Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [141]
The timing of the different phases through which each nation’s Resistance movement passed depended upon a variety of matters: the circumstances of its defeat, the extent and brutality of its occupation, the condition of its government, whether it was in residence like Vichy or in exile like Holland, and similar factors. Nonetheless, all the movements had similar stages of development.
The first of these is the most difficult to document or treat historically, for it was intensely private and individualistic. This was the phase of rejection, of refusal to submit. The state was conquered; if the national government existed, it was either in exile or had made some sort of accommodation. The individual therefore was left to make his own decision, and it was a necessarily lonely, painful, and dangerous one. In Poland one could be shot for a gesture of ill will toward a German. Yet all over Europe, one at a time, people made such gestures. A Frenchman who habitually sold newspapers to Germans would one day watch a convoy of Jews being shipped off; the next morning when the Germans came for their papers, they found the vendor suddenly understood no German. When Germans entered a café, conversation stopped. Silently the patrons finished their drinks, paid, and got up and left. Such acts were small but they were still dangerous, and a small act because it was dangerous thus became an act of patriotism.
Thousands of Europeans who did no more than turn their backs when a German parade marched by could still feel they had committed an act of defiance. The Germans forbade listening to the overseas service of the British Broadcasting System; it therefore became a patriotic act to gather behind closed blinds and listen to the evening news. There were jokes about the enemy, and the Germans, like most conquerors, notoriously lacked humor. A classic was the tale in France that at nine-twenty a Jew killed a German, cut his heart out, and ate it; why was this story untrue? For three reasons: first, a German has no heart; second, Jews do not eat pork, and third, at nine-twenty everyone is listening to the BBC anyway.
The second phase was that of organization. Like-minded people began to seek each other out and slowly to coalesce into groups and units. This development was fraught with danger; mistakes were easily made. Many people who were willing to turn their backs on Germans were not willing to move to active participation of the kind that might land them in jail, or before a firing squad. There was also a great problem of differing aims. Groups developed to get men to England, and to take soldiers and sailors, and later downed fliers and place them on routes back home. But other groups wanted to educate and propagandize; still others wanted to gather intelligence, and a few hotheads wanted to kill Germans in the streets. These last were the most dangerous, for the Germans soon adopted a policy of reprisals: one dead German was worth fifty to a hundred executions, and eventually they were wiping out whole towns and villages, especially in eastern Europe, as punishment for killings or assassinations.
One of the most notable examples of this kind of situation occurred in Czechoslovakia. In May of 1942 Himmler’s number two man, Reinhard Heydrich, the Protector of Bohemia, was assassinated by a group of Czechs who had been in exile in Britain. They had been infiltrated