• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 940 0

Europe would lapse into subservience to Hitler’s hegemony. It provoked his chagrin that few French people rallied to de Gaulle’s standard not only in 1940, but through the years which followed. Usefully for Churchill’s aspirations, Germany adopted towards most of its European empire policies so shamelessly selfish, as well as brutal, that even the rulers of Vichy France came progressively to understand that they could forge no partnership with their occupiers. Berlin wanted only economic plunder876 for the benefit of the Reich’s citizens. Hitler’s policies thus assisted those of Churchill.

Yet, at least until after D-Day, in 1944, reprisals convinced most people in the occupied countries that the cost of violent acts outweighed their value. The Norwegians, though strongly anti-German, conducted resistance with notable prudence. Norwegian special forces dispatched from Britain occasionally attacked important targets, such as the Rjukan heavy water plant, but local people avoided open combat. In Czechoslovakia, the May 27, 1942, killing of Reinhard Heydrich, “Protector” of Bohemia and Moravia, by Czechs parachuted in from Britain, prompted shocking reprisals, most notoriously the slaughter of the 198 men of the village of Lidice, whose women were sent to concentration camps. Local resistance groups were smashed. Many Czechs believe to this day that the assassination was mistaken, because it was purchased so dearly in innocent lives.

In France, the detonation of a roadside bomb in Marseilles prompted the Germans to demolish the entire vieux quartier of the city, making forty thousand people homeless. Terrasson, a pretty little town in south-central France, suffered heavily both from resistance activism and German reprisals. “The cycle is simple,”877 its mayor, Georges Labarthe, wrote wretchedly to his mother in Paris in June 1944: “the maquis conduct an operation, the Germans arrive, the civil population pay the tariff, the Germans go away and the maquis reappear. Where there are casualties among the Germans, the retribution is terrible. I must confess that in these circumstances it is hard to be the representative and defender of the people.”

In western Europe resistance achieved its greatest strength in wildernesses which mattered least to Hitler strategically—those most remote from potential invasion coasts. An overwhelming majority of people with large possessions—the aristocracy and the business community—collaborated with the occupiers, because they had most to lose. Many SOE agents captured by the Germans were betrayed by local inhabitants. British officers relied for assistance and shelter chiefly upon the little people of their societies—schoolteachers, trades unionists, peasant farmers. Only 20 percent of letters opened by French censors even late in the war, in the first six months of 1944, expressed approval of “terrorism.” A typical comment was: “The maquis act in the name of patriotism, but fortunately the police are getting tough and I hope with all my heart that these youths are soon destroyed, for they commit all kinds of atrocities on innocent people.” One of the best historians of wartime France, Julian Jackson, writes: “Other evidence exists that maquis violence was widely condemned.”878 In the Jura, where terrible German acts of savagery took place in 1944, some local doctors refused to tend Resistance wounded. Many people refused fugitives shelter. Priests declined to say prayers for the dying. In Haute-Saône, the Vichyite prefect noted: “Less and less do the terrorists enjoy the complicity of the rural population.” Extreme repression and unbridled brutality fuelled hatred but also fear. German policy was notably effective in suppressing dissent.

Churchill envisaged the peoples of Europe causing such trouble for the Germans that occupation became costly, even unviable. Yet untrained and ill-organised civilians could never aspire to defeat regular troops. “What is an army without artillery, tanks and air force?” demanded Stalin contemptuously about the Polish resistance. “In modern warfare such an army