German-occupied Europe

• 1. Introduction

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  German-occupied Europe was, at its peak in 1941-1942, a continent where more than half the entire population lived under the direct rule or influence of Nazi Germany and its Axis partners. Picture the geographic scale: Wehrmacht forces stretched as far north as Franz Josef Land in the Soviet Union, as far south as Gavdos in Greece, and as far west as Ushant in France. That range is almost impossible to hold in the mind at once. How did one nation build and administer a structure of control that vast? Who fell under its grip, and what happened to them? And when that grip finally loosened, what did liberation actually look like for the people who survived it?

• 2. Road to Occupation

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  Czechoslovakia was forced to surrender before a single shot of the general war was fired, making it one of the earliest victims of German expansionism. Poland then became the first country invaded after the war officially began, on the 1st of September 1939. The campaign that followed produced two distinct outcomes for the governments of the conquered nations. Some rulers and administrations fled to Allied countries and formed governments-in-exile, continuing to represent their people from abroad. Others had no such continuity; their territories were absorbed, carved up, or handed to puppet regimes. Officially neutral countries were not immune either: several nations that had tried to stay out of the conflict ended up under German occupation regardless. Former Axis members were not spared in the end, as both Italy and Hungary were eventually occupied by German forces after breaking from the alliance.

• 3. How Control Was Exercised

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  Germany governed its occupied territories through several overlapping structures: direct administration, civil occupation, military occupation, and the creation of puppet states. The Kriegsmarine focused chiefly on establishing hegemony in the North Atlantic, particularly in the North Sea, while German weather stations operated as far north as Schatzgräber on Alexandra Land in Franz Josef Land. In Western Europe, the occupation authorities concentrated arrests on resistance fighters and saboteurs. Eastern Europe faced a different and far harsher policy. There, the German forces conducted mass roundups tied to explicit population policy goals, including the forced recruitment of workers for German industry and war production. This created a stark imbalance inside the camp population: Eastern Europeans, and especially Poles, made up the majority in some of the largest facilities.

• 4. The Camp System

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  The first German concentration camps opened in March 1933, immediately after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Following the 1934 purge of the Sturmabteilung, known as the SA, the camps were placed under the exclusive control of the Schutzstaffel, the SS, operating first through the Concentration Camps Inspectorate and later the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office. Initially, most inmates were members of the Communist Party of Germany. Over time the net widened to include people labelled as habitual criminals, asocials, and Jews. By January 1945, at least 4.7 million Soviet prisoners alone had been registered as captives. Across all camps combined, roughly 1.65 million people were recorded as prisoners, of whom approximately a million died during their imprisonment. The majority of those deaths occurred during the second half of the war. Poland, which sat at the centre of this network, also held Auschwitz, to which people of many different nationalities and ethnicities were transferred from across occupied Europe.

• 5. Networks of Resistance and Exile

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  Every occupied country produced a resistance movement. Albanian fighters pushed back against the occupation until the 29th of November 1944. Channel Islands residents in Guernsey and Jersey organized resistance despite the islands sitting under German control from July 1940. French, Norwegian, Dutch, Polish, Greek, Yugoslav, and many other resistance networks operated throughout the occupation, often at great personal risk. The governments-in-exile formed a parallel political world. The Polish government-in-exile established itself first in Paris, then moved to Angers by 1940, and then to London by the 12th of June 1940, where it persisted all the way through to December 1990. The Norwegian government-in-exile operated out of London from the 7th of June 1940 until the 31st of May 1945. Some exile governments were on the Allied side; others, like the French State government, eventually reconstituted in Sigmaringen in Greater German Reich territory until April 1945, represented the collaborationist Axis. The Belarusian Democratic Republic held perhaps the most unusual position of all: a neutral government-in-exile that has maintained continuous operation since 1919 and remains in exile to the present day.

• 6. Liberation and Its Limits

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  Allied military victories allowed the gradual liberation of the concentration camps beginning in 1944 and continuing through 1945. Yet liberation did not come cleanly or quickly for everyone inside. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners died during death marches, which the SS ordered as Allied forces closed in and as guards attempted to move captive populations away from the advancing front lines. The Channel Islands, among the most westerly territories under occupation, were freed on the 9th of May 1945 in Guernsey and on the same date in Jersey, some of the final moments of the European war. The Republic of Estonia maintained its government-in-exile in Stockholm and in New York City from the 17th of June 1940 all the way until the 20th of August 1991, when the Soviet-era occupation of the Baltic states formally ended. For some of the nations swallowed by the broader upheaval of the war, 1945 marked not liberation but one occupation exchanging itself for another.