The Second World War (78 page)

At the heart of Britain’s self-imposed moderation of its right to rule over its enormous twentieth-century empire lay deference to its own democratic beliefs and concern for the good opinion of other peoples, particularly Americans, who shared those beliefs. Churchill, though he had isolated himself from his own party in the 1930s by his opposition to the devolution of government in India, was emotionally, if not intellectually, as committed to the principle of self-determination as the most doctrinaire liberal. Moreover, through his experience in fighting the Afrikaners in the Boer War, he had learned how deep the urge to freedom could drive, and how difficult it was for an occupying power to persist in imposing alien rule on any people inspired by faith in their right to independence. Churchill’s personal experience was reinforced by his wide reading in modern history, which abounded in examples of the success of popular resistance to foreign conquest and domination – for instance, resistance by the Spaniards and Prussians against Napoleon, and by the American colonists against George III.

A wider mismatch between the philosophies of empire held by Churchill and Hitler could scarcely be imagined. Imperialistic though he was, Churchill believed in the dignity of man; Hitler held ‘the dignity of man’ to be a bourgeois vacuity. As recognised by those in the Anglo-Saxon world who had read
Mein Kampf
– they were still only a tiny handful in 1940 – he rejected with contempt the idea of self-rule for those who did not belong to the Germanic race. For purposes of expediency he was prepared to make common cause with the Japanese; out of loyalty he included Mussolini (‘a descendant of the Caesars’) and the Italians in the Germanic confraternity; he had an ideologically soft spot for the modern Greeks, whom he identified with the defenders of Thermopylae against the Asiatic hordes and esteemed as dogged warriors; the Scandinavians he recognised as racial cousins, a title he yearned for the British to accept, and which he also extended to those Dutchmen and Belgian Flemings who identified with his cause; he was prepared at a pinch to include the Finns and Balts among his approved minorities; and, as long as they fought on his side, he excepted the Hungarians, Romanians, Slovaks or Bulgarians from racial stigma. For the rest of the inhabitants of Europe who by the end of 1941 had fallen under his sway he reserved nothing but contempt. They belonged either to those groups, like the French, which were tainted by their subjugation to Roman rule (Hitler’s political memory was long) or to the Slavonic ‘riff-raff’, Poles, Serbs, Czechs and above all Russians, whose history was one of subjection to superior empires.

In consequence Hitler was not at all affected by the moral reservations which so easily touched Anglo-Saxon attitudes to empire. He positively exulted in the ease with which he had extinguished autonomous governments in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia; and he measured the rectitude of the authority with which he had replaced these legitimate regimes purely in terms of expediency: if the successor administrations worked, with the minimum of vexation to his occupying forces, he was content to leave them in office undisturbed. Thus he devolved authority in Norway to the Quisling regime from February 1942 (Vidkun Quisling was the local Nordic authoritarian), conceded continuing rights of parliamentary government to the Danes, who conducted a democratic election as late as 1943, in which 97 per cent of the candidates returned were patriots, and left Pétain to embody the appearance if not the reality of sovereign French head of state even after he had extended German military occupation to the whole of France in November 1942.

The complexity of Hitler’s occupation policies was reflected in the complex pattern of resistance to his occupation regimes in both western and eastern Europe. However, the pattern of resistance was determined not only by the nature of the regime Hitler chose to impose in any particular occupied territory. Three other factors operated: the first was the attitude of the left; the second was the degree of assistance which the British (and, after December 1941, the Americans) were able to bring to local resistance organisations; the third was geography.

Geography, being a constant, is best dealt with first. The degree of success of any movement of resistance to enemy occupation is directly determined by the difficulty of the terrain in which it operates – with this proviso: difficult terrain, mountain, forest, desert or swamp, is bereft of the resources necessary to support an irregular military force, and external supplies are therefore required. Most of German-occupied Europe, however, was either topographically unsuited to irregular operations or too distant from Allied bases of support for irregular forces operating there to be easily and regularly supplied. For example, Denmark, in which the spirit of resistance was strong (despite the existence of military and political groups sympathetic to Hitler’s anti-Bolshevik propaganda), lends itself badly to partisan activity, being flat, treeless and densely inhabited; the same conditions characterise most of Holland, Belgium and northern France. In all those areas clandestine activity was readily monitored by the police – and throughout occupied Europe the domestic police forces accepted the authority and direction of the conqueror from the outset – and reprisal punishments were as readily inflicted. The ease and ruthlessness with which reprisals were carried out, either by the Germans or by their satellite security forces, such as the Vichy
Milice
, proved a sufficient deterrent for much of the war. Moreover, fear of reprisal – on a scale which ran from curfew through arrest, hostage-taking and transportation to exemplary execution – encouraged informing, which in turn directly heightened the efficiency of German control. Most resistance organisations, when they began to form, were obliged to devote a high proportion of their energy to combating informers, nowhere with complete success.

The only part of occupied western Europe in which the terrain favoured resistance activity was Norway, north of Oslo; but there the population was so sparse and the density of German occupation troops was so high that all guerrilla activity had to be organised outside the country. The infiltration of Norwegian resistance fighters from Scotland (who in February 1943 destroyed the heavy-water plant at Vermork, thus crippling the German atomic weapons programme), reinforced by the programme of British commando raids against German military outstations, had the highly desirable effect of persuading Hitler grossly to over-garrison Norway throughout the war; but the internal resistance itself was of negligible strategic significance.

Certain regions of eastern and south-eastern Europe were topographically favourable to partisan activity, notably Carpathian Poland, the Bohemian Forest in Czechoslovakia, much of Yugoslavia, the mountainous parts of the Greek mainland and its larger islands, and the Italian Alps and Apennines. The growth of resistance in Italy, however, had to await the fall of Mussolini in July 1943, while Czechoslovakia was too distant from bases of external support for resistance to take root. The Czech government in exile ran the most efficient of Allied-oriented intelligence organisations to operate inside Europe during the war, but SOE’s only serious sponsorship of resistance activity inside the country, the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, SS ‘Deputy Protector of Bohemia-Moravia’, in May 1942, provoked so terrible a reprisal (the extinction of the population of the village of Lidice) that the effort was not repeated; it reveals much about the efficiency of Hitler’s occupation policies that the assassins were betrayed by one of their own number, who made himself known to the Gestapo as soon as he was parachuted into his homeland. In Greece, where SOE set up an extensive network of agents as early as the autumn of 1942, many of them Oxford- and Cambridge-educated classical scholars inspired by the philhellenes (Byron foremost among them) who had aided the Greeks in their struggle against the Turks in the 1820s, the Germans responded to partisan activity with such pitiless cruelty that the British officers soon found themselves obliged actually to dissuade activists from initiating attacks against the occupiers.

In Poland – again partitioned after 1939 so that its western province became German, its eastern Russian and only its centre, the ‘General-Government’, remained a separately administered entity – the ‘Home Army’, under the direction of the government in exile in London, abstained from provocative military action against the occupier until it unleashed the Warsaw rising of August 1944. Though the Poles ran an intelligence network second in efficiency only to that of the Czechs (one of its triumphs was to supply the British government with key parts of crashed German pilotless weapons which had made rogue flights), they decided from the outset that the national interest lay in preserving the strength of the Home Army against the moment when the collapse of Germany would allow it to strike for the recovery of independence. The military efforts of the Home Army were also restricted, however, by its difficulty in acquiring arms. Its lack of weapons was a factor in its nonintervention against the Germans during their destruction of the Warsaw ghetto in April 1943, when its heroic Jewish resistance groups were systematically overwhelmed in a street-by-street battle conducted by SS troops and militia under the command of SS General Jürgen Stroop. Until 1944 SOE lacked aircraft with sufficient range to reach central Poland; even after the acquisition of bases in Italy in 1943, flights were still lengthy and dangerous. The Soviet Union, which occasionally granted the Western air forces refuelling facilities for bombing raids against Germany, refused to do so for arms-dropping missions to Poland. It also refused to supply arms to the Home Army itself.

Russia’s attitude was determined by its political differences with the government in exile and the Home Army, which persisted even after the signing of the agreement in August 1941 which released Polish prisoners held in Russia to join the British armies in the Middle East. Stalin had politically identified the Home Army as a potential opponent of the Polish Communist Party, through which he began to sponsor his own army in exile in the Soviet Union after June 1941. This was the only negative effect of Barbarossa on the development of resistance to German occupation inside Hitler’s Europe. Almost everywhere else the efforts were positive. The European communist parties, through the persisting control of the Comintern, had been restrained from joining in resistance to occupation as long as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact remained in force. As soon as it was broken, all European communist parties were ordered to initiate subversive activity, with a marked increase in the efficiency of resistance groups of whatever political colour. This effect was due either to collaboration by the communists, whose habits of secrecy were far superior to those of recently formed clandestine groups, with the non-communist resistance, as notably in Holland, or to creative competition between left and right, as in France: there de Gaulle, alarmed by the prospect that ‘Free France’ might fall under communist leadership on home territory, succeeded in creating a pan-resistance ‘Secret Army’, commanded by a National Resistance Council under his authority. The marriage it imposed between communist and non-communist groups was one of convenience. The French Communist Party privately reserved the intention to operate to its own political advantage as soon as opportunity offered, and it did indeed institute local reigns of terror against its committed opponents during the interregnum which followed liberation in August 1944; but from June 1941 to July 1944 the marriage worked to unify and strengthen the resistance as a whole.

Objectively, however, it must be recognised that the principal achievement of resistance in western Europe during the years of Hitler’s strength was psychological rather than material. The most visible symbol of resistance was the underground newspaper (120 separate imprints were circulating in Holland in 1941) and the most seditious activity the transmission of intelligence, of varied value, via clandestine networks to London. Some of these networks fell into enemy hands and were ‘turned’; the North Pole network, for example, was ‘run’ by the Germans between March 1942 and April 1944. Such setbacks did little harm to the Allied war effort but resulted in numbers of brave men and women (SOE judged that women made better agents than men) being parachuted straight into the hands of the Gestapo. The publication of underground newspapers and the running of intelligence networks, whose subsidiary activities included the smuggling of crashed aircrew out of occupied territory, occasional acts of sabotage and sporadic assassinations, did a great deal to sustain national pride during the occupation years, but none of the activities shook the German system of control, which was both efficient and remarkably economic. Historians of the resistance are naturally reluctant to put figures to the size of the German security forces (civilian
Sicherheitsdienst
, military
Feldgendarmerie
) which were the resistance groups’ enemies, but it is probable that their total strength in France did not exceed 6500 at any stage during the war; the German police garrison of Lyon, the second largest city of France, comprised about 100 secret policemen and 400 security troops in 1943. The divisions of the German army stationed in France (sixty in June 1944) took no part whatsoever in security duties, and, since they were almost exclusively stationed in coastal districts, they were not in a position to do so. Against the German security forces the resistance deployed at most 116,000 armed men, a figure established in July 1944 when the arrival of the Allied liberation armies raised their strength to its maximum. During the occupation proper, the number and size of armed groups were small and their activities consonantly limited; in the first nine months of 1942 the total number of assassinations of German security officers was 150, while major acts of sabotage throughout the war did not exceed five (interference with the railway network was extensive, but was largely confined to the months before and during the D-Day landings).