Resistance during World War II

• 1. Introduction

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  Resistance during World War II took countless forms across dozens of countries, from a single Czech saboteur planting bombs in Berlin in September 1939 to hundreds of thousands of men and women organizing underground armies that stretched from Norway to the Philippines. At its peak, the Polish Home Army alone numbered around 400,000 fighters, making it by several historians' reckoning the largest resistance organization in all of Nazi-occupied Europe. Yet despite that scale, a hard question shadows the entire movement: did any of it actually matter?

  Historian Evan Mawdsley argued that in military terms, the resistance "did not do a great deal to achieve the strategic objectives" of the major Allied powers. Major resistance networks such as the Soviet partisans and the French Resistance, British assessments concluded, did not significantly hamper German operations until late 1943. And yet the same scholars who say this also say the opposite cannot be dismissed. Resistance movements carried what Mawdsley called "great political and moral (and propaganda) importance" that translated into lasting collective memory. Those two truths sit in permanent tension, and the rest of this documentary will try to hold them both.

• 2. Underground or Army

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  Resistance movements across occupied Europe divided themselves along two sharp political lines. One camp was internationalist, most often led by Communist Parties, and it operated in nearly every country in the world. The other was nationalist, driven by groups in German- or Soviet-occupied territories who opposed both Nazi Germany and the Communists simultaneously. Poland's resistance was the clearest case of the second kind: the Polish Underground State answered to the government-in-exile and fought on two fronts at once.

  Organization was, from the beginning, shaped by danger. Because every meeting was a potential death sentence, most resistance actions were performed by individuals rather than coordinated cells. Terrain made a decisive difference. In Eastern Europe, large tracts of uninhabited hills and forests gave Soviet partisans room to organize without detection. In the densely populated Netherlands, fighters used the Biesbosch wilderness as their cover. In northern Italy, the Alps and the Apennines sheltered partisan brigades, though many groups also operated directly inside major cities.

  Resistance rarely emerged fully formed. It grew from spontaneous local acts and was then encouraged and supplied by London and Moscow. The Special Operations Executive, officially formed by British Cabinet approval on the 22nd of July 1940, existed precisely for this purpose: to build a spirit of resistance in the occupied countries and to prepare networks of fighters who could engage in open opposition when Britain was able to return to the continent. Its American counterpart, the Office of Strategic Services, served as the forerunner of what would later become the Central Intelligence Agency.

• 3. How Few, How Many

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  Historians and post-war governments have sometimes portrayed resistance as a widespread popular phenomenon, but the raw numbers complicate that picture. In western Europe, organized resistance drew in only an estimated one to three percent of the population. The German occupation there was less oppressive, and correspondingly fewer people risked their lives. Eastern Europe told a different story: Nazi rule was far harsher, and in Poland an estimated ten to fifteen percent of the population participated in organized resistance movements.

  For France, historian François Marcot ventured an estimate of 200,000 activists, with a further 300,000 people having substantial involvement in Resistance operations. Italy's numbers grew dramatically toward the end: Giovanni di Capua estimated that by August 1944, around 100,000 partisans were active, a figure that escalated to more than 250,000 with the final insurrection in April 1945. Passive resistance by non-cooperation with the occupiers was far more common than armed action throughout all of occupied Europe.

  Historian Tony Judt observed that in western Europe, where the German hand was less oppressive and resistors were fewer, the "myth of resistance mattered most." The gap between what resistance actually achieved militarily and what it came to mean in national memory is itself a historical phenomenon worth examining.

• 4. Early Sparks

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  On the 15th of September 1939, Ctibor Novák, a member of the Czech resistance, planted explosive devices in Berlin. His first bomb detonated in front of the Ministry of Aeronautics and his second in front of police headquarters. Both buildings were damaged and many Germans were injured. It was one of the earliest acts of organized resistance in the war, carried out before most of Europe had even been occupied.

  In Poland, Witold Pilecki did something arguably more audacious. In 1940 he presented his superiors in the Home Army with a plan to enter Auschwitz from the inside. The Home Army approved, gave him a false identity card, and on the 19th of September 1940 he deliberately walked into a street roundup in Warsaw and allowed himself to be sent to the camp. Once there, he organized the underground group known as the Związek Organizacji Wojskowej, or ZOW. Beginning in October 1940, ZOW began sending the first reports about the camp and its genocide back to Home Army headquarters in Warsaw. Beginning in March 1941, those reports were forwarded through the Polish resistance to the Polish government in exile and from there to the British government in London. They became the first intelligence on the Holocaust to reach the Western Allies.

  Around May 1940, a separate group formed around Austrian priest Heinrich Maier. Until 1944, Maier's network very successfully passed to the Allies the plans and production locations for V-2 rockets, Tiger tanks, and aircraft including the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet, enabling Allied bombers to target those factories. The group also passed early information about the mass murder of the Jews.

• 5. Assassination and Reprisal

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  On the 27th of May 1942, two Czechoslovak members of the army in exile, Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík, carried out Operation Anthropoid in Prague: the attempted assassination of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and the chief architect of the Final Solution. Heydrich was not killed on the spot but died later in hospital from his wounds. He became the highest-ranked Nazi to be assassinated during the war.

  The German reprisal was catastrophic. Over fifteen thousand Czechs were killed. The towns of Lidice and Ležáky were completely destroyed. The calculus of Nazi reprisal was a permanent feature of resistance work, and it shaped every decision about when and whether to strike. J. R. Seeger, writing on resistance effectiveness, noted that on the rare occasions resistance forces successfully tied down German troops, this benefited conventional Allied forces in the theater but often resulted in what he called "horrific Nazi reprisals."

  In Poland, Irena Sendler, head of the children's division of the Council to Aid Jews, known as Żegota, smuggled 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto, provided them with false documents, and sheltered them in homes outside the ghetto. Żegota, founded in September 1942 by Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and Wanda Krahelska-Filipowicz, was the only dedicated secret organization of its kind in all of occupied Europe. Poland was the only country where such an organization existed. More than 50,000 Jews who survived the war received some form of help from Żegota.

• 6. Yugoslavia and the Limits of Force

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  Nowhere in occupied Europe did resistance reach the scale and ferocity it did in Yugoslavia. By the middle of 1943, as the source puts it, partisan resistance had grown "from the dimensions of a mere nuisance to those of a major factor in the general situation," and Germany was suffering losses it could ill afford.

  In early January 1943, the 20,000-strong main operational group of the Yugoslav Partisans in western Bosnia came under attack by over 150,000 German and Axis troops supported by about 200 Luftwaffe aircraft in what became the Battle of the Neretva. The Axis deployed eleven divisions against them. The goal was to destroy the Partisan headquarters and main field hospital, with all wounded and prisoners facing certain execution. Marshal Josip Broz Tito planned a diversion and retreat across the Neretva river that allowed the main force to escape into Serbia.

  Five months later, the Battle of Sutjeska from the 15th of May to the 16th of June 1943 saw 127,000 Axis troops, along with over 300 aircraft, turn on 18,000 Yugoslav Partisans organized into 16 brigades. Three brigades and a central hospital holding over 2,000 wounded were surrounded and annihilated on the orders of German commander-in-chief General Alexander Löhr, following Hitler's instructions; medical personnel and the unarmed wounded were killed alongside combatants. The main Partisan force broke through the German 118th and 104th Jäger Divisions to escape, and the failure of the offensive is considered a turning point for Yugoslavia in the war.

  Then in April and May 1944, German SS parachute commandos launched the Raid on Drvar in an attempt to capture Tito himself. Elite units fought their way to his cave headquarters and exchanged heavy gunfire. By the time the Germans penetrated to the cave, Tito had already fled by train to the town of Jajce. The commandos could only retrieve his marshal's uniform, which was later displayed in Vienna.

• 7. Sabotage, Codes, and the Bomb

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  On the 5th of June 1944, the BBC broadcast a group of unusual sentences. The German command knew these were code words, possibly for the invasion of Normandy. A few days before D-Day, the commanding officers of the French Resistance heard the first line of Verlaine's poem "Chanson d'automne": "Les sanglots longs des violons de l'automne," meaning that the day was imminent. When the second line was broadcast, the Resistance knew the invasion would take place within the next 48 hours. Across France, communications were cut, trains derailed, roads and water towers destroyed, and German garrisons attacked. Some resistance fighters relayed information about German defensive positions on the beaches of Normandy to American and British commanders by radio just prior to the 6th of June.

  Norwegian resistance fighters carried out a multi-year campaign against the German nuclear program that drew to a close on the 20th of February 1944 with the bombing of the ferry SF Hydro. The ferry was carrying railway cars loaded with heavy water drums from the Vemork hydroelectric plant, where they were produced, across Lake Tinn for shipment to Germany. Its sinking effectively ended Nazi nuclear ambitions. The British SOE later called the full series of raids on the plant the most successful act of sabotage in all of World War II.

  In Poland, Operation Most III delivered something equally significant. The Armia Krajowa provided the Allies with crucial intelligence on the German V-2 rocket program; around 50 kilograms of the most important parts of a captured V-2, along with final reports, analyses, sketches, and photos, were transported by a Royal Air Force Douglas Dakota aircraft to Brindisi. In late July 1944, those parts were delivered to London, giving Allied scientists direct access to the hardware behind Germany's most advanced weapon.

• 8. Memory and Measure

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  By 1941, a British assessment concluded that despite Nazi Germany's control of much of Europe, only Czechoslovakia, Poland, and China had considerable resistance networks. The movements that later developed across occupied territories did not, by the same assessments, significantly hamper German operations until late 1943. All resistance movements were also significantly dependent on support from Allied powers; none could have sustained itself without external supply and coordination.

  The Polish Home Army rescued something else in August through December 1944. Operation Halyard, conducted by Chetniks in occupied Yugoslavia, became the largest rescue of American airmen in history. According to historian Professor Jozo Tomasevich, a report submitted to the OSS showed that 417 Allied airmen downed over occupied Yugoslavia were rescued by Mihailovic's Chetniks and airlifted out by the Fifteenth Air Force. According to Lieutenant Commander Richard M. Kelly of the OSS, the grand total reached 432 U.S. and 80 Allied personnel.

  The Forest Brothers of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania fought on long after Germany's defeat, operating against Soviet occupation of the Baltic States into the 1960s. Their persistence points to something the standard military accounting of resistance leaves out. Resistance was never only about what it achieved against the enemy in front of it. It was also about what it preserved inside the communities that sustained it, including the underground press, the forged documents, the hidden children, and the schools that Communist partisans reopened in the short-lived Republic of Užice in the autumn of 1941.