Dan Snow's History Hit - Resisting the Third Reich

Episode Date: April 7, 2022

Across the whole of Nazi-ruled Europe, the experience of occupation was sharply varied. As a result, resistance movements during World War II occurred through a variety of means - from open partisan warfare in the occupied Soviet Union to dangerous acts of insurrection in the Netherlands or Norway. While some were entirely home-grown, other resistance movements were supported by the Allies.Historian and author Halik Kochanski joins Dan on the podcast to discuss the history of occupation and resistance in war-torn Europe. They walk through the life-or-death decisions made by ordinary people during the Second World War's darkest days, including the stories of individuals who carried out exceptional acts of defiance in attempts to resist the Third Reich.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.We need your help! If you would like to tell us what you want to hear as part of Dan Snow's History Hit then complete our podcast survey by clicking here. Once completed you will be entered into a prize draw to win a £100 voucher to spend in the History Hit shop.

Hi folks, welcome to Dan Snow's History here. I'm talking about resistance. Resistance to German rule during the Second World War. We're thinking about resistance a bit more at the moment because we're talking about Ukrainian forces inflicting losses, irregular forces inflicting losses on areas of Ukraine occupied by the Russians. I thought it'd be good to go back and have a look at resistance during the Second World War. How much difference does it make? Does it matter? Or are wars fought and won by big conventional forces? or are wars fought and won by big conventional forces? I've got Halleck Hohensky on the podcast. She has written a gigantic history of occupation and resistance in war-torn Europe.

It's said to be the first English-language history of the resistance for the whole of Europe, from the Balkans to Norway. And she talks about how they were organised, what they were trying to achieve, and why it all mattered. As she points out, sometimes resistance is not just about the military effect in the present, but about preserving something of the character of a nation, of a people, preserving self-esteem and giving you something to work with after you've gained your independence. Before you listen to it, just quickly a reminder of History Hit TV. It's the world's best history channel. Tens of thousands of people signing up. Thank you very much to everyone doing that. You can follow the link if you click on the link in the description of this podcast. You get taken right there and you get two weeks for free. If you sign up, you can watch it on your smart TV. You can watch it

on your phone, on your computer, anywhere. It's got all the podcasts. It's got hundreds of hours of history documentaries, more being added all the time. Lots of exciting stuff, including all of my recent adventure at Antarctica in the footsteps or in the wake of Shackleton. So please head over there and check all that out. But in the meantime, here's Hayek Kahinsky telling us all about the Resistance. Enjoy. Hayek, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Well, thank you for inviting me. Okay, so I'm going to ask a really big question first. Did the resistances move the dial on the Second World War?

Did they mat all these incredibly brave people across Europe? Or was the outcome of the war decided by massive tank battles in Normandy and on the Dnieper? Well, war is more than just defeating the enemy, which was done by the mass allied armies. But it is also about the self-respect of the populations who have been occupied. And I think that's where the resistance was so important. It was an exaggeration, as de Gaulle said, that France liberated itself. That's not true. The allies did. But the work by all the resistance movements to get the

population not to collaborate with the Germans was vital for post-war self-respect. And given that we built some of the most successful liberal democracies in history in those places following the war, those two facts are probably related. Well, certainly for Western Europe, that is where the resistance helped to uphold the pre-war liberal democracy and restore it, and in fact, ensure a very smooth transition from war to peace. But in the East, of course, the Soviet Union imposed its own regime. And so for the resistance movements there, in fact, the war ended in their defeat, and many were arrested and taken to Siberia. Terrible, which we'll cover when we talk about the Poles and things. But let's go to 1940,

catastrophic defeat of Western European powers by Germany. We Brits can be a bit naughty. We think that Winston Churchill magicked up these resistance movements. I mean, to what extent are they indigenous response to the German occupation? And to what extent were they encouraged by the British, the Special Operations Executive from the UK? Well, you have to remember the war actually did begin on the 1st of September 1939. But even prior to that, the Czechs had been occupied. And so in both the former Czechoslovakia and in Poland, the resistance began from the beginning. Particularly in Poland, the Germans considered they had a mission. And that mission was Lebensraum, the extension of the German living space. And so they completely dismembered Poland, along with the Soviet Union,

and enslaved the Polish population. The children were to be deprived of education and brought up to believe that their only purpose was to serve the German cause. Any signs of resistance were subject to great points of repression, with thousands being executed and even more put into prison. The Czech Republic also formed its early resistance movements and had to move through several stages. The first to hoping that the outbreak of World War would save them, and that didn't, that the defeat of Germany would come from the West. After France fell, that's altered. So when SOE was set up, it was to set Europe ablaze, but Europe was already ablaze itself. It just needed organisation, direction to work in accordance with Allied war aims. And most of all, SOE really worked as a

contact to remind the people of occupied Europe that they hadn't been forgotten by the Allies. Of all the resistance that you've studied, is there a typical pattern that emerges around recruitment, around early objectives and methods, or is it very different from country to country? Well, there are various themes in common. When people hear the word resistance, they automatically think of armed resistance, of ill-equipped soldiers rising up to fight the might of the Germans, and of SOE agents, as we've already referred to, parachuting into occupied Europe. But in fact, most of the resistance was unarmed resistance. That was the production of the clandestine press in order to tell people the truth and to win the battle of

the mind, to try and convince people that German rule was not going to be permanent and that they could do something about it. And also really just to publicise the existence of resistance movements. about it. And also really just to publicise the existence of resistance movements. And then there was also resistance in assistance of the Allies, which was helping Allied airmen escape from Belgium across France, across the Pyrenees and into Spain. And also across Europe, the resistance provided intelligence for the Allies, beginning from looking at German war aims and how likely it was that the Germans would try and invade Britain, and if so, when. Through the war, they continued to provide intelligence on the sailing of U-boats and other German shipping, and the location of the German main battle fleet in Norway. And finally, of course,

they provided vital intelligence on the development and deployment of the V weapons. And many of those, to my own point, did probably have an impact on the outcome of the war. Well, certainly with the V weapons, they did because the resistance began right from Poland, where they observed the tests for the V2 and in fact managed to salvage part of the V2 that went off course and send the bits to London, right through to France, where they reported the location of almost every ski site so that the RAF could come and bomb it. What about the violent resistance? In Western Europe, we'll get to Russia and the Second Soviet Union.

In this early portion of the war, presumably heroic acts of violence against uniformed members of the occupying force. Did that happen? Was it encouraged? The original SOE plan was to encourage the build-up of forces to have an uprising at a point when Germany would be close to defeat. That changed with the entry of the Soviet Union and America into the war, because then it was obvious that Germany would be defeated by mass armies. So then the resistance was supposed to focus on sabotage, and that was sabotage of

the railways, sabotage of factories making stuff for the Germans, and any sort of sabotage of the German war effort. And that was encouraged and explosives were sent for that. But they also sent weapons so that when the Allies did land, they could help the Allied corps. But on the other hand, the resistance had a different idea. Many of them wanted to liberate themselves. And that's where the tragedies happen. In France, you have the effort to take the corps and the resistance got massacred there. And then you have the three uprisings, August, September, October 1944. Warsaw, as you know, ends up in tragedy as the Soviets leave the Germans to kill the Poles and the Allies prove manifestly incapable of supplying

the Warsaw with the weapons they desperately needed. The same happened in Slovakia. Again, the Russians stayed still and the Germans were free to destroy the Slovaks. Only in Paris did it work, and that was because the Americans gave permission for the French troops to turn south to help Paris. If you listen to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the resistance.

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from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. There's something in your work and elsewhere, I only said because you have said it as well, there is something extraordinarily brave, obviously, about the system, but also quite funny, because these are people who aren't necessarily combatants, they don't often have the right training. And there are great successes and then catastrophic failures, aren't there? The story of the resistance is bound up in a way with, I don't know, it's like all of us just trying to do the best of it, not making an absolute

pig's ear of it half the time. Well, resistance is about human nature. I mean, we're talking about normal, ordinary people who, a few years before the war, would never have believed they were capable of carrying out the heroic things they did. Most of them fell into resistance by accident. Someone would knock on the door and say, could you hide this person overnight, please? Or could you provide clothes for someone in hiding? And so they might get involved in the escape line. They might be working in the dairy and someone will ask them, can you calculate the size of the German garrison by how much milk they're ordering? All these little pieces become the resistance. But many of the people in the resistance didn't

even know or think that they were in the resistance. After the war, someone said, well, if I'd known there was a French resistance, I would have joined it. And yet she had been active. But the amateur nature of it, yes, does lead to some funny things like getting together all the transport to collect stuff from an airdrop, but forgetting to fill up with petrol, or working in the Balkans with, then we're often talking about illiterate peasants who are so enthusiastic about seeing an artillery gun go off that they forget to mount their attack. You have a tight relationship between comedy and then horror. It feels very pronounced on this topic. Speaking of horror, talk to me about the post-German invasion of the Soviet Union, because that's when resistance does start to look like the Churchillian dream of militias,

locally raised volunteers, actually seizing back land from an occupier. Well, the situation in the Soviet Union was actually very complex because the partisan movement began under the aegis of the Communist Party. But the communists had been in control for so long that their members no longer had any idea how to work undercover. So many of them were caught. Then it gradually developed, always under the control of Soviet high command, to become groups of Soviet soldiers who'd got left behind the lines, plus agents who were trained and were parachuted in to join them, to become a mass movement. But at the same time, an almost equal number of people on the ground were

collaborating with the Germans. And so you had this odd situation when the population's caught between the Germans coming and requisitioning their goods during the day and the partisans coming by night. And you get things like the Bryansk Forest, which is enormous, housing the greatest partisan units and the greatest anti-partisan units at the same time. Complicated, complicated. And then I suppose Tito in Yugoslavia, would you call it a very successful resistance movement? No, I wouldn't. The situation in the Balkans was complicated because whereas in Western Europe they were looking to re-establish the pre-war governments, or at least the pre-war form of government, in the Balkans there were resistance movements looking for regime change.

there were resistance movements looking for regime change. And at the same time, there were resistance movements looking to restore the pre-war status quo. And that happened in Yugoslavia, where you had Mihailović's Czechniks wanting the restoration of the Serbian king, and Tito wanting to turn Yugoslavia into a communist state. In Greece, you had it even worse because you had two republican movements and the British were supporting the Greek king and were greatly annoyed that the only resistance came from the republicans. But those two republican forces tended to fight each other just as much or more than they fought the Germans. And certainly in Yugoslavia, I mean, Tito did fighting the Germans. Towards the end of 1944, as the Soviets are approaching, the Germans are retreating up the coast from Albania and Greece through Yugoslavia, while Tito is turning east into Serbia and doing very little to stop the

German retreat. Is that something we need to think about? Our view of resistance in the Second World War, well, it's my view, it's probably naive and largely positive. If you look at Greece, if you look at other countries, well, there's a kind of hornet's nest stirred up. I mean, would it have been better to sit out the occupation, let the great powers duke it out and wait for the outcome? Well, most people did sit on the fence. The resistance in any country was tiny, and the number of collaborators was tiny. But what you do see during the war is gradually more people become involved in the resistance. And that's largely as a result of German policies, particularly the imposition of forced labour, which came in in 1942, because the Germans realised they had a long war in the Soviet Union and needed manpower

from the whole of Europe. They'd already been taking it from Poland and the Soviet Union. Now they needed workers from Western Europe. And many of those went into hiding and some of those then joined the resistance. But I think what also happens is, as there becomes a chance that allies after Stalingrad and after the victory in North Africa, there seems a chance that allies will win. So people have to choose sides, but it's still too dangerous to go totally over to the allies. And so you see a divergence of opinion that more people join the resistance, but also the collaborators collaborate even more, like you get the creation of the Milice in France, which was the collaborators collaborate even more. Like you get the creation of the milice in France, which was the worst enemy of the French resistance, because they

were native speakers, they could infiltrate networks very easily. But also throughout the war, you have the question of who is the enemy? The obvious answer is the Germans or in areas occupied by the Italians, the Italians. But they are unreachable or it is too dangerous with the German reprisal rate being 50 resistors for one of the Norwegian resistance against Quisling's attempt to Nazify Norway. When in the end, they are so successful in every area he tries to Nazify, they defy him. And so Quisling chides the resistance at the end, saying, you've spoiled everything for me. But civil war is present in every country, but it's only actual in the Balkans during the war. As you've studied such a vast range of resistance movements across Europe, what are some of the ones that you would pick out that made the biggest difference? Well, the Soviet partisans worked closely with the Red Army,

and so could make a difference with the rail war that they did to slow the German reinforcements to the front. The French resistance assisted their allies largely through acting as guides or an advance guard after Normandy and after Operation Dragoon in the south. The Polish resistance was probably potentially the greatest, both numerically and in the will to fight. But they never received enough weapons. And of course, they had the question of who is the enemy became who is the greater enemy, the occupying Germans who were on the verge of departing or the incoming Soviets. And so they tried to work with the Soviets to hasten the German departure. And the Soviets duly were grateful for the help in liberating the towns

of eastern Poland and then turned around and arrested the members of the Polish Home Army. And then, of course, you had the Warsaw Uprising, which virtually destroyed that. The Italian partisan movement developed very quickly after the Italian surrender and held together throughout the war. But then again, there was also the danger of civil war. And after the experience that the Allies had had with Greece, they kept much tighter control over the Italian resistance to stop the communists hoarding weapons and turning them on fellow Italians, but getting them to focus on the Germans. So the Italian uprisings in Milan, Turin, Genoa, right towards the end of the war,

succeeded, partly because the Germans were in retreat and the Allies were nearby, but partly because the resistance there was well controlled and would follow orders. And resistors, you mentioned the Poles, paid a terrible price across Europe, though it was a dangerous thing to do. It was extremely dangerous. Some people thrived on the danger. Most were pragmatic and they used to talk about how they would behave, not if they were arrested, but when they were arrested. We always knew the names of the main German concentration camps of Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, but for the resistance, their memory is the more local prisons, such as Fresnes

in France, Grigny in Norway, Pawiak in Poland, Plas, Buchwald and Mauthausen in Germany, which are also great execution sites for the resistance, and many other prisons across Germany. And a number of them, their records were never kept. They disappeared under the Nacht und Nebel decree, the night and fog thing. So no one knows quite what happened to them all. And I think the most admirable feature of the resistors across Europe is their resilience. Time and time, networks were broken up and people were tortured to death. And time and time again, those networks rebuilt and continued. In 1943, the Germans inflicted tremendous damage on the resistance. They arrested the head of the Polish Home Army.

Someone stepped into his place and things went on as normal. They had most of the Dutch resistance under their own control and they wiped out the resistance in quite a large part of France. And yet by D-Day, the resistance was there to work. Yeah, and doing some very interesting, important things, as you point out, intelligence gathering and other things. What about women in the resistance? There's a sort of myth. Is it true that women were able to play a bigger role than they would have been in conventional force at the time? Well, certainly not in conventional force, but in conventional society. The society from which these resistors came from was still very male-dominated. And though women were getting

more professional education, now most, when they married, just became housewives, brought up their children. So with a number of the men away in prisoner of war camps, and the remaining men having to prove why they were at liberty, they would have a lot of paperwork to prove they were exempt from forced labour. Women had freedom of movement and they used that. Very few of them actually carried weapons or fired weapons in anger, but they were the support services. They were the couriers taking messages between networks. They were often the radio operators for SOE. They were the ones who typed up the clandestine press and helped distribute it. There were many roles they got that they wouldn't necessarily have thought of taking before the war. You know, they could transport weapons hidden in a pram and they could flirt with guards to get through a dodgy checkpoint. So they really gained a sort of sense of self-belief through their actions. Well, thank you very much for coming on and talking all about The Resistance. What's your book called?

The book is called Resistance, The Underground War in Europe, 1939 to 1945. Thank you very much indeed. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished.