Romanticized and glorified, resistance was a far more fragmented, varied, and rare animal than initially portrayed. Multitudes claimed to have actively fought their oppressors, yet few actually did.
As for the great silent majority, most preferred to rationalize their plight rather than rebel against it. Lacking the organization and firepower of professional armies, civilians expected minimal gain and maximum cost for fighting back. If caught, imprisonment was the least of their worries. Nazis frequently advertised the price of rebellion by publicly hanging captives. Soviets traditionally shot dissenters in the back of the head. Frustrated by heavy resistance in northern China, the Japanese army diligently applied a succinct mantra in 1941 and 1942: “Take all, burn all, kill all.”19
A small percentage accepted the risks and in many cases achieved measurable success. By biting the hand that terrified them, Greeks and Yugoslavs tied down more than fifteen Axis divisions in the Balkans. Filipinos and Indonesians prevented Japan from securing total occupation. Several resistance leaders eventually became heads of state, such as Hoxha in Albania, Tito in Yugoslavia, de Gaulle in France, and Mao in China.
Ranked here, by level of violence, are the ten most prominent forms of civilian dissent in the war against military repression. Some were more effective than others, but all provided hope against the specter of degrading servitude.
1. COMBAT
By 1943, the Polish Home Army had at least 40,000 members, partisans in the Soviet Union numbered 200,000, and Communist soldiers and militia in China totaled 300,000. There was the Home Front of Norway, the Czech Central Leadership of Home Resistance, Indochina’s Viet Minh, and hundreds of other groups. Yet in any given occupied country the number of armed insurgents was less than 1 percent of the population. Exceptions were Albania, Greece, and Yugoslavia, all of which had more than 10 percent (and all three were undergoing civil war).20
Paramilitary activity was at first uncommon and minuscule. As the war progressed, persons under occupation began to gather around remnants of army units, political parties, and religious groups. Some outfits were ad hoc gangs of the brutish and vengeful; others became highly structured networks with their own paymasters and medical personnel. Assisting these groups were state agencies, such as the U.S. Office of Strategic Services and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. Among the most organized were the Communists, especially in France and China, with well-defined memberships and long traditions of opposition.
Two of the better-documented episodes of guerrilla combat were the Warsaw uprisings. By 1943 a quarter-million Warsaw Jews had died through starvation, execution, or deportation. In April, to honor Hitler’s impending birthday, the SS moved in to eradicate the last 60,000. Several hundred Jews, armed with incendiaries, pistols, and a single machine gun, held off the onslaught for nearly three weeks. Fewer than one hundred insurgents escaped alive. In August 1944, 40,000 Poles, most of them in the Home Army, resisted a German advance into the capital. After two months of vicious urban fighting, 250,000 inhabitants were dead, and the Home Army essentially ceased to exist.
In most pitched battles the goal was to stave off defeat rather than achieve outright victory. Yugoslavia was, for all intents and purposes, the only country self-liberated. Even in France, synonymous with “the resistance,” freedom came only after the Allied invasion. Reportedly Charles de Gaulle confessed to an associate after the war, “Between you and me, Resistance was a bluff that came off.”21
Jean Moulin created the Conseil National de la Résistance, a unification of eight major resistance groups and the eventual foundation of Charles de Gaulle’s political support. In 1943, Moulin was betrayed, imprisoned, and tortured to death at the hands of Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon.”
2. ASSASSINATION
Along with the sniper shot, assassinations were carried out by ambush, grenade, firing squad, knifing, and demolition. A German commissioner died in his sleep—immediately after the bomb under his bed went off.22
German officials and officers were targets. In an effort to curb the attacks, Nazi officials published the consequences for such attacks. Belgians were told they would lose five countrymen, the French heard fifty, Poles were told one hundred, and Czechs were given no limit. In this the Third Reich was good to its word. The slaying of an officer in France brought a fine of several million francs and the immediate execution of fifty townspeople. The death of a Gestapo agent in Poland resulted in one hundred locals being rounded up and shot. When Czechs assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the Holocaust, the SS leveled the nearby towns of Lidice and Lezaky and killed at least two thousand inhabitants.23
Underground assassins most often aimed for known collaborators. Whereas killing a soldier brought dire consequences, killing a stooge taught locals to stay with the resistance or stay out of the way. The practice was most prevalent in the eastern front and in China, especially against anyone caught figuratively or literally sleeping with the enemy.
Undoubtedly the most famous partisan assassination occurred near Lake Como, Italy, on April 28, 1945. After surviving two previous attempts on his life, Benito Mussolini was captured, taken to the countryside, and shot nine times with a submachine gun.
Then there were the ones who got away. During the war, unsuccessful attempts were made on the lives of Nikita Khrushchev, Maurice Chevalier, Wilhelm Keitel, Rudolfo Graziani, Victor Emmanuel III, Tojo Hideki (twice), and Adolf Hitler (at least three times).
3. SABOTAGE
The threat of sabotage was often more menacing than the actual event. This forced militaries to dedicate far more resources to the protection of railways, bridges, and roads than normal. It also led many officials to credit any accident or bottleneck to the work of saboteurs. Stalin and Hitler blamed any breakdown on the work of saboteurs, and the FBI insisted there were more than three thousand acts of sabotage in the United States during the war.24
Not to say the paranoia was unfounded. Partisan armies, lone daredevils, and hard-line terrorists destroyed factories, government buildings, phone lines, airplanes, pipelines, and tanks. A favorite target was rail lines. Rail lines being long and vulnerable, removal of a piece of track or a few spikes could derail a train in seconds and block a route for days. On average, a forced derailment occurred somewhere in Poland every forty hours. But railroad damage was often a double-edged sword. If enemy troops and shells couldn’t be shipped, neither could food and coal for everyone else.25
Actions didn’t have to be explosive to be efficacious. Due to the constant shortage of rubber, slashing truck tires did amazing damage to army logistics. Removal of a firing pin rendered any gun impotent. Mislabeling a shipment manifesto could send vital supplies far astray. The British claimed to have developed an abrasive grease that would rapidly wear out engine parts and factory machinery.26
A few saboteurs were fortunate enough to work with cyclotrimethylene-trinitramine, Composition C—a wartime British invention better known as plastic explosives.
4. PUBLIC PROTESTS
Vocal and open demonstration was a dangerous undertaking in areas under totalitarian control. In 1942, when told their nation was going to be annexed into the Reich, citizens of the tiny duchy of Luxembourg protested en masse. The Nazis crushed the revolt through widespread executions and deportations.
Two avenues of marginal effect but frequent use were pulpits and schools. In a rare case of civil victory against Nazi atrocities, Bishop of Münster Clemens August Count von Galen succeeded in halting Hitler’s euthanasia program on the physically and mentally handicapped, but not until one hundred thousand had perished.27
In Norway almost every clergy member of the state Lutheran Church resigned in protest of the fascist puppet government. From the pulpit, Cardinal van Roey of Belgium beckoned his parishioners to fight “the enemy” and all their collaborators. More than a thousand rebellious French priests were arrested and extradited by the Third Reich.
Among schools and universities, students and faculty rejected closures and censorship. Nearly all teachers in Norway refused the creation of Hitler Youth programs in their schools. Thirteen hundred were summarily arrested. In France and Belgium, students protested the dismissal of Jewish students and professors. Whereas many churches continued to resist, especially at the parish level, academic institutions declined in influence due to forced closures and conscription.28
The “White Rose” operated out of Munich University for four years, quietly disseminating reports on Nazi atrocities. In 1943, they “went public,” handing out leaflets and protesting in the open. Their leaders were immediately arrested, tried, and executed.
5. LABOR STRIKES
In a world where unarmed attacks against totalitarian regimes were tantamount to suicide, labor strikes provided a clever substitute. Strikers masked their assaults by making nonthreatening demands, such as asking for more bomb shelters, shorter workweeks, and safer working conditions. In gathering together, demonstrations also projected a moral unity. Of a more concrete impact, work stoppages curbed production of war materials. Yet several marches turned bloody. In Oslo, Norway, during September 1941, workers demonstrated against milk rationing. The SS addressed the issue by rounding up hundreds of laborers, torturing many, and selecting a few for execution.29
Labor uprisings became more aggressive in the last years of the war. In the spring of 1943 Italy’s industrialized north erupted in widespread protest. Wracked by inflation, corruption, and a string of military defeats abroad, laborers at the Turin Fiat factory initiated a walkout that grew to hundreds of thousands. The fascist government reluctantly arrested a few hundred and sent a token amount of demonstrators to the front in Sicily. In 1944 French factory walkouts exploded after D-day, Hungarian workers openly demonstrated against the pro-Nazi government, and the Dutch launched a rail strike in concert with OPERATION MARKET-GARDEN.
The United States was not without labor strikes, experiencing nearly fifteen thousand of them during the war. A massive 1944 railway stoppage threatened the war effort enough to make George C. Marshall call it the “damnedest crime ever committed against America.”
6. ESPIONAGE
More so than government operatives, civilians were the eyes of the war. Rail clerks read train schedules. Dockworkers knew what was being loaded onto ships. Shopkeepers spotted shoulder patches on visiting troops and thus knew which divisions were in the area. Farmers reported on local weather and road conditions—essential information for military ground operations. Residents along sea lanes had clear views of ship convoys and support squadrons.
Some of the best collectors and transporters of information were young women. Unlike healthy young men of military age, teenage girls were rarely suspected of being partisans or spies. Some of the best spy networks consisted predominantly of ordinary citizens, such as France’s “Noah’s Ark,” led by MARIE-MADELEINE FOURCADE.30
Occupying powers never fully stopped the flow of information. When Nazis demanded the confiscation of all bicycles in Holland, the Dutch scrounged up and sent in every old rusty bike they could find and simply hid their good ones. The Third Reich also tried, with little success, to eradicate all known homing pigeons.31
Though not always heeded by the military hierarchy, citizens offered their scouting services. The Belgian underground supplied most of what the Allies knew about German radar tactics and development. Civilians informed Allied bomber command that Germany’s ball-bearing plants were almost exclusively in Schweinfurt. When a V-2 rocket crashed far off course, Poles removed the engine and sent it off to London.32
“Rote Kapelle” (Red Orchestra) was a prolific Communist spy ring operating against the Third Reich. In 1942, the Gestapo arrested forty-six of its members, tortured them, then guillotined the women and hanged the men. One Leopold Trepper escaped and made his way to Moscow. Stalin accused him of being a Nazi spy and threw him into prison.
7. PROTECTION OF JEWS
Swedish envoy Raoul Wallenberg granted “protective passports” to tens of thousands. Practically the whole villages of Chambon-Sur-Lignon, France, and Nieuwlande, Holland, helped those in need. Diplomat Sugihara Sempo lost his job in the Japanese consulate in Lithuania for granting exit visas to fleeing Jews.
In spite of the obvious danger in doing so, many citizens of Western Europe defied the principle objective of Himmler’s SS from 1942 to 1945. In Warsaw the underground had literal meaning; neighbors broke through cellar walls to create a vast grid of subterranean passageways, connecting with sewers and water mains, creating paths to freedom. France had scores of escape routes out of the country. Danes successfully ferried away 95 percent of their Jewish population to neutral Sweden. Even fascist Italy was wholly uncooperative with the Nazis in regard to handing over Jewish citizens.33
Through their own volition and the work of others, some 280,000 European Jews left the Continent, while more than 3 million stayed behind and survived the Holocaust.34
The State of Israel officially recognizes more than fourteen thousand Gentiles as “Righteous Among Nations” for having risked their lives to save Jews.
8. UNDERGROUND PRESSES
To people under occupation, underground papers were gold in black and white. From scraps of parchment slipped into mail slots to multipage dailies plastered on walls, the written word became the most consistent, visible, and communal expression of the resistance.
Some journals actually prospered. France’s Combat grew from 40,000 copies per issue in 1943 to 300,000 by 1944. Défense de la France went from a circulation of 5,000 in 1941 to almost a half-million by the time of liberation. Ukrainians printed and read an estimated 400 million copies of leaflets and newspapers during the war.35
For reasons of safety, most covert prints were small and temporary affairs. Norway had some three hundred different journals, but the majority soon disappeared by force or flight. Shortages of ink and paper, loss of printing machines, plus arrests and executions quieted many more. Yet everywhere the presses continued. Soviets behind the lines read Death to Our Enemies. Italians took courage from Unita, Belorussians learned of guerrilla triumphs in Partizanskoye Slovo. News mattered less than the papers themselves, acting as tangible proof that the resistance was alive and working.36
One country where underground presses did not flourish was China. The country’s literacy rate of 20 percent may have been a contributing factor.
9. PASSIVE RESISTANCE
After the war, when citizens claimed to be part of the resistance, they most often recalled engaging in labor “slowdowns,” a kind of patriotic slacking. Machinists “misplaced” tools, teamsters drove at a leisurely rate, station agents took their time loading trains. Work absenteeism often reached 30 percent in parts of occupied Europe and China. It all had some tangible effect. From prewar levels, Belgian coal mining dropped more than 60 percent; steel and iron production in Luxembourg fell 70 percent.37
Barely perceptible but greatly reassuring were symbolic gestures. Devoted Scandinavians refused to talk to suspected collaborators, what became known as the “Ice Front.” Dissidents marked sidewalks and walls with patriotic graffiti—“H7” for Norway’s King Håkon VII, the Cross of Lorraine in France, and V for victory across Europe. Everywhere, flowers and wreaths, especially those in the hue of national colors, appeared in buttonholes and on monuments.38
Citizens often used levity to lighten the weight of oppression. As with speech, press, and assembly, the freedom of humor was also heavily curtailed under totalitarian regimes. Cracks against Hitler and Stalin often brought imprisonment, but the custom endured nonetheless, with its profound ability to both hide and express anguish.
Humor became a tool of survival in many concentration camps. Jewish psychiatrist and author Viktor Frankl kept himself sane in Auschwitz by trying to invent a joke each day.
10. DRAFT EVASION
Faced with conscription into factories and the armed forces, literally millions simply refused to go. Nazi Germany demanded seventy thousand young Norwegian men for labor service in the Third Reich; they collected only three hundred. A further eighty thousand went into hiding rather than submit. Before and during the war, countless ethnic Germans and Austrians living in East Europe fled westward to avoid impressments into the Red Army. The largest number escaping mandated service were the Chinese, millions of whom refused to work for either the Japanese or the warlord CHIANG KAI-SHEK.39
Governments designated the adamantly uncooperative in several ways. The Third Reich used the term “work-shy elements.” Stalin preferred the classification “traitors.” The usual reprimand for those so designated was harsh imprisonment. Though no state tolerated “draft dodging,” a few countries officially recognized conscientious objection, namely Australia, Holland, the Scandinavian nations, Great Britain, and the United States.40
Of these, Britain may have been the most tolerant. Only about 1 percent of those drafted declared objection on moral or political grounds. Some were given jail time and some were excused from obligation, but most “conchies” were assigned to public service. Less than 0.1 percent of American draftees declared C.O. status. The U.S. government granted no dismissals. Options were jail, public service, medical experimentation (such as subjection to typhus, hepatitis, sleep deprivation), and military support.41
Both Britain and the United States had C.O.’s take part in combat. A third of Britain’s airborne ambulance corps on D-day were conscientious objectors. In a definitive expression of counterviolence, several hundred C.O.’s volunteered for bomb disposal.42
In the Second World War, three American conscientious objectors won the Medal of Honor, two of them posthumously.