The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  Moulin, who needed a military man to command what would later become the Secret Army, recruited General Charles Delestraint. Working tirelessly, Moulin won over the main networks in the unoccupied zone, Combat, Libération and Franc-Tireur (confusingly, not the same as the Communist organization Francs-Tireurs et Partisans). Despite this success, the British government was still determined not to turn F Section over to the Free French.

  Ironically, American support for Darlan greatly helped de Gaulle come to an agreement with the Communists. The Communists were outraged that the Allies should have supported Darlan, who had been Vichy’s prime minister when their members had been executed as hostages. In January 1943, Fernand Grenier arrived in London as the French Communist Party’s delegate to the Free French. The following month, Pierre Laval, bowing to German pressure for more workers to be sent to the Reich, instituted the Service de Travail Obligatoire. This outright conscription of labour was bitterly resented in France, and prompted tens of thousands of young men to escape to the mountains and forests. Resistance groups were almost overwhelmed by the influx, and although they found it hard to feed them, let alone arm them, the Maquis, as it was called, became a mass movement.

  In the spring, Moulin set up the Conseil National de la Résistance and contacted networks in northern France to persuade them to join. But in June a series of disasters began, largely due to bad security. The SD managed to penetrate one group after another. General Delestraint was arrested in the Parisian Métro, and on 21 June Jean Moulin and all the members of the Conseil National de la Résistance were surrounded in a house on the edge of Lyons. Moulin was tortured so badly by SS Hauptsturmführer Klaus Barbie that he died two weeks later, without giving anything away. The British, horrified by all the lapses in security and the spate of arrests which continued, were even more reluctant to confide in the BCRA.

  The Gaullists reconstituted the council of the resistance, this time headed by Georges Bidault, an honest but uncharismatic left-of-centre Catholic. Because Bidault lacked Moulin’s clarity and determination, the Communists, who had suffered very few infiltrations of their tight cell system, greatly increased their influence. The Communists, having agreed to associate with the Gaullist Secret Army, hoped to receive large quantities of weapons and money from SOE. They also sought to infiltrate the various resistance committees with their own ‘submarines’, who were secret Communists pretending to have nothing to do with the Party. Their vision of the liberation of France was diametrically different to the Gaullist idea. By the control of committees and the growing strength of their armed groups in the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, they wanted to carry liberation into revolution. They did not know, however, that Stalin had other priorities and they also underestimated the political skills of the Gaullists.

  De Gaulle himself, who had almost been consigned to oblivion by the Darlan deal and the Americans’ promotion of General Giraud, soon turned the tables on his rival. Roosevelt had sent Jean Monnet to advise Giraud, but Monnet, although he had been against de Gaulle, now showed his realism. He worked in the background to smooth a transition of power. On 30 May 1943, de Gaulle landed at Maison Blanche airfield in Algiers, where Giraud welcomed him with a band playing the ‘Marseillaise’. The British and Americans watched from the sidelines. A frenzy of disagreements and rumours of plots, even of kidnappings, soon followed. The scheming prompted General Pierre de Bénouville to observe that ‘nothing was more like Vichy than Algiers’.

  On 3 June, the Comité Français de Libération National was set up with de Gaulle dictating virtually every aspect of what was clearly a government-in-waiting. De Gaulle, with his remarkable foresight, had also seen the need to make overtures to Stalin, and not just in order to manage the French Communists better. He decided to send a representative to Moscow. The Free French, alone among the western Allies, had already contributed a fighter group to the eastern front. On 1 September 1942, the Groupe de Chasse Normandie had formed up at Baku in Azerbaijan, prior to operational and conversion training on the Yak-7 fighter. Having entered combat on 22 March 1943, the Normandie-Nieman Group, as it became designated, would eventually claim 273 Luftwaffe aircraft destroyed. De Gaulle calculated that good relations between the Soviet Union and France offered Stalin a wild card in the west, and would improve his own position when dealing with the Anglo-Saxons.

  After the conquest of Belgium, Hitler ordered that the Flemings should receive preferential treatment. He had an idea that they might become a form of sub-German annexe to the Reich, in a future reorganization of Europe. A section of Belgian territory south of Aachen, as well as the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, had been incorporated into the Reich.

  The need for more manpower on the eastern front prompted Himmler in 1942 to increase the Waffen-SS with units from ‘Germanic’ countries, which included Scandinavians, the Dutch and the Flemish. In addition to the Légion Wallonie, raised by the fascist Léon Degrelle, who saw himself as a future leader of Belgium in the New Order, a Flemish Legion was also incorporated. Altogether some 40,000 Belgians from both communities served in the Waffen-SS, twice as many as the number of Frenchmen who formed the SS Charlemagne Division.

  The vast majority of Belgians, however, detested this second German occupation of their country in a quarter of a century. Underground newspapers flourished, and young resisters resorted to graffiti to attack the occupation. As in other occupied countries, V signs for Allied victory appeared chalked on walls. When Rudolf Hess flew to Britain in 1941, they painted ‘Heil Hess!’ on walls. The German army adopted a pragmatic approach, tending to ignore such pinpricks. But when a series of strikes threatened industrial production, their severity increased.

  Armed resistance would have been suicidal, so a number of well-placed Belgians, including former intelligence officers, did all that they could to spy for the Allies. An underground Armée Secrète was formed eventually with some 50,000 members, but it had to wait until liberation was imminent. There was great distrust between the Belgian government-in-exile in London and the SOE section responsible for the country. The most effective controller, who took over in mid-1943, was Hardy Amies, who later became the Queen’s dress designer.

  A more militant organization was the Communist-led Front de l’Indépendence which, as well as fomenting strikes, assassinated collaborators in the street. Other brave groups organized escape lines for Allied aircrew shot down during the strategic bombing campaign against Germany. The most successful was the Comet line organized by a young woman, Andrée de Jongh, who had the codename Dédée. Many Belgians also took great risks in hiding Belgian-born Jews. Jewish refugees from other countries trapped there were less fortunate. They made up the bulk of the 30,000 transported to camps.

  The Netherlands, which had remained a neutral country in the First World War, suffered from the shock of occupation perhaps even more than Belgium. Although a small minority collaborated or later joined the Waffen-SS Nederland Division, the majority of the country became bitterly anti-German. As in Belgium, the round-up of Jews in February 1941 prompted a strike, which brought severe reprisals. One Dutch resistance group burned down the registry of births in Amsterdam to hamper the Germans’ searches, but most of the 140,000 Jews in Holland were transported to death camps, including the young Anne Frank. Then, with the beginning of the war in the east, German occupation authorities instituted a much harsher regime. On 4 May 1942, the Germans shot seventy-two members of the Dutch resistance and imprisoned hundreds more.

  The Sicherheitsdienst had been active in the Netherlands before the war, so when opposition grew to the forced recruitment of labour, its arrests were carefully targeted. And having obtained a list of Dutch intelligence contacts from the two SIS officers seized at Venlo in 1940, the Germans rounded them up rapidly.

  The Abwehr also achieved a great success against the Dutch resistance beginning in March 1942. It called this counter-intelligence coup Operation North Pole, or the Englandspiel. This disaster was almost entirely due to appallingly
lax practices in N Section at SOE’s London headquarters. An SOE radio operator was picked up in a sweep in The Hague. The Abwehr forced him to transmit to London. He did so, assuming that, because he had left off the security check at the end of his message, London would know that he had been captured. But to his horror London assumed that he had simply forgotten it, and replied telling him to arrange a drop zone for another agent to be parachuted in.

  A German reception committee was waiting for the new agent, and he was in turn forced to signal back as instructed. The chain continued, with one agent after another seized on arrival. Each was deeply shocked to find that the Germans knew everything about them, even the colour of the walls in their briefing room back in England. The Abwehr and SD, for once working harmoniously together, thus managed to capture around fifty Dutch officers and agents. Anglo-Dutch relations were severely damaged by this disaster; in fact many people in the Netherlands suspected treachery at the London end. There was no conspiracy, just a terrible combination of incompetence, complacency and ignorance of conditions in occupied Holland.

  Denmark, surprised and overwhelmed by the Nazi invasion in 1940, opted for a form of passive resistance during the early part of its occupation. The German regime maintained a light touch and basically allowed the country to govern itself, prompting Churchill to refer unfairly to Denmark as ‘Hitler’s tame canary’. Highly productive Danish farmers produced up to a fifth of the Reich’s needs in butter, pork and beef. Himmler especially wanted to recruit as many Danes as possible for the Waffen-SS, but most volunteers came from the German-speaking minority in the south.

  In November 1942 Hitler, exasperated by King Christian’s open dislike, demanded a more obedient government. The detested pro-Nazi Erik Scavenius was installed as prime minister. Scavenius made Denmark join the Anti-Comintern Pact, and called on Danes to volunteer to fight in the Soviet Union. Although Denmark’s fate under the Nazi regime was among the least severe in Europe, Danes managed to save almost all the Jews in their country by smuggling them in fishing-boats across the Kattegat to southern Sweden. The Danish underground, the Dansk Frihedsrådet, provided valuable intelligence to London, especially for the RAF. It also carried out its own sabotage actions and, in 1943, set up a shadow administration.

  Of all the governments-in-exile in London, the Norwegian was the strongest, both in authority and in resources. The large Norwegian merchant navy was placed at the service of the British, and represented a major contribution to the war effort in Atlantic and Arctic convoys. Norway, which demonstrated a wide degree of support for King Haakon VII, also suffered far less than other occupied countries from the threat of a potential civil war, either during the occupation or at the end of the war.

  After the country’s defeat, Norwegian officers began to organize an underground army, the Milorg, towards the end of 1940. By the end of the war it numbered some 40,000 members. There had been considerable frustration at the inept Allied intervention, and in the early years of the German occupation there was tension between the Norwegians and SOE, which wanted to develop an aggressive campaign.

  Churchill’s longing to launch raids on Norway, with two on the Lofoten Islands in 1941, then advocating an invasion in 1942, drove his chiefs of staff to distraction, but the raids encouraged Hitler’s conviction that the Allies would attack across the North Sea. The German dictator’s insistence on maintaining more than 400,000 troops in Norway, to the frustration of his own generals elsewhere, tied down considerable forces for nearly five years of the war. With such a huge occupying army, it was hardly surprising that Milorg did not want to start a partisan war which would have led to massive civilian casualties.

  Norway’s self-styled leader, Vidkun Quisling, had led a small party of Nazi sympathizers, the Nasjonal Samling, before the war. Having proclaimed himself head of a government during the German invasion, he was promptly removed by Josef Terboven, the Reichskommissar, who despised him. In February 1942, Hitler appointed Quisling minister president, but Terboven continued to undermine Quisling’s delusions of power. The Rikshird, a copy of the Nazi SA, was established and attracted 50,000 members, most of them opportunists. Other Nazi organizations, such as the Hitler Jugend, were also imitated. Perhaps inevitably with such a large army of occupation, a substantial number of Norwegian women became involved with German soldiers and just over 10,000 children were born from these liaisons.

  But the bulk of the population hated their German occupiers. In April 1942, the overwhelming majority of the Lutheran clergy declared against the Quisling government, and when the Germans ordered the round-up of Jews, only 767 out of 2,200 were deported. Most of the rest were smuggled by Norwegians over the border to Sweden, which, although happy to sell Germany its rich iron ore and other materials for its war industries, started to distance itself from its Nazi trading partner once the war began to turn against Germany.

  A vital target for the RAF had been the Norse Hydro plant in the district of Telemark, which produced heavy water for what was suspected to be the prototype of a German atomic bomb. But bombing from the air was ruled impracticable, so SOE was called on to organize a sabotage raid. A British commando assault in November 1942 ended in disaster, with two Horsa gliders crashing in bad weather. German troops captured the survivors of one, bound their hands with barbed wire and executed them on the spot. This was in response to Hitler’s recent Kommandobefehl, which ordered that all members of special forces or raiding parties, whether or not in uniform, were to be shot. The Germans immediately discovered from maps on the crashed aircraft what their objective had been.

  The reception committee of three Norwegian commandos had parachuted into the mountains in October. They stayed on through the terrible winter, surviving in snowed-in huts and living off wild reindeer meat. Their only source of vitamin C came from the gørr, the semi-digested green matter in the reindeers’ stomachs. Finally on 17 February 1943, another six Norwegian commandos trained in Britain parachuted in, but landed on the wrong frozen lake in the mountains. In the end the two groups met up, and successfully laid explosives at the Vermork heavy water plant on the night of 28 February. They got in and out without a shot being fired and caused considerable damage. The Germans repaired the installations and production started again four months later. US Eighth Air Force raids failed to hit the target effectively, so the Norwegian resistance was called upon again.

  When a sufficient quantity of heavy water was ready in February 1944, the Germans loaded it in railway wagons on to a ferry, unaware that two elderly members of the Norwegian resistance had slipped aboard the night before and laid charges with timers fashioned from alarm clocks. The ferry sank exactly as planned in the deepest waters of the lake. Fourteen civilians had also been killed, but the Norwegian authorities in London had agreed in advance that the target justified the risk. Although German scientists were not even close to building a nuclear bomb, the Allies could not afford to take any chances. In any case, the two Vermork actions were among the most efficient sabotage operations of the entire war.

  Czechoslovakia, the first victim of German aggression, was abandoned by the British and French in 1938, and then completely occupied by the Germans the following March. But Czech students marked their independence day on 28 October 1939 with a big demonstration. The Nazis closed all universities and executed nine students as a warning. The former prime minister Edvard Beneš set up a government-in-exile in London, and Czech soldiers and pilots made their way to England. Czech pilots fought with great skill and bravery in the RAF.

  The Germans dismembered the country. The Sudetenland had already been incorporated into the Reich, Slovakia became a puppet fascist state under Monsignor Jozef Tiso, and the rest of the country was named the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Although the Nazi regime avoided the harshest measures at first, the SD was ready to smash any signs of disaffection, especially after June 1941 and the entry of the Soviet Union into the war on the Allied side. The Czech resistance–the UVOD or Ústeduí
vedení odboje domácího–began a campaign of sabotage against fuel dumps and railways, as did Communist groups.

  Hitler appointed Reinhard Heydrich to take over as protector of Bohemia and Moravia to crush the opposition. Heydrich immediately opted for a policy of terror to ensure that war production was no longer interrupted. He arrested the leading officials and had them sentenced to death. Altogether ninety-two people were shot in the first few days, and several thousand others were sent to Mauthausen concentration camp. Heydrich’s longer-term plan was to Germanize the territory through massive deportation. He also started the despatch of the region’s 100,000 Jews to concentration camps, where almost all perished.

  In London, the Czech government-in-exile decided to assassinate Heydrich. Two young Czech volunteers were trained by SOE and parachuted into the country at the end of 1941. On 27 May 1942, after much reconnaissance, the two-man team took up position for a roadside ambush. One tried to shoot Heydrich as his open Mercedes slowed for a sharp bend, but his sub-machine gun jammed. His companion then threw an improvised bomb. Heydrich was wounded by the blast. Although his wounds were not fatal, they were contaminated and he died from septicaemia on 4 June.

  Although angry that Heydrich should have taken the risk of driving around Prague in an open car, Hitler’s fury against the Czechs led to massive reprisals, with killings and deportations. The villages of Lidice and Ležáky were destroyed, with the execution of all male inhabitants over the age of sixteen. The women were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. Although not as extreme as some Nazi atrocities, Lidice became the symbol of German oppression throughout the western world.