by John Keegan
By then it was too late. Model had indeed scraped together enough armour to mount a holding attack on 29 July against Rokossovsky’s First White Russian Front near Praga, the Warsaw suburb across the Vistula. Then Himmler, whom Hitler had entrusted with authority to put down the Warsaw rising, brought up troops, including the Dirlewanger brigade of German criminals and the Kaminski brigade of Russian turncoats, both recently formed by the SS for internal security operations judged to demand particular ruthlessness. Within twenty-four hours of the outbreak they opened a reign of terror against the city’s inhabitants – combatant or not – which, through fighting, massacre or area bombardment, would bring death to 200,000 of them before the rising was over.
TWENTY-SIX
Resistance and Espionage
‘Now set Europe ablaze’ was Winston Churchill’s instruction to Hugh Dalton on appointing him to direct the Special Operations Executive set up at Churchill’s express wish on 22 July 1940, to foment and sponsor resistance to Hitler’s rule of occupied Europe. No event in the history of occupied Europe’s defiance of Hitler more exactly matched Churchill’s expectation of what a ‘setting ablaze’ might mean than the Warsaw uprising of August 1944. It confronted Hitler with an acute internal military crisis; it threw down a challenge to oppressed peoples elsewhere within his empire to do likewise; it endorsed the message Churchill had proclaimed to the English-speaking nations throughout the war – that the defeated were ready to rise against tyranny when the moment offered; and it validated the ‘parallel’ war of subversion and sabotage sponsored by the British and American ‘special’ agencies inside occupied Europe during four years of conventional war against its periphery.
So it appeared on the surface. Historically, however, it must be recognised that for all the bravery and suffering of the Polish Home Army in seven weeks of combat against Hitler’s security troops – 10,000 fighters killed, perhaps as many as 200,000 civilians killed also – the Warsaw rising was not a spontaneous reaction to the brutality of occupation. Nor, by any objective valuation, did it seriously undermine Hitler’s ability to maintain order within Poland at large while continuing to sustain an effective defence against the Red Army, which had halted on the far side of the Vistula at the moment the rising broke out. On the contrary: the rising was precipitated by the Home Army’s calculation that the Germans’ defeat in the Battle of White Russia presented it with a not to be repeated chance of seizing Poland’s capital city for the government in exile before the arrival of the Red Army led to the installation of Stalin’s puppet Polish regime; but its calculation was invalidated by the failure of the Russians to maintain military pressure on the Germans, who, in turn, found the means to fight – and eventually defeat – the insurgents without drawing on their front-line strength.
Far from demonstrating what an earlier uprising in a series of similar insurrections might have contributed to the defeat of Hitler, therefore, Warsaw stood as an awful warning of how dangerous it was, even at that late stage of the war, for any of his subject peoples to take up arms against him on territory which remained under the Wehrmacht’s control. If Warsaw were not sufficient proof, the point was reinforced by the experience of the Maquis in southern France in June and of the Slovaks in July. In France, on D-Day itself, the Maquis of the Grenoble region set up the standard of revolt on the plateau of Vercors, from which it began to raid German troops using the Rhône valley route; by July there were several thousand Maquisards at Vercors, most of them fugitives from the forced labour programme. Army Group G, which was being troubled by pinprick attacks all over its area of responsibility, then decided to make an example of this isolated and vulnerable resistance base, cordoned the plateau, landed SS troops by glider on the summit and between 18 and 23 July brutally killed everyone they found there. On a small scale it anticipated the action German security troops were simultaneously taking against the Slovak rebels in eastern Czechoslovakia. Elements of the satellite Slovak army rose against the occupation forces in the expectation of imminent Russian intervention, but were not rescued and were put to the sword. Hitler had to deal with no further uprising – except the carefully timed outbreak of insurrection in Paris during the week of its liberation – while his armies still stood on conquered territory.
What made the Vercors massacre all the more dispiriting for those committed to Churchill’s policy of ‘setting Europe ablaze’ was that the resistance had been supported and supplied by the Special Operations Executive; one of SOE’s liaison teams (codenamed ‘Jedburghs’) had been parachuted to the support of the Vercors Maquisards, who on 14 July had received a drop of 1000 loads of weapons and ammunition flown to the plateau by the USAAF. This supply had availed them not at all. Although led by a French regular officer, the resistance fighters wholly lacked the experience and training to engage professional troops – who were in any case indoctrinated to put down resistance with pitiless brutality.
Warsaw, Slovakia and Vercors, coming so late in the course of the Second World War, were key events in the history of Hitler’s Europe against which all other resistance and subversion to his rule between 1939 and 1945 must be set in the balance. (The partisan wars behind German lines in Russia and Yugoslavia are exceptions and require separate consideration.) If the three uprisings typify in their outcome the unintended effect of the programme of subversion, sabotage and resistance which Churchill, later abetted by Roosevelt, and the European governments in exile so ardently supported after June 1940, the programme must be adjudged a costly and misguided failure. All failed at the price of very great suffering to the brave patriots involved but at trifling cost to the German forces that put them down; as a result, all the lesser and preliminary activities of the resistance forces which they crowned must be seen, by any objective reckoning, as irrelevant and pointless acts of bravado. If that is a fair verdict on European resistance and the Allied efforts to plan and support it, what is the explanation for its failure?
At the root of Churchill’s misapprehension of what resistance could achieve against ideological tyranny, a misapprehension shared by hundreds of intelligent and energetic men and women among his fellow countrymen, was a total misunderstanding of the role of public opinion in the politics of conquest. Britain’s history is suffused both by conquest and by resistance to it. In Churchill’s own lifetime the boundaries of the British Empire had been greatly extended by military force, in South, West and East Africa, in the Middle East, in Arabia and in south-east Asia. However, the tide of British imperialism had always been tempered by extraneous factors: the continuing influence of anti-imperialism, domestic and foreign, and the British empire-builders’ own ethos of equity and trusteeship. Confronted by rebellion and atrocity in India during the Great Mutiny of 1857-8, the mid-Victorians reacted with a ruthlessness from which Hitler’s security forces could have learned little. Their successors were raised in a more equitable philosophy of empire. ‘Eventual self-rule’ became the principle on which colonial governments were founded in Africa in the late-Victorian and post-Edwardian era; ‘trusteeship’ was the concept on which Britain administered the African and Arabian mandates granted by the League of Nations; ‘self-rule as soon as possible’ informed the regime which Britain imposed on the Afrikaner republics in the wake of the Boer War; and the same spirit transfused British rule in India in the years after the First World War.
At the heart of Britain’s self-imposed moderation of its right to rule over its enormous twentieth-century empire lay deference to its own democratic beliefs and concern for the good opinion of other peoples, particularly Americans, who shared those beliefs. Churchill, though he had isolated himself from his own party in the 1930s by his opposition to the devolution of government in India, was emotionally, if not intellectually, as committed to the principle of self-determination as the most doctrinaire liberal. Moreover, through his experience in fighting the Afrikaners in the Boer War, he had learned how deep the urge to freedom could drive, and how difficult it was for an occupying powe
r to persist in imposing alien rule on any people inspired by faith in their right to independence. Churchill’s personal experience was reinforced by his wide reading in modern history, which abounded in examples of the success of popular resistance to foreign conquest and domination – for instance, resistance by the Spaniards and Prussians against Napoleon, and by the American colonists against George III.
Hitler’s philosophy of empire
A wider mismatch between the philosophies of empire held by Churchill and Hitler could scarcely be imagined. Imperialistic though he was, Churchill believed in the dignity of man; Hitler held ‘the dignity of man’ to be a bourgeois vacuity. As recognised by those in the Anglo-Saxon world who had read Mein Kampf – they were still only a tiny handful in 1940 – he rejected with contempt the idea of self-rule for those who did not belong to the Germanic race. For purposes of expediency he was prepared to make common cause with the Japanese; out of loyalty he included Mussolini (‘a descendant of the Caesars’) and the Italians in the Germanic confraternity; he had an ideologically soft spot for the modern Greeks, whom he identified with the defenders of Thermopylae against the Asiatic hordes and esteemed as dogged warriors; the Scandinavians he recognised as racial cousins, a title he yearned for the British to accept, and which he also extended to those Dutchmen and Belgian Flemings who identified with his cause; he was prepared at a pinch to include the Finns and Balts among his approved minorities; and, as long as they fought on his side, he excepted the Hungarians, Romanians, Slovaks or Bulgarians from racial stigma. For the rest of the inhabitants of Europe who by the end of 1941 had fallen under his sway he reserved nothing but contempt. They belonged either to those groups, like the French, which were tainted by their subjugation to Roman rule (Hitler’s political memory was long) or to the Slavonic ‘riff-raff’, Poles, Serbs, Czechs and above all Russians, whose history was one of subjection to superior empires.
In consequence Hitler was not at all affected by the moral reservations which so easily touched Anglo-Saxon attitudes to empire. He positively exulted in the ease with which he had extinguished autonomous governments in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia; and he measured the rectitude of the authority with which he had replaced these legitimate regimes purely in terms of expediency: if the successor administrations worked, with the minimum of vexation to his occupying forces, he was content to leave them in office undisturbed. Thus he devolved authority in Norway to the Quisling regime from February 1942 (Vidkun Quisling was the local Nordic authoritarian), conceded continuing rights of parliamentary government to the Danes, who conducted a democratic election as late as 1943, in which 97 per cent of the candidates returned were patriots, and left Pétain to embody the appearance if not the reality of sovereign French head of state even after he had extended German military occupation to the whole of France in November 1942.
The complexity of Hitler’s occupation policies was reflected in the complex pattern of resistance to his occupation regimes in both western and eastern Europe. However, the pattern of resistance was determined not only by the nature of the regime Hitler chose to impose in any particular occupied territory. Three other factors operated: the first was the attitude of the left; the second was the degree of assistance which the British (and, after December 1941, the Americans) were able to bring to local resistance organisations; the third was geography.
Geography, being a constant, is best dealt with first. The degree of success of any movement of resistance to enemy occupation is directly determined by the difficulty of the terrain in which it operates – with this proviso: difficult terrain, mountain, forest, desert or swamp, is bereft of the resources necessary to support an irregular military force, and external supplies are therefore required. Most of German-occupied Europe, however, was either topographically unsuited to irregular operations or too distant from Allied bases of support for irregular forces operating there to be easily and regularly supplied. For example, Denmark, in which the spirit of resistance was strong (despite the existence of military and political groups sympathetic to Hitler’s anti-Bolshevik propaganda), lends itself badly to partisan activity, being flat, treeless and densely inhabited; the same conditions characterise most of Holland, Belgium and northern France. In all those areas clandestine activity was readily monitored by the police – and throughout occupied Europe the domestic police forces accepted the authority and direction of the conqueror from the outset – and reprisal punishments were as readily inflicted. The ease and ruthlessness with which reprisals were carried out, either by the Germans or by their satellite security forces, such as the Vichy Milice, proved a sufficient deterrent for much of the war. Moreover, fear of reprisal – on a scale which ran from curfew through arrest, hostage-taking and transportation to exemplary execution – encouraged informing, which in turn directly heightened the efficiency of German control. Most resistance organisations, when they began to form, were obliged to devote a high proportion of their energy to combating informers, nowhere with complete success.
The only part of occupied western Europe in which the terrain favoured resistance activity was Norway, north of Oslo; but there the population was so sparse and the density of German occupation troops was so high that all guerrilla activity had to be organised outside the country. The infiltration of Norwegian resistance fighters from Scotland (who in February 1943 destroyed the heavy-water plant at Vermork, thus crippling the German atomic weapons programme), reinforced by the programme of British commando raids against German military outstations, had the highly desirable effect of persuading Hitler grossly to over-garrison Norway throughout the war; but the internal resistance itself was of negligible strategic significance.
Certain regions of eastern and south-eastern Europe were topographically favourable to partisan activity, notably Carpathian Poland, the Bohemian Forest in Czechoslovakia, much of Yugoslavia, the mountainous parts of the Greek mainland and its larger islands, and the Italian Alps and Apennines. The growth of resistance in Italy, however, had to await the fall of Mussolini in July 1943, while Czechoslovakia was too distant from bases of external support for resistance to take root. The Czech government in exile ran the most efficient of Allied-oriented intelligence organisations to operate inside Europe during the war, but SOE’s only serious sponsorship of resistance activity inside the country, the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, SS ‘Deputy Protector of Bohemia-Moravia’, in May 1942, provoked so terrible a reprisal (the extinction of the population of the village of Lidice) that the effort was not repeated; it reveals much about the efficiency of Hitler’s occupation policies that the assassins were betrayed by one of their own number, who made himself known to the Gestapo as soon as he was parachuted into his homeland. In Greece, where SOE set up an extensive network of agents as early as the autumn of 1942, many of them Oxford- and Cambridge-educated classical scholars inspired by the philhellenes (Byron foremost among them) who had aided the Greeks in their struggle against the Turks in the 1820s, the Germans responded to partisan activity with such pitiless cruelty that the British officers soon found themselves obliged actually to dissuade activists from initiating attacks against the occupiers.
In Poland – again partitioned after 1939 so that its western province became German, its eastern Russian and only its centre, the ‘General-Government’, remained a separately administered entity – the ‘Home Army’, under the direction of the government in exile in London, abstained from provocative military action against the occupier until it unleashed the Warsaw rising of August 1944. Though the Poles ran an intelligence network second in efficiency only to that of the Czechs (one of its triumphs was to supply the British government with key parts of crashed German pilotless weapons which had made rogue flights), they decided from the outset that the national interest lay in preserving the strength of the Home Army against the moment when the collapse of Germany would allow it to strike for the recovery of independence. The military efforts of the Home Army were also restricted, however, by its difficulty in
acquiring arms. Its lack of weapons was a factor in its nonintervention against the Germans during their destruction of the Warsaw ghetto in April 1943, when its heroic Jewish resistance groups were systematically overwhelmed in a street-by-street battle conducted by SS troops and militia under the command of SS General Jürgen Stroop. Until 1944 SOE lacked aircraft with sufficient range to reach central Poland; even after the acquisition of bases in Italy in 1943, flights were still lengthy and dangerous. The Soviet Union, which occasionally granted the Western air forces refuelling facilities for bombing raids against Germany, refused to do so for arms-dropping missions to Poland. It also refused to supply arms to the Home Army itself.