Resistance movements (WW II) Resistance activities encompass a wide range of activities against an occupying army, from the traditional guerrilla tactics of harassment, sabotage, and ambushes, to the writing, printing, and distribution of underground propaganda and the passive resistance of factory go-slows and non co-operation. Such opposition can also take the form of moral and intellectual resistance, not just against an occupying power, but against one's own government, as in the case of citizens in Nazi Germany. Although the term is associated commonly with the activities of WW II groups, acts of resistance have been recorded through history. The Jews resisted Roman rule in the first and second centuries ad, while Jacobites in Britain and various groups in Revolutionary France practised active and passive resistance. Spaniard resistance to Napoleonic rule in the Peninsula campaign gave birth to the word guerrilla itself, and similar movements sprang up among militant Zionists in pre- and post-WW II Palestine, while activities against the communist regimes of Cold War eastern Europe also fall into this category.
With this long-established pedigree, it was not surprising that the Nazi regime found itself at the receiving end of resistance activities in mainland Europe. Eastern and western European resistance movements differed in character and, until the invasion of the USSR in June 1941, communist resistants outside the USSR were torn between loyalty to the Moscow line (there was a Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact (the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact) in force until broken by BARBAROSSA) and patriotism to their own invaded homelands. This helps explain, for example, the early lack of co-operation between different groups in France, and the lingering suspicion between them throughout and after the war. Eastern European movements tended to reflect the Soviet creed of the mass-mobilization of the people, and were violent in character from the start. Large partisan bands operated behind German lines, the term spreading to Tito's men in Yugoslavia, who became known as Partisans. German reprisals against them were particularly vicious, and were often implemented by locally recruited units, with their own ethnic and other private scores to settle. Polish resistance culminated in the heroic but doomed Warsaw uprising of August 1944.
In western Europe, much initially spontaneous resistance activity came to be co-ordinated through Britain and the SOE and the later the American OSS, who supplied arms, equipment, and radio operators. The SOE was conceived by Churchill as a means of hitting back at the Germans, and resistance movements established invaluable escape-chains enabling shot-down Allied airmen to evade capture and return to the United Kingdom and resume their war. In southern France organized groups were known as the Maquis, originally composed mainly of young men avoiding compulsory labour service in Germany. Two major resistance activities were incorporated into the planning for the invasion of Normandy in June 1944. The first was the provision of intelligence about German defences (and later about V-weapon sites), the second was the disabling of communications, sabotaging railways, and generally delaying the movement of reinforcements and supplies to the Normandy region. These activities certainly saved the lives of many civilians who would otherwise have been injured in bombing raids, but cost the lives of others shot in reprisal or deported to Germany (some 90, 000 French men and women died in this way). The French Resistance army (FFI) also liberated their capital, Paris, before the arrival of regular (French) troops, and the Belgian underground similarly managed to take over Antwerp and prevent the destruction of its port—a valuable strategic resource—in early September 1944, as Canadian troops drew near. Belgium and Denmark also established popular underground newspapers, while Danish groups were particularly successful at aiding their own Jewish community to escape.
The terrain and dense settlement in Holland prevented the operation of a Maquis, as in France, but an underground newspaper (Je Maintiendrai) was especially successful, and the Protestant and Catholic Churches sponsored much passive resistance in the form of general strikes. Some workers and ex-servicemen simply went into a perpetual underground existence for the duration (known as ‘submarines’), but the Dutch resistance was infiltrated by the Abwehr and thus hampered until late 1943. Dutch and Norwegian resistance was focused by loyalty to their monarchs, who actively encouraged revolt. In Norway there was widespread passive non-co-operation particularly against Quisling's collaborators, and active SOE-sponsored sabotage. The Norwegian group which sabotaged the hydroelectric plant at Rjukan and then sank a ferry carrying heavy water (essential for Germany's atomic weapons programme) may possibly have saved London from joining Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the short list of cities destroyed by an atomic bomb.
In Greece as in Yugoslavia, a small communist underground had operated prior to WW II, in opposition to the monarchy, so it was already organized (if not well equipped) when the Germans invaded in 1941. The monarchist, republican (EDES), and communist (ELAS) resistance movements rarely co-operated, though when they did, such as in the SOE-co-ordinated destruction of a viaduct carrying the Salonika-Athens railway (November 1942), the results were spectacular. However, by the war's end a bitter civil war had broken out between the two. The German occupation of Greece and northern Italy (after the September 1943 armistice) was characterized by some vicious anti-partisan reprisals by regular German formations, including the army, and assorted Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe ground troops, giving the lie to the belief that such acts were perpetrated exclusively by the Field Police, SS, SD (Sicherheitsdienst), or Gestapo. Aided by geography, the Balkan resistance movements in Italy, Greece, and Yugoslavia were some of the strongest in Europe, though all were reliant on the SOE for arms and, to a degree, co-ordination. In each of these three countries, local communist groups saw military resistance as a route to peacetime power, with resultant troubles in 1945. In Yugoslavia over one million died, underlining the bitter fratricidal strife between different resistance, collaborationist, and ethnic movements, while 40, 000 Italians died as a result of resistance activities or in reprisals.
Many communists readily formed resistance movements in 1940-1, some already living off the land, leading the life of outlaws. In the USSR, such partisan bands (perhaps numbering as many as 250, 000 to 500, 000) were treated cautiously by Stalin, who perceived them (probably correctly) as a political threat, and quickly placed them under NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) control, attaching political commissars to each formation. They aided the regular forces in the collection of intelligence, but were not necessarily supplied by the native population who, for example in the Ukraine, welcomed German liberation from Soviet oppression. Germany's failure to capitalize on this must be accounted a major strategic error.
There was much intellectual resistance to Nazism within Germany (the Widerstand), but the movements were scattered, uncoordinated, and received no aid from Britain. A ‘White Rose’ student movement suffered the execution of its leaders, while groups within the Protestant clergy under Dietrich Bönhoffer, the Abwehr under Canaris and Hans Oster, the Foreign Office with Ülrich von Hassell, and civilian politicians such as Karl Gördler, a former mayor of Leipzig, all maintained anti-Nazi sympathies. Their only major activity was the bomb plot of 20 July 1944, led by Count Claus von Stauffenberg, Ludwig Beck, and other senior officers of the Reserve Army, which failed because a table-leg fortuitously deflected the blast from Stauffenberg's bomb away from Hitler. The Gestapo then used this as an excuse to eliminate all known opponents to the regime (and some of their families), whether implicated in the July plot or not. Perhaps 5, 000 perished in this way, among them men and women who once believed that Hitler might lead Germany to greatness rather than squalor and defeat. As Jürgen Förster has written: ‘The men, women, and adolescents of the resistance saved the honour of the German people, but their courage should no longer be used as an alibi for the compliant attitude of the great majority.’
Bibliography
- Förster, Jürgen, et al., ‘Germany’, in The Oxford Companion to the Second World War (Oxford, 1995)
— Peter Caddick-Adams
