Resistance: The Underground War Against Hitler, 1939-1945

by Halik Kochanski

Overview

WINNER OF THE 2023 WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE
New Yorker • Best Books of 2022

“This is the most comprehensive and best account of resistance I have read. It addresses the story with scholarly objectivity and an absolute lack of sentimentality. So much romantic twaddle is still published . . . it is marvelous to read a study of such breadth and depth, which reaches balanced judgments.”
—Max Hastings, The Sunday Times (UK)

Resistance is the first book of its kind: a monumental history that finally integrates the many resistance movements against Nazi hegemony in Europe into a single, sweeping narrative of defiance.

“To resist, therefore. But how, when and where? There were no laws, no guidelines, no precedents to show the way . . .” —Dutch resister Herman Friedhoff

In every country that fell to the Third Reich during the Second World War, from France in the west to parts of the Soviet Union in the east, a resistance movement against Nazi domination emerged. And every country that endured occupation created its own fiercely nationalist account of the role of homegrown resistance in its eventual liberation. Halik Kochanski’s panoramic, prodigiously researched work is a monumental achievement: the first book to strip these disparate national histories of myth and nostalgia and to integrate them into a definitive chronicle of the underground war against the Nazis.

Bringing to light many powerful and often little-known stories, Resistance shows how small bands of individuals took actions that could lead not merely to their own deaths, but to the liquidation of their families and their entire communities. As Kochanski demonstrates, most who joined up were not supermen and superwomen, but ordinary people drawn from all walks of life who would not have been expected—least of all by themselves—to become heroes of any kind. Kochanski also covers the sheer variety of resistance activities, from the clandestine press, assistance to Allied servicemen evading capture, and the provision of intelligence to the Allies to the more violent manifestations of resistance through sabotage and armed insurrection. For many people, resistance was not an occupation or an identity, but an activity: a person would deliver a cache of stolen documents to armed partisans and then seamlessly return to their normal life. For Jews under Nazi rule, meanwhile, the stakes at every point were life and death; resistance was less about national restoration than about mere survival.

Why resist at all? Who is the real enemy? What kind of future are we risking our lives for? These and other questions animated those who resisted. With penetrating insight, Kochanski reveals that the single quality that defined resistance across borders was resilience: despite the constant arrests and executions, resistance movements rebuilt themselves time and time again. A landmark history that will endure for decades to come, Resistance forces every reader to ask themselves yet another question, this distinct to our own times: “What would I have done?”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324091660
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	05/24/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	960
Sales rank:	22,494
File size:	41 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Halik Kochanski is a British historian. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, she has taught history at several universities and is the author of The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War. She lives in England.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Map: Europe on the Eve of the Second World War x

List of Illustrations xiii

Introduction xv

Part 1 Why Resist?

1 The Shock of Defeat 3

2 Choices 24

3 The Clandestine Press 39

4 Escape from Occupied Europe 59

5 Resisters of the First Hour 84

6 Intelligence Gathering: 1939-41 111

7 The Origins of SOE and OSS 134

Part 2 Growing the Resistance

8 The Early Partisans 161

9 The Mobilization of the Communists 185

10 SOE Gets to Work 206

11 Three SOE Operations 230

12 The Sauckel Effect 250

13 The Holocaust: The Christian Response 267

14 The Holocaust: The Jewish Response 294

15 Who is the Enemy? 321

16 Divided Loyalties: France 1942-43 343

17 The Germans Hit Back 367

18 Resistance or Civil War? The Balkans 402

Part 3 Resistance in Action

19 The Italian Surrender 435

20 Denmark Enters the Fray 461

21 Civil War or Resistance - The Balkans 474

22 Challenges and Dilemmas in the East 510

23 Intelligence: 1942-44 538

24 Preparing for D-Day 559

25 Summer 1944: France 588

26 Summer 1944: Other Fronts 617

27 Uprisings: Warsaw, Paris, Slovakia 645

28 Autumn 1944: Western Europe 687

29 The German Retreat from the Balkans 713

30 Nearing the End: Winter 1944-45 745

31 To the Bitter End: Spring 1945 776

32 The Aftermath 802

Notes 831

List of Abbreviations 893

Bibliography 897

Index 917

Editorial Reviews

"Individual national histories have documented these efforts, but Kochanski ... pulls back to take in both Eastern and Western Europe, revealing a wider perspective on these underground movements . . . Kochanski, after first surveying the breadth of Germany’s conquests, details the growth of resistance movements in all their manifestations, from sabotage to assassination . . . She also casts revealing light in chapters devoted to both the Christian and Jewish responses to the Holocaust. In this massive work of research, Kochanski brings together individual stories and larger historical forces to document how ordinary people successfully challenged what seemed overwhelming military might."

Mark Knoblauch

"[R]eads less like a work of history and more like a chronicle of a partisan war foretold . . . The thematic structure that Kochanski has given to her book, her scrupulous scholarship, and her refusal to romanticize the grim, grimy work of being a resister, does make Resistance something of a primer for the many Ukrainians now fighting to undermine Russian authority over the areas of our country that the invader now occupies."

Yuliya Tymoshenko

"This is an exceptionally clear and comprehensive study, which deserves to become a standard reference work on the subject."

Military History - David Porter

"In her unflinching and sober account of the response of ordinary people under occupation, Kochanski shows that there is no straightforward answer to the question of why some Europeans chose to resist the Nazis while most did not. . . . A nuanced and dispassionate study, Resistance nonetheless pays tribute to those who ‘were determined to thwart the designs of the Germans, to harass them, to deny them the opportunity to ever assert total control over the peoples of Europe.’ Ideas of independence and dignity were at the heart of the struggle—worth fighting and even dying for."

Katja Hoyer

"[E]minently readable . . . wide-ranging and thoroughly researched . . . subtle, multilayered and kaleidoscopic . . . Kochanski’s gripping account of the activities of the resistance and those sent from, mainly, Britain to work with them includes, as might be expected, tales of derring-do and extraordinary courage as well as tragedy, betrayal and Nazi barbarism."

Wall Street Journal - Andrew Stuttaford

"Kochanski tells this story effectively on the basis of deep research . . . Her long book is always interesting and readable, sensitive to the powerful human drama it presents . . . this is an instructive book. Kochanski tells us of Norwegian teachers who stood up to their puppet government’s demands to reshape the school curriculum, and of the oath of the pro-fascist Vichy French police force, the Milice, whose members swore their opposition to ‘democracy, individualism and international capitalism’ and their support for ‘an authoritarian, national socialist regime.’ One does not need to listen too closely to detect the melancholy echoes in our own time."

Benjamin Carter Hett

"This ambitious history offers the first unified picture of resistance against Nazi Germany in the many countries it invaded . . . Dispensing with heroics and highlighting the imperfect, human nature of the underground, [Kochanski] nevertheless depicts a vital defense of dignity, spirit, and the future, mounted against all odds."

New Yorker

"This is the most comprehensive and best account of resistance I have read. It addresses the story with scholarly objectivity and an absolute lack of sentimentality. So much romantic twaddle is still published . . . it is marvelous to read a study of such breadth and depth, which reaches balanced judgments."

Sunday Times (UK) - Max Hastings

04/02/2022

This ambitious book by historian Kochanski (Britain's Royal Historical Society; The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War) takes an exhaustive approach to the resistance movements in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War. II The book's organization is thematic, chronological, and geographic, which is important in a work of this scope. Kochanski's definition of "the resistance" will be somewhat controversial, as it doesn't include German resisters, whom she instead classifies as internal opponents to the Nazi regime. She argues that the development of resistance movements in a given Nazi-occupied region depended almost entirely on that nation's treatment by the occupying Germans. For instance, Nazi ruthlessness in occupied regions of the Soviet Union and in occupied Poland led people there to join resistance movements because they felt they had no other chance at survival, whereas the relative leniency exhibited by Nazis in occupied Western European countries, like France and the Netherlands, led to more complacency among the people of those nations. Kochanski also posits that the goals and effectiveness of resistance movements also varied from nation to nation: many resistance groups almost ignored the Germans and focused on fighting one another, with an eye to grabbing political power after the war; some resisters declared their opposition to the principles of Nazism, others were Nazi collaborators who then turned against the Germans when it became advantageous. The story of the resistance is a messy one, and Kochanski needs all of the book's 960 pages to tell it thoroughly. VERDICT This title will be appreciated by specialists but is not for the general reader.—Michael Farrell

Library Journal

★ 2022-03-25
A magisterial doorstop of a history that is well worth the effort.

Readers whose knowledge of the resistance against Hitler comes from movies must unlearn a lot of misinformation about its contribution to victory (modest), organization (sloppy), security (inept), and level of participation (low). Impressively debunking myths and deconstructing faulty history, Kochanski adds that a resistance movement was active in every conquered nation, and heroism was widespread. However, resistance seemed futile from 1939 until Hitler’s June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. The Axis had conquered most of Europe. Responding to vicious Nazi treatment, Poles resisted from the beginning, but occupiers in Western Europe exerted a lighter hand, so there was a great deal of collaboration. The earliest organized opposition assisted refugees and then airmen to escape occupied Europe. This was as dangerous as sabotage, with “approximately one person being arrested for each airman who was helped.” Matters improved as Wehrmacht defeats in the Soviet Union made Allied victory a possibility, energizing resistance organizations, which learned from their mistakes, although not before a brutally efficient Gestapo devastated them with mass arrests during the summer of 1943. The resistance fighters also benefited when the Nazis vastly expanded forced labor and began their extermination programs. Various movements worked to integrate masses of young people, who suddenly had a motive to resist. Sadly, despite scattered exceptions, the resistance neglected many Jewish populations. Matters improved by 1944, with the Red Army advancing and the Allies landing in Italy and France. Legendary warfare agencies in the U.S. and Britain were dropping a steady stream of supplies and agents into occupied Europe, and most agents survived. Although sabotage dominates many popular accounts, intelligence gathering may have contributed more to victory. Kochanski continues her masterful chronicle beyond Germany’s surrender. She capably shows that while resistance organizations dissolved or entered politics in Western Europe, they continued to fight Soviet occupation or civil wars for years in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, and Greece.

A definitive history and a great read.

Kirkus Reviews