Halik Kochanski - Resistance: The Underground War Against Hitler, 1939-1945

The Wall Street Journal, August 5, 2022 (Print edition, August 6, 2022)

Home Army Memorial, Warsaw, Sept 1988 © Andrew Stuttaford

“It is hard to pin down,” notes Halik Kochanski toward the end of her enormous, but eminently readable, history of resistance to German occupation during World War II, “why certain people chose the path of resistance . . . . [T]he resisters themselves often give unsatisfactory responses: ‘one had to do something’ or ‘one just did what one could.’ ”

Perhaps that is because the experience was, in retrospect, so strange, so out of time and place. Ms. Kochanski, a British historian, quotes Jean Cassou, a resistance leader in Toulouse who remembered this “as a unique period . . . impossible to relate to or explain, almost a dream. We see . . . an unknown and unknowable version of ourselves, the kind of people no one can ever find again, who existed only in relation to unique and terrible conditions, to things that have since disappeared, to ghosts, or to the dead.”

Then again, Cassou (who, as those words might suggest, was also a novelist and poet) was writing in a liberated France. Witold Pilecki was never able to consign the past to the past in the same way. A member of the Polish resistance, in 1940 he arranged his own arrest, calculating that this would mean he would be sent to Auschwitz. His goals were to, somehow, send out reports on conditions there (as indeed he did) and to do what he could to set up a resistance group within the camp. Eventually Pilecki was one of the relatively few to escape from Auschwitz and later participated in the 1944 Warsaw rising. After Poland’s Nazi occupiers were replaced by Soviet domination and by a communist puppet regime, Pilecki relayed information on the situation in the country to the Polish government-in-exile in London. He was captured, recounts Ms. Kochanski, tortured, “tried,” and, in 1948, shot.

In a work as wide-ranging and thoroughly researched as “Resistance,” singling out a single theme would be a distortion of a narrative that is subtle, multilayered and kaleidoscopic. But one constant that does emerge is how much the story varied from country to country. The resistance in Pilecki’s Poland never bore much resemblance to the resistance in Cassou’s France, and never was going to. Like many of the states overrun by Germany in the West, France was envisaged by the Nazis as surviving in some manner in their new Europe. Poland was not. In Poland, as in much of the occupied east, those not targeted for extermination knew that the best that they might hope for was indefinite helotry. This gave them a powerful incentive to fight back. “Even the Germans admitted,” writes Ms. Kochanski, “that the Poles resisted from the first day of the occupation.”

In France, by contrast, the occupiers’ initially (relatively) light touch persuaded many to opt for attentisme (wait and see). Moreover, the Nazis split the country into occupied and “free” zones and appointed Marshal Pétain, the hero of Verdun, as head of state (if only in the most nominal sense, so far as the occupied zone was concerned). This preserved the illusion that some scraps of sovereignty remained intact and helped some who regarded themselves as patriotic come to an accommodation with the Germans. (That step was step easier for those who welcomed the Pétain regime’s rejection of the “republican” France that had fallen in 1940.) Meanwhile, French Communists had greeted the war—this was the era of the Nazi-Soviet pact—with the slogan “neither Churchill nor Hitler” and only took up arms against the occupiers after Germany’s invasion of the USSR.

The persistence of a country’s internal politics beneath the occupier’s yoke repeatedly features in the story that Ms. Kochanski tells. And it is visible in the behavior of resistance movements across the continent, especially after the tide had turned against the Axis. A key question became who and what would replace the Germans and more specifically—the times being what they were—the role to be played by the Communist Party in postwar government.

The conflicts that ensued were generally at their most acute—and most violent—in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. The disputes there—wars within war—could encompass ideology, nationality and territory and were sharpened, in some cases, by the Soviet advance, as the Poles who battled to liberate Warsaw discovered. That the Red Army did next to nothing to assist them is notorious. Less well-known is that, after Moscow had broken with the Polish government-in-exile, Poland’s communist resistance “followed,” Ms. Kochanski explains, “a deliberate policy of betraying” their non-communist counterparts to the Gestapo.

The Poles and others in the east may have fought back hard from the start, but resistance in Western Europe stiffened as time progressed. In no small part, this was due to Germany’s deteriorating strategic position. But it was also a response to measures more typical of the war in the east that Germany imported west, from the growing use of collective punishments for acts of resistance to mandating forced labor in the Reich. What’s more, the participation of local authorities in the deportation of Jews was not only a reminder of the moral cost of collaboration but also highlighted the unwillingness, or inability, of those authorities to soften German rule. The implications were clear enough. Attentisme had its own risks.

Collaboration was the flip side of resistance. A significant number of western Europeans volunteered to work in Germany for good wages and, in the early years of the war, decent living conditions—an attractive proposition, and not just for the previously unemployed. Many western European manufacturers accepted contracts to produce war materiel for the occupier. The profits were reasonable, and the alternative could well have been to go out of business. Some collaborators did what they did to survive (or try to), some saw collaboration as the least bad option, others collaborated out of ideological conviction and others out of crude opportunism—all choices that, to varying degrees, could lead to participation in the Holocaust.

Collaboration was, like resistance, profoundly shaped by where and when it took place. And so Ms. Kochanski’s meticulous and primarily country-by-country approach works well—even more so because it leads her to include often overlooked (and far from straightforward) topics such as the complex conflicts in the Baltic States and Ukraine. Ms. Kochanski does not neglect Jewish resistance, which like the genocide it tried to defy, necessarily crossed frontiers.

Ms. 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. She recounts the frequently difficult relationship—at many levels—among the Allied governments, agencies such as Britain’s Special Operations Executive, or SOE (with its mission to “set Europe ablaze”), governments in exile and resistance groups.

But Ms. Kochanski is a determinedly clear-eyed historian. She doesn’t confuse heroism with effectiveness. Thus she is inclined to agree with the view of one of its staff officers that SOE “was only just worth it.” This verdict might be accurate on a strictly military basis, but, immune to the appeal of lazy revisionism, Ms. Kochanski adds that the presence of SOE agents “on the ground . . . proved to the native resistance that they had not been abandoned to their fate by the Allies.” This boost to morale was essential in the early years of the war, when Stalingrad was just another city and the Normandy beaches, overlooked by the Atlantic Wall, were quiet.

The BBC delivered a similar message, both reassuring and inspiring. The effect of its broadcasts (often made by émigrés from whatever country was being targeted) “cannot be overestimated,” Ms. Kochanski maintains—not least because they helped create (and thus foster) the idea of a coherent national resistance, even before one may have existed. Something similar can be said of the clandestine press that sprung up almost immediately across occupied Europe and which over time developed a remarkable reach. Many publications were short-lived, their evanescence evidence of how dangerous this work was. But some built up impressively large circulations, and, together, they played a critical part in shaping public opinion. As such, reckons Ms. Kochanski, these publications “must be seen as one of [the resistance’s] principal achievements.”

Although the author recognizes that the military value of the resistance was of “some importance,” such as when it slowed the arrival of reinforcements to German forces fighting conventional Allied armies, she clearly believes that it falls short of its legend. The exception to this is the “one field in which [its] role was vital—the provision of intelligence,” which could, for example, be invaluable when selecting targets for airstrikes. But Ms. Kochanski has no doubts that the resistance was useful in forging the notion of a nation “united in resistance.” This sentiment may have been exaggerated during the war, and certainly was afterward, but the mythology was essential at a time of nation-rebuilding—even if, as she writes, “the uncomfortable truths of divided loyalties had to be overlooked.”

On April 26, 1944, Marshall Pétain attended a mass in Paris’s Notre-Dame cathedral to commemorate the victims of a recent Allied bombing. “Outside,” Ms. Kochanski writes, “a crowd estimated at one million people greeted him enthusiastically.” Exactly four months later, de Gaulle, finally back in France’s liberated capital, set off down the Champs-Élysées toward the same cathedral, cheered by possibly two million onlookers. Suspicions that there might have been considerable overlap between the two crowds are probably correct.

Appeared in the August 6, 2022, print edition as 'Facing Impossible Odds'.