Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945

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neutrality, yet the Iberian powers were ideologically aligned with Germany; the others

volunteered material support.

The reshufﬂing of territories entailed the displacement of peoples on an unprece-

dented scale. This process had begun with the Nazi takeover of power which prompted

200,000 German Jews to ﬂee abroad during the 1930s.

As Guderian’s Panzers

spearheaded the invasion of western Europe, in May–June 1940 anywhere in the

region of 6–8 million civilians in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg

took to the roads, their harrowing experiences caught in such memoirs as Maurice

Sachs’ La Chasse à courre. Even though Britain had been preparing to welcome some

250,000 overseas refugees (in the event, only a tenth of that number arrived) should

Germany have invaded, it is likely that the chaos in France would have been repeated

across the Channel. Ian Beckett records that there were 60 million changes of address

in Britain during the war years, this out of an overall population of 48 million.

The scale of these displacements was as nothing compared to those in eastern

Europe.

In 1939, 500,000 Finns headed westwards to avoid the Soviet advance, as

did nearly 2 million Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, and Swedes. Thanks to the

arrangements of the Nazi–Soviet pact (August 1939), approximately 750,000

Germans (located in Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, southern Bukovina, Dobrudga,

and the Baltic) were expected to resettle in Greater Germany, although most ended

up in transit camps. With the invasion of the Soviet Union (June 1941), possibly

16.5 million Poles, Russians, and Jews headed east to avoid the Nazis, while 1.75

million Lithuanians, Estonians, and Latvians ﬂed the Red Army. Displacement did

not end here: 8.5 million foreign workers were conscripted into Nazi factories; count-

less thousands were rounded up into ghettos (such as the 400,000 Jews in Warsaw);

and approximately 6 million died in the Holocaust. While the Soviets did not sys-

tematically pursue genocide, a cruel fate awaited those 500,000 Germans, Bulgars,

Poles, and Romanians who, following the successes of the Red Army in 1944–5, were

deported to the USSR, often to Gulags where malnutrition, disease, and overwork

claimed the lives of at least a million people for each of the war years. Anticipating

what might await them, in 1945 7 million Germans retreated westwards. Overall,

possibly 30 million Europeans were uprooted during World War II.

With the reshufﬂing of peoples, Hitler’s economic designs became apparent. His

goal, writes Alan Milward, was to create an industrial dynamo within the Greater

Germany which would draw on a steady supply of labor, goods, and raw materials

from the conquered territories. As Jean Freymond adds, this was no more a blueprint

for pan-European union than was Napoleon I’s Continental System – German inter-

ests were overriding.

This vision explains why in the period since 1936 Hitler had

been gearing the economy for war, notably through the Four Year Plan. Here is not

the place to debate whether the war he really wanted was scheduled for the mid-

1940s. It is agreed that he was keen to avoid the mistakes of 1914–18 when, he

alleged, the army had been let down by a non-productive and demoralized home

front. Some historians have since suggested that the strategy of blitzkrieg, the short

lightning war used so effectively in Poland in 1939 and western Europe in 1940, was

a deliberate ploy to cushion the home front from the insatiable demands of the mili-

tary. Richard Overy has disputed this. Military expenditure, steadily rising since 1936,

reached a high point in 1939–41 which, as one report acknowledged, required “a

throttling of civilian consumption.”

Additionally, the German economy was not

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sufﬁciently organized to permit any sudden shift from consumer and military spend-

ing, as implied by the theory of blitzkrieg. Typical of the topsy-turvy world of Nazi

administration, there was not one but several bodies presiding over economic matters,

including Göring’s brief-lived Council of Ministers for Reich Defense. Some sem-

blance of centralized control was achieved in February 1940 with the appointment

of Fritz Todt as minister for weapons and munitions, yet the so-called “Organization

Todt” still lacked the desired ﬂexibility. After Todt’s death in February 1942, Albert

Speer was delegated extensive powers to “streamline” the “entire economy,” which

he did to great effect, yet, as Overy has again shown, he was undermined by military

setbacks, rivalries between civilians, industrialists, and generals, and the inability to

exploit occupied territories to the full. As the demands of total war rose, such exploi-

tation lost rhyme and reason. In 1940 it was intended to develop Norway’s hydro-

electric power; by 1943, Germany was taking whatever Norway could supply, primarily

lumber and manpower. The same process overcame France, the most economically

precious of the occupied states. Short-term plunder gave the Germans what they

needed, yet naturally discouraged the French from producing more.

Because of the earlier drive towards collectivization, in 1941 the USSR already

possessed the “command economy” which Nazi Germany lacked. Notwithstanding

the debates over the effectiveness of planning and its interruption by the Terror, this

had enabled the Soviets to make extensive military preparations. The Nazi–Soviet

pact provided further respite, facilitating the stockpiling of goods in the east. When

Germany eventually invaded, Stalin was quick to establish (June 1941) the Soviet

State Defence Committee, empowered to direct all war production, which was soon

coordinating the evacuation of both peoples and industrial plants. The German

seizure of the Ukraine was an early setback, as it contained much of Soviet grain and

livestock reserves, together with 66 percent of coal, iron, and aluminum production.

Nonetheless, coercion and centralization enabled the Soviets to transform the remain-

ing territories into an integrated economy. As Overy has shown in his book The

Dictators, working conditions were “tough in the extreme,” involving an extension

of the working day, the wide-scale conscription of women and children, the setting

up of makeshift factories, the imposition of draconian penalties for alleged slackers,

and the abolition of holiday entitlements.

Such hardships enabled the production

of weaponry on a formidable scale, far beyond what had been achieved under the

ﬁve-year plans. Yet, as Overy concludes, the Soviets did not merely rely on intimida-

tion. Apart from Allied assistance, consisting primarily of food, raw materials, and

plant machinery as opposed to weapons, the people understood that their labor was

the only way to scratch out an existence, an instinct hardened by the belief that civil-

ians were just as important as soldiers in resisting the German menace. So evolved

the legend of the Great Patriotic War and reawakening a Stalin personality cult, bril-

liantly depicted in Konstantin Simonov’s novel The Living and the Dead.

Signiﬁcantly, the home front which proved most efﬁcient in responding to total

war was that of the UK. Before April 1940, despite some key successes, the economy

still seemed geared to peacetime, with unemployment running at unacceptable levels.

It required the inspired leadership of Churchill and the recognition, painfully obvious

after the fall of France, that the government was on its own in persuading the British

people that tough measures were required if invasion and occupation were to be

resisted. Thus, unlike the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, Britain did not resort to

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coercion, but drew on public assent.

In a liberal democracy, the Daily Telegraph

had declared presciently in April 1939, the “corporal’s rule, brutality and slavery”

were not required “to induce the country to make an effort.” It further helped that,

in the cabinet subcommittee created in spring 1940 by the lord president, Britain

already had a central body with powers to synchronize production. This took on

greater responsibilities the following year when it was fronted by the formidable Sir

John Anderson. As mounting US aid arrived in Lend-Lease, planning was the trend,

anticipating the nationalizations of 1945 and giving rise to the Beveridge Report of

1942, which founded the welfare state. The result was that the UK mobilized its

citizens and resources more extensively than any other belligerent nation. By D-Day,

records Angus Calder, 22 percent of the population was enrolled in one of the armed

services, while 33 percent was engaged in civilian war work, a much higher ﬁgure if

pensioners and part-timers in civil defense are included. Unemployment vanished,

and women ﬁgured prominently in the workplace, although the USSR went further

in their enlistment. Notions that the Nazis resisted female employment, on the

grounds of misplaced gender assumptions, no longer hold good. By 1945 the

“second sex” comprised half of Germany’s workforce and two-thirds of its agricul-

tural labor.

Calder emphasizes that it would be erroneous to believe that the British war

economy was the well-oiled machine it is occasionally portrayed. With the elimination

of unemployment, trade union membership was enhanced, provoking several stop-

pages (technically illegal), although they tended to be short lived; the demands of

wartime also artiﬁcially boosted heavy industries in need of streamlining before 1939;

and outdated management and production processes persisted. Right-wing histori-

ans, most obviously Corelli Barnett, have subsequently suggested that war contrib-

uted to Britain’s decline, saddling post-1945 governments with obsolescent

management and labor practices, antiquated machinery, and an unsustainable welfare

bill. For their part, left-wing historians have questioned whether war did enough to

reshape class structures and institutions, perpetuating inequalities and sustaining divi-

sion.

Whatever the truth, it cannot be denied that Britain’s war economy was an

achievement in itself, out-producing that of Nazi Germany.

The shift towards war production impacted on consumer consumption and her-

alded austerity measures in all belligerent nations, notably in Britain. As Calder has

shown, the paradox was that, through egalitarian rationing and an emphasis on vital

foodstuffs, elements of the working class were better nourished in terms of vitamins

and calories than in the 1930s when Depression brought with it malnourishment.

The same could not be said of the USSR which, in June 1941, initiated rationing

on a calorie basis, with those employed in heavy industry being entitled to more. It

was an unappetizing diet – mainly bread and potatoes. Those uninvolved in war work

had no ofﬁcial ration entitlement, and it is believed signiﬁcant numbers of the old

and sick starved to death. Whereas the German workforce was better supplied, it is

again misleading to assume that shortages only hit in 1943–4. Rationing for essential

goods was introduced as early as 1939, and most people sustained themselves on a

menu little different to that of Russians. At least Germany could call upon the

resources of conquered territories, yet at the cost of the occupied peoples. Worst

affected were east Europeans. In Warsaw, in 1941–2, individuals were entitled to 669

calories a day – Jews to only a third of that; people, in order to survive, resorted to

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begging, charity, and the black market. It was not uncommon to see the vulnerable,

especially children, collapse with hunger.

Within western Europe, too, German

plundering meant going without. As Richard Vinen records, in London the writer

Simone Weil attempted to empathize with her compatriots by living off ofﬁcial French

rations – she died of TB and anorexia.

By 1941, most French in the Vichy

zone were surviving on less than 1,000 calories a day, although peasants squirreled

away supplies with the result that death rates dropped for the war years in some rural

areas. Before long, the food situation was desperate everywhere. In his moving

account of the so-called “hunger winter” of 1943–4, Henri Van der Zee recalls how

the Dutch survived on tulip bulbs and sugar beet.

The greatest impact of shortages was on women. In wartime, women had

traditionally kept the home ﬁres burning, yet the scale of the 1939–45 conﬂict

meant disruption to domestic life on an unprecedented scale. In his interviews with

French women, Rod Kedward discovered the drudgery of everyday lives: the need

to get up at an early hour to queue for scarce foodstuffs, the demands of balancing

a small budget, and the chore of making the best of ersatz commodities. Many

complained, for instance, of how inferior soap made washing-day unbearable.

Interestingly, within concentration camps, it was again women who seemed best

suited to devising survival strategies, something highlighted by the Nazi segregation

of sexes.

The traditional role of women on the home front was further emphasized

by the absence of men, many of whom were either conscripted or held as POWs.

In any case, for Nazi Germany, and for several states within the New Order, notably

Fascist Italy and Vichy France, a woman’s place was naturally in the home, resulting

in pronatalist propaganda and punitive legislation directed against those who sought

careers. The reality was that women had to work, even in Germany; and, as in World

War I, they ended up doing “male” tasks. In Britain, ﬁrst to conscript female labor,

women thus moved from domestic service and textiles into desk jobs, munitions,

civil defense, voluntary groups (such as the Women’s Voluntary Service), and the

Land Army. No European country, outside of the USSR, however, deployed women

as ﬁghting troops.

Gender historians disagree whether the years 1939–45 proved a liberating experi-

ence for women. It is only recently that women’s lives, once dismissed as marginal,

have been collated; for some countries, for instance Greece, that effort is only

now being made; elsewhere, the material is contradictory. Within the world of work,

in 1945 trade unions and employers, both in Britain and liberated Europe, were

more accepting of female labor, yet equal pay and equal rights remained elusive.

Within political life, women were at long last given the vote in France and Italy, in

recognition of their contribution to resistance, although there remained formidable

cultural and institutional obstacles to overcome. Within domestic life, the postwar

years eventually brought with them in western Europe a new culture of labor-saving

devices and fashion accessories, but these often reinforced traditional stereotypes.

And within sexual relations, there was some relaxation of existing mores. Apart

from the Freudian notion that war acts as an aphrodisiac, the bombing of civilians

was a constant reminder of mortality – an injunction to enjoy life while one could,

something made easier by the blackouts which, as Tom Driberg’s memoirs Ruling

Passions reveal, facilitated both heterosexual and homosexual behavior. Yet the rise

in divorce rates, high among American servicemen who had married European

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brides, a hike in the numbers of illegitimate children, and the spread of venereal

disease, common to many home fronts, prompted a moral backlash in which women

were singled out for condemnation. Liberation, on any meaningful scale, would not

happen until later in the century.

Collaboration

In uncovering the lives of women during wartime, historians have increasingly

focused on la collaboration horizontale, that is sleeping with the enemy, a phenome-

non highlighted at the Liberation when French women suspected of sexual relations

with Germans were subjected to mob justice: around 10,000 had their heads shaved

and were paraded naked, sometimes with swastikas daubed on their breasts.

Initially,

however, historians of collaboration were preoccupied with the high politics

of collaboration d’état, that is the relationships between Berlin and the subjugated

countries, although it should not be overlooked that, following its invasion of the

Baltic states, the communist puppet regimes colluded with their maker, in the shape

of the USSR. As implied by the geopolitics of Hitler’s Europe, these relationships

varied from the relative freedoms permitted to the Aryan peoples of northern

Europe, through the military administration placed on strategic areas such as Belgium,

to the puppet regimes in the Balkans, to end with the repressive control exerted

upon Poland and Slav territories. Race, strategic importance, and economic value,

remarks Burleigh, thus determined the extent to which Berlin involved itself in the

internal affairs of its possessions. Ultimately, Hitler had no intention of conceding

anything worthwhile, although this did not deter subjected states from seeking

collaboration. In the case of Vichy France – unique in Nazi Europe in that it was

left unoccupied until November 1942 – the French fell over themselves to cooperate.

As Robert Paxton famously suggested, the regime sought to avoid the fate of Poland,

yet ended up “Polandizing” itself by facilitating the deportation of Jews, workers,

and minorities.

Beyond the high politics of collaboration, historians have focused on the collabo-

rationism of individuals ideologically committed to Hitler’s vision, although to

believe that there is a marked division between the collaborators of puppet govern-

ments and the collaborationists of pro-fascist parties, as is sometimes implied, is mis-

leading.

What is clear is that these Nazi sympathizers largely gravitated from the

fascist movements of the 1930s: Léon Degrelle’s Rexists in Belgium, Anton Mussert’s

National Socialistische Beweging in Holland, Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling in Norway,

Doriot’s Parti Populaire Français, and Ferenc Szálasy’s Arrow Cross (Nyilas) in

Hungary. Ideologues, failed hommes de lettres, opportunists, criminals, and opportun-

ists – they all sought to feather their own nests. Yet if fascist sympathizers thought

that German victory would open the way to power, they were mistaken. At root,

Berlin wanted compliant leaders who would not disrupt the war effort; men such as

Admiral Horthy in Hungary, General Antonescu in Romania, and Pétain in France.

Hitler knew full well, to use Paxton’s phrase, that “playing second ﬁddle” ﬁtted

“badly with fascists’ extravagant claims to transform their peoples and redirect

history.”

To allow Quisling and others to occupy real positions of authority was

thus to invite a challenge to Nazi hegemony; and, on occasion, as with the Iron

Guard in Romania, Berlin welcomed the suppression of extremists. Perhaps only in

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Croatia, where the Ustasha ran amok, murdering its many ethnic enemies, did

Germany fail to maintain tight discipline. Otherwise it was the task of Nazi authori-

ties to play a game of “divide and rule” among collaborationists and, to use Laval’s

phrase, “what a lot of authorities” there were, a deliberate strategy to dissipate yet

further the energies of occupied states. In this regard, it helped that the collabora-

tionists themselves were at sixes and sevens. Prewar jealousies and ideological rivalries

persisted during occupation. The only contribution Hitler really valued from collabo-

rationists was their ability to recruit volunteers to ﬁght on the eastern front, for

instance the French Légion des Volontaires contre le Bolschevisme. Earlier, at the time

of Operation Barbarossa, he had welcomed the support of those Ukrainians and

Cossacks, victims of Soviet collectivization, who heralded the Nazis as liberators.

Notwithstanding the example of the Ukraine and those eastern states such as

Hungary and Romania where the far right retained something of its prewar popular-

ity, in western Europe, where the fascists had struggled to make much headway in

the 1930s, a lack of popular appeal extended into occupation. In France, the collabo-

rationist groupings never amassed more than 150,000 supporters (chieﬂy young,

urban, middle-class males), whereas in Norway, says Hans F. Dahl, Quisling’s

party could not meet its own frugal membership targets.

This unpopularity is

entirely understandable. As Burleigh writes, “German occupation was a rude intru-

sion into the lives of the peoples affected, exposing all of them to alien rule, and

some to deportation, terror and mass murder. Very, very few people wanted the

Germans there, regardless of how they conducted themselves.”

It naturally followed

that people had little time for the Nazis’ satraps. As Mark Wheeler writes of the

Balkans, “For the bulk of Slavs, Slovenes and Montenegrins, and eventually for the

Croats and Macedonians” the Axis powers and their puppet regimes had “nothing

positive to offer.”

It was not necessary to be ideologically committed to the New Order in order to

engage in collaboration broadly deﬁned. As Gerhard Hirschfeld reﬂects, “Whenever

an army enters another country there is cooperation and a certain degree of frater-

nization between the occupied population and the occupier.”

The nature of that

collaboration was commonly deﬁned by the spheres of activity in which people were

engaged. For example, civil servants, who kept the wheels of local government

turning, often discovered themselves working alongside the occupier. In so doing,

several convinced themselves that they were pursuing – to borrow the Belgian phrase

– la politique du moindre mal, a policy of doing the least harm. It proved increasingly

hard to justify this position when the Holocaust required ofﬁcials to hand over details

of Jews and, on occasion, participate in the round-ups. After the war, bureaucrats

put on trial for assisting genocide rehearsed a familiar defense: they were merely fol-

lowing orders; they knew little of the fate that awaited deportees; and, in their posi-

tions of authority, they disrupted the transportation process. Shameful was the way

in which the Nazis established the Judenräte, councils of prominent Jewish leaders

entrusted with caring for the welfare of fellow Jews destined for the camps. There

was much debate, both at the time and after, as to whether such prominenti, caught

in the maw of what might be called “administrative collaboration,” had truly collabo-

rated.

Others who had to justify their consciences included “economic” collabora-

tors, especially Belgian, French, and Dutch industrial concerns obliged to contribute

to the German war economy. Some cooperated all too willingly (e.g., Renault),

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whereas others (Rhône-Poulenc and Pechiney) objected that they had domestic

markets to fulﬁll. Those demands were met by another type of “economic collabora-

tor,” the black-market racketeer who was frequently supplied by the Germans keen

to exploit material shortages for their own ends. It was the Germans, too, who

encouraged “cultural” collaborators – artists, writers, and musicians – who had to

balance their commitment to writing and performance with the circumstances of

occupation. Apart from those who nailed their colors to the Nazi mast, it was an

impossible balancing act to maintain; for instance, the pro-Pétain but anti-Nazi singer

Maurice Chevalier was appalled when a concert he gave for POWs was appropriated

by collaborationists. As Julian Jackson writes, “The moral was that the only way to

avoid compromising oneself was to abstain from any public gesture.”

Although not

in the spotlight, all the peoples of occupied Europe had to determine their behavior

in respect of the occupier, the danger being that the slightest fraternization might

lead to allegations of collaboration. As David Littlejohn suggests, “collaboration”

ranged from volunteering for the SS to buying a postcard of Pétain.

Resistance

The history of resistance is likewise riddled with ambiguity, something historians were

initially reluctant to acknowledge for fear of denting the work of postwar reconstruc-

tion, which did not invite close examination of everyday behavior. Within Germany,

both the FDR and the GDR made much of resistance to Hitlerism as the regimes

sought to construct their competing political and economic systems. A similar process

occurred elsewhere, notably in Italy and France, with the result that the history of

resistance was often written in an uncritical manner, as an account of institutions

which gallantly deﬁed the occupier.

Only with the passing of time have more

probing questions surfaced, including one obvious one: what was resistance?

In the simplest sense, as Michel wrote, it was a rejection of military defeat, a rejec-

tion of the occupier, but also a refutation of whatever administrative apparatus the

Germans had erected. In those parts of the Greater Reich comprising large quantities

of ethnic Germans – Austria, Sudetenland, Memelland, and Eupen-Malmédy –

Bernard Kroener and others have shown that civilians did not view themselves as

under subjugation, with the result that resistance was slow to evolve.

In those Aryan

territories of northern Europe, rejection of Quisling and others was not difﬁcult, but

the relative freedoms permitted by the occupier diluted early attempts at protest.

Interesting was the case of Vichy. In northern occupied France there was an immedi-

ate distaste for the Germans, although the military presence of the Wehrmacht

impeded resistance. Within the southern unoccupied zone people had no difﬁculty

in defying defeat and the armistice, but found it difﬁcult to renounce Pétain. After

the shock of military collapse and the exode, the marshal emerged as a symbol of

security, an image enhanced by his reputation as one of the most humane generals

of World War I. The fact that earlier in his career he had kept his reactionary political

views to himself also meant people could read into him whatever they chose. As

Kedward ﬁrst stated, becoming a resister in France thus meant overcoming a loyalty

to Pétain, who was often mistakenly credited with secretly working for liberation.

Less ambiguity surrounded resistance in those countries immediately subject to the

jackboot and, in the case of Poland, both Nazi and Soviet exploitation. Even before

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the Polish campaign had ended, partisan groups were forming, among them the

Service for the Victory of Poland, which in early 1940 became part of the under-

ground army, the Union for Armed Struggle, which liaised closely with Sikorski’s

government-in-exile in London.

In asking “what was resistance?” historians have uncovered three factors which

determined its evolution: time, place, and tradition. As can be deduced from above,

resistance was conditioned by where one lived and the speed with which the Nazis

let slip the mask of civilization. Given these variables, it is small wonder that protest

quickly developed in Poland, although it was hampered by Nazi brutality. In Denmark,

resistance dawdled. The maintenance of national institutions and the relatively light

touch of the occupier enabled people to wait on events. Increasingly, however,

Germany reneged on earlier guarantees, conscripting workers and requisitioning

foodstuffs. There was further disgust at Nazi plundering of the economy, an aware-

ness, fueled by the BBC overseas broadcasts and agents belonging to the Special

Operations Executive (SOE), that Germany was losing the war, and a repugnance at

the rounding up of Jews. Resistance escalated in 1943, effectively forcing the Nazis

to take full control.

To the variables of time and place may be added tradition. Resistance was con-

centrated in countries possessing a heritage of protest, such as Poland, which had

been regularly partitioned by the great powers. “Poles had been in the Resistance

since 1772,” writes Michael Foot.

In Yugoslavia, too, memories of foreign interven-

tion enhanced dissidence. In 1940–1 two groups appeared: the C

etniks, the rump of

the army and police force, under Milhailovi´c, which sought a Serbian-dominated

Yugoslavia under a restored monarchy, and who were not ashamed to do business

with the Germans; and the Partisans (essentially the communists) under Josip Tito,

who wanted revolution. As Wheeler observes, the result was that Yugoslavia became

the location of Europe’s “greatest resistance struggle,” as C

etniks and Partisans

fought Germans, the puppet regimes set up in 1941, and one another.

Other areas

of Europe, lacking legacies of deﬁance, proved less fertile ground, an obvious example

being Germany itself, where a strong tradition of conformity prevailed, aided by the

ruthlessness of the Nazi system which since 1933 had punished the slightest dissent.

Finally, any discussion of traditions of protest must not neglect localities. In his pio-

neering study of France, Rod Kedward uncovered how, in the Protestant Cévennes,

partisans drew inspiration from the dissidence of seventeenth-century Huguenot

protests.

And, in Holland, one of the ﬁrst resistance papers was signiﬁcantly entitled

Action of the Gueux, recalling the resistance of sixteenth-century Calvinist sea-beggars

to the Spanish occupation of the Netherlands.

It is Kedward, too, who illustrated the diverse forms of resistance behavior. The

most dramatic was, of course, military action. As noted, this was noticeable in coun-

tries with traditions of violent protest – Poland (scene of the 1944 Warsaw uprising),

Yugoslavia, and Greece – and was less common in western Europe, at least in the

early stages of the war, partly because German reprisals after the shooting of military

personnel were ferocious. The involvement of communist parties in resistance further

augmented the military dimensions, as did growing SOE operations. Beyond military

resistance, there was industrial action. In the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, miners in 1941

undertook a gallant protest; in Denmark, an early sign of growing unease was an

intensiﬁcation of stoppages in 1942–3; in Turin and Milan, in March 1943,

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widespread strikes heralded the imminent collapse of the fascist state; and in Belgium,

industrial life was peppered with go-slows. Belgium was home to another important

type of resistance, the réseaux, which transferred intelligence information to London

and aided the escape of Allied airmen shot down over Europe. Several hundreds of

these lines existed, and secrecy was paramount as they could be easily disrupted by

inﬁltrators. Networks were a further means of distributing clandestine tracts and

newspapers. Such information was critical given Nazi censorship of the media. There

were up to 300 different Norwegian resistance papers, many of which only lasted a

few issues; a similar number existed in Belgium; in Poland, there may have been

1,400. Each major French organization had its own journal, some of which gravitated

into dailies after the Liberation, for instance Combat, whose circulation rose from

40,000 in 1941 to 400,000 in 1944. To be caught reading such a newspaper during

wartime could entail a stiff penalty, pointing to a category of resistance once thought

inconsequential, that of “passive” resistance. This included such things as listening

to the BBC, chalking V signs on the wall, giving wrong directions to German soldiers

(a specialty in Amsterdam), and defacing notices, for instance scratching out letters

in the sign Raucher (Smoking) in railway carriages to read Rache (revenge). Such

actions were “pinpricks,” writes Ralph White, yet they agitated the Germans.

For

some historians, the “dignity” with which Jews and others faced deportation was an

additional form of “passive” or “spiritual” resistance – a refusal to relinquish beliefs

and traditions when confronted with the inhumanity of Nazism. The term “spiritual

resistance” has also been applied to those Christians who struggled with their con-

sciences when reconciling their hostility to Nazism with their duty to “render unto

Caesar” and thus obey the state. In the event, Christians were evident in all types of

resistance, although it could not be said that Catholics received clear guidance from

their spiritual leader, Pius XII.

Another question has preoccupied historians: who were the resisters? Apart from

such ﬁgures as Tito and General de Gaulle, they were mainly ordinary civilians caught

up in traumatic events, forced to undertake roles they would previously never have

considered. Because of this, and because of the need to retain anonymity, it is virtu-

ally impossible to establish the numbers of resisters in any one country: 400,000 is

the ﬁgure suggested for France, but this is guesswork. A series of other characteriza-

tions can be hazarded. First, resistance tended to grow out of existing networks of

friends and colleagues. In Norway, veterans’ associations, riﬂe clubs, and youth

groups were especially crucial. Thanks to the attentions of the Gestapo, resistance

cells in Germany were by necessity closely knit, for example the brief-lived Weiße Rose

(White Rose) group, comprising students and academics from the University of

Munich, which broadcast news of the exterminations. Second, communists were

prominent although, as Tony Judt says, the timing of their entry into resistance

depended on relationships with the USSR.

Within Greece and Yugoslavia commu-

nists paid little heed to Moscow and were quick to agitate; in France, the party slav-

ishly followed Stalin’s line and was held back by the Nazi–Soviet pact, though many

resisted on an individual basis; and in Italy the party, exiled since Mussolini’s coming

to power in 1922, did not truly mobilize until the Duce’s fall in 1943. Yet because

of their organizational skills, the communists often appeared the best prepared, and

their involvement frequently masked the sizable contribution of other groups. Third,

historians have gradually uncovered the role of women who, as Perry Wilson observes

the home fronts 467

in the case of Italy, were hesitant to come forward “to claim the diplomas and medals

later awarded to partisans.”

Because of the absence of men in society, women could

go about their business unnoticed. It further helped that, for some time, the Germans

believed that women were naturally submissive and unlikely to act politically. While

individuals in charge of resistance cells – for instance, Lucie Aubrac in France – were

exceptional, it is now acknowledged that women generally made a signiﬁcant contri-

bution to resistance. Wilson records how in Italy women ferried propaganda, typed

clandestine papers, collected clothes for partisans, and fronted food protests, a tradi-

tional form of discontent.

Nowhere in Europe was resistance united. Beyond the expulsion of the occupier,

resisters were ﬁghting for different ideological goals. Everywhere there was resent-

ment at the ways in which communists attempted to dominate, often using resistance

as an opportunity to eliminate their enemies. This gave rise to particular tensions in

Greece, where internecine struggles and the wider context of the Cold War resulted

in a bitter civil war which endured from 1946 until 1949. Personal rivalries further

intruded. Resistance leaders often built up spheres of inﬂuence which they were

reluctant to abandon, and they resented those who joined late in the day. Regionally,

too, resistance was diverse. Much military activity was concentrated in mountainous

areas where there was cover to engage in sabotage. It was the scrubland in France

which, of course, provided the name for the maquis, comprising men avoiding com-

pulsory work service in Germany. Organizationally, resistance movements frequently

intruded on one another – within Norway, for instance, Milorg supposedly dealt with

military matters and Silorg with civilian ones, yet the two often overlapped. Historians

have been quick to criticize the splits within the resistance yet, as Kedward said, it is

difﬁcult to see how they could have functioned differently – the need for secrecy

militated against there being single movements. Through counter-intelligences the

Nazis devastated the Dutch networks in early 1944, for instance. That said, at least

in France, resistance eventually achieved a remarkable degree of unity, something

accomplished by de Gaulle and his emissaries to metropolitan territory, crucially Jean

Moulin.

Because of these divisions, historians have questioned the overall contribution of

resisters. In military terms, partisan units were more of a nuisance to the Germans

than anything else, and tended only to be inﬂuential in liberating particular areas. In

eastern and western Europe the Allies thought in conventional military terms and

were reluctant to trust underground groups whose logistical strength and depend-

ability were uncertain. It was perhaps only in Yugoslavia that Tito’s supporters –

maybe 200,000 strong in 1944 – caused the Germans real problems. However, this

should not distort the wider picture. Historians agree that resistance maintained

morale and gave people hope. It also bestowed a dignity on certain countries, most

obviously France and Italy, enabling them to rejoin the war on the Allied side. They

were thus able to play a role in the ﬁnal defeat of Nazism and in the rebuilding of

Europe. It is especially noticeable that leading proponents of European integration

were often resistance veterans, several emanating from Catholic movements which

evolved into Christian Democratic parties.

Historians stress that these achievements are all the more astonishing when it is

recalled that most partisans originated from ordinary backgrounds, and it would be

comforting to write the overall history of the home fronts as one of an emphatic