, the Albanian and Yugoslav communist parties effectively transformed a clandestine underground apparatus into a new ruling elite, with all the problems this entailed. By 1957 Milovan Djilas, himself a partisan hero, would describe in The New Class how a regime built on this historical legitimacy was hermetically closed to the younger generations and fundamentally frozen in its evolution.

Western and central Europe

Finally, there is the heterogeneous group of occupied countries from western and central Europe—Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, and Czechoslovakia. Here the Nazi occupier proceeded to limited annexations of regions integrating the Reich—the Sudeten area, Alsace-Lorraine, the whole of Luxembourg, and the Eupen-et-Malmédy area ceded to Belgium in 1919—but mainly, the occupation policy was one of Aufsichtsverwaltung, a policy of economic exploitation at minimal cost, leaving the national administration largely intact.

The institutional setting in this third area was extremely heterogeneous. Czechoslovakia was dismembered between the annexed zone, the protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia, and the fascist clerical puppet state of Slovakia. Denmark, which had accepted the entry of German troops into its territory, was placed under the protection of a German governor, but was otherwise allowed to maintain its institutions, to the point that it even held free elections in March 1943—elections that did not even alter the internal political balance. In France, political events anticipated German decisions as to the fate of its institutions, as the national assembly of the Third Republic dissolved itself and elected a World War I hero, the elderly Philippe Pétain, as head of a new authoritarian state. Pétain's first decision was to offer an armistice and accept unconditionally the terms imposed by the German occupier, including the partitioning of the country into a southern zone, unoccupied until November 1942, a central zone under German military rule, and the "forbidden zone" of the coastal defense line. In Norway, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium, the national governments and, with the exception of Belgium, heads of state, had fled to London before the French collapse, in the hope of continuing the war. In Norway, the Germans first instituted military rule and later installed the fascist government of Vidkun Quisling, a notoriously failed experiment in the exportation of their political model. In Belgium, they opted for military rule for the whole duration of the occupation, while in the Netherlands they imposed civilian Nazi rule under Reichskommissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart.

In spite of these very contrasting institutional settings, Nazi policies in this third area were both comparable and coordinated. National and local administrations were left in place, with an overall relatively prudent policy to replace recalcitrant civil servants with politically more obedient personnel. The central concern was to limit the German presence and avoid major disruptions. The army, procurement ministry, and the SS leadership had conflicting views on the priorities guiding occupation policy; these parties were concerned, respectively, with: military security by avoiding radical policies, maximal economic benefit or Nazification, and an all-out war against the ideological enemies of the Reich. The first two imperatives did dominate the occupation policy, with one brutal exception: the deportation of all Jews from these territories to the centers of mass death in eastern Europe, a quite disruptive policy, but one that was an unquestionable priority on the Nazi agenda. The mass deportation of Jews in the summer of 1942 was one example of an operation planned for the whole area in a concerted timetable. Another example is the deportation of workers for German industry, after a policy of voluntary recruitment, reaching a peak in the summer of 1943. Obviously, these coordinated policies provoked comparable reactions and delineated a common horizon of action for local resistance movements.

The view of the occupier

The vantage point for an integrated analysis of these very heterogeneous situations, between the three groups and inside each of the groups described above, is of course the perspective of the German occupier. Even though the pursued goals were entirely different depending on the geographical reach, Nazi Germany also acquired considerable expertise in occupation management in general and in counter-insurgency in particular—an experience carefully studied by the U.S. military in particular after 1945. The science of occupation management started from an analysis of the precedent of World War I. The first occupation of Belgium had mobilized an inordinate number of military and administrative personnel, for a disappointing return on investment in economic terms, and a catastrophic impact on Germany's public relations, an error Nazi planners were determined to avoid in 1940. Nazi domination over half a dozen countries by the summer of 1941 offered a new sample for comparative analysis.

Extremely instructive in this regard is the report published by the occupation expert and SD (Sicherheitsdienst) man Werner Best concerning his study tour of occupied capitals in August 1941. At the height of the Nazi onslaught on the Soviet Union, Best tried to establish the elementary rules allowing the most efficient management of any given occupied territory, with a minimal input of German military and administrative personnel. After a stint as occupation expert in Paris in 1940 and 1941, Best would apply his conclusions as German governor of Denmark. Best, whose credentials as a first-hour Nazi and anti-Semite cannot be doubted, not only allowed the elections of March 1943, but he also organized or at the very least tacitly authorized the discreet evacuation of the tiny Danish Jewish community over the Copenhagen Sound. The predictable disruption and polarization a manhunt in the streets of the capital would have caused were a price Best was not willing to pay for the sake of adding one thousand victims to a continental program killing several millions. Denmark continued to be the exemplary student in the classroom of occupied nations, to the point of causing genuine concern among the Danish elites about the postwar treatment of Denmark after an Allied victory. Best then proceeded to negotiate with the Danish "underground" on a mutually agreed program of "demonstrative Sabotagetätigkeit," a series of spectacular but harmless bomb attacks, sufficient to convince Allied capitals of the Danish resistance spirit, but not destructive enough to hinder German logistics, nor to force the occupier into retaliation and a spiral of terror and counter-terror that would threaten the mutually beneficial Aufsichtsverwaltung. But the evacuation of the Copenhagen Jews did pass to posterity as one of the most heroic and humanitarian resistance acts in the whole of occupied Europe.

CHRONOLOGICAL FACTORS

A second parameter is chronology, and more particularly the duration and proximity of battle. On the eastern front, the military confrontation raged uninterruptedly from June 1941 through April 1945 and with it the spiral of radicalizing violence, among belligerents and against the civilian populations caught between the hammer and the anvil, with intense partisan activity behind the German lines. The awkward position of Italy in the geographical typology described above illustrates the pertinence of the chronological factor. Until September 1943, Italy was an occupation force and cobelligerent with the Wehrmacht on the eastern front. After the Italian surrender and until April 1945, the very slowly receding front line crossed the peninsula, with the polarizing effects of massive violence observed elsewhere. From the urban revolt in Naples to the guerrilla battles in the hills of Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna, the military confrontation spilled over into local civil wars, with over ten thousand civilians killed in massacres by German troops and the auxiliaries of the Salo Republic. No country better illustrates the difference between antifascism and resistance than Italy. By 1926, Benito Mussolini had effectively placed the political opposition against his regime out of harm's way. Antifascism was limited to the milieu of political exiles, and domestic public opinion was characterized by consent rather than widespread opposition and subversion. The Allied and, consequently, German invasions triggered very different reactions, and the sheer violence and displacement of the military confrontation mobilized a partisan movement both in size and strategy more akin to the Balkan situation than to that of the occupied countries of western Europe. One year later, the advance of the Red Army in south-central Europe would cause short but intensely violent confrontations in the Axis states of Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. There are in this regard obvious difficulties in comparing the Hungarian "resistance" in April 1945 with the Norwegian resistance in April 1940.

In western Europe, resistance is foremost characterized by physical separation from the battlefield. In May and June 1940, the battle lasted for five days in the Netherlands, eighteen in Belgium, and forty days in France—too short to allow for any organized, nonmilitary resistance to emerge. Until the return of battle in June 1944, resistance was mainly limited to intelligence, escape lines, the underground press, or the preparation of popular militias for D-Day and H-Hour. Radical formations who engaged in bomb attacks or shooting of the German Army were condemned in most underground newspapers, which deemed such a strategy both useless from a military point of view and wasteful of civilian lives because of the draconian retaliation they provoked. The Allied landings opened a wholly new and very violent chapter, with the full-out engagement in battle of resistance troops and generalized guerrilla warfare. Large-scale massacres of civilians, such as in the French village of Oradour, where 642 civilians were killed, or in the Vercors, where a partisan uprising was massacred by retreating German troops, occurred only in the wake of the invasion, partly because of the emergency transfer of troops from the eastern front who imported their brutal methods of counterinsurgency. Similarly violent episodes occurred during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and January 1945. The partisan warfare in western Europe is mostly a rural phenomenon, coinciding with the length of regular military engagement in a given locality. Major cities such as Paris and Brussels were spared from potentially murderous liberation battles.

A last important chronological distinction applies to the "end" of resistance. For Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic countries, anti-Soviet partisan activity continued into the late 1940s. For parts of central and eastern Europe, particularly for the Balkans, including Greece, 1945 is not the end of the cycle of civil war, ethnic cleansing, expropriation, and political violence. The second half of the decade from 1938 to 1948 is in that regard often more fundamental than the five years up to 1943.

COMMON CHARACTERISTICS OF THE RESISTANCE MOVEMENTS

These fundamental differences serve as an elementary precaution to any generalizing overall interpretations of the phenomenon of resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe. With these reservations in mind, one can, however, outline a few common characteristics of the organized opposition to Nazi rule in Europe.

A first useful distinction applies to the forms of engagement. One should not confound "intentional" resistance of highly motivated "first movers" with the less political "functional" resistance of large networks. Intentional resistance involved patriots and nationalists, who rejected German occupation because it violated national sovereignty, and a broad alliance of antifascists, the most active and organized of which were the communist parties. Functional resistance involved individuals, groups, and institutions that occupied a particular place in society allowing them to give crucial support to an organized resistance movement. There are notoriously few intentional resisters among farmers and clerics, yet both social groups came to play a crucial role in the hiding and feeding of an ever increasing clandestine population, including resistance militants whose identity has been discovered by the enemy, Allied prisoners of war and recovered aircrew, Jews, and requisitioned workers. Farms, monasteries, orphanages, and boarding schools had the real estate, the means, and the advantage of not being suspected of subversion, which allowed them to play a pivotal rule in the "humanitarian" resistance all over Europe. Policemen, as well as civil servants working in the labor administrations and the municipal registry offices, were faced with a very different choice. Their daily tasks involved often-considerable assistance to the occupation authorities in tracing the addresses and identities of wanted individuals or lending assistance to their arrest. Under the increasing pressure of the ever more intrusive policies of occupation, disobedience and/or resistance became an inevitable choice. Warning searched-for individuals or delivering forged papers was often a less dangerous approach than a blanket refusal to cooperate with the occupation authorities. The dynamic of engagement in resistance activities is thus very different for each of these groups.

This distinction between intentional and functional resistance also offers the possibility of reconstructing a chronology of resistance engagement different from the chronology of battle outlined above. Practical difficulties of logistics and organization are a major factor that occupies a central place in the first generation of historiography on resistance movements. Establishing contacts between exile governments in London and resistance movements on the Continent and, often only in a second stage, among resistance movements themselves, working in complete isolation, took one to two years. Facilitating these contacts through radio transmitters, rather than emissaries and "mail-boxes," in southern France, Spain, Portugal, and Switzerland, took even longer. Charles de Gaulle's emissary, Jean Moulin, for example, was parachuted into the French Alps in January 1942, but only after a perilous return to London in February 1943 did he succeed, at the end of May 1943, in creating the Conseil National de la Résistance (National Resistance Committee), representing most movements, parties, and trade unions in occupied France. The Belgian government-in-exile set up a highly inventive system of financial support for workers in hiding to escape labor conscription in Germany, through guaranteed loans by Belgian banks, but the scheme started functioning only in April 1944. Conflicts between movements, emissaries, British services, and exile governments, the arrest of emissaries, and highly successful infiltration operations by the German counterintelligence, Abwehr, notoriously in the Netherlands in the so-called Englandspiel, all made these efforts long and costly in terms of human lives.

Resistance was also intrinsically a bet on the future. The military and geopolitical prospects were therefore a crucial factor: the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941; the U.S. declaration of war in December of that year; the halting of the German offensive on the eastern and North African fronts; the first German defeats, especially at Stalingrad at the start of 1943; and the Allied landings in North Africa, Italy, Normandy, and the Provence all affected public opinion in the occupied countries and, by creating hope for a liberation from German presence, encouraged resistance. Even more decisive were the concrete policies pursued by Nazi Germany in the occupied regions. During the killing spree of the Einsatzgruppen on the eastern front in the summer of 1941, there was hardly any organized resistance, and the local Jewish population was completely taken by surprise by these indeed inconceivably brutal actions. It was only in the following months that the partisan movement organized its actions behind enemy lines. During the razzias (roundups) of the summer of 1942, the Jewish population of western Europe was similarly taken by surprise. The fact that the first three months of deportations represented two-thirds of the total number for the whole of the war shows the effectiveness of the various forms of resistance to the German policies that developed in the ensuing months. Among them, Jewish immigrant militants of the communist parties in both France and Belgium—the famous Francs tireurs et Partisans–Main d'Œuvre Immigrée—formed the most radical units of urban guerrillas in a fight for survival, targeting also the personnel organizing the deportations. One year later still, the labor draft took the form of massive roundup operations, but by the end of the summer of 1943, the yields of the German labor recruitment policies dropped dramatically, thereby fueling the resistance with tens of thousands of clandestines to hide, feed, and, for a minority among them, enroll in Maquis formations preparing for guerrilla warfare. The failure of the labor draft from the summer of 1943 onward was undoubtedly the main success of the resistance in western Europe and the main factor explaining its transformation from an active minority into a mass movement involving all sectors of the occupied society.

The combination of these factors helps to explain the early engagement of nationalists in the resistance, during the fall of 1939 in Poland; the summer of 1940 in Norway, the Netherlands, and Belgium; from April 1941 in Serbia and Greece; followed by the simultaneous entry of communist militants all over occupied Europe in June and July of 1941. A broadening of the basis occurred late in 1942 and in the course of 1943, particularly through the dynamic of "functional" resistance involving resisters with a very different profile. In late 1943 and during 1944, the expectation of a German retreat then created space either for a process of unification of a national resistance front anticipating the formation of a new postwar political coalition, such as in most western European countries, or a situation of civil war in the absence of prospects for coalition and power-sharing, such as in eastern and southern Europe. Resistance is thus a central category in understanding the war experience and postwar trajectory of European societies, but one whose impact has to be measured carefully in political, social, and even cultural terms depending on the geographical and chronological setting, and it is furthermore necessary to distinguish between the different forms of engagement in the struggle against it.