CHAPTER 13
CONSCRIPTED labourers, prisoners of war, Jews, communists and gipsies were all minority groups. Even together they were still a minority of the peoples who came under German rule. The great majority stayed where they were or returned to their homes after having been temporarily scattered by the German advances. Some experienced life in a battle zone and in an army rear area; most of them a much longer spell under some form of occupational régime while the great bulk of Germany’s front-line fighting forces was engaged on Russian soil. Only in the east, and to a lesser degree in Italy, did civilian populations live through protracted fighting.
The first shock left little room for anything except the sheer facts of defeat and abandonment. Those in the path of the Blitzkrieg were left dazed as the Germans swept away the familiar things of daily life from goods and houses to the governments and officials to whom a settled people is wont to turn for guidance or instruction in a crisis. Communities were atomized. The individual’s first thought was to find his family, recover his belongings and get himself a job and a livelihood. The job became all important, first as a means for securing the necessities of life in a strange world and later in order to qualify for exemption from forced labour; a job meant also a renewal of contact with familiar routines, an assurance that some things remained the same. But jobs were scarce and in the immediate wake of defeat there was widespread unemployment. Many factories were reduced to a ten-hour week and earnings sagged until labour began to be required again for reconstruction and the occupiers’ needs (building airfields, for example). Some employers paid reduced wages to help and keep their workers during temporary stoppages caused by lack of materials or power, but poverty spread alarmingly as the gap between earnings and prices widened at both ends and large quantities of food, clothing and other necessities disappeared into expensive black markets. Poverty caused neglect of children, social divisions and crime. The towns became resentful of the comparatively better-fed countryside; the law-abiding resented the profits made by black marketeers who, since they sold mostly to Germans, were beyond the reach of the law; the poor looked with rising anger at the advantages of the rich (in Paris, to take an extreme case, the six most famous restaurants were exempt from all restrictions until 1943). Crimes such as theft, whether committed by adults or juveniles, multiplied and became respectable; in the Netherlands the crime rate almost trebled; stealing was both a symptom of poverty and a form of protest. Scruples of all kinds wilted in the face of need, and the hostility of the have-nots against the haves quickened. Prostitution increased by as much as tenfold as a result of financial hardship and the break-up of family life; women with no previous police records traded themselves to German soldiers in spite of the hostility which their conduct provoked among their more forbearing compatriots.
As a general rule everybody over fifteen had to have an identity card, observe a curfew and expect to have his movements restricted. The police state arrived on the heels of the German army. Jews had to produce baptismal certificates of grandparents or lose their citizenship. Few people possessed such documents but a number were forged by Christian clergymen. Freedom of movement was curtailed by the virtual elimination of private transport and severe limitations on public transport. Bicycle-taxis appeared in towns. Mail was censored and in some cases prohibited: between the zones of France the only kind of mail allowed was printed postcards with simple messages of the ‘we are well/ill…’ type, from which the sender could choose one by crossing out the rest. Newspapers either became pro-German and sparse of news or disappeared; about half of the national and local press ceased publication and the circulation of the survivors dropped sharply. Radio programmes continued under German control. The Germans offered good pay to well-known broadcasters, kept favourite programmes on the air and tried to use radio to propagate their views, but the nature of radio prevented them from securing a monopoly, and although they penalized listeners to enemy broadcasts they could not proscribe transmissions from neutral Switzerland, whose broadcasts became an important item in preserving for the conquered a window on the world. But life narrowed and this spiritual retrenchment was reflected in swelling attendances at cinemas and sporting events – even when, later, the Resistance admonished people to stay away. It also threw families together and sharpened the demand for books, including serious books about national history and culture.
Immediately after the end of the fighting there was a marked difference between those parts of a country which had seen the war at first hand in the form either of enemy armies or of refugees, and other parts which had learned of it by hearsay. Soon, however, all parts faced the same question: attitudes to the victors; to which was added the secondary question of attitudes to collaborators, which were often more bitterly intense. As people recovered they tended to divide into two groups, those who on the whole accepted the new world in which they had woken up again and those who felt too angry or too ashamed to do so. Although ultimately the Germans earned widespread hate, at first their coming raised more questioning than clear-cut emotions. The behaviour of the occupying forces in the west was for the most part correct and even affable and it was some time before their habit of strolling around singly in villages and towns was replaced by more circumspect promenading in pairs or groups and the abandonment of attempts at social intercourse with the natives; even where there was from the beginning a wall of silence, there was also that mutual respect which has been most tellingly portrayed in Vercors’ Le silence de la mer. Some countries had an anti-German tradition but others – Greece, for example, which was anti-Italian but not initially anti-German – had not. The Germans were given the benefit of the doubt. Attitudes crystallized slowly in societies which had been atomized and people were thrown back on local or personal motives in deciding what to think and how to conduct themselves. There was something of a psychological vacuum in which the Germans had, and lost, their chances. There was no overall pattern. In a country like France, where the Third Republic had failed to command wide enough allegiance, the new order benefited at the start from adventitious aids such as the countervailing respect for Pétain (especially in the lower reaches of the social scale), an intensification of anti-British feelings among the bourgeoisie and a reinforcement of anti-radicalism. But these were not inherently pro-German feelings. They only gave a conditioned blessing to the German presence and perpetuated for a while after the armistice the confusion created by war. Only in the east did it swiftly become clear that the German occupation was a threat to the entire population and that the choice lay between resistance and extermination.
In most places there was a case for collaboration, for lying low for the time being. Moreover the disruptions of war and the contradictions of the occupation made it difficult for ordinary people to get a lead from their traditional mentors. In Belgium the king had declared himself a prisoner while his government had fled to London to continue the fight. In Denmark the king and government were undisguisedly anti-German. The king ignored German salutations on his daily rides through his capital, sent telegrams of sympathy to police wounded in a fight in which 300 Danish Nazis were arrested, gave an audience to a well-known historian just before he was arrested for spreading anti-German propaganda, and eventually threatened to abdicate if anti-semitic legislation were introduced, but he and his government also officially discouraged anti-German activities and recommended a policy of acquiescence for a considerable time.
Two things in particular resolved this ambivalence: the course of the war and the behaviour of the Germans. A numb acceptance of Germany’s victories sprang not only from the shock of defeat but also from the conviction that defeat was complete and final. Men like de Gaulle who never accepted defeat at any moment were rare and had the logic of events against them. But even before the end of 1940 doubt began to spread. The failure of the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain and the British initiative in Africa at the end of the year showed that the war was not over. The entry of the Russians and then the Americans into the war in 1941 showed that the Germans were going to lose it. These events became well-known throughout occupied Europe through broadcasting and a clandestine press which became amazingly extensive. One of the most important facts about occupied Europe was that people in it knew what was going on. This knowledge was due to radio which prevented Europe from being totally cut off. The BBC’s news services were widely heard and believed; Swiss radio, with its built-in reputation for neutral impartiality, played a similar role; communists, who took after June 1941 an exceptionally important part in Resistance, listened to broadcasts from the USSR, which possessed the most powerful transmitter in the world and the longest experience in broadcasting propaganda; governments-in-exile in London reached their compatriots with news and exhortation and gave them a factual and legal basis for opposing the Germans and their satellite regimes.
Foreign broadcasts nourished indigenous clandestine newspapers. The clandestine press became an industry of great potency in forming the will to resist. In Belgium about 12,000 persons came to be engaged in it and published 300 papers; in France underground presses produced books in fine editions as well as over 1,000 papers and pamphlets (this figure included regional editions of the same paper); in Denmark the number of papers published rose from 222 in the whole of 1943 to 315 in the first four months of 1945 and by the end of 1944 over 10 million copies of these papers and pamphlets had been printed and distributed; in the Netherlands some papers appeared three times a week after the confiscation of radio sets in 1943 and the five principal left-wing papers attained a combined circulation of 450,000. The distribution of this quantity of material was a well-organized and yet highly risky business, handled by members of small local groups who took their lives in their hands with every sheet which they delivered to a neighbour. These groups and their newspapers recall the secret societies which carried on the revolution in France underground after the restoration of the ancien régime in 1814. Through their efforts the underground in Europe was in general better informed about the war than the regular combatants were about the underground. The flow of information was an essential factor in rebuilding the societies which had been smitten by the German victories and in stimulating opposition to a no longer invincible victor. It restored to the defeated a sense of coherence and a sense of purpose, and the clandestine press which raised the morale of Resisters likewise demoralized an enemy who, having thought that he had finished off the opposition, was presented with evidence of its persistence and even began to exaggerate it. The activities of the clandestine press led to other forms of resistance, as the confidence of these groups expanded and with their confidence their aims. Many active Resisters served an apprenticeship by helping to run a clandestine paper.
The German contribution to anti-Germanism was no less substantial. The natural nationalist opposition to the presence of Germans was swollen by opposition to their behaviour. Besides being aliens, they showed themselves inhumane: Jews were segregated, deported and killed – the roundup of Jews in the Vélodrome d’Hiver shocked Parisian opinion even more than the taking of hostages; human rights and freedoms were trampled on far beyond the necessities of war and occupation; the new rulers pillaged the material resources of the defeated, failed to provide them with enough food and conscripted them for labour in appalling conditions; prisoners of war did not come back; all in all the non-German individual was degraded body and soul. This inhumanity converted the resentment of the subject populations into hatred – which in Norway was given an edge of a very special kind, for in the First World War Norwegians had looked after German children, and they were filled with disgust at the thought that the invading armies of 1940 probably contained some of these very children grown to be violators of the charity shown to them twenty-five years earlier. Hatred of the Germans fostered various forms of opposition such as networks for helping fugitive allied servicemen who had been shot down or had escaped from prison camps; the collection and forwarding of military intelligence; the clandestine press; industrial sabotage, go-slows and strikes; and eventually the beginnings of organized and active armed resistance.
But the Germans went even further. Confronted with this opposition they took the iron fist right out of its velvet glove and began to use terror as a principal means of government. Hostages were taken and shot, concentration camps established, stunning reprisals exacted and picked areas devastated. Although the details varied in practice from country to country the overall pattern was uniform because it reflected not individual initiative or local eccentricity but a policy devised and commanded at the highest level in the German state, the Nazi Party and the armed services. Thus in December 1941 Keitel, as Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, issued the Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) order which was designed to strike fear into whole populations. Hitler, he said, was interested in no penalty except death; no other deterrent seemed to him effective; even a sentence of hard labour for life struck him as a sign of weakness. Consequently the Nacht und Nebel order decreed that in cases where the death penalty was unlikely to be imposed by a court in an occupied country, offences against the Reich were to be visited with a substitute death. The offender was to be secretly spirited away to the Reich without trial, leaving friends and relations to tremble in suspense for his fate – and theirs.
The distinction between guilt and innocence had already been virtually abolished, for as early as September 1941 Keitel had instructed commanders on all fronts to ascribe all acts of resistance to communists and to execute batches of so-called communists for every German soldier killed: fifty to a hundred communists was the number recommended. A few weeks later fifty hostages were executed in France as a reprisal for the death of a German officer, and a further fifty a few days later when another officer was killed; the executions would have been twice as many but for strenuous intervention by Vichy. By the end of the war about 30,000 French hostages had been shot and the toll was comparable all over occupied Europe. In the Netherlands Seyss-Inquart revealed in May 1942 that 480 prominent Dutch personages were being held and that many had already been shot in retaliation for breaches of public order; on another occasion the village of Putten was burned down and all its males deported (very few ever returned) after a German motorcar had been attacked in the neighbourhood and one German wounded. In Poland a tally was established of one hundred Resisters to be killed for the death of every one German, and at Palmiry, a village near Warsaw, several thousand deaths were in fact exacted in revenge for a single attack. At Televaag in Norway 300 houses were burned down, 76 persons deported and a further 260 interned in April 1942 in an attempt to intimidate and quell Norwegian resistance. The first case of devastation and mass executions in Italy occurred at Boves in Piedmont in September 1943, while in Rome 330 people picked at random were executed in March 1944 after thirty-two German soldiers had been killed by a bomb. At Oradour-sur-Glane, selected by a mistake instead of a place of the same name a few kilometres away, only ten persons out of a population of 652 survived the calculated fury of the Germans, the men being shot and the women and children being locked into the church and burned to death. This last enormity occurred in July 1944.
The most famous of these razzias befell the village of Lidiče in Czechoslovakia where the entire population was killed or sent to concentration camps with a horrifying sort of nonchalance in revenge for the assassination of Heydrich. At the end of 1941 two men from the Czechoslovak army in England, one a Czech and the other a Slovak, had arrived by parachute, with British assistance, in order to do this deed, which was undertaken in the belief that Heydrich and his police chief, Karl Hans’ Frank, were planning to destroy the entire Czech people. It was achieved in the following May when the two executioners threw a bomb into Heydrich’s open car. He took a week to die. About 1,500 Czechs were immediately killed, including the executioners and another 120 members of the Resistance who had escaped into a church. In addition, 3,000 Jews were removed from the concentration camp at Terezin (Theresienstadt) and sent to Poland to be killed. But this was not the end. A few days after Heydrich’s death, Lidiče, apparently selected at random, was sealed off by the S D. That day nothing much happened, although a woman and a small boy were shot and killed for trying to escape. The next day the entire male population over sixteen years of age was shot in batches – 172 of them in a leisurely massacre which took ten hours; the women were sent to Ravensbrueck concentration camp and the children to a different camp; pregnant women were first allowed to give birth to their children in hospital and then joined their friends in Ravensbrueck, their babies having been killed. Lidiče itself was razed to the ground. Lezaky, another small village near Prague, was treated in the same way a few days later. These savage reprisals were supplemented by some 10,000 arrests. The Czech composer Martinů, who had fled from Paris to the United States in 1940, composed an orchestral ‘Memorial to Lidiče’.
As things got worse for the Germans, so did their behaviour. In July 1944 Hitler ordered all saboteurs to be executed on the spot and all suspects to be handed over to the SD (which was worse). This decree, called the Kugelerlass or Bullet Decree, was a form of words for transferring wide categories of prisoners to the SD for execution. It did not apply to British or American combatants unless they were commandos (in which case they were already covered by the Commando Order of 1942 requiring them to be summarily slaughtered to the last man, even if they surrendered). The Kugelerlass was extended two months after its promulgation to prisoners under sentence and to those whose cases were still pending. Keitel explained that there was to be no compunction about innocent persons who might accidentally get killed in the course of the measures needed to eliminate what he called dissidents. The response to these foul and frantic measures was active armed resistance on a militarily significant scale and, complementarily, a dwindling of the numbers of collaborators and attentistes as the complicity involved in siding with the Germans or even doing nothing amounted to condoning the unforgivable.
Such were the cumulative sources of Resistance. The word itself did not make its appearance at once. In France it does not seem to have been in general use before 1943, although Gaullism had by that time become a well-known term. The phenomenon of Resistance, however, appeared immediately after defeat, if only in modest, disconnected and often unsuccessful forms, spontaneous expressions of spirit by disbanded officers and men of the fighting forces which the Germans were usually able to master without much difficulty. Most people remained, then and for some time thereafter, very vague about their neighbours’ activities and about Resistance movements, and also ignorant (as they were meant to be) about the separate intelligence and escapers’ networks. People heard that something was going on without knowing what it was. The development of Resistance was to some extent dependent on growing awareness of its existence and endorsement of its aims and methods, and this interacting process took time. It was not until the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker felt moved to join active Resistance groups that there could be active Resistance groups for them to join. The process was one of awareness leading to complicity, and complicity leading to activity. Movements grew as householders sheltered Resisters, fed them, lent rooms for radio transmissions, failed to report raids on their farms by gangs who might be Resisters (though sometimes they were not), and so gradually became more deeply and sometimes more actively involved.
In point of time the earliest forms of opposition were intelligence networks which had in some cases been formed before the war began – in Czechoslovakia, for instance, in 1938. Some of these became so extensive that they were able to shadow and report on the entirety of the official administrative machine. Besides spying on German activities and installations they recruited their own agents and helped agents who arrived from outside (mostly by parachute). Belgium, partly because of its proximity to England, was specially active in this work, providing some 5,000 agents, supported by another 13,000 helpers. Czechoslovakia, to which aircraft from England could safely make the return flight only on moonless nights, was less closely linked but provided valuable information both to Great Britain and, before Barbarossa, to the Russians, to whom it supplied detailed warnings of the impending German attack, including the names of the airfields which the Luftwaffe intended to attack; Czech Intelligence also unmasked a German sabotage group working beyond the Urals. In Poland an underground organization operated throughout the country, reporting on German troop movements, following the Germans as far as the Volga and the Caucasus and dispatching in 1942–4 some 300 reports to the west by radio or by courier via Hungary, Sweden and Switzerland. In Greece, to take a further example from another quarter, 1,072 agents – Greek, British, American and Polish – were dropped during 1941–4 and stayed in the country for varying lengths of time, usually a few months.
Similar to the intelligence networks were the escape routes along which escaped prisoners or airmen who had been shot down (and who, especially in England in 1940, were urgently needed back with their units) or Europeans seeking a way to re-enter the fight by getting to England were passed from hand to hand, sometimes by men and women who had performed the same service in the First World War or by their children. These routes were often long and intricate, running from Belgium or northern France or Germany itself through Switzerland and unoccupied France to Spain, Portugal or Africa; or from Poland through Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Italy; or northwards to Sweden. In Belgium alone some thirty-five groups were engaged in this work at one time or another, employing 10,000 persons and using their own teleprinter communications.
These were examples of the more obviously useful services which Resisters could render. They were of their nature clandestine. But Resistance was also effective in more open, if less concrete, ways. People came to realize that it was worth showing how they felt, and that strong feelings did not have to find vent in such dangerous activities as spying or such violent ones as guerrilla warfare. They used symbols and badges, like the red, white and blue knitted caps with which Danish students paraded their affinity with the RAF; or the Dutch habit of raising their hats when the traffic lights turned to the symbolic orange colour; or the Parisian students’ mimicry of Germans, especially German airmen whose dress they copied by sporting their biros in the way that the Luftwaffe wore daggers. They even used silence, abruptly terminating all conversation if a German entered a shop or, again in Paris, rising and leaving university lectures if Germans came in to attend them. (The Germans closed the Sorbonne after a demonstration at the tomb of the unknown soldier at the Arc de Triomphe in November 1940.) Anti-German leaflets were slipped into licensed newspapers before distribution, a simple way of getting a large circulation. University laboratories were used to make bombs for the Resistance. Post-office workers intercepted denunciatory letters addressed to the SD by opening all SD mail and significantly impeded the activities of the S D which depended on a network of correspondents – amounting in Paris alone to eight to ten thousand persons. Police went into the business of forging false identity papers, a contribution which they were specially equipped to make owing to their familiarity with the genuine articles and their possession of genuine official stamps. Administrators turned their talents to losing dossiers and protracting discussions with the occupiers. A peculiar form of patriotic self-denial practised in France was hoarding instead of spending coins containing nickel and bronze in order to deny the metals to the Germans; this ingenious tactic not only created an embarrassing shortage of small change but also represented a considerable sacrifice by the poor, who had to go without the things which their coins could have bought.
From these non-violent declarations of hostility Resisters passed to equally non-violent but more positive protests, such as the resignation of the Norwegian bishops and nearly all the judges of the Norwegian High Court and the almost unanimous refusal of Norwegian teachers to sign an undertaking to teach in accordance with Quisling’s party line, a protest which was backed up by hundreds of thousands of signed letters from parents. But moral resistance of this kind was possible only in countries where the Germans were, at least comparatively, lenient. In the east spiritual resistance could not be overt, but it occurred none the less, as witness the clandestine education of two to three thousand students in Poland and the continuance of scientific work and the secret publication of its results.
Economic resistance occurred everywhere. The methods were sometimes almost trivial but the results were considerable. Germany was denied the fruits of European labour and skill which, in an atmosphere less poisoned by hate, could have contributed extensively to Germany’s war effort and home comforts. The means included going to work regularly a quarter of an hour late, mixing labels on packages so that they went to the wrong destination, more serious sabotage in factories and on railways, and strikes. Polish economic sabotage affected the delivery of Russian goods to Germany before Barbarossa and the supplying of the German armies on the eastern fronts after it, in both cases on a large scale. Sabotage in Czechoslovakia had become a serious worry to Heydrich before his assassination, and Czechs conscripted into the German army also engaged in sabotage. Strikes in Italy were the precursors of the fall of Mussolini and were repeated against the Germans when they occupied the northern half of the country. There were a number of extensive strikes in the Netherlands. But the strike was a dangerous weapon, which many workers were unwilling to use. It entailed not only loss of job and pay but, consequently, liability for deportation to compulsory labour service in Germany; and the leaders of the Dutch strikes were executed.
The more spectacular operations included two Anglo-Norwegian raids on the Lofoten Islands in 1941, when several thousand tons of shipping and eighteen cold-liver-oil factories were destroyed. These raids were a good example of the hazards of Resistance. Besides the material damage inflicted, they gave a boost to British and perhaps to Norwegian morale and kept Hitler guessing about his enemies’ intentions, but they also provoked heavy reprisals and, when the British withdrew without warning on the second occasion after a week’s stay which the local inhabitants had expected to be permanent, bitter resentment among the Norwegians left behind and an official protest from the Norwegian government in London. The reprisals severely damaged the Resistance movement in the same way, although not quite to the same extent, as the Czech Resistance movement which was virtually destroyed by the reprisals exacted after the death of Heydrich.
Limited operations could, however, be extremely valuable as well as less costly. The British were worried about German nuclear research. They wished to destroy the plant at Vemork in Ryukan in Norway where heavy water was being produced by electrolysis, and early in 1942 a first group of Norwegians from England was dropped in the region to spy out the land. In November a first attempt, by glider attack, to destroy the plant failed but in the following February a party of Norwegians succeeded in putting it out of action for five months. Later in 1943 it was bombed and partially destroyed by the Americans. The allies also wished to destroy the entire stock of heavy water. This involved the sinking of a ferry on which innocent Norwegians would be bound to be travelling. The Norwegian government in London was asked to decide whether this should be done. The government hardened its heart and gave the order to proceed. In similar limited operations valuable stocks of pyrites, iron ore and ball bearings were destroyed. Towards the end of the war sabotage groups were converted into anti-sabotage groups. One of their most notable achievements was the preservation by the Belgians of the port of Antwerp which was placed intact into the hands of the allies immediately they entered the city.
A large part of the Danish Resistance effort was directed to sabotaging Germany’s exploitation of Denmark’s food and strategic position. The Danish government refrained at first from encouraging sabotage for fear of reprisals, but the British pressed for more activity and got their way towards the end of 1942. The anomalies in the Danish situation were largely removed by the German take-over in 1943, when the official government ceased to function and a less inhibited, undercover government was formed under the name of the Freedom Council. From 1943 sabotage, and especially railway sabotage, increased: there were nearly 2,000 separate incidents in the first four months of 1945. At the other end of Europe the Greek Resistance, by blowing up the Gorgopotamos viaduct in November 1942, interrupted for six weeks the main route by which German supplies were going to Rommel in Africa and brought the port of Piraeus to a standstill. Subsequently Greek sabotage parties derailed 117 trains, destroyed 209 locomotives and 1,544 wagons, cut telephone wires and wrecked various tunnels, bridges and motor vehicles. Similar damage was inflicted on communications all over Europe. Much of it was quickly repaired by the Germans.
Economic sabotage merged into military action. The essential requirements were suitable terrain and climate and the support of the population. Without places to hide and people to help the dice were too heavily loaded in favour of the regular military and police forces of the occupiers. The Netherlands and Denmark, flat and bare, could not support a powerful militant movement, even with massive popular sympathy (in Denmark in elections in 1943 97 per cent of the votes cast were given to democratic parties and the Danish Nazis won only one seat out of 150); in the USSR partisan activity was impossible in the north and difficult in the Ukraine. Next, the Resistance forces needed training and organization which were to some extent of an orthodox military nature but also markedly unorthodox; and they needed arms. Secret armies had to operate on a cut-and-run basis until their German enemies were demoralized and themselves on the run. Attempts by partisans to fight pitched battles often led to disaster (as for example in the Vercors and at Montmouchet, as will be related in a later chapter). Active Resistance groups tended to form in the first place round regular officers adrift from defeated armies, but these first leaders were as a general rule superseded by new men who rose to command by proving their aptitude for the new kinds of warfare prescribed by circumstances. These leaders had to strike a balance between the need for caution in the face of a superior enemy – the need to score points but also to survive to carry on the fight – and on the other hand the need to engage the enemy frequently and effectively enough to satisfy their followers. Arms were not less important than tactics and there was a constant tug of war between the accumulation of arms (by raids or by parachute drops from outside) and the loss of arms through discovery of dumps by German Intelligence: this last danger put pressure on Resistance leaders to use arms when they had them instead of waiting for a more propitious moment.
Active Resistance contributed to the tribulations and ultimately to the defeat of the Germans by tying down units or preventing their orderly transfer from one front to another and by engaging them in battle. The threat of an armed rising in Norway by the Resistance movement called Milorg in cooperation with allied forces constrained Hitler to detail thirteen army divisions, 90,000 naval personnel, 6,000 SS men and 12,000 paramilitary troops to watch and control a country with a total population of only three million, and at the end of the war Milorg received the surrender of 400,000 Germans (ten times Milorg’s own strength) and liberated over 90,000 prisoners of war, nearly all of them Russians. When the Anglo-American armies landed in Normandy in July 1944 French Resistance forces delayed the reinforcement of the crucial sector: the SS division Das Reich took nine days to get from south-western France to the battle area. In September the Dutch paralysed the railways at the time of the allied advance towards Nijmegen and Arnhem. The Danes harassed and impeded the withdrawal of German forces from Norway to the defence of Germany itself. National armies were reborn and rejoined the war: 120,000 Belgians were fighting as regular units by the end of the war, the Danish secret army was 45,000 strong, 60,000 Czechs fought with the Russian army in addition to the units which had been serving with British forces since the beginning. In France the Alpine departments and the Massif Central were liberated by the French Resistance, whose total contribution at the time of the re-invasion of Europe was put by Eisenhower – with perhaps a degree of pardonable exaggeration – at the equivalent of fifteen divisions.
This impressive resurgence of European nationalism in arms helped to salve the humiliation of the defeats in 1940–41 and by doing so contributed more to the spiritual rehabilitation of Europe, which was in the balance, than to the defeat of Germany, which was assured by other forces. It also emphasized the national character of European policies since the Resistance movements were nationalist not only in the sense of being anti-German but also in the almost complete absence of any contacts among themselves. At one point Resistance leaders met at a conference in Switzerland and discussed a new and less nationally divided Europe, harking back to Mazzinian ideas of a confraternity of nationalisms, looking forward to a Europe des patries, echoing ideas which were being discussed at the same time by anti-Nazi conspirators inside Germany; but so long as the war continued there was little opportunity for common action. Attempts to concert French and Belgian, Yugoslav and Italian Resistance came to little. A Resistance movement had to be ultra careful about its security and it was often suspicious of its neighbour’s politics or ideology. So the international character of the external attack on Germany by the Anglo-American-Russian coalition could not be matched by any corresponding internationalism on the continent. Communism, which might have served as a link between Resistance movements, did not do so during the war because communist resisters were no more able than non-communist resisters to make effective contacts beyond the bounds of their local field of operations. Thirdly, the patriotic aims of Resistance were yoked with objectives of national regeneration and revolution which will be more closely examined in the next chapters. Although Resistance movements began without any definite political purpose and were often anti-political in the sense that they distrusted the political parties and institutions which had failed them before the war, yet at the same time these movements were obliged to be political in another sense. They responded to prevailing popular emotions and aspirations which were of a political nature and, because they were constructive and not merely hostile to occupiers or pre-war régimes, imposed on the Resistance movements a distinctive blend of moral-political programme which was characteristically left-wing.
As Resistance developed it involved not only the Resistance movements themselves inside occupied countries but also governments in exile (all of them in London except the Greek government which was in Cairo) and the organizations established with similar aims by the British and American governments. The first of these in point of time, and for some time the most active, was the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) which was created in July 1940 as a department in the Ministry of Economic Warfare. The date indicated the need: to preserve or renew contacts with a continent from which Great Britain had been expelled and cut off. The Ministry indicated the prime aim: to injure Germany’s war-making capacity by sabotage. The two together prescribed the method: to find, train and dispatch small groups of technically equipped demolitionists. At the beginning of the war the British government had made plans for interferring with Germany’s supplies of iron ore from Sweden and oil from Rumania and although these had been attended by no success the notion of economic warfare had been embodied in a Department of State, and after Dunkirk Great Britain’s inability to do much else in Europe, combined with the emergence of Resistance in the following year and Churchill’s decision to foster it, focused attention on the possibilities of sabotage. SOE set to work to find saboteurs with the right aptitudes and languages (they were recruited in French-speaking Canada and polyglot South America as well as among the refugees from Hitler’s Europe) and it eventually established sixty training schools for operations in Europe besides others for Asia. These schools sent 7,500 agents, mostly nationals of the countries concerned, to western Europe and 4,000, mostly British agents and military liaison parties, to Italy and south-eastern Europe.
Almost at the outset these operations were extended from sabotage to intelligence. Many intelligence contacts had been broken by the retreat from the continent. In addition, military intelligence networks had been penetrated by the Germans before the war: in Holland, for example, the British headquarters, which was next door to the house made famous in the First World War by Mata Hari, had been under surveillance since 1935 and all visitors to it had been regularly photographed as they went in and out. There was therefore something of an intelligence vacuum and it seemed natural to ask SOE, which was organizing sabotage trips, to get its agents to do some intelligence work too. Unfortunately agents of the one kind are not necessarily the right people for work of the other kind, nor had they been trained for it, and the confusion of the two functions endangered SOE’s work. It also endangered Resistance groups, since there were more agents around who had contacts with these groups and were at the same time liable to be picked up by German counter-intelligence or to become unsuspectingly involved with double agents.
A further extension of SOE’s work occurred when subversion and insurrection were added to its brief. Churchill told Hugh Dalton, the Minister of Economic Warfare, that it was his business to ‘set Europe ablaze’. Prizing variety and unconventionality for their own sake, and stirred perhaps by the historical recollections of chouans, carbonari and klephts, Churchill welcomed the chance to revive the fighting spirit and fighting forces of Europe’s nations. He wanted to summon them to make life hell for the Germans and, ultimately, to cooperate with the allies’ regular armies when the time should come to return to the continent. But this part of the programme raised unforeseen political complications. SOE’s emissaries became charged with diplomatic tasks: persuading Resistance groups to adopt certain policies or tactics, reconciling them with one another for the good of the common cause, reporting on them and advising which were more worthy of support than others. Supplying one organization with arms in preference to another was a political act. The British tried to operate on the principle that the only thing that mattered was harassing the Germans and the only touchstone for deciding between competing groups was this anti-German fervour. But this simple rule of thumb ignored the facts. The Resistance movements were not simply, sometimes not primarily, anti-German. They represented for the time being the domestic politics of their countries. Some of them were fighting against the pre-war order and distrusted or opposed their governments in exile with which the British government was in alliance; and they became more definitely left-wing after Hitler’s invasion of the USSR unshackled the communists and set them free to join and try to dominate the Resistance.
To a man with Churchill’s uncomplicated sense of purpose these were secondary matters so long as the Germans had to be beaten. He knew that war and politics could not be separated but he also knew which he was going to subordinate to the other. The political issues would have to be dealt with later, by which time they would doubtless present themselves in a new context and a new light. Meanwhile he pledged Great Britain to the restoration of the independence of Europe. He became a European leader. The V sign for victory which he coined and its aural equivalent…–, tapped out in Morse or played by the BBC to all Europe in the familiar phrase from Beethoven’s fifth symphony, were symbols of an intimate link between Great Britain and the subject peoples of the continent without distinction between political creeds. Although a conservative and a monarchist, Churchill discarded all tests except that of anti-Germanism. Only when the war was manifestly won but not concluded did he turn from battling to politics and set himself, unsuccessfully in the one case, successfully in the other, to baulk the republicans in Italy and Greece.
The Americans saw things otherwise. They were quicker to see the communists than the klephts in the Resistance ranks. They were even inclined to suspect all Resistance movements, including Gaullism, of being either communist or stalking horses for communism. They appreciated the political implications of helping the Resistance. They fell into a different kind of unreality from the British. Traditionally wary of European politics and less well versed in them because of their distance from the scene, they sought to separate strategic from political issues, to avoid giving blank cheques to exiles and to get on with the war in the expectation that victory would produce a return to stability in Europe, a withdrawal of American intervention and a settlement of political problems by Europeans through the magic of free elections. But this expectation was wishful thinking. It is almost true to say of Roosevelt that he substituted a talisman for political analysis and had no political aim in Europe during these years other than getting agreement, particularly from Stalin but also from everybody else, on the holding of free elections all over Europe (except in Germany) as quickly as possible after the end of the war. On this basis it might be safe to help the Resistance. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was created to emulate and in many instances surpass SOE. American aid was lavish. It was given without acknowledging that this kind of intervention had political as well as military implications: whereas the British, in helping Tito for example, gave aid on the deliberate basis that military considerations overrode all others and that the obvious political implications must of necessity be subordinated, the Americans tended wishfully to believe that military and political considerations were so far distinct that military aid had insignificant political consequences.
Resistance created difficulties between the allied governments – in this case mainly the British – and governments-in-exile. Supporting governments-in-exile was not always compatible with the aid given by the British to armies-not-in-exile. The governments suspected the British of trying to dominate and direct a part of their national activity. They also protested on behalf of their nationals against what they regarded as foolish British tactics or serious British mistakes. There was an acrimonious feud between French and British authorities over which of them should employ French citizens as agents. The Norwegians and the British tussled ill-naturedly for control of Milorg and, as already mentioned, the Norwegian government protested sharply against experimental British coastal raids in 1940 which seemed to the unfortunate Norwegians in the places raided to achieve nothing beyond provoking frightful German reprisals. Relations with the Dutch were even worse and led to allegations that the British wanted to destroy the Resistance and that a senior SOE officer was a German agent. These accusations were the outcome of the so-called Englandspiel, the penetration by German Intelligence of SOE’s networks in the Netherlands. An SOE agent was captured. He sent a pre-arranged coded signal to warn his headquarters in London of his capture and the vulnerability of his communications but London, in breach of its own rules, decided to ignore this warning and assume that the agent had made a mistake and could still be treated as secure. This basic error was repeated and was observed by the Germans who confirmed the illusion by staging bogus acts of sabotage to persuade SOE that its plans were working as intended. As a result all but two of sixty agents sent to the Netherlands were caught and sent to die in concentration camps, enough British equipment to train and arm 10,000 men was intercepted by the Germans, and many arms dumps and agents’ networks were uncovered not only in the Netherlands but also in France where brave men and women fell into the hands of the SD.
Disgruntlement arose also from lack of communication and so lack of understanding on both sides. Resistance leaders did not realize that SOE and OSS were the poor relations of the traditional armed services, which tended to regard Resistance movements as amateur sideshows, a drain on their material and planning resources, an impediment to the more serious business of conventional campaigning and a distasteful adulteration of honest fighting with dubious politics. Resistance commanders complained of being undervalued and undersupplied. They asked in vain to be given the jobs which Bomber Command thought it could do better, felt bitter when innocent civilians were killed because a factory which could have been more easily and more cheaply disrupted by sabotage was attacked by hundreds of bombers, and blamed the allied organizations with which they were in touch. They did not know that SOE and OSS frequently shared their views, nor did they know how limited resources were (for a year SOE had only two aircraft) nor perhaps how difficult they themselves were to reach. To take an extreme case: at the beginning of the war Great Britain had no aircraft with the range necessary to fly to Poland and back without landing and but for the invention of wireless the Poles’ feeling of abandonment would have been complete. The situation improved with the arrival in service of the Lancaster and Liberator and the conquest of air bases in Italy, but even then not many of the latest types of four-engined bomber could be spared for liaison with the Polish underground, eastern Poland remained out of reach of the western allies throughout the war, and Poles never felt satisfied that the British were doing enough to sustain what they regarded as a substantial arm of the general allied war effort. Of the operations attempted – 858 in all – only a little over half were successful. Polish complaints about the scale and purposefulness of British aid have to be judged against the Poles’ own uniquely dangerous position. Caught in the German-Russian crossfire – and not for the first time in their history – they witnessed the fearful German onslaught on the Polish intelligentsia, were vaguely aware of a Nazi plan to deport 16–20 million Poles to Siberia after the war and judged from their experiences in 1939–41 that their treatment at Russian hands would be little less painful. Their appeals were attuned to their desperation.
Yet despite the mistakes and misunderstandings great and small, and despite the activities of double agents who were more numerous and more successful in their special brand of perfidy than the romantic would like to believe, the combination of Resistance and allied governments was an appreciable factor in winning the war and is not diminished by the fact that collaborators were more numerous than resisters. Men and women of many nations worked together with thrilling trust and courage even during the periods when the organizations to which they belonged happened to be quarrelling. SOE and ASS provided arms, wireless sets and a great range of ingenious equipment, invented new weapons and new gadgets, found, trained and dispatched thousands of remarkable men and women. The contribution to Europe’s morale was also great. The BBC in particular not only linked the Resistance with Great Britain by providing news, encouragement and coded instructions but also created an esprit de corps. The Resistance could have become a separate war, but it did not. It has a special history and a special pride but they are part of the shared experience of the Second World War.
Sharing and cooperating imply communication. By the mid-twentieth century radio had put millions of people in direct touch with one another. In spite of prohibitions on listening, confiscations of radio receivers and jamming, a government could not prevent its people or its conquered subjects from hearing something of what other governments had to say. Radio propaganda became one of the most effective subsidiary weapons of the war. It was used for communicating with friends, keeping their spirits up and concerting active operations against the enemy. It created a sense of presence, or impending presence, which was invaluable between Great Britain and the continent after other normal links had been broken. It also enabled belligerent governments to address each other’s peoples in attempts to shake their steadfastness, undermine their morale and generally sow doubt and unease. It was a difficult weapon to use because it was relatively untried and two-edged. On the one hand it provided, like the activities of SA and ASS, an extra means to attack the enemy’s military efficiency. From this point of view any statement which upset the combatants on the other side was useful and it did not essentially matter whether the statement was true or false. Lies, forgeries and rumours were all used in the course of what came to be called black propaganda. Radio programmes supposed to emanate from secret stations in enemy territory – the most famous was Soldatensender Calais – spread stories about, for example, how top Nazi bosses were enjoying themselves with blondes and plenty of food and spending more time in specially safe air raid shelters than in visits to the front. Leaflets and forged copies of well-known German newspapers were used in the same way. But the basis of black propaganda was nevertheless credibility, and credibility required a substantial degree of truth. Therefore black propaganda, however much it might embroider the facts, could not do without them. Its basic technique was to retail facts and insert among them one or two tendentious and alarming items. The tricks of the black propagandists (which make particularly entertaining reading in retrospect) were unfailingly ingenious but no more than marginally instrumental in directing the fortunes of war.
For white propaganda on the other hand truth was all important. White propaganda was directed against the enemy’s civilian morale rather than his military efficacy. The distinction could on occasions be a fine one, but even in modern warfare there is a dividing line between the civilian and the military factors in the total war effort: white propaganda, like the mass bombing of civilian housing to which we shall come in a later chapter, was an attempt to destroy the enemy’s will to fight as opposed to destroying his fighting forces. White propaganda also aimed to swing opinion in occupied Europe.
Neither side was very effective when it tried to subvert the other. German broadcasts to Great Britain were almost entirely ineffectual. British broadcasts to Germany, although much better informed and more imaginative, did not achieve their main object and Goebbels was able, as we shall see, to maintain German morale right to the end and against fearful odds. Suffice it to say here that the BBC’s broadcasts to Germany, in which there was an almost dogmatic addiction to truth, were hampered because Goebbels could argue that they were not true. He repeated British bombing claims which the Germans themselves and neutrals could see to be greatly exaggerated and he was able for a time to decry BBC statements by recalling discredited accounts of German atrocities in the First World War and saying that the British were at it again. The BBC was also hampered by mass bombing which, although it had the same aim, proved to be counter-productive in the sphere of morale.
In their propaganda to occupied Europe the British and the Germans had opposite problems. The Germans, who were in occupation, cajoled, impressed and bullied. Their principal advantage was their monopoly of public entertainment and their principal instrument was the film. The British and the Americans, physically at a distance, exploited radio. Their principal advantage was that their audience wanted to believe what they were saying. Fostering and satisfying this desire required them to tell the truth and as the war progressed allied propagandists were in the happy position of having the truth working for them. It remains an open question, debated by psychologists, how far one man can make another act contrary to his basic wishes or instincts. Anti-German propaganda during the war had little effect on Germans for, although it may have penetrated their minds, it did not stir them to action against their leaders. But anti-German propaganda to non-Germans proved its worth.