11 - Fighting resistance and the persecution of Jews

Summary

During World War II, more than 200 million people in seventeen nations came under German occupation. Germany conquered these countries for a mixture of intertwined political, strategic and economic reasons. Control over them served military functions, but it was also a precondition for exploitation. Because of geographic overextension and the concentration of troops at the fronts, the Germans were usually only able to deploy relatively weak military and police forces to the occupied areas. This resulted in the German view that one needed to rely, first, on indigenous forces and, second, on fear-inducing violence. For this they developed systematic strategies that went far beyond aimless reprisals. Nonetheless, armed resistance movements and guerrilla warfare sprang up in many areas. Across Europe, German repression led to the deaths of about a million people (most of whom were not Jews), often unarmed civilians, primarily in rural areas.

In comparison to work about the impact of repression on the countryside, there has been little systematic research on German methods of terror for suppressing urban resistance. Though it is clear that thousands were detained, deported to German camps and often murdered, numbers specifically for urban victims of terror have not been clearly delineated from other forms of persecution (such as forced labor conscription), and nor are the patterns of urban violence entirely clear.

The fate of Jews was connected in many ways to the persecution of resistance fighters and those suspected of supporting them. Blaming partisan activity on Jews prompted many efforts to kill them, but guerrilla warfare also created spaces where it was possible for Jews to survive. In order to understand these links it is necessary in this chapter to explain, phase by phase, who the partisans were, what their activities consisted of, and which repressive strategies and for which areas Germans developed. These conflicts were not always binary. Other Axis governments killed hundreds of thousands in this context (see Chapter 14). As a result of the German practice of indirect rule, partisan warfare included an element of domestic conflict from the start, and, given deepening social tensions, it often ended in civil war. The end of this chapter discusses the influence of partisan war on the survival chances of Jews. The connection that German politicians and functionaries saw between Jews and insurgency was important, but not their only reason by far for killing Jews.