Axis-occupied Europe: collaboration and resistance

The map of occupation: annexation, General Government, Reichskommissariats, military rule

At their peak in 1941–1942, Germany and the other Axis powers, Italy above all, governed more than half of the continent’s population through direct administration, civil and military occupation and puppet states. There was no single model. Austria, the Sudetenland, the Memel Territory, parts of Poland and Eupen-Malmedy were incorporated into the Reich by law; Luxembourg, Alsace, Lorraine, Lower Styria, Upper Carniola and the Białystok District were placed under a “Chief of Civil Administration” and annexed de facto without any declaration under international law. The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the General Government were semi-autonomous yet considered an inherent part of the Reich. 1 2

Poland was the laboratory for all of these forms. By two decrees of Hitler on 8 and 12 October 1939 western Poland was annexed to Germany, and on 26 October the rest became the General Government under Governor-General Hans Frank. Martin Bormann’s note of a meeting between Hitler and Frank on 2 October 1940 called the General Government “a Polish reservation, a great Polish labor camp” and stated that all representatives of the Polish intelligentsia were to be killed. In March 1941 Frank told his subordinates that Hitler had decided to “turn this region into a purely German area within 15–20 years”. 3) 4

The Netherlands and Norway received civilian Reich commissioners; the one in the Netherlands was Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Austria’s last chancellor before the Anschluss. The Reichskommissariats of Western and Northern Europe kept the existing administrative structure and were conceived as transitional stages towards incorporation into a Greater Germanic Reich. Their eastern counterparts, proposed by Alfred Rosenberg just after the invasion of the Soviet Union — Ostland in the Baltic states and Belarus, and Ukraine, where Hitler appointed Erich Koch on 20 August 1941 — were given new structures and served colonial ends, as Lebensraum for German settlement and sources of resources. Ostland is covered in The Baltic states under German occupation. 5 6 7

The remaining lands were put under military government or local collaborating regimes. Belgium and northern France were under military administration from 1940 to 1944. In Serbia supreme authority lay with the German Military Commander, and Milan Nedić’s “Government of National Salvation” had no status under international law and no powers beyond those granted by the Germans — it was simply an instrument of German rule. On 10 April 1941 the Independent State of Croatia was set up under Ante Pavelić’s fascist Ustaše with the backing of Hitler and Mussolini. Greece was divided into German, Italian and Bulgarian occupation zones, with the Germans holding the most important regions, including Athens and Thessaloniki. Italy occupied part of south-eastern France from June 1940 and greatly expanded its zone in November 1942, when Germany occupied the Vichy free zone. France is continued in The Fall of France and the Vichy Regime. 5 8 9 10 11

Plunder: hunger and forced labour

Occupation was first of all plunder. The Hunger Plan, devised by Herbert Backe and first formulated at a meeting of state secretaries on 2 May 1941 in preparation for the invasion of the Soviet Union, ordered the seizure of food in the occupied territories for German troops and the home front and intended an artificial famine in Eastern Europe that would have killed around 31 to 45 million people. It was only partially implemented, but it killed millions. Generalplan Ost, the plan to settle Eastern Europe with Germans and to murder and expel its Slavic and other inhabitants, was also partially carried out during the war. 12 13

In Greece, unlike the rational exploitation applied in Western and Northern Europe, the Germans and Italians resorted to plunder. Hermann Göring wrote to the Reich commissioners and military commanders of the occupied territories on 6 August 1942: “I could not care less when you say that people under your administration are dying of hunger. Let them perish so long as no German starves.” Requisitions, the Allied blockade, infrastructure wrecked by the invasion and a powerful black market produced the Great Famine, which peaked in the winter of 1941–42; according to German army records 300 people a day died in Athens alone in December 1941, while the Red Cross estimated 400. Mortality fell after the blockade was lifted in February 1942 and Swedish ships brought Canadian wheat, but Greece is estimated to have suffered some 300,000 deaths from famine and malnutrition during the occupation. 14)

Labour was taken too. The Germans abducted approximately 12 million people from almost twenty European countries, about two thirds of them from Central and Eastern Europe. In the late summer of 1944 German records listed 7.6 million foreign civilian workers and prisoners of war on German territory, most brought there by coercion; by then slave labour made up a quarter of Germany’s entire work force. The Soviet and Polish Ostarbeiter, who wore an “OST” badge and lived under guard in camps fenced with barbed wire, numbered between 2.8 and 3 million, and Polish workers from the General Government had to wear a “P” on their clothing. 15

In the West collaborating governments ran the mobilisation. On 22 June 1942 Pierre Laval, head of the Vichy government, announced the relève, under which one French prisoner of war would be released for every three French workers sent to Germany. When volunteers fell short, the law of 16 February 1943, signed by Laval, made all males over 20 subject to the Service du travail obligatoire. Between June 1942 and July 1944, 600,000 to 650,000 French workers were sent to Germany, making France the third largest source of forced labour after the Soviet Union and Poland. 16

The faces of collaboration

“Collaboration” acquired its modern meaning of traitorous cooperation with the enemy after Marshal Philippe Pétain met Hitler at Montoire-sur-le-Loir on 24 October 1940. Believing that Germany had won the war, Pétain informed the French people that he accepted “collaboration” with Germany. The historian Stanley Hoffmann divided collaboration into involuntary — reluctant recognition of necessity — and voluntary, an attempt to exploit necessity, and used the term collaborationnistes for the fascists and Nazi sympathisers who, for anti-communist or other ideological reasons, wanted a reinforced collaboration with Hitler’s Germany. 17

In Norway Vidkun Quisling tried to seize power on 9 April 1940, with the German invasion in progress, in a radio-broadcast coup, but failed because the Germans sought to have the recognised government legitimise the occupation. On 1 February 1942 he became minister president of a government approved by the Germans, and before the war was over his surname had become a synonym for “collaborator” or “traitor” in several North European languages. Collaboration also wore uniform: by the end of the war the foreigners who served in the Waffen-SS numbered some 500,000, including those pressured into service or conscripted, and several of these units — raised through a mix of volunteering, coercion and conscription — and of the SS police formations were implicated in war crimes in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. 18 19

The Holocaust, too, depended on collaborating governments and local administrations. The Bulgarian government deported 11,000 Jews from the parts of Greece and Yugoslavia it occupied, who were murdered at Treblinka, but because of widespread opposition from prominent individuals and groups within Bulgaria it did not allow the deportation of Jews from its prewar territory. Until the German occupation of March 1944, the Hungarian government did not deport very many of its approximately 846,000 Jews; between March and 9 July 1944, however, 434,000 were deported on trains, mostly to Auschwitz, where the great majority were murdered immediately. That story is told in Hungary under German occupation. 20

The Holocaust in occupied Europe

From 1941 to 1945 Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered around six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, approximately two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. The killing was done primarily through mass shootings across Eastern Europe and in the gas chambers of the extermination camps in occupied Poland — Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chełmno and Majdanek. The first, Chełmno in the annexed Wartheland, began operating in December 1941 with gas vans, and after the Wannsee Conference presided over by Reinhard Heydrich on 20 January 1942 the Final Solution to murder all the Jews of Europe was put into effect. 20

In Poland the murder of the Jews went together with the destruction of Polish society’s leadership. Proscription lists prepared before the war identified more than 61,000 members of the Polish elite and intelligentsia deemed unfriendly to Germany, and tens of thousands — clergymen, officials, doctors, teachers, journalists — were executed or sent to camps, in operations such as the AB-Aktion against university professors, teachers and priests and Sonderaktion Krakau. Four million of the General Government’s 1939 population had lost their lives by the time Soviet forces entered the area in late 1944, among them perhaps as many as two million Jews. 3) 4

In some places a way out opened. In Denmark the German diplomat Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz leaked word of the planned round-up to the Social Democratic leader Hans Hedtoft on 28 September 1943, and the resistance and ordinary citizens evacuated 7,500 of the country’s 8,000 Jews by sea to neutral Sweden; with Danish intercession for the 464 who were deported, 99 per cent of Denmark’s Jews survived. In Poland the Council to Aid Jews, Żegota, was founded in September 1942, and half of the Jews who survived the war — over 50,000 — were aided by it in some way. Many thousands of Jews also moved into the Italian zone of occupation in southern France to escape persecution in Vichy France. 21 22 11

Resistance: who and how

Resistance took many forms, from non-cooperation and propaganda to hiding crashed pilots and outright warfare to recapture towns. Armed resistance meant raids for food coupons and documents, assassinations, uprisings and guerrilla war; unarmed resistance meant sabotage, strikes and demonstrations, espionage, the underground press, covert listening to the BBC, hiding people from forced labour and deportation, escape lines for Allied servicemen and forged documents. Only a minority took part in organised resistance — an estimated one to three per cent of the population in Western Europe, more in the East where Nazi rule was harsher, some 10–15 per cent in Poland. Passive non-cooperation was much more common. 22

Politically the resistance movements fell into two broad streams: the internationalist, usually Communist-led anti-fascist resistance found in nearly every country, and nationalist groups that opposed both Nazi Germany and the Communists. In Poland the Union of Armed Struggle was created on 17 November 1939 on the orders of General Władysław Sikorski of the government-in-exile and became the Home Army on 14 February 1942; by the summer of 1944, at around 400,000 members, it was the largest resistance organisation in Europe. In Yugoslavia Draža Mihailović’s Chetniks and Josip Broz Tito’s Partisans, and in Greece the Communist-led National Liberation Front (EAM) and other organisations, fought separately; their course is followed in The Yugoslav Partisan War and Greek Resistance and the Dekemvriana. 22 23

Communist resistance changed at June 1941. The French Communist Party was neutral at first, following the Soviet Union’s official view that the war was a struggle between imperialists, and turned to armed resistance after Germany invaded the Soviet Union; its armed organisation was the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, with Charles Tillon in charge of military matters. Yet Communist-led resistance had come earlier too: on 25 February 1941 the outlawed Communist Party of the Netherlands organised a general strike against the arrests and pogroms in Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter, which 300,000 people had joined by the next day. After June came the Communist-initiated uprisings in Serbia on 7 July 1941 and in Montenegro six days later, and that autumn the Republic of Užice in western Serbia became the first part of occupied Europe to be liberated. In Greece ELAS began its actions against the occupiers on 7 June 1942. 24 25 22

Resistance movements depended heavily on Allied support. Britain formed the Special Operations Executive on 22 July 1940 to develop a spirit of resistance in the occupied countries and to prepare fighters for open opposition when Britain returned to the continent. Even large networks such as the Soviet partisans and the French Resistance are assessed not to have significantly hampered German operations until late 1943, and their military effect is still debated: Evan Mawdsley holds that the resistance “did not do a great deal to achieve the strategic objectives” of the major Allied powers, while Jørgen Hæstrup argued that it “influenced the course of the War decisively”, particularly in the psychological sphere. 22

Jews resisted extermination as well. On 19 April 1943 the Warsaw Ghetto refused to surrender to the SS and police commander Jürgen Stroop, who ordered the ghetto destroyed block by block; the fighting lasted until 16 May, and Stroop reported at least 56,065 Jews killed or captured and 110 German casualties, including 16 killed. Prisoners rose in Sobibor the same year and in Auschwitz in 1944. 26 22

The logic of reprisal

The occupiers met resistance with collective punishment. On 16 September 1941 the Wehrmacht High Command issued Hitler’s order, signed by Wilhelm Keitel, that all attacks in the occupied East were to be “regarded as being of communist origin” and that 100 hostages were to be shot for every German soldier killed and 50 for every one wounded; an identical policy had been in force in Serbia since 28 April 1941. On 21 October German soldiers shot between 2,778 and 2,794 mostly Serb men and boys in Kragujevac, including 144 high school students. The ratio was halved in February 1943 and dropped altogether later that year. 27

On 7 December 1941 Hitler issued the Night and Fog decree, under which political activists and resistance “helpers” in the occupied territories were to be imprisoned, executed or made to disappear into the “night and fog” of the Reich; Keitel immediately passed it on as guidelines. When Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík of the Czechoslovak army in exile attacked Heydrich, the Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, in Prague on 27 May 1942 and he died of his wounds, all 173 men aged 15 and over in the village of Lidice were shot on 10 June. More than fifteen thousand Czechs were killed in the reprisals. 28 22 29

Anti-partisan operations targeted whole villages. On 13 December 1943 the Wehrmacht’s 117th Jäger Division, in an operation to encircle Greek resistance fighters in the surrounding mountains, nearly exterminated the male population of Kalavryta and destroyed the town. On 10 June 1944, four days after D-Day, two massacres took place on the same day: at Oradour-sur-Glane in France a Waffen-SS company killed 642 civilians, women and children among them, and at Distomo in Greece SS troops killed 228 men, women and children in reprisal for a partisan attack on their convoy. 30 31 32

Liberation and reckoning, 1944–1945

As Allied armies approached, resistance movements sought a direct share in liberation through uprisings. In Paris, after weeks of strikes, the French Forces of the Interior — the military structure of the Resistance — rose against the German garrison on 19 August 1944. Charles de Gaulle, head of the Provisional Government, pressed for the liberation of the city to pre-empt both Allied military rule and an uncontrolled uprising led by the Communist FTP under Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy. Dietrich von Choltitz surrendered the garrison on 25 August, and de Gaulle, arriving the same day, credited the liberation to the French people themselves. The story is told in The French Resistance and the Liberation of France. 33

Not every rising succeeded. The Polish Home Army rose in Warsaw on 1 August as part of Operation Tempest and was crushed by 2 October, when Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, its commander since July 1943, surrendered to the Germans (Warsaw Uprising). In Slovakia parts of the army rose on 29 August against the German invasion and Jozef Tiso’s collaborationist regime; their centre, Banská Bystrica, fell on 27 October. In Bulgaria the Communist-led movement overthrew the pro-Axis government on 9 September, and on 5 May 1945, as Allied forces advanced, Prague rose. 22 23 34

Liberation brought a reckoning. In France local Resistance groups and crowds carried out an estimated 9,000 to 10,000 summary executions of suspected informants, municipal officials and members of the Milice, and publicly shaved the heads of some 20,000 women accused of “horizontal collaboration”. The courts set up by de Gaulle’s Provisional Government pronounced 6,763 death sentences between 1944 and 1951 (3,910 in absentia); about 73 per cent of the 2,853 sentenced in person were commuted, leaving 791 executions, Pierre Laval’s among them, and nearly 50,000 people lost their civic rights for the new offence of indignité nationale. Pétain was sentenced to death and had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment by de Gaulle. Quisling was shot on 24 October 1945, and Hans Frank, sentenced to death at Nuremberg, was hanged on 16 October 1946. 35 18 4

Germany’s defeat in 1945 freed approximately 11 million foreigners classed as displaced persons, most of them forced labourers and prisoners of war; 5.2 million were repatriated to the Soviet Union, 1.6 million to Poland, 1.5 million to France and 900,000 to Italy. The experience of occupation and the divisions within the resistance shaped post-war politics across Europe; how they carried over in the East is covered in The People’s Democracies of Eastern Europe. 15