The Resistance in Western Europe, 1940–1945

by Olivier Wieviorka

Author	: Olivier Wieviorka
Publisher	: Columbia University Press
Total Pages	: 339
Release	: 2019-09-03
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 0231548648

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In just three months in 1940, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France fell to the Nazis. The German occupation of Western Europe had begun—but a brave few rose up in defiance. National resistance has long been celebrated in remembrances of World War II, depicted as making significant contributions to the defeat of Nazi Germany. However, the so-called army of shadows drew heavily on the support of London and Washington, a fact often forgotten in postwar Europe. The Resistance in Western Europe, 1940–1945 is a sweeping analytical history of the underground anti-Nazi forces during World War II. Examining clandestine organizations in Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Italy, Olivier Wieviorka sheds new light on the factors that shaped the resistance and its place in the grand scheme of Anglo-American military strategy. While national actors played a leading role in fomenting resistance, British and American intelligence services and propaganda as well as financial, material, and logistical support were crucial to its activities and growth. Wieviorka illuminates the policies of governments in exile and resistance actors regarding cooperation with the British and Americans, pointing to the persistence of national self-interest and long-standing historical tensions. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources and bringing together the political, diplomatic, and military dimensions of the conflict, this book is the first account of the resistance on a continental scale and from a trans-European perspective.

The French Resistance

by Olivier Wieviorka

Author	: Olivier Wieviorka
Publisher	: Harvard University Press
Total Pages	: 584
Release	: 2016-04-25
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 067497039X

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“Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not and will not go out.” As Charles de Gaulle ended his radio address to the French nation in June 1940, listeners must have felt a surge of patriotism tinged with uncertainty. Who would keep the flame burning through dark years of occupation? At what cost? Olivier Wieviorka presents a comprehensive history of the French Resistance, synthesizing its social, political, and military aspects to offer fresh insights into its operation. Detailing the Resistance from the inside out, he reveals not one organization but many interlocking groups often at odds over goals, methods, and leadership. He debunks lingering myths, including the idea that the Resistance sprang up in response to the exhortations of de Gaulle’s Free French government-in-exile. The Resistance was homegrown, arising from the soil of French civil society. Resisters had to improvise in the fight against the Nazis and the collaborationist Vichy regime. They had no blueprint to follow, but resisters from all walks of life and across the political spectrum formed networks, organizing activities from printing newspapers to rescuing downed airmen to sabotage. Although the Resistance was never strong enough to fight the Germans openly, it provided the Allies invaluable intelligence, sowed havoc behind enemy lines on D-Day, and played a key role in Paris’s liberation. Wieviorka shatters the conventional image of a united resistance with no interest in political power. But setting the record straight does not tarnish the legacy of its fighters, who braved Nazism without blinking.

Hitler's Collaborators

by Philip Morgan

Author	: Philip Morgan
Publisher	: Oxford University Press
Total Pages	: 385
Release	: 2018-05-31
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 0192507087

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Hitler's Collaborators focuses the spotlight on one of the most controversial and uncomfortable aspects of the Nazi wartime occupation of Europe: the citizens of those countries who helped Hitler. Although a widespread phenomenon, this was long ignored in the years after the war, when peoples and governments understandably emphasized popular resistance to Nazi occupation as they sought to reconstruct their devastated economies and societies along anti-fascist and democratic lines. Philip Morgan moves away from the usual suspects, the Quislings who backed Nazi occupation because they were fascists, and focuses instead on the businessmen and civil servants who felt obliged to cooperate with the Nazis. These were the people who faced the most difficult choices and dilemmas by dealing with the various Nazi uthorities and agencies, and who were ultimately responsible for gearing the economies of the occupied territories to the Nazi war effort. It was their choices which had the greatest impact on the lives and livelihoods of their fellow countrymen in the occupied territories, including the deportation of slave-workers to the Reich and hundreds of thousands of European Jews to the death camps in the East. In time, as the fortunes of war shifted so decisively against Germany between 1941 and 1944, these collaborators found themselves trapped by the logic of their initial cooperation with their Nazi overlords — caught up between the demands of an increasingly desperate and extremist occupying power, growing internal resistance to Nazi rule, and the relentlessly advancing Allied armies.

Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis

by Patrick Henry

Author	: Patrick Henry
Publisher	: CUA Press
Total Pages	: 670
Release	: 2014-04-20
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 0813225892

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This volume puts to rest the myth that the Jews went passively to the slaughter like sheep. Indeed Jews resisted in every Nazi-occupied country - in the forests, the ghettos, and the concentration camps.The essays presented here consider Jewish resistance to be resistance by Jewish persons in specifically Jewish groups, or by Jewish persons working within non-Jewish organizations. Resistance could be armed revolt; flight; the rescue of targeted individuals by concealment in non-Jewish homes, farms, and institutions; or by the smuggling of Jews into countries where Jews were not objects of Nazi persecution. Other forms of resistance include every act that Jewish people carried out to fight against the dehumanizing agenda of the Nazis - acts such as smuggling food, clothing, and medicine into the ghettos, putting on plays, reading poetry, organizing orchestras and art exhibits, forming schools, leaving diaries, and praying. These attempts to remain physically, intellectually, culturally, morally, and theologically alive constituted resistance to Nazi oppression, which was designed to demolish individuals, destroy their soul, and obliterate their desire to live.

Defying Hitler

by Gordon Thomas

Author	: Gordon Thomas
Publisher	: Caliber
Total Pages	: 562
Release	: 2019
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 0451489047

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Nazi Germany is remembered as a nation of willing fanatics, but countless Germans actively resisted Hitler. No matter how small the act, the danger was the same: any display of defiance was met with arrest, interrogation, torture, and even death. Thomas and Lewis follow the underground network of Germans who believed standing against the Fuhrer to be more important than their own survival. Their bravery is astonishing, and the authors illuminate their struggles, yielding an accessible narrative history with the pace and excitement of a thriller. -- adapted from jacket.

Hitler's Empire

by Mark Mazower

Author	: Mark Mazower
Publisher	: Penguin UK
Total Pages	: 768
Release	: 2013-03-07
Genre	: Political Science
ISBN	: 0141917504

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The powerful, disturbing history of Nazi Europe by Mark Mazower, one of Britain's leading historians and bestselling author of Dark Continent and Governing the World Hitler's Empire charts the landscape of the Nazi imperial imagination - from those economists who dreamed of turning Europe into a huge market for German business, to Hitler's own plans for new transcontinental motorways passing over the ethnically cleansed Russian steppe, and earnest internal SS discussions of political theory, dictatorship and the rule of law. Above all, this chilling account shows what happened as these ideas met reality. After their early battlefield triumphs, the bankruptcy of the Nazis' political vision for Europe became all too clear: their allies bailed out, their New Order collapsed in military failure, and they left behind a continent corrupted by collaboration, impoverished by looting and exploitation, and grieving the victims of war and genocide. About the author: Mark Mazower is Ira D.Wallach Professor of World Order Studies and Professor of History Professor of History at Columbia University. He is the author of Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century, The Balkans: A Short History (which won the Wolfson Prize for History), Salonica: City of Ghosts (which won both the Duff Cooper Prize and the Runciman Award) and Governing the World: The History of an Idea. He has also taught at Birkbeck College, University of London, Sussex University and Princeton. He lives in New York.

The Dutch Resistance 1940–45

by Klaas Castelein

Author	: Klaas Castelein
Publisher	: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages	: 65
Release	: 2022-04-28
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 1472848004

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Describes and illustrates the full range of Dutch resistance groups and German and collaborationist counter-resistance groups during the Nazi occupation in 1940-45. The Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in World War II followed a complex course, whose scope is not widely understood. It was a great deal broader and more varied than the much-reported German counter-espionage success against Dutch agents parachuted in by the Special Operations Executive. From spring 1943 onwards, three Dutch Resistance organizations gained momentum: the Order Service (OD), the Resistance Council (RVV), and the National Assault Teams (LKP). In response, the Germans raised collaborationist forces to counter the Resistance, including the much-feared Landwacht. In September 1944 the OD, RVV and LKP amalgamated into the Netherlands Interior Forces (NBS), while Allied troops began to liberate the southern provinces. This allowed NBS forces in the south to form Stoottroepen, uniformed and armed by both the British and US armies. These assisted the Allied advance, while a bloody underground struggle continued in the occupied north until final liberation in April–May 1945. Illustrated with rare photos and new colour plates, this book gives a comprehensive account of one of the lesser-known struggles of World War II.

The Danish Resistance

by David Lampe

Author	: David Lampe
Publisher	: Pickle Partners Publishing
Total Pages	: 343
Release	: 2016-08-09
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 1787200906

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A HISTORY OF FIVE YEARS OF SECRET WARFARE AGAINST THE NAZI OCCUPATION Students were the first to resist Entire cities went on strike All the Danish population worked to save their Jewish countrymen V-2 component factories were destroyed in pitched battles General Montgomery described the Danish Resistance as “second to none.” By the end of the war, illegal newspapers had published a total of about 26 million issues; radio guides for Allied aircraft had been set up on the coasts; boats were running timetable services between Britain, Sweden and Denmark; illegal broadcasts were transmitted regularly; German ships were unable to move from Danish harbors; and vast numbers of German troops were kept from the main fighting points by Danish sabotage of the railways and airfields, and of the factories that the Nazis thought would be invulnerable sources of vital air force and military components. It is a fantastic story, full of tales of impudent, almost foolhardy heroism. With every reason to collaborate in safety, the Danes established an international news bureau that provided the Allies with a continuous service of inside information; they shipped seven thousand Jews to safety; they organized strikes; they spirited away most of Denmark’s tug fleet; they even established an office of the British Ministry of Food in Copenhagen. A quarter of a million feet of film recording their activities were shot by the Resistance under the eyes of the Gestapo, including photographs of many of their sabotage raids, which were meticulously planned. To the Danish Resistance the Nazis were not all-conquering supermen but dangerous fools to be parried at every turn. Their story is one of which any nation would be proud. Illustrated with 19 photographs.

The Cambridge History of the Second World War: Volume 2, Politics and Ideology

by Richard Bosworth

Author	: Richard Bosworth
Publisher	: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages	: 718
Release	: 2017-11-23
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 9781108406406

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War is often described as an extension of politics by violent means. With contributions from twenty-eight eminent historians, Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of the Second World War examines the relationship between ideology and politics in the war's origins, dynamics and consequences. Part I examines the ideologies of the combatants and shows how the war can be understood as a struggle of words, ideas and values with the rival powers expressing divergent claims to justice and controlling news from the front in order to sustain moral and influence international opinion. Part II looks at politics from the perspective of pre-war and wartime diplomacy as well as examining the way in which neutrals were treated and behaved. The volume concludes by assessing the impact of states, politics and ideology on the fate of individuals as occupied and liberated peoples, collaborators and resistors, and as British and French colonial subjects.