Season 15: Episode 21: Resistance

When discussing the Second World War, or any large-scale conflict for that matter, it is a common shorthand to refer to the belligerents by their national identification. Britain fought Germany, the US fought Japan, etc. However, speaking this way leads to imagining that the respective populations of these nations were all working together toward a common, agreed-upon objective — and this is simply inaccurate. There were plenty of people during the First World War, the Franco-Prussian War, and every other conflict before, between, and since, who disagreed with the stances taken by their national leaders and, in some cases, actively worked against their government’s objectives. The Second World War especially tends to get flattened for a variety of reasons, so in the interest of a more holistic understanding of that conflict, this episode will discuss residents and citizens of many of the belligerent nations of the Second World War who worked against their respective governments, including those within the Allied nations.

We will begin in France. The French national government prior to the second world war, referred to by historians as “The Third French Republic,” seemed almost uninterested in German aggression against Poland. After the rather lackluster Saar Offensive, they made no further plans for a future retaliatory incursion, expecting that the Maginot Line would protect them from suffering the same fate now meted out against the Polish people. The Battle of France, however, lasted only six weeks, after which time the nation was divided into the occupied zone in the north and west, and leaving only the puppet state of Vichy France to rule the southeast and, at least in name, manage the remaining French colonies throughout the globe.

While it would afterward prove convenient to pretend that European antisemitism was purely a German phenomenon, such claims are historically inaccurate. In fact, one of the problems faced by the German soldiers and bureaucrats who were initially sent to occupied France was that a large number of French people were dragging their Jewish neighbors before the German authorities and demanding they be deported like the German Jews had been. However, while some people throughout occupied France were eager to welcome their new Nazi overlords, or at least do their best to stay out of their way, significant numbers decided instead to find ways to fight back.

The earliest acts of resistance were largely symbolic and involved raising the French tricolor flag or singing the national anthem, a song called La Marseillaise - acts which had both been proscribed as illegal in the occupied zone. The Nazi occupiers moved quickly to transform both occupied and Vichy Frances, forcing them to accept official book banning, art censorship, and other thought restrictions which were standard in Germany. The acts of resistance grew steadily more intense, but in the early years were usually confined to vandalism, minor sabotage like cutting phone lines, or rendering German vehicles inoperable by slashing their tires. However, even such minor actions could warrant severe punishment. The first resident of France who was executed by German authorities for an act of resistance was not French at all, but a Polish Jew named Israel Carp, who mocked a German military parade in Bordeaux.

Telling their stories years later, many members of the French Resistance recall that they were radicalized by horrific acts of abuse they witnessed at the hands of the Germans. Because the punishment for any act of resistance was execution, those who banded together to resist Nazi occupation quickly decided that they may as well do as much damage as possible.

In a wry twist of irony, many of the earliest members of the French Resistance were not French at all, but were immigrants and exiles from other nations who had made France their home. The excellent 2009 French film “The Army of Crime,” follows one of the earliest organized groups, led by Missak Manouchian, an Armenian poet and communist. Having survived the Armenian Genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire during the First World War in his childhood, he was determined to do whatever he could to prevent another such attempt at mass ethnic cleansing.

Manouchian was arrested soon after the Nazi occupation of France for being a known communist but was quickly released thanks to the petitioning of his wife, Melinee. He led a group of around fifty resistance fighters and they engaged in a widespread campaign of terror against the Nazi occupiers, including the assassination of SS General Julius Ritter, who had been part of the occupation government which was charged with labor mobilization - a program which enforced compulsory labor and deported large numbers of workers to factories in Germany to support the war effort. Throughout the summer and fall of 1943, the Manouchian Group successfully executed over twenty strikes against the German occupiers - sometimes directly against soldiers, other times against war infrastructure - and have been credited for saving many Jewish residents endangered by Nazi ethnic cleansing.

In late 1943, most of the Manouchian group, including Missak himself, was arrested by French police, who were acting as collaborators with the Nazi regime. His wife Melinee successfully escaped arrest but Manouchian and many of his fellow guerrillas were subjected to a show trial and execution. Before their untimely demise, their photographs were taken to be used in Nazi propaganda, which attempted to cast the French resistance as being composed of foreign agitators and criminals. However, there were many resistance groups operating throughout both occupied and Vichy France and they continued to sabotage vital infrastructure, pass along intelligence to Allied agents, and provide sanctuary and rescue for those threatened by the Nazi regime.

In response to the French resistance, the Nazi government implemented a policy of random mass execution, in which fifty or a hundred French people would be grabbed off the street en masse and given summary executions in response to resistance attacks. This led many resistance groups to scale back their overt terrorism a bit and focus more on rescue, intelligence gathering, and less violent methods of resisting Nazi tyranny. If you’d like to read more about the French Resistance, I highly recommend the 2015 book, “Fighters in the Shadows” by Robert Gildea, which discusses the subject both in great depth and with fascinating historical detail.

The Czech Resistance likewise carried out acts of sabotage, spying, and even assassination after their nation was invaded and occupied by the Nazis. In mid-1942, members of the Czech Resistance executed a plan in collaboration with British intelligence called “Operation Anthropoid.” The objective of this plan was the successful assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the local military governor who was also a mass murderer and one of the architects of the Holocaust. On May 27, 1942, two exiled members of the Czechoslovak army who had been parachuted into the area made their move, targeting Heydrich’s car as it slowed while rounding a tight corner in Prague. Although the hand-held sten machine gun of the principal assassin jammed, his compatriot managed to toss a grenade under Heydrich’s car, which detonated and severely wounded him. In spite of his wounds, Heydrich and his driver chased the assassins away, firing their pistols as their assailants fled. The assassins initially believed that their mission had failed but after his adrenaline wore off, it became clear that Heydrich was seriously wounded. He was taken to a hospital but after surgery he developed sepsis and died in agony about a week later.

In spite of the technical success of Operation Anthropoid, the reaction from the Nazis was swift, extremely terrible, and merciless. The subsequent mass arrests of dissidents, both real and suspected, practically eliminated the remaining Czech resistance, forcing the few who survived underground. They would later emerge in early May 1945, when Prague itself was gripped by an anti-Nazi uprising during the closing days of the second world war in Europe.

The vast majority of writing, both fiction and non-fiction, which discuss resistance movements during the Second World War tend to focus on the groups which were active in the Axis nations. However, there were plenty of similar groups operating within Allied nations, though typically with less overt violence and terrorism.

One of the most well-known pro-German groups active in the United States during the 1930s was the German American Bund. Cobbled together in 1936 from a merger of pre-existing German affiliation groups like the “Friends of Germany,” the German American Bund was not just pro-Germany but was explicitly a pro-Nazi organization. Its members would frequently infiltrate other organizations, sometimes German-affiliates but often otherwise non-specific service clubs, and would attempt to both recruit like-minded members from those groups or, in some cases, transform those groups into becoming either pro-Nazi or pro-isolationism. Even before the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe, Adolf Hitler was very determined to ensure that the US should be dissuaded from joining with England in a war against Germany.

The German American Bund regularly featured Nazi symbolism like the swastika at their rallies, which frequently targeted President Roosevelt’s “New Deal” policies and attempted to paint American boycotts of German goods as communist activity. They frequently flew the US Flag alongside that of Nazi Germany and their public speakers often engaged in a unique strain of historical revisionism, for example claiming that George Washington was one of the original fascists because in his writings he was skeptical of democracy as a governing system.

The German American Bund’s trouble began at the 1936 Olympics when some of its members posed for photographs with Adolf Hitler, which they then publicized as though it was an official approval for their activities by the German government. This caused a diplomatic uproar in Washington DC and a minor political scuffle which culminated in Congress passing the Foreign Agents Registration Act in 1938. This law required anyone acting as an agent on behalf of a foreign government to register as such with the US State Department.

Eager to avoid provoking war with the United States, Hitler and his government were embarrassed by the German American Bund and in the same year that the Foreign Agents Registration Act was passed, they placed additional restrictions upon the German American Bund. Using Nazi emblems was now forbidden.

The German American Bund made up for this new restriction by more heavily utilizing the US flag in their imagery and trying to cast themselves as a “Pro-American” organization, promoting isolationism, and attempting to bond with mainstream Americans by going all-in on anti-semitism.

In early February of 1939, the Bund held a rally in Madison Square Garden which attracted 20,000 attendees. In the midst of anti-Semitic speeches, a horrific fight broke out between those protesting the Bund and its own security forces. Later that year, an investigation by the state of New York revealed that the Bund’s leader had embezzled more than $14,000 dollars from the organization, an amount which is roughly equivalent to a little over $300,000 today. He was found guilty of embezzlement and tax evasion and was sentenced at the end of the year.

When the US entered the Second World War in late 1941 after the attack on Pearl Harbor and after the subsequent declaration of war by Germany, the Bund was outlawed. However, it was not the only group with an interest in preventing the US from joining the Second World War. By the summer of 1940, the war in Europe was in full swing and it was beginning to appear that the US very well might join the fray. In addition to the formulation of what would become the Lend-Lease Bill, President Roosevelt had launched a peacetime draft and pushed to drastically increase the US Navy’s budget. In September of that year, a wildly diverse group of people formed a political action committee around one unifying issue: preserving American isolationism and, by extension, preventing the US from joining the second world war. They called themselves the America First Committee.

While its rank-and-file membership was composed of a broad swath of people across the ideological spectrum who were determined to prevent a repeat of the horrors experienced during the first world war, its leadership had somewhat different motivations. Many notables of US culture during that time served on the board of the America First Committee, including automobile pioneer Henry Ford, and Robert Wood, a retired Army General who was then serving as the chairman of the board of Sears, Roebuck, and Company. However, the real star of the America First Committee, a man who made dozens of public speeches on their behalf arguing that the US ought to withdraw its support of the Allied powers, was none other than famed aviator Charles Lindbergh.

To explain why the Roosevelt administration was expending so much effort and treasure to support the Allied powers during the early phases of the second world war in Europe, Lindbergh and other leaders placed the blame squarely on a secret cabal of Jewish overlords who controlled world finance and… well, you can probably fill in the rest of the blanks yourself. While the rank-and-file membership of the America First Committee may have had perfectly noble motives in lobbying against US involvement in the second world war, the rabid and open antisemitism of its leadership ensured that it would remain a fringe movement. Cartoonist Theodor Geisel, better known by his nom-de-plume Doctor Suess composed several political cartoons mocking the America First Committee, though we’ll discuss some of his other political cartoons at the time in the next episode. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in late 1941, the America First Committee voluntarily dissolved itself.

As you can see, most organizations preaching peace in the United States prior to the Second World War ceased their activities after the US became directly involved. Those organizations which enjoyed Soviet sponsorship generally stopped calling for peace and isolationism as soon as Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941.

However, while the vast majority of citizens in the United States were eager for a war of revenge after the attack on Pearl Harbor, it bears mentioning that black servicemembers and draftees frequently expressed reluctance to fight for a nation which refused to defend the basic civil rights which they were guaranteed under the constitution. That being said, there were many black servicemembers who nevertheless fought courageously in spite of the second-class status that awaited them back in the United States.

In Germany, one of the most well-known anti-Nazi groups to maintain activity after the Nazi seizure of power through the Enabling Act of 1933 was Antifaschistische Aktion, commonly called “antifa.” The people who composed both the leadership and rank-and-file of antifa had largely been members of different, often-feuding political parties before the Nazis took power. Some, in fact, had even occasionally joined with Nazi groups in street fights against one another. They represented a diverse ideological spectrum, typically spanning between liberal and communist, and their activities remained largely clandestine for much of the duration of the Second World War itself.

The level of repression in Nazi Germany made organization of anti-war groups very difficult and many leaders of these formerly legitimate political parties were arrested by the Gestapo on the basis of testimony from one of their co-conspirators. Sometimes these confessions were coerced, other times the informant had volunteered the information in hopes of staying well outside the secret police’s target zone. In 1944, however, with the fortunes of war beginning to turn against the Nazis, antifa re-emerged and assisted with the Allied liberation effort, usually through sabotage or intelligence gathering.

Throughout the Second World War, the Gestapo arrested over 800,000 Germans under accusations of resisting Nazi rule. Many of these were sent, after a brief show trial, to concentration camps, though tens of thousands were executed. However, while antifa largely focused on acts of violence and terrorism, a student group in Munich called the White Rose Movement opted for more subtle methods of resistance.

In late June of 1942, the White Rose Movement was founded by a group of five students and a professor. They printed and distributed anti-Nazi leaflets and also engaged in a graffiti campaign urging people to resist Nazi rule. After about seven months, however, many were arrested by the Gestapo, including their core leadership. Most were executed or imprisoned.

Although Japan did not suffer the same level of political repression as that of Nazi Germany during the Second World War, it did employ many government agents who were very willing to commit acts of violence in the name of protecting or defending Kokutai. Combined with government censorship of the press, this meant that there was very little questioning of the war by the common people of the empire of Japan. However, that did not mean there was no resistance at all.

In 1940, outspoken pastor Kagawa Toyohiko was arrested for publicly apologizing to China for Japan’s invasion and occupation. He was released soon after and traveled to the US. Other pacifists like Tadao Yanaihara published underground magazines denouncing the war with China and later, with Britain and the US.

Japanese expatriates and exiles, meanwhile, created an impressive network of artists throughout the world who worked for Allied governments creating anti-imperial propaganda and also aiding with intelligence work, usually with language translation. Many who were willing and able signed up to fight with the US Army, though their segregated unit was sent to fight in the European theatre. 

Next time, we’ll discuss the victims of mass imprisonment during the second world war, in the nations of both the Axis and Allied powers.