THE SECOND WORLD WAR AT HOME - PART ONE
The Second World War at Home – Part One
After the 1939 – 45 war it was in the interests of all those who had lived under German or Italian occupation to present themselves as having actively resisted, or at least not to have collaborated. The tongue-in-cheek comment that until 1944 in France there were forty million collaborators and after 1944 there were forty million resistance fighters is an exaggeration, but it makes the point that in most occupied countries the bulk of the population were concerned with surviving, with their own lives and with those of their families, and whatever they may have thought of the occupiers, they tended to keep their heads down and stay out of trouble.
German occupation varied widely depending on the country: in general terms, it was fair but firm in the West and ranged from mildly brutal to utterly bestial in the East. The inhabitants of Western European countries were seen as either racially akin (Scandinavia, Holland, Flemish Belgium) or not so far removed as to fall into the racially inferior category (France, Wallonia). In Poland and the Soviet Union, however, the Slav populations were generally untermenschen to be exploited without regard to legal niceties, or indeed common decency, while active partisan activity in the Balkans meant that there too control measures were harsh. In large parts of the Soviet Union, the Germans were initially seen as liberators from the hated Russian or communist yoke and it was one of the major errors of the German government and Wehrmacht that they did not tap into this. They did employ large numbers of Crimean Tartars, Ukrainians and Latvians as military auxiliaries, although the Latvians and other citizens of the Baltic States who came into German employ were mainly of German ethnic origin. In Poland, ethnic Germans, now German citizens, were conscripted into the army like any other German, but large numbers of ethnic Poles were also employed, ex-soldiers to whom a uniform, pay and three square meals was vastly more attractive than languishing in a prisoner of war camp.
While the image of the Italians, at least in British minds, is one of harmless accordion-playing and Chianti-drinking military incompetents, their occupations were in fact remarkably harsh. In areas of Libya that had been overrun by the British and then reoccupied by the Axis, the Italian authorities shot large numbers of Jews (mainly Italian Jews but some French as well) and Arabs whom they suspected (often correctly) of driving Italian colonists off their land in British-controlled areas. Italian attitudes to Jews varied: in Libya they happily exterminated them, yet in the sliver of France occupied by Italy the Italians refused to hand over the Jews living there to either the Milice Francaise or to the Germans for deportation to extermination camps in the East. In Italy itself, Mussolini did agree to deport his Jews but the machinery for doing so worked so slowly that very few actually went.
It is, though, the French Resistance that has attracted the most post-war coverage on the page and screen, but it has to be said that much of this is fiction. The fall of France in 1940 came as a mind-numbing shock to most French men and women, who thought that the British had left them in the lurch, had never heard of the obscure brigadier-general who broadcast to them from London and in the main pinned their faith on Marshal Petain, the hero of Verdun who had been brought back from his post as ambassador to Spain to be deputy prime minister and then head of state and who negotiated the surrender. To many, perhaps most, Frenchmen, Petain had maintained France as a nation, still with her empire, still with her fleet and still allowed an army of 100,000. It was true that the north-western départements, Nord and Pas de Calais, were governed directly by the German military administration in Belgium; that three fifths of the country including the area around Paris and the coastal strip was occupied by German troops; that the portion of Lorraine and all of Alsace that were German between 1871 and 1918 were annexed to the Reich with its men (generally not unhappily) conscripted into the German army, and that France was required to pay US$10 million per day towards the occupation costs, but nevertheless nearly half the country was not occupied, the church was not unhappy to see the demise of the anti-clerical Third Republic and Papa Petain would surely ensure that all would be well in the end.
Indeed, Petain’s government, based in Vichy, was not established by a coup nor forced on France by the Germans but a perfectly legal government recognised by most of the world including the United States and most of the British dominions and by the UK until Vichy broke off diplomatic relations after the British attack on the French fleet in Mers el Kebir in July 1940. Even then, unofficial contact was maintained and the British assured the Vichy regime that they would permit the French to retain their empire after the war, would not appropriate French colonies and would allow France to import food from her North African colonies through the British blockade. In return, Vichy promised not to attempt to recover the colonies that had gone over to de Gaulle and not to allow the rest of the French fleet to pass into German hands. The fiction that Vichy ruled not only unoccupied France but the occupied portion as well was maintained, and outwardly that was true in so far as the civil administration was concerned, but behind the scenes in occupied France gendarmes and civil servants who did not act as the Germans wished were swiftly removed.
Most Frenchmen assumed that Britain could not long outlast their own surrender: after all, if the Germans could beat the finest army in Europe – that of the French – how could the puny British army possibly resist? The Royal Navy would be destroyed by the Luftwaffe and Britain would have to make what accommodation she could, and in fact around 20,000 Frenchmen volunteered for the SS, in either the Charlemagne Division or the French Storm Brigade. It was the French who first used the term collaboration, but far from having the pejorative connotation attached to the word now, then it simply meant cooperation. In occupied France were those Frenchmen – not all of them Fascists – who welcomed a German victory, whose future depended on it and who worked enthusiastically to ensure it, as allowing a regeneration of France from the old corrupt and incompetent democratic regime, and who saw a future French nation as having a major part to play in a German-dominated Europe. In Vichy, while the fact of French defeat in war was accepted, collaboration only went as far as to ensure the survival of a French state, although as the war went on, the little independence given to Petain was constantly whittled away. Vichy France very quickly introduced anti-Jewish laws – and its ministers were at pains to point out that these owed nothing to the Germans – which were actually stricter than the Nuremberg Laws. The latter defined a Jew as someone who had at least three Jewish grandparents and who practised the Jewish religion, whereas Vichy’s rule required only two grandparents and converts were not exempt. While Vichy did not run its own extermination programme, it cooperated wholeheartedly by rounding up Jews in the unoccupied zone and returning those who fled from the German-controlled areas.
Active, as opposed to passive, resistance to the Germans came only slowly, and when it did, it was divided and expended more time in squabbles between the various groups than it did in opposing the occupiers. Up to June 1941 the French Communist Party, which was persecuted by Petain’s government but sizeable none the less, supported Germany in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; thereafter, when it did start to organise anti-German resistance, its members were hunted down by the Germans and by Vichy. To begin with, the methods were simple: the writing of graffiti on walls, then the publication of clandestine newspapers and eventually the assassination of Germans waiting for a train or shopping, actions which inevitably attracted reprisals in the shooting of hostages, these latter drawn from the many communists already detained by the French government on the outbreak of war. In due course the communist groups coalesced into the Front National, but they were not the only organisation. There was Combat, based in Marseille and run by an ex-army officer; Liberation, based in Lyons and headed by an ex-navy officer; Franc Tireur, based in Avignon and made up of leftist Catholics; Sabotage-Fer, whose speciality was derailing German troop trains; and the Maquis, originally young men hiding from compulsory forced labour in Germany but whose numbers were swelled by officers of the Vichy army, disbanded when Germany occupied all of France after the Torch landings. These were the main groupings but there were many others, some locally based, some centred on political parties or determined by religious or class affiliation. All were jealous of their own areas of expertise and of the territory in which they worked, lacked cohesion, were suspicious of each other and, initially at least, lacked structure and organisation. Most were particularly contemptuous of any attempt from London to direct their activities, whether by British or American agents or by de Gaulle’s Free French, and despite the setting up of the Conseil National de la Resistance in London in 1943, it took another six months before the main resistance groups in France agreed to be part of it – and, crucially, to accept that it would be de Gaulle and his Free French who would form a French government once the Germans had been driven out. Despite the publicity given to acts of resistance at the time and since, it is probable that their military contribution was slight, although their attacks on roads and railways prior to and just after Overlord did hamper German movement up to a point. After the war, General der Artillerie Walter Warlimont, who had been Deputy Chief of the Armed Forces Operations Staff at OKW, was asked what affect the Resistance had had on German military operations. ‘What resistance?’ was his reply. The achievement and legacy of French resistance, therefore, was in ensuring an agreed government of liberated France, rather than the civil war that many feared.