The Resistance in Western Europe 1940-1945, by Olivier Wierviorka (foreword and prelude)

Foreword RO B E RT O. PA X TO N

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eneral Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Western Europe in 1944–1945, recalled afterward with gratitude how the French resistance had helped him in Normandy. It was the equivalent, he wrote, of fifteen divisions.1 No doubt he was benevolently handing out postvictory laurels. It is in fact quite difficult to measure with precision how much the resistance contributed to Allied victory. This authoritative account by the French historian Olivier Wieviorka expertly sums up the matter.

Familiar images of the resistance are colored by dramatic scenes of midnight train derailments and parachute receptions, images derived from novels, films, and personal reminiscences that could be a bit inflated. I remember discovering at the age of ten my parents’ copy of John Steinbeck’s novel The Moon Is Down (1942). I devoured this tale of an indomitable town in a country that resembles Norway, where Nazi executions only provoked further acts of sabotage. A translation of Steinbeck’s novel was published clandestinely in occupied France.2 Other translations appeared throughout Europe, and even in the Soviet Union.

Olivier Wieviorka has not written that kind of adventure story. His book is the best survey we have of how citizens across Nazi-occupied Western Europe formed and ran clandestine resistance organizations, how these interacted with the Allied military staffs in London, and what they were able to accomplish together. The Allies welcomed these organizations and [ xi ]

gave them money and weapons. But they feared unleashing premature risings that could end only in futile bloodshed. Above all they wished to avoid setting off the social revolutions desired by some resisters. Inevitably conflicts arose between London and the various national undergrounds on the Continent. Wieviorka explains how these conflicts were resolved in ways that made effective action possible.

Wieviorka’s focus on the six occupied countries of Western Europe— France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Denmark, and Italy—is a fruitful one.

Most books about the opposition to Nazi occupation treat individual nations, and logically so, since resistance movements, striving for national liberation, were inherently national. A continental focus shows that the six nations faced problems common to all of occupied Western Europe but came up with distinctive national responses. Wieviorka’s continental perspective also matches that of the Allied staffs in London who were planning to invade Hitler’s Fortress Europe.

So this book is as richly informative about the Allies as about the resistance. It examines more fully than any previous work the complicated three-way negotiations among the Anglo-American authorities; the exiled governments of France, Holland, Belgium, and Norway in London; and the underground movements that together made it possible to plan and execute clandestine operations.

Wieviorka omits the anti-Hitler resistance within Germany, and quite reasonably so, for the unique moral and physical obstacles it faced made it a different story. Eastern Europe constitutes another different story. Occupation regimes there were harsher, and resistance movements were more closely related to the gigantic armed clashes of the Russian front.

Resistance movements probably had more impact in Eastern Europe than in the West. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Soviet military leadership actively encouraged partisan activity behind the German lines. Eventually some 250,000 irregulars harassed German supply lines and created a climate of insecurity in the German Army’s rear. In the Yelnya-Dorogobash area (today in Belarus), all or parts of nine Germans divisions were involved in trying to suppress partisan activities in May-June 1942. 3 But even there the partisans could not by themselves change the course of the war. Elsewhere, the Polish Home Army’s celebrated effort to liberate Warsaw, beginning on August 1, 1944, only to be crushed by the German Army as Soviet forces waited on the opposite bank of the Vistula River, showed once again that underground [ xii ]

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forces alone could not liberate territory. Similarly, a German decision on August 29, 1944, to occupy militarily the satellite country of Slovakia set off a rising by resistance forces that at first freed large sections of the country. In the absence of effective aid from nearby Russian forces, however, the Germans recaptured these areas by the end of October. Only the Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito succeeded in freeing some territory from German control in the absence of regular Allied armies. These immense and sanguinary sagas of partisan warfare in Eastern Europe remain offstage in this book, as does of course the whole Pacific dimension of World War II. Nevertheless, the Western European resistance movements were important enough to engage the Nazi occupation authorities in intensive efforts to destroy them. Their role in the liberation and in postwar Europe was not limited to sabotage. Resisters performed other, no less dangerous and indispensable, functions. They collected and transmitted intelligence about Axis forces; countered Axis propaganda with clandestine publications and symbols, like chalking V for victory on walls (the occupation authorities erased fifty-five hundred of these in Lille, in northern France, on March 21, 1941); and smuggled downed Allied pilots to safety.

Resistance movements in occupied Western Europe were of course not homogeneous. They contained multiple, sometimes conflicting strands.

Before Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Communist parties in these areas operated illegally underground, but they were not pro-Allied, in accordance with Stalin’s scrupulous adherence to the Nazi- Soviet Pact of August 1939. Their entry into active anti- German resistance in June 1941 forms a major turning point in this story. Habituated to clandestinity, ready for sacrifice, Communists came to play a leading role in Western European resistance movements. A Communist revolution, however, was never in the cards. Joseph Stalin, in desperate straits, was more interested in an early Anglo-American landing in the West, to relieve the pressure on his front, than in promoting immediate social revolution in Western Europe.

Another turning point was the Nazi regime’s decision in 1942 to draft young Western European men to work in German factories. According to conventional wisdom, this dreaded coercion sent masses of young men into remote resistance encampments, giving the resistance its first popular base.

Wieviorka shows more realistically that about 15 to 20 percent of the young men who refused German labor service actually joined a maquis, or resistance encampment, perhaps thirty to forty thousand in all.

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Some resistance veterans have legitimately asked whether the Allied military planners made adequate use of their potential. The professional soldiers were by temperament dubious about amateurs working underground.

But having resisters on the ground destroy bridges, power plants, railway yards, and other strategic targets in the invasion zone might have been more effective and less costly in collateral damage than entrusting this task to inaccurate high- altitude bombers. Between sixty and seventy thousand French civilians died in Allied air raids on French cities and coastal fortifications between 1942 and the end of the war,4 more than the forty-three thousand British civilians who died under the Nazi blitz. Further tens of thousands of Belgian, Dutch, and Italian civilians were killed by Allied aerial bombardment. Some targets, of course, such as the submarine pens at the French port city of Saint-Nazaire, were too solid and too tightly guarded for sabotage. Faced with a choice between sabotage and bombs, the Allied military staffs supported sabotage efforts up to a point but were ultimately unwilling to rely mostly on it.

On the rare occasions when resistance forces managed to liberate singlehandedly an enclave within occupied Western Europe, Allied military support became an acute necessity. The most important of these enclaves, the Vercors plateau in the foothills of the French Alps, held out against German and Vichy forces for forty-three days in June and July 1944. It was eventually extinguished when the Allied military command decided not to airlift troops there. All such isolated enclaves were doomed before the arrival of regular Allied armies, though after Allied landings resistance units helped liberate important adjacent areas, notably in Brittany and the French Alps.

Another resistance tactic that did not work was the assassination of individual German servicemen. Resistance teams executed some German officers in France in the late summer and fall of 1941, setting off Nazi reprisals that cost hundreds of French civilians their lives without significantly aiding the Allied cause. These actions were soon abandoned in France, at the urging of Free French leader General Charles de Gaulle, and were not attempted elsewhere.

Despite some failures, the Western European resistance had important successes. One was the destruction of a heavy-water reactor in Norway, a major factor (though not the only one) in the German failure to develop an atomic bomb. Another success was the disruption of German reinforcements following the Allied landing in Normandy in June 1944. During [ xiv ]

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the twelve months before D-Day, resisters destroyed 1,822 locomotives.

They blew up the dam and lock at Gigny on the Saône River in July 1943 and again in November, closing to the Germans a vital river passage to the Mediterranean. And their information about Axis defenses was indispensable to the D-Day landing.

Wieviorka extends his study pertinently beyond the liberation, asking why the resistance movements had less impact on their countries’ postwar political and socioeconomic systems than they had reason to expect. The exile governments in London intended, of course, to reestablish their authority at home, and while they might accept progressive reforms, they were adamantly opposed to the revolutionary transformations dreamed of by some in the resistance. Allied policy also reinforced a process of restoration.

Wieviorka concludes with a final balance sheet. The Western European resistance movements could not change the outcome of the war by themselves, without the presence of traditional armies, but they contributed significantly to Allied success. Their role was tactical, not strategic. They could probably have been better used. Wieviorka concludes that “without Anglo-American assistance, the Western European resistance would have been powerless; but the Allied intelligence services would have been blind without the resistance.”

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Prelude A Glowing Picture

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n April 1940 Nazi Germany, shattering the deceptive tranquility of the “phony war,” attacked Scandinavia, before launching its panzers against Western Europe in early May. That blitzkrieg resulted in an unabashed success: by summer, all the principal European countries apart from Great Britain had laid down their weapons, and the swastika was flying from Brussels to Warsaw, Paris to Oslo, Prague to Amsterdam. Nazi barbarism imposed its law for five long years, plunging the Old Continent into deepest darkness.

From the outset, however, the majority of the people and their leaders rejected the false fatality of the defeat. In 1940 the heads of the Belgian, Norwegian, and Dutch states or governments reached London, anxious to keep their country in the war and to bear witness by their presence to their high regard for valiant England. Responding to the appeals of the Frenchman Charles de Gaulle, the Belgian Hubert Pierlot, and the Norwegian Johan Nygaardsvold, volunteers joined en masse to fill the ranks of the regular armies or to support the cohorts of the resistance forces who, under a ruthless occupier’s yoke, feverishly awaited the arrival of the Allied troops. In all the countries subjected to the Nazis’ iron rule, revolt was brewing, anticipating the moment of insurrections. London and later Washington, aware of the asset these rebels represented, assisted them without reservations and offered them the resources necessary to fight the Third Reich.

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In 1943–1944 the Anglo-American forces successfully landed, first in Italy, then in France, breaking through the Wehrmacht’s defenses. Everywhere, patriots assisted them, providing them with invaluable intelligence, performing bold acts of sabotage, engaging in merciless guerilla warfare.

Victory crowned the sacrifices made by the GIs and the Tommies. But, to an equal extent, it marked the triumph of the women and men who, in the darkness of the underground and in the sunlight of liberation, had agreed, with complete disregard for their own survival, to shake off their chains, to hasten the triumph of democracy, and to reinstate the rule of human rights.

Revisions That interpretation, it must be admitted, seems quite dated. Until the 1970s, however, it was considered gospel. True, it corresponded to a politics of remembrance launched during the glorious hours of the Liberation. From Belgium to the Netherlands and from France to Norway, every country extolled its internal resistance and its government in exile, pleased to emphasize the preeminent role these patriotic forces had played in the liberation of their nation. At the same time, they all minimized the role of the Allies—when they did not quite simply maintain a stony silence about it: “Paris! Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated!

Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the French armies, with the support and the help of all France, of the France that fights, of the only France, of the real France, of the eternal France!” So declared Charles de Gaulle on August 25, 1944, merely saluting in one rather stingy interpolated line “our dear and admirable allies,” even though it was they who had forced the Germans to beat a retreat from French territory.1 De Gaulle was more the rule than the exception in Western Europe, and his biases were largely shared. As Pieter Lagrou points out, in the kaleidoscope of wartime experiences “resistance was crucial to the formation of a national epic. ‘Being liberated’ was too passive a mode to celebrate the recovery of national independence, and gratitude is a weak basis for national identity.

For the three countries concerned [France, Belgium, and the Netherlands], glorification of the contribution of the resistance movements was the only basis available for a true national myth.”2 The politics of remembrance launched in 1945 therefore minimized the role of the United States and [2]

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Great Britain, while praising, but in a minor key, the excellent cooperation between the exiled powers and the British and American authorities.

In Denmark, for example, resistance was for a long time viewed as a ceaselessly rising tide for which the British had simply “supplied the means.”3 In short, resistance in Western Europe was long considered a national phenomenon that had made a remarkable contribution, both politically and militarily, to the Nazi defeat. In the same vein, the cooperation between the Anglo-Americans and the national forces—both the resistance and governments in exile—was judged exemplary, with only a few sour notes.

That collaboration, under the auspices of entente rather than conflict, friendship rather than rivalry, respect rather than enmity, was said to have increased the effectiveness of subversive warfare launched in Fortress Europe in 1940.

That bright view hardly tallies with the facts, however, at least as historians grasp them. The glowing picture of Allies fighting harmoniously against the Third Reich conceals an iron law: Great Britain, the United States, and their allies, even while banking on the defeat of Nazi Germany, also defended their national interests. Again and again, that reality created tensions, which encourages us to qualify the view of an irenic alliance cloudlessly uniting Berlin’s adversaries. Granted, the coalition placed under the Union Jack and the Star-Spangled Banner belonged to the present tense of a world war that had to be won at all cost, a fact that overshadowed past conflicts; but that coalition suffered as well from the bitter resentments of the interwar period and had diverging, if not opposing, notions of the world’s future.

Toward a Pan-European Approach to the Resistance As a general rule, both the politics of remembrance and the historians situate resistance within a national context, and not without reason.4 Indeed, members of the resistance were engaged for and usually in their own countries, to hasten the departure of a reviled occupier and to restore the freedoms being flouted by the new order established by the brownshirts. By that measure, the development of underground forces depended in part on the dynamics created by the occupation and the regime imposed by the German authorities. But the army of shadows would never have been able to grow without the support first of London and then of Washington. The PRELUDE

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Allies did not underestimate the contribution the resistance could make.

The British especially dreamed of setting Europe ablaze, imagining that the people under the jackboot would revolt against their servitude. Later they returned to a more realistic approach, striving to support nascent resistance movements by creating networks and arming and equipping members of the underground.

That contribution was crucial. The Anglo-Americans provided the army of shadows with radio connections, weapons, and, more generally, the material resources they so cruelly lacked. Thanks to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) airwaves, the rebels were able to popularize their battle and address their instructions to the civilian populations. The recognition granted to the exiled powers also contributed toward legitimizing a struggle that Vidkun Quisling and Philippe Pétain, for example, portrayed in the sinister colors of terrorism, if not gangsterism. National factors therefore played a notable role in the birth of the resistance; in its growth, however, the Anglo-Americans’ role was clearly preeminent.

That support was certainly more complex than what people of the time— or of our own time—imagined. Parachute drops, for example, involved an arduous process, which slowed the delivery by air of men, weapons, and materiel to Fortress Europe. In the United Kingdom and the United States, the secret services had difficulty gaining a foothold. They ran up against the hesitations of the Ministry of Defense and the Foreign Office, the Department of Defense and the State Department, which all had scant belief in the possibilities of subversive warfare. And London and Washington, even as they cooperated, sometimes clashed.

The Anglo-Americans, moreover, despite the prestige of their radio broadcasts, the extent of their resources, and the strength of their finances, also had to compromise. To capitalize on the internal resistance and enjoy the support of civilians on the day of the landing, they had to secure the backing of the governments in exile, the internal resistance, and the native populations. And these forces were also defending their national and political interests. They meant to impose their views without submitting blindly to Uncle Sam or Perfidious Albion, especially since the rationale driving them was at odds with that of their backers. The aim of national resistance movements was often to protect the people from the ravages of Nazification; as a result, they opted for a defensive and civilian approach.

London and Washington, by contrast, sought to take down Nazi Germany militarily, an objective that assigned a primarily offensive and combative [4]

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role to the underground forces. The relations between the western part of the European continent and England and the United States were thus also marked through and through by conflicts that disrupted the cooperation established between them.

Great Britain and the United States constructed their battle on a European or even global scale, disregarding the constraints of borders. Even while situating their action within the context of particular countries— the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) privileged national divisions—they thought in global terms and engaged in constant arbitration, favoring now France, now Italy, sometimes at the expense of Denmark and Norway. In addition, they incorporated resistance into an overall military strategy. They therefore adapted the policy to be followed vis-àvis the underground forces to that reality— a truth that the postwar powers kept quiet for the sake of patriotism and that historians, blinded by the national issues inherent in the history of resistance, too often set aside.

In short, we must leave behind four oversimplifications: first, the belief that omnipotent Allies pulled the strings of the internal resistance; second, the notion that these movements were able to develop effectively on their own; third, the idea that the need to destroy Nazism suddenly obliterated arguments based on self-interest; and fourth, the overestimation of the role of national factors in the common struggle.

The time has no doubt come to broaden our perspective by freeing ourselves from borders, in order to construct a European history of the resistance.

Such is the ambition of this book. My aim here is to better understand the actions of the underground forces in Western Europe: Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Italy. The choice of these six countries is not random. All experienced an occupation that, though it conformed to varied modalities and followed a specific chronology in each country, remained fundamentally different from the occupation faced by Eastern Europe or the Balkans. All belonged to the Anglo-American intervention zone: they would be liberated by the British or by U.S. troops and not by the Red Army, a fact that the military staffs quickly took to heart.

In 1941, therefore, SOE stopped arming paramilitary groups in Czechoslovakia and Poland.5 Conversely, the Soviet Union had little weight in the western theater of operations. Moscow, while striving to maintain links to Western Communist parties, did not have the logistical and material resources or the desire to aid the resistance in the West, where everyone, PRELUDE

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Communists included, turned their eyes to Big Ben rather than the Kremlin. By contrast, British and American propaganda bureaus, secret services, and general staffs, sure that their countries’ forces would land in Western Europe, set out rather quickly to define the military and political contributions that the underground in those nations ought to provide to hasten the Reich’s defeat. The choice of that geographical zone is thus justified by all the points these countries had in common.

In all these Western territories, a homegrown resistance came into being.

Yet the underground forces benefited from the support, even the supervision, of the Anglo-Americans, a support that greatly contributed to the form the movements would take. In this book, without claiming to write the exhaustive history of resistance in Western Europe, I wish to retrace a segment of it, by analyzing these interactions, which were certainly complex, and by inserting the history of the soldiers of shadow into the Allied grand strategy. Along the way, this book will provide an assessment of the uniqueness of each country, even while constructing—in its fashion—a first transnational history of the resistance.

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Praise for The Resistance in Western Europe, 1940–1945 WINNER, 2018 PRIX DU LIVRE D’HISTOIRE DE L’EUROPE

“Olivier Wieviorka treats the resistance in Western Europe as a multinational coalition. Anglo-Americans supplied arms and funding to resistance groups on the continent, and resistance movements in turn aided in the Allied war effort.

It was part tug-of-war, résistants striving to maintain autonomy, and part pas de deux, the two sides working together in a common effort that helped shape what Wieviorka calls an incipient ‘European consciousness. ’ This is a history on a grand scale commensurate with the epic character of the complex struggle it recounts.”

— Philip Nord, Princeton University “Wieviorka presents a clear-eyed view of the achievements and limitations of resistance efforts, moving beyond romanticized tales of valor and dismissive tales of military ineffectiveness. Above all, the book shows the vital role played first by the British and, later, American secret services—all too often forgotten in Europe since the war—in coordinating and directing the efforts of disparate movements across Western Europe.”

—Clifford Rosenberg, City College of New York “This book is as richly informative about the Allies as about the resistance.

Wieviorka examines more fully than any previous work the complicated three-way negotiations among the Anglo-American authorities, the exiled governments of France, Holland, Belgium, and Norway in London, and the underground movements that together made it possible to plan and execute clandestine operations.”

—From the foreword by Robert O. Paxton EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVES A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism

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