Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  Attempts to Nazify the Netherlands, promote Dutch Nazis and carry out anti-Semitic measures caused widespread anger, and resistance encouraged by the government-in-exile increased. When the Germans attempted to arrest and re-intern previously released Dutch prisoners of war, there was a general strike, which was put down with great severity, but the Germans did stop the arrests. The execution of saboteurs caused particular outrage in a country where the death penalty had been abolished seventy years before and many young men went underground to avoid the forced labour introduced in 1943. In September 1944 the government-in-exile ordered a national rail strike to coincide with Operation Market Garden, a strike which continued for the rest of the war, and in retaliation the Germans banned the movement of foodstuffs by road or canal, with the result that perhaps as many as 15,000 Dutch died of starvation during the winter of 1944/45. To their great credit, the Dutch did their best to prevent their Jews being deported to the concentration camps, with mixed success. In a small country like the Netherlands everybody knew everybody else’s business and concealing people on the run was not easy; nor was there a hinterland into which they could escape. The Germans deported 104,000 Dutch Jews to camps in Poland and eastern Germany, and around 36,000 were hidden in attics and allotment sheds or by being given false identities. Recruiting for the SS was admittedly more successful in Holland than in any other Western European country, but many of those joining did so in order to avoid being drafted to Germany as forced labourers, others because they believed in a pan-Germanic Europe which would give Holland the Flemish-speaking parts of Belgium. In all, 50,000 volunteers joined various SS units, including the Dutch Legion commanded by Lieutenant-General Seyffart, lately the Chief of Staff of the Dutch Army, whose tenure was short as he was promptly assassinated by one of the Dutch resistance groups. Another SS unit formed in Holland was the SS Wachbataillon Nordwest, which had six Dutch companies and one of Ukrainian volunteers, and accepted recruits up to the age of forty for duty as guards in concentration camps in Holland, whose occupants were largely uncooperative Dutch academics or suspected saboteurs.

  Whereas the Dutch head of state and government had departed before the Germans arrived, Leopold, the King of the Belgians, insisted that it was his duty to share the sufferings of his people and as Commander-in-Chief of the army he demanded to be taken prisoner. The Germans obliged, confining him to his palace, Laaken Castle on the outskirts of Brussels, with a staff of twenty and 100 servants. Like Holland, Belgium at first complied and cooperated. Forty thousand Belgians joined the German forces, the Flamands the SS and the Walloons, who were not considered sufficiently Aryan, the German army, but they too were later incorporated into the SS. Despite the return to Germany of those frontier areas ceded to Belgium after the first war, the Belgian administration carried on with a relatively light German touch on the tiller now and then; Belgian industry worked happily for the Germans and exports of food and raw materials continued. Apart from the early stages of the war when there were food shortages (and a thriving black market), the civilian population was not greatly discommoded by occupation, at least to begin with. The Germans released Flemish prisoners of war (they kept the Walloons locked up), right-wing Belgian organizations, mainly Flemish, pointed out Belgian Jews for deportation and the churches were treated with respect and allowed to function provided sermons did not become too critical of German policies. Resistance grew but slowly, initially led by ex-army officers and, even before the German attack on the USSR, Belgian communists, but the imposition of the conscription of labour provided an increasing stream of recruits for the various anti-German organizations. While the Belgian resistance achieved little militarily, its running of clandestine escape routes for shot-down Allied airmen and its seizure of the port of Antwerp before the Germans could destroy the facilities were useful contributions to the war effort. At the end of the war, however, it was Belgium that put on trial a larger proportion of its population as having collaborated than any other occupied country in the West.

  In the Channel Islands, the only part of the British homeland to be occupied, there was effectively no organized resistance. The Royal Navy had removed 30,000 civilians, including most able-bodied males to the mainland before the Germans arrived, leaving a population of 60,000 behind. Policemen and civil servants were ordered to stay at their posts, and were generally well treated. Many of those not belonging to the administration were not well treated, however, and endured a hungry and much restricted existence with fines and detention imposed for breach of the occupier’s rules. Civilians found hiding Russian prisoners of war brought in to build defences were deported to Germany, as were a number of the islands’ Jews. Even today, the part played by the local British administration in that deportation is contentious.

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  While the German occupation in the West, the conscription of labour (for which the labourers were paid) aside, was generally firm but reasonably fair if the inhabitant was not a Jew and did not attempt to oppose the conquerors, the same cannot be said of the East. In Poland those of ethnic German origin became German citizens and were subject to military service, Jews were put into concentration camps and many exterminated, and ordinary Poles were treated as the subhumans NSDAP ideology said they were. Resistance was inevitable and came to a head with the Warsaw Rising of 1944. In the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, that part of the erstwhile Czechoslovakia that was not hived off to Germany or incorporated into the puppet state of Slovakia, the occupation was much less harsh than in neighbouring Poland, largely because the Germans were keen to make use of its agricultural and industrial potential, in particular Skoda, one of Europe’s most advanced arms manufacturing firms. The Germans ruled through existing Czech administrative channels and resistance was very slow to appear and, when it did, was of little military value, although the intelligence it transmitted to London was to prove of considerable help. Student demonstrations in favour of Czech independence led to the closure of the universities and the shooting of the ringleaders, but the most obvious act of resistance was the assassination of the German governor, Reinhard Heydrich, in May 1942 by two Czechs parachuted in from England. Heydrich, best known as the architect of the Final Solution, may well have been a monster but he was no fool, and he fully understood the importance of keeping the Czech people if not actively onside then at least acquiescent, which was all the more reason for the Allies to have him removed. The assassination attracted brutal reprisals, including the complete destruction of two villages, Lidice and Lezaky, and the shooting of virtually all their inhabitants, which acted as a recruiting stimulus for the underground, such as it was. Later, a rising in Prague in 1945 as the Red Army approached did hinder the German defence and probably forced them to withdraw earlier than they otherwise would have done.

  Resistance in Russia was almost entirely by partisan warfare, and warfare it undoubtedly was, with the partisans armed and directed by officers of the Red Army and engaged in attacks on German outposts, ambushes of convoys, sabotage of roads and railways and the killing of any German they could find. No mercy was shown by either side and the activities of the partisans meant that very large numbers of German troops were tied down guarding the lines of communication when they could have been used to far greater effect at the front. Despite the appalling treatment meted out to civilians in the path of their advance through the USSR, the Germans found many willing volunteers and auxiliaries from amongst the non-Russian minorities and ethnic Russians who had no love for the communist system, or who simply wanted to stay alive. Over 60,000 volunteers from the USSR served in the SS and up to 750,000 in Hilfswilliger or ‘voluntary assistant’ units of the German army: Russians, Byelorussians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Turcomans, Uzbeks, Cossacks and Ukrainians all served and suffered for it after the war, while volunteers from the Baltic States included 80,000 from Latvia, 25,000 from Estonia and 50,000 from Lithuania.

  In the Balkans, the German occupation that followed Berlin’s need to bail out the Itali
ans met with much opposition and a civil war, and repressive measures were harsh. Even here, though, the Germans found men prepared to fight for them: 20,000 from Croatia, 10,000 from Serbia, and 7,000 from Albania. In what had been Yugoslavia, the Croat fascists – the Ustashe – set up a client state cooperating wholeheartedly with the Germans provided that they were allowed to slaughter anyone who was not Croat and Roman Catholic, while armed resistance was provided by the Cetniks commanded by the Serb Colonel Draža Mihailović, who wanted to return to a Serb-dominated monarchy after the war, and the partisans, commanded by Josip Broz, cover name Tito, the Croat head of the Yugoslav Communist Party, who wanted a communist republic allied to the Soviet Union. Both men were typical of their race: mercurial, murderous, treacherous and happy to shift their loyalty to whatever seemed temporarily expedient. With both the Italians and the Germans occupying their respective areas, the two resistance groups fought each other, the Germans and the Italians, or cooperated with Germans or Italians against each other. The Allies originally supported Mihailović but later, from September 1943, switched their support to Tito, on the grounds that he was killing more Germans. That Tito had negotiated with the Germans to jointly oppose a (mistakenly) expected British landing in the spring of 1943 was conveniently passed over, as by now Tito was fighting the Germans, the Italians and the Cetniks, while the latter seemed to be avoiding fighting anyone but waiting for an Allied landing. Despite being from time to time far too friendly with the Italians, and even the Germans, Mihailović did continue to look after Allied airmen on the run and never betrayed the British and American agents who came into his hands. He did not deserve to be executed after a show trial in 1946.

  Across the border in Greece, there were a large number of resistance groups, as one might expect of the Greeks. Most were republican to a greater or lesser degree, ranging from those who would reluctantly permit the king to return if a majority plebiscite approved it, to by far the largest and most effective, ELAS, which was communist and unsurprisingly wanted to turn Greece into a communist republic. The occupying power was Italy, at least until its surrender, when the Germans took over, and resistance was military and largely restricted to the hills, where bridges were blown up and Axis troops ambushed. As the Germans could never quite make up their minds whether the Greeks were Balkan mongrels or the inheritors of the Glory That Was Greece, reprisals varied from the ferocious to the merely extreme. Much of the rural population survived at only just above starvation level, and after the war the British government estimated that 85 per cent of Greek children suffered from tuberculosis and up to 1,000 villages had been laid waste. The inability of the various resistance groups to agree the post-war governance of their country meant that the departure of German troops in November 1944 did not end the fighting, which went on until January 1945 and needed the removal of two British divisions from the Italian front to quell it. Even that was not the end of the story, for civil war flared again from 1947 to 1949, when the country was only saved from a communist takeover by military support and a massive injection of cash from Britain and the USA.

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  Active resistance everywhere was encouraged by the British to begin with and then by the Americans, but here there were conflicting agendas. Churchill, once prime minister, encouraged the setting up of the Special Operations Executive in July 1940, along with the renamed Combined Operations, which had been established a month earlier as Raiding Operations. Churchill said that SOE was ‘to set Europe ablaze’ and that Combined Operations was ‘to leave a trail of dead Germans behind it’. All this rhetoric conflicted with the more traditional British foreign intelligence organization, MI6, from which SOE was a spin-off, which wanted a quiet Europe with sleepy policemen and lazy occupation troops, so that they could get on with collecting clandestine intelligence. The American equivalent of SOE, the Office of Strategic Services, was established in the summer of 1941 but not given that name until June 1942. Although SOE came under the direction of the Ministry of Economic Warfare, other organizations from the Chiefs of Staff, the Foreign Office, Bomber Command and local commanders-in-chief had an interest in what SOE was up to, which often restricted and infuriated its strong-minded and frequently eccentric members. Both SOE and OSS attempted to run agents in occupied countries, to arm, train and direct the various resistance movements where they existed, and raise them where they did not. Clandestine agents inserted into enemy-controlled territory were well aware of the risks they were taking: legally spies, they could perfectly properly be executed, as were German agents caught in the United Kingdom. The latter were shot by firing squad, usually in the moat of the Tower of London, having been first given the option of being turned and sending back false information provided by the British. Many of them did agree to cooperate with their new masters, although to their credit some, usually officers of the German armed forces, did not and they paid the price.

  By 1944 SOE could field around 13,000 agents, of whom 3,000 were female, and was supported by 40,000 RAF air and ground crew, as the chief method of insertion, supply and extraction was by air. Its operatives were active around the world, except in the Soviet Union, where, although it had a liaison office, the NKVD told it nothing and permitted it to do nothing. Communications were usually by short-wave radio, which had the range to get back to the nearest Allied territory but could be pinpointed by radio direction-finding. Operators had to keep moving and keep transmissions short, and of those caught red-handed by the Germans or Italians most were radio operators. While the Germans were not good at foreign intelligence, they were very good at infiltration of Allied networks in occupied or neutral countries: most of the SOE (and OSS) agents they caught were betrayed by a member of a resistance cell who had been turned. In Holland, the German counter-intelligence Abwehr and the security service, the SD, penetrated the SOE and MI6 operation very early on and from March 1942 until November 1943 virtually controlled it as Fall Nordpol or das Englandspiel, capturing most of the agents parachuted into that country. Altogether, fifty-four SOE and MI6 agents and an unknown number of Dutch civilians were executed and around fifty RAF aircrew were killed when their aircraft were ambushed and shot down or caught on the ground. Probably the most useful act of sabotage by SOE was the destruction in February 1943 of a heavy water plant in Norway, essential for the control of a nuclear reactor, after a Combined Operations mission the previous year had failed.

  Although the Combined Operations Directorate often worked with or cooperated with SOE, it was in fact an entirely separate organization and operated in a more conventional manner, mainly by undertaking small-scale amphibious raids on enemy coastlines, using Royal Marines and specially raised army commandos for the purpose. Many of these raids were spectacular and looked good in the press, but proved of little value to the war effort. Blowing up a fish-oil factory in Norway might irritate the Germans but was hardly likely to keep Hitler lying awake at night in a cold sweat wondering what was coming next. On the other hand, the destruction in March 1942 of the dry dock at St Nazaire, the biggest in Europe and the only one that could accommodate the Tirpitz, meant that the one remaining modern German battleship stayed in a Norwegian fjord and rarely ventured out for the rest of the war. Combined Operations’ biggest raid was that on Dieppe in August 1942, involving 6,000 soldiers, mainly from the Canadian 1 Division, with naval and air elements. For all sorts of reasons, including faulty intelligence, bad security, lack of sufficient naval firepower and air support, and the inability of the tanks to get off the beaches, it was a disaster. Mountbatten, then Chief of Combined Operations with a seat on the Chiefs of Staff Committee, survived the fiasco, and Montgomery, who shared at least some of the responsibility, had gone to North Africa. The Dieppe Raid happened at a time when Stalin and the Americans were pressing the British for a second front on the ground in Europe, when the British knew very well that there were neither enough landing craft nor enough men to effect a landing that would have a reasonable chance of success. The cynic might won
der whether the British knew very well that Dieppe would fail but mounted it anyway to prove their point.

  Combined Operations’ raids were carried out by soldiers, sailors and airmen who were usually in uniform, and thus under the protection of the laws of war and entitled to be treated as prisoners of war, but in October 1942 Hitler ordered that any commandos captured in action were to be shot and, if captured otherwise, were to be handed over to the SD and then shot. What appears to have happened is that during the Dieppe Raid German prisoners had their hands tied, in contravention of the Geneva Convention. This angered the Germans, who ordered Canadians in German prison camps to be shackled as a result, whereupon the British duly replied in kind. Eventually, common sense prevailed and a mutual unshackling was brokered by the Red Cross. Then, in October 1942, in a raid on the island of Sark in the Channel Islands, the Germans claimed that four of their soldiers were snatched, had grass stuffed in their mouths to stop them alerting their comrades and their hands tied behind their backs. When they were being taken to the waiting British boat, three broke free and tried to escape. Two were shot and one knifed. All this, if true, was also a breach of the laws relating to the treatment of prisoners and Hitler’s Commando Order was the result. It was actually hardly ever carried out, German soldiers being well aware of the rules of war, although it was followed in the case of the Operation Freshman raid on Norway in November 1942, when Combined Operations sent two glider-loads of Royal Engineers to Norway to blow up the Vemork hydroelectric plant, which produced heavy water. The gliders crashed and the survivors, despite the fact they were in uniform, were shot. If Combined Operations men were caught not in uniform, it depended upon who caught them. Capture by the Gestapo or by the French Milice, who usually handed such prisoners over to the Gestapo, normally meant a bullet and a quick trip to an unmarked grave, whereas capture by the German army meant there was a fair chance of survival, even if the law was not entirely clear: execution was permitted for saboteurs and spies, but escaping soldiers in civilian clothes were entitled to protection provided they carried no weapons.