| Title | : | Resistance: The Underground War Against Hitler, 1939-1945 |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1324091657 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781324091653 |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 960 |
| Publication | : | First published March 3, 2022 |
Taking us from France in the west to parts of the Soviet Union in the east, Resistance reveals why and how small bands of individuals undertook actions that could lead not merely to their own deaths, but to the destruction of their entire communities. As Kochanski demonstrates, most who joined up were ordinary people who would not have been expected—even by themselves—to become heroes. Simultaneously panoramic and heartbreakingly intimate, Resistance is an incomparable history necessary for any home library.
Resistance: The Underground War Against Hitler, 1939-1945 Reviews
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It's a long, dense flyover account that aims to gather in one single volume all the disparate and spread out resistances against the Nazis that existed during WWII in all the occupied countries, as the aim stated in the introduction goes, and to that purpose it groups the historical development of resistance activities in three parts: the first deals with the motivation to resist in spite of the costs of resisting ("Why Resist?"), the second part addresses the foreign assistance, coordination and logistics support for the newborn resistances through government agencies such as SOE and OSS from the UK and US ("Growing the Resistance"), and the last part is about the resistances's full-blown scale of sabotage and cooperation bearing fruit to the benefit of the Allied war effort.
It's informative and helpful for getting a big picture view of the resistance against Nazi Germany as a whole instead of a per country basis, trying to establish a link throughout the diverse national resistances, although it's a dry account and rather limited in its scope despite its pretensions to be all-encompassing. Mainly because, for all the book's goal to avoid nationalistic bias and self-aggrandising national narratives by taking a big picture view, it's still markedly partial to Britain and it's a bias that is going to be obvious the deeper one dives into the contents, to the point you might get the impression this is a narrative of pan-European resistance filtered through the British's own lionising national narrative. And not just because of how much the SOE contributed to resistance in several countries in the continent; it's still very much an Anglo-centric narrative with little in the way of other national resistances outside this sphere. And also because the self-imposed limitations harm the objective of an all-encompassing narrative of resistance, as the book purposefully excludes anti-Soviet resistance and German opposition at home.
Whilst I agree that anti-Soviet resistance merits its own volume because it did indeed outlive the war well into and up to the fall of the Soviet Union, I don't think that excluding the part of it that took place during the war is conducive to a proper understanding of resistance to WWII totalitarian powers, and believe it could have been worked into the global picture. How can you pretend to present a global narrative and then purposely chop a big chunk off of it with the excuse that that specific resistance lasted too long? At one point, countries were fighting both the Nazis and the Soviets. I'm aware that Kochanski has written another book on the Polish case, but they weren't the only ones that found themselves in this quandary as other Eastern European countries did too, and to exclude them with such an unconvincing argument does the book no favours. Best to have given them their own separate section, and stated by the end that the section would conclude with WWII because post-WWII is beyond the scope of the book.
Another case is Jewish resistance, which Kochanski claims are "often excluded from general histories of resistance." Are they, really? I can name a few books that deal with Jewish resistance myself, it's probably the most popular topic in books about anti-Nazi resistance besides the much-lionised French Résistance. But if the implication is that they're deliberately ignored, I don't believe that's the case, because they are generally separate and have their own dedicated books because they are a special case, as Jewish resisters had sometimes to fight both the Nazis and their own countrymen who, driven by anti-Semitism, would deal harshly with them. The Holocaust affected both victims and bystanders, Kochanski also claims, when the latter were exposed to the barbarity of Nazi rule, and I'm not sure I can go along this "us too" attempt at diluting the very specific and very targeted tragedy of the Holocaust by spreading its effects to the rest of victims. There were millions of non-Jewish victims of Nazism, but they were targeted differently and had context that's different to that of the Jews. Honestly, this sounds suspiciously like the arguments over the Holocaust in Poland that walk around uncomfortable facts that don't conflate victims and perpetrators/bystanders as neatly as some would like. The Jewish case is unique, always has been, and anyhow their inclusion here isn't exactly thorough or has much onpage-time but rather an overview.
But the third aspect that was most negatively surprising was this passage:
The German ‘resistance’ is another matter and is not covered in this book. Germany was neither invaded nor occupied and in that sense there was nothing to resist. Much of the German opposition
to Hitler was not anti-German and it did not want Germany to lose the war. Indeed, the aim of the actual plots against Hitler was to make Germany win, or at least save it from losing.
If there were any remaining doubts this book doesn't hide its biases, this should make it clear. Not only is the wording unnecessarily snooty and dismissive but the claims are questionable themselves. Why put "resistance" in air quotes in the first place if you don't intend to imply there was none or none worth the mention? I would've understood it if the author had stated the internal opposition was outside the scope of her book because this book is about armed resistance to Nazi invasion, and it'd be perfectly legitimate. The author could even have said German internal opposition is not her field of expertise so she can't dive into that, and it'd also be understandable. She could even have left it at "it's a different matter" that deserves its own book, and it'd have been fine. But this display of condescension only goes to show bias and a troubling approach to fighting totalitarianism that only considers armed resistance and wanting your country to lose a war as valid resistance, as that's what the line will imply. "Nothing" to resist? We know the Germans who resisted were few, that there could've been more they should've done to oppose Hitler, but to say that there was nothing to resist just because Germany wasn't invaded is misleading and false. There was a lot to resist, and many did, more than Kochanski and others are willing to acknowledge. And furthermore, applying the case of plots by the Abwehr and the Wehrmacht officers to the entirety of resistance groups in Germany is disingenous and disinformative, as that was by no means universal to all resisters and ignores those who did want Germany to lose early on, if wanting Germany to lose is the criteria the author needs to qualify something as legitimate resistance, sans dismissive quoting marks. And I'm not sure the "nothing in common" between domestic resistance and foreign resistance is true either. Yes, they're very different, but there are points of overlap: in one passage, Kochanski is praising the resistance carried out by Danish boys, apparently oblivious to the fact that this same thing was also done by German youths, and that is just one example.
It wasn't a book that brought much new or intriguing to the table, as all of the information it contains is going to be well known to those interested in WWII resistance history, internal and by occupied populations. There's far more in-depth studies that focus on individual/national resistance that bring more to the table than this collage made of bits and pieces from here and there, and I imagine this also would answer the question of why there wasn't a general history of resistance before, a fact the blurb claims is "shocking": because the topic is complex, and as this book proves, can't exactly be contained in one single volume without falling into a number of pitfalls, omissions, overgeneralisations, and blanket judgments. My own thoughts are that a general history would've been better split in two volumes, and divided in more inclusive sections: the Anglo-assisted sphere of resistance, the Eastern resistance (and include the Soviets here), the Jewish resistance, and the German domestic resistance. Now, that would've been a great, fair, and thorough account for me.
I received an ARC in exchange for an honest review. -
I received a free publisher's advance review copy, via Netgalley.
While there are countless books about the Nazi era, and many about the resistance to the Nazis and German occupation, I’m not aware of another book that attempts to cover the entire landscape of these resistance movements. This is a massive undertaking, so it’s no surprise that it takes nearly 1,000 pages to tell the tale—and that’s without taking into account resistance movements inside Germany. Kochanski takes the view that inside-Germany opposition isn’t properly categorized as resistance, so she doesn’t include that in her history. I suppose some people may object to her categorization, but I don’t she has a political agenda in her decision.
Kochanski posits that the speed of development, strength, and motivation of resistance movements was largely dependent on how Germany treated the particular country’s population. In “Aryan” countries, the German occupiers let life go on much as it had previously. In Slavic countries, they were far more heavy-handed, especially in Poland. In the better-treated countries, organized resistance grew slowly, while in Poland it was strong from the start. And, of course, as the Nazis tightened the screws, slower-to-develop resistance movements responded accordingly.
Though obviously there are these differences in how the resistance began and operated from country to country, Kochanski doesn’t organize her book by country. Her broad topics are:
Part One: Why Resist?
Part Two: Growing the Resistance
Part Three: Resistance in Action
This is essentially a chronological organization. Of course, within her chronology Kochanski focuses on the particular events within each country, but she also draws many parallels, such as in how passive resistance methods spread via graffiti that were strikingly similar across occupied countries.
Particularly interesting are the examples of how resistance movements often battled their countrymen as much as the Germans. Collaborators and resisters fought, and some resistance factions fought each other, such as communist groups against nationalist groups, Slavs against Jews. It's also notable how Kochanski presents far more information about lesser-known resistance organizations. In recent years, it seems as if the focus of many books has been Britain's Special Operations Executive and its agents, particularly their work with resistance units in France. Kochanski certainly includes much of that information, but there is also so much detailed information about the resistance in the Nordic countries, the Baltics, the Czech lands, Slovakia, the Balkans, Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, and more.
Resistance is a thoroughly researched, well-documented and exhaustively detailed history. It’s a tremendous undertaking and should be a great resource for anybody doing further research. -
'Resistance' is an encyclopedic account of the varied resistance movements across occupied Europe between 1939 and 1945. It is not about political resistance to the Axis powers (of Italy only after Mussolini was ousted) nor of resistance to Axis empires overseas (Abyssinia and Libya are ignored).
It is more conventionally Eurocentric than, say, Overy's recent account of the Second World War but still covers some 14 countries (Luxembourg is forgotten and the last days of the Axis-allied regimes in Eastern Europe are included) in 180 pages is no mean feat.
If I have a gripe, it is not about the patronising abandonment of resistance to the expansion of the Italian Empire, but the equally and currently fashionable Westocentric weaker coverage of the Soviet partisan resistance. It is covered but as if it was a sideshow to the work of SOE.
But these limitations do not make the book any the less invaluable as a single volume compendium of resistance experiences under very different national circumstances. It is for someone else to write the more awkward story of the other side of the coin - collaboration.
Perhaps what does not come across in current historiography is that the Second World War was not only a war of empires (Overy) and a war of liberation (the preferred narrative) but a European Civil War eventually settled by a non-European and two barely European outsiders.
If we look at Europe as a whole (no country was precisely like any other in its experience) we can break the story down into regional zones of similar experience, assuming we exclude both the neutrals and the Axis core of Germany and Fascist Italy.
There were the highly politicised resistance activities in France and Italy where the forces of order and socialism contested the right to determine the nation's destiny along lines that perhaps were only diverted from civil war on the Spanish model by the skill of the occupying powers.
To the north a line of North Atlantic states sullenly disliked occupation, were broadly obedient to the dictates of allied strategy and faced (as did the French resistance) various forms of ideological collaboration negotiating its way to political power not always with the assistance of the Nazis.
In Europe's south east, resistance was sometimes tantamount to local warlordism with ethnic cleansing and social violence just below the surface when it was not manifest - Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece. Again, international war enabled civil war which the allies could not control or avert.
Above them was a bloc of often reluctant Axis allies from Bulgaria through Romania and Hungary to Slovakia where pragmatism and some very real material benefits dictated compliance until the Soviets started to arrive on their borders and priorities shifted.
Then, to their north, are the very different cases of Bohemia-Moravia and Poland where nationalist feeling often pushed resistors into traps where they misjudged their own capability. Further to their north, of course, the Baltic States and Finland had their nationalisms recognised by Germany.
Finally, there are the 'bloodlands' (still bloodlands today) where the Soviets had moved to take over Western Poland, been pushed back and then returned in force over the heads of the non-Russian identities, notably Ukrainian, to find themselves eventually masters of all Eastern Europe.
The European Union is still dealing with these very different experiences - France as balance to Germany, an unstable Italy and Balkans, the liberal democratic Atlantic, nationalism in Poland and the Baltic States, the 'bloodlands' now in a state of localised war in Ukraine.
It is thus very difficult to find something common to say about 'resistance' under all these different scenarios (just as it would be if we tried to pigeon-hole all forms of collaboration) but Kochanski gives us all the facts we need to theorise and suggests thoughts of her own.
The first general point to make is that, in general, resistance was, in military terms, fairly futile except as an affiliate operation providing intelligence and targeted sabotage for the Allies. The destruction of the heavy water facilities in Norway might have been decisive but little else was.
One exception might have been the partisan operations in Russia and Belarussia but, even here, the Germans under Bach-Zelewski and others soon learned techniques of anti-partisan activity that made behind-the-lines operations mostly an irritant rather than decisive.
More useful, as sabotage operations, were the destruction of rail supply lines in West and East as the Allied armies advanced although the Germans seem to have been adept at work-arounds. The Russians use missiles to do what resistors did and the Ukrainians no doubt work around these.
The intelligence role was vital. The Allies were wise to ensure that intelligence-gathering circuits were generally separated from active service units although the Germans seem to have been skilled at breaking these circuits.
As to the 'home armies' these were likely to be valuable only as irregulars or affiliates when Allied armies were nearby. Indeed, the tendency of over-enthusiastic resistors to demand weapons from the air to undertake premature operations seems to have been a thorn in the Allied side.
Often we find local resistance forces, keen to act out of emotional national pride, misjudging the situation and shooting off their war bolts far too soon, eliciting vicious reprisals that may have encouraged a stronger attitude of resistance but deterred much further direct action.
As the story unfolds we see a narrative in which the majority of Europeans were 'attentistes' rather than collaborators or resistors. A temporary soft form of collaboration was often encouraged by governments-in-exile in order to maintain the structures of government and avoid reprisals.
This enables us to see the Nazi regime as 'interesting' because its brutality was of two entirely different types that might be called Nazi and military, both of which centred on the permission granted to it by Adolf Hitler himself. The first was racial-ideological and the second pragmatic.
The resistance (other than the Jewish resistance) appears to have been quite detached (relatively) from the racial-ideological process of deportation and extermination although the treatment of the Jews undoubtedly contributed to decent distaste for the occupiers as time went on.
Resistance was primarily about restoring the nation and/or restoring a very particular form of the nation (monarchical, democratic-bourgeois or socialist). It was a minority sport (as was formal collaboration) while the majority simply tried to survive.
Often times, the particular form of the nation dominated the agenda to the point that the Germans could pass through a war zone while 'resisters' were more interested in killing each other. Old regime military types were also in constant tension with civilian irregulars.
Several times we come across popular resentment at over-enthusiastic irregulars bringing down on the heads of the population horrendously brutal German reprisals - massacres of whole villages, executions of hostages, mass deportations. This was simply 'technique' to the Germans.
The situation is fluid everywhere with the resistant authorities (generally in exile but still with infrastructure at home) advising restraint and as often disturbed as the Allies at premature operations of no strategic benefit.
Over time, the dynamic of growing resistance and increasing reprisals destroyed the German ability to hold the middle ground in the West (there was no middle ground in the East). Populations grew more eager for Allied victory rather than (as might have been the case) a German peace.
It could be argued that the various resistances were not so much important in deciding the Second World War as in deciding the destinies of the nations that emerged after the war (at least in the West since the Soviets were to decide the destiny of the East regardless of resistors).
Kochanski closes by suggesting that the importance of resistance should be seen as something that I might perhaps call 'spiritual' - an expression of the desire of a small and then a growing minority of a nation to 'act' and to 'be' and not simply accept conditions from outside.
It may be no accident that the philosophical school that emerged in France during and after the war was 'existentialism', a philosophy, if ever there was one, of choice and action, ironically drawn largely from two German philosophers more closely associated with the 'enemy'.
The Western allies showed much skill such as permitting France to become an accredited Ally despite it not honestly earning the right. It used what it could of the resistors, was often exhausted and frustrated by them but it engineered them into a new national democratic mythology.
This new mythology of direct participation by the people (even if a minority in practice) in their own liberation (despite the fact that the actual liberation was down to the hard power of the three Allied empires) allowed democracy to settle in again and fascist alternatives to be marginalised.
A European Civil War takes two sides. Fascist ideologies were either dominant or growing across much of Europe in the interwar period. The war of resistors against collaborators (which sadly often turned into civil war between resistors) was central to eliminating this European 'norm'.
Indeed, to the sensitive modern mind, the conduct of some resistors in victory (at least in Italy, France and the Balkans) might leave a lot to be desired ethically with extrajudicial killing a norm. The treatment of women who had sexual relations with the occupiers was deeply perverse.
But generalisms are not helpful in history, not with so many diferent national histories to deal with. There are exceptions to every possible general statement but the primacy of hard power over civil resistance in war does not diminish the role of civil uprising in setting the terms of peace.
Kochanski is a historian of Poland. This helps to explain the depth of coverage of Polish conditions where her narrative is often eye-opening about the Polish determination to resist against all the odds. The final uprising in Warsaw was an attempt to pre-empt Soviet hard power that failed.
The Paris Rising in 1944 on the other hand only succeeded because Allied hard power, much to its own strategic frustration, felt it had to intervene where Stalin clearly did not think he had to. There was, in fact, a certain brutal logic to the behaviours of all the Allies.
Warsaw and Paris were about national re-assertion in the face of the Allies. The difference was that Stalin, as an internationalist communist, did not want a strong national Poland on his Western flank whereas the Allies wanted to restore a self-confident democratic France.
Both sides (Soviet and democratic) were perfectly aware that the United Nations rested on fragile ground and that imperial spheres of influence would replace the crushing of the Axis empires. Churchill explicitly recognised this by abandoning much of Eastern Europe for Greece.
One aspect of the book is worth emphasising - the importance of SOE and the British effort to mobilise and manage European resistance. The OSS played its role but far less even if it was to become the seed from which the CIA grew.
In this narrative, the SOE and other similar British organisations (SIS, SAS and others) were ubiquitous, playing roles (albeit smaller for logistical reasons) as far as Bohemia and Poland. Being British, there are, of course, blunders alongside the triumphs.
Kochanski can barely repress her revisionist disgust at British support for Tito at the expense of Mihailovic in Yugoslavia. The Cairo Office seems at times to have been particularly stupid on occasions. British spycraft could be naive in the early days.
But the general story is one of remarkable engagement by an organisation learning the arts of subversion and the management of secret armies from the ground up. An exhausted Britain was to pass on this experience to the Americans later.
Although they recognised they could not charge Germans with war crimes related to the execution of spies, the sheer persistence of the British at Nuremburg in hunting down perpetrators of orders to kill captured commandos in uniform indicates that 'secret war' was regarded as legitimate.
Kochanski's book has merit in not hiding the blunders and the self-defeating actions of the resistance movement but only as part of a very complex and confused picture where there would never have been a perfect solution to any problem.
From the point of view of liberal democracy in Europe (whether you believe in it or not), the British commitment to building national resistance movements was almost selfless, expensive in resources and operatives and prejudiced in favour of the effective resistor regardless of their ideology.
Although it can get bogged down in detail and it is not easy to keep track of so many narratives in so many different location amidst impossible tactical and strategic complexity, the book is well worth working through. You are much wiser by the end of it.
Resistance can, and this is wisdom, be futile and not futile, destructive and constructive. It cannot win against entrenched hard power prepared to take off its gloves and do what it takes to retain power. It can, however, win the peace if it can bring external forces into play.
But deeper than that, in a world where most people are political puddings, sitting there waiting to see which way the wind blows and accepting the opinion of the last person who spoke to them (often the media), resistance demonstrates that imposed systems will find their rule costly.
Over time, the wind changes direction, the costs of maintaining rule on the puddings becomes too great and the men, women and ideas that represent the resistance may come to dominate discussion of what the nation is to be when the old order collapses.
I suppose the lesson, therefore, is that resistance is not futile after all. If our order is collapsing under second-rate leaders who cannot manage the economy and are detached increasingly even from their own puddings, then those with a language of resistance, though few, may yet triumph. -
Kochanski effectively traces the history of the resistance in Europe from its inception after Nazi invasion to liberation. Through a plethora of well-researched, diverse examples across Europe, a few themes emerge:
1) The resistance did not emerge immediately in its final form. When it appeared the Nazis were likely to prevail, few were willing to risk their lives by engaging in outright resistance, especially in the West, where the Nazis worked through collaborationist governments.
2) The resistance experience was markedly different in the east versus the west. In the east, especially Poland, the Nazis were intent on carrying out a policy of national extermination. As such, the resistance was a necessity and emerged in greater strength early on. And the Nazi response to the resistance, accordingly, was far more severe, with mass retaliatory killings and deportations to concentration and death camps. In the west meanwhile, the Nazis first worked through collaborationist governments and refrained from retaliatory killings until later in the war, when the resistance had grown.
3) Through their brutality, the Nazis alienated potential allies and fueled the resistance. For example, when the Nazis invaded the Baltic countries and Ukraine, they were at first greeted as liberators after decades of Soviet rule. Instead of enlisting their help, the Nazis engaged in mass murder to create living space for future German settlers, fueling the partisan movement and worsening Germany’s manpower challenges.
4) The active engagement of the British SOE across Europe signaled Britain’s commitment to the resistance even when conditions appeared most dire and helped organize resistance across Europe (with more success in France and Denmark, for example, than Yugoslavia or Greece).
5) The resistance movement came into its own when the Nazis failed to capture Moscow, injecting hope into occupied countries and inspiring resistance. As the war continued and German victory appeared less likely, more men and women joined resistance movements.
6) The resistance’s greatest military contribution was intelligence. The intelligence shared by the resistance contributed to Allied military victory in concrete ways (e.g., locating Axis units before D-Day). Sabotage of railway lines and factories helped as well, though not in a deciding way.
7) The fate of resistance movements differed significantly between east and west. In the west, resisters were feted as heroes and experienced liberation as, well, liberation. When western resisters decided to launch revolts in cities like Paris before the Allied armies arrived, those Allied armies adjusted their movements to relieve them and made it possible for De Gauls to say France liberated itself. In the east, resisters like the Polish AK were disarmed and often sent to the Gulag. When the AK launched the Warsaw Uprising, Stalin refused to send them arms and blocked Allied planes from landing on Soviet airfields until public pressure mounted. By the time he sent arms, it was too late and he had never meaningfully moved to redirect the Soviet offensive to help. Instead, he let his postwar enemies be liquidated by the Nazis. Eastern European countries came to experience liberation as the beginning of a new occupation.
8) The resistance was key to rebuilding Europe’s self-image. In France, for example, the efforts of resisters and the Free French forces allowed De Gaulle to label France a nation of resisters and so whitewash the more nuanced history of Vichy collaboration. -
I can well believe that this is the first volume to comprehensively look at the resistance activities in all countries in the European theater of World War II – the scholarship is exhaustive. And that may be a problem.
The author's coverage is so vast that it becomes difficult to follow the people. There are so many, and they come and go so quickly, along with the various organizations that spring up. There are innumerable acronyms to keep track of (don't confuse the ELAS of Greece with the EDES, their implacable foes).
It's singularly impressive but a very dense read. It's very rewarding, though, in viewing the contrast in resistance activities among the countries, and the attitude of the Germans (harshest in the East, more lenient (relatively speaking) in the West).
There are a couple of omissions that are intentional: Resistance within Axis countries like Germany and Austria. The scope of the book focuses on occupied countries. However, there is substantial coverage of the Allied secret agencies such as SOE and OSS that assisted the resisters.
It was disheartening to read how in some countries like Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece the resisting organizations fought each other as much, or likely more, than they fought the Germans. The Germans seemed a nuisance while the real enemy was internal. There were copious episodes of betrayal and brutality between resisters, not just the collaborators (although there's lots of coverage of them, too).
How effective was the resistance overall in the conduct of the war? A telling detail is the result of interviews the historian Liddell Hart had with German generals after the war, where they described the resistance as ineffective in changing military results, and more of a nuisance. However, the generals probably not considering the immense assistance in information that the resistance provided to the Allied military, helping them with effective targeting of key units and resources.
It is clear that the resistance's greatest effect was providing intelligence to the Allied military that they could act on effectively and with overwhelming power. That was the best legacy of the resistance, and it was provided by thousands of people throughout Europe. -
This is a very impressive work of scholarship, covering the huge issue of resistance during the Second World War. She covers both the military and the diplomatic/political aspects of the issue, without ever losing sight of the individuals involved.
Perhaps best of all, she keeps a perspective on her topic. Resistance didn't win the war. Only after mid-1943, when it was clear that Germany was going to lose and Italy changed sides, did resistance movements really mushroom beyond German ability to control. The big contribution of the resistance movements to the defeat of the Germans was in gathering (and transmitting) intelligence.
I am impressed by the detail of her work. She mentioned one disturbance in Prague in November 1939, and I realized that one of my former professors was one of the students punished in the aftermath of that event.
Highly recommended to anyone interested in the Second World War. -
Today's nonfiction post is on Resistance: The Underground War Against Hitler, 1939-1945 by Halik Kochanski. It is 936 pages long and is published by Liveright. The cover are picture of different resistance movements. The intended reader is someone who is interested in an in-depth guide into resistance movements outside of Germany during World War 2. There is mild foul language, no sex, and some violence in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.
From the dust jacket- It’s almost shocking to think that now, more than seventy years after the Nazi surrender in 1945, there is not a single volume that has attempted to unify the resistance movements that convulsed Europe during the brutal years of occupation. In her extraordinary work, Resistance, Halik Kochanski does just that, creating a prodigiously researched account that becomes the first to bring these disparate histories into a single narrative.
Taking us from France in the west to parts of the Soviet Union in the east, Resistance reveals why and how small bands of individuals undertook actions that could lead not merely to their own deaths, but to the destruction of their entire communities. As Kochanski demonstrates, most who joined up were ordinary people who would not have been expected—even by themselves—to become heroes. Simultaneously panoramic and heartbreakingly intimate, Resistance is an incomparable history necessary for any home library.
Review- This is an extremely in-depth book about all the different resistance movements in mainland Europe. Kochanski's research is very through and at times can be overwhelming with all the information, the names and dates. But it is also fascinating to read about all the different factions within Europe that were fighting for freedom. Starting at the very beginning of the war and then following some of the bigger names all way to death. This book is not for light reading, this is for people who want to know more about forgotten history.
I give this book a Four out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library. -
One publisher's blurb opens with a statement about it being almost shocking to think that it is now 60 years since the events and there is no comprehensive volume about the role the underground played in defeating Nazism. That may be valid statement and this volume takes a pretty good stab at filling this void.
I do recall having listened to several shorter works about heretofore undisclosed tales of women's contribution in this area, and thinking that perhaps there is a whole genre about women of the Resistance in WWII - some rated as non-fiction, other claiming to be historical fiction. This book does not elevate women, but does attempt to elevate overall people who involved themselves in resisting the Nazi regime.
For me, the striking aspect of the 'big picture' story is the number of failures that eventually led to some successes in actually helping the war effort. Eisenhower said quite forcefully that the invasion of Europe could not have succeeded without the Resistance while others had quite different opinions. One need only consider what contemporaries of the events had to say to see how varied this outlook could be. It is almost assumed, probably quite rightly, that nobody actually really welcomed being subjugated to Nazi occupation - even the Austrian Anschluess was not universally welcomed there. But those who lived through it could wish to "get along" with their Nazi occupiers without welcoming them. On the other hand, taking an active role in resisting the occupiers could have mortal consequences. Put yourself in the place of, for example, a Dutch citizen who wished only to "get along" being brought up on charges after the war for having conducted themself in a way that might have been viewed a collaboration. Quite a moral quandary, often with life and death consequences. -
Really enjoyable, whistlestop tour of European resistance to German domination and crimes which doesn't skimp on any country or type of resistance. Great to learn about Scandinavian resistance beyond the commonly-known tales of rescue and sabotage, in particular. The duplicity and single-mindedness of various Communist forces is well expressed (and the naivete of British and American intelligence people who facilitated their successes). With such a massive number of people to cover from innumerable backgrounds and agencies, at least one I know something of, was too lightly dealt with to the detriment of accuracy (i.e. he did some good, but much bad). The chapter on remembrance and how our nations use resistance myths as a balm for bruised egos and self-perception, was quick but effective. The only book one needs for a general survey.
(I was amazed, incidentally, that having read her book solely on Polish participation in the war (The Eagle Unbowed) that Kochanski was so restrained talking about that peculiarly horrendous side of the war in amongst, for instance, the far less bloody French, Danish and Norwegian experiences.) -
A real monster of a book- prepare to get lost in a sea of information here. I wouldn’t go into this looking for a narrative arc or big-picture view. This book gets into the details, especially with regard to operations. People who are into the nuts and bolts of military history, chains of command, stats and numbers and espionage will enjoy this. Personally I would have preferred a book focusing more on the pathos side of things but, there are moments here if you apply your imagination. I think the most important takeaway from this book was the sheer complexity of Resistance during WW2, with multifarious motives and effects. The country by country analysis is what really interested me, seeing the different degrees resistance took and what motivated the various actors. Of course, like any WW2 history, there is an incredible amount of death and suffering in the book that complicates the heroic, luminous pictures I had before reading it. Truly an immense scholarly effort that I doubt will be topped anytime soon.
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Comprehensive. Don't think I've ever seen a book covering all the resistance movements in occupied Europe and the SOE --
Which is kind of the problem. This is a huge book, stuffed to the gills with stories and facts, many of which I never knew, such as the fact that the majority of French soldiers abroad (North Africa, Syria, etc) when captured and paroled did not want to fight with the Free French but return home to occupied France; or that millions of Europeans willingly relocated to Nazi Germany to work there.
Proof once again that history is never neat and tidy. We are just taught neat and tidy stories as morality plays. History has no morality.
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An enormous achievement when the author sticks to reliable sources, but sadly misleading on the Baltics.
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Its bulk is initially off-putting but this is a surprisingly easy read and very, very informative. Kochanski is a master of her subject. Eye-opening.
