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Contrast between East and West

In general, German rule in Eastern Europe was much harsher than in Western Europe. Hitler had long wanted to expand east into what he called Lebensraum, as Germany’s Aryan population grew. This expansion would be at the expense of the inferior Poles and Slavs of the East. Therefore, the German conquest of Eastern Europe was undertaken to expand Germany itself and in order to destroy the Nazis’ racial enemies.

In contrast, the conquest of Western Europe, as well as that of Denmark and Norway to the North, was completed for strategic reasons: to gain vital war resources and to pre-empt a French invasion of Germany. Western Europeans were not viewed as racially inferior and there was no long term plan to absorb these territories into Germany, but rather to keep them weak and dependent on an enlarged Germany.

As such, German rule in Western Europe largely focussed on keeping order and on the deportation of European Jews as part of the Final Solution. Southern France was even allowed to govern itself from the town of Vichy under Marshal Petain until 1944, when Italy invaded. However, the government in southern France were no more than Nazi puppets that would do as Hitler wanted. In Paris, artists and intellectuals like Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre were able to go on working virtually unaffected by the Nazi occupation.

However, in Eastern Europe Nazi rule was brutal. In Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic States the local populations were forcibly resettled to make way for Germans, used as forced labour or killed. In 1940, Hitler ordered that the Polish intelligentsia – politicians, academics, priests – be wiped out, in order to prevent a resistance movement developing. Poles were forced to survive on starvation rations as Poland’s food was confiscated for German soldiers and civilians. Around 6 million Poles, or 18 per cent of the country’s population, were killed during the war. The Poles were considered below the Aryan German people in Nazi racial ideology.

Responses to Nazi occupation: resisters, collaborators and bystanders

By the end of 1942, German-occupied Europe stretched from the Atlantic coast of France in the West to the Russian Ural Mountains in the East, and from Norway in the North to Greece in the South. In addition, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia had signed alliances with the Nazi state. In all of these places, there was a combination of collaboration, resistance and those who stood by.

Collaboration

Collaboration ranged from official government collaboration with the Nazis to individuals and groups who supported the German military effort:

• The countries that signed alliances with the Nazis represent official collaboration. They provided troops for the Axis forces (Germany, Italy, and Japan) and took part in the invasion of the USSR from June 1941. In addition, they all complied with Nazi requests to round up and deport their Jewish populations to Poland from 1942.
• Other countries under German occupation, such as Vichy France, Denmark, Norway and the Low Countries retained their governments, but were forced to cooperate with their military occupiers. Although these countries did not supply troops to the German war effort, they did generally round up and deport Jews after 1942.
• In some areas of the USSR, the Nazis were welcomed as liberators from communist rule, for example in the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia (which the USSR had occupied in 1939) and by groups such as the Tartar Muslims in Crimea in the Ukraine. In these areas, some members of the local population joined in with the murder of communists and Jews, most infamously at Babi Yar near Kiev, where in 1941 over 33,000 Jews were murdered by German security forces and the Ukrainian police. Others formed armed battalions to support the German army. Many also joined the SS and undertook anti-partisan operations. By the end of the war 500,000 members of the SS, half of its total number, were non-Germans.
• Millions of eastern Europeans, including prisoners of war, were forced to collaborate with the Germans through forced labour or by supplying German troops with equipment and foodstuffs.

Resistance

• In France the main resistance group was known as the Maquis, which undertook acts of sabotage against the railways and other targets. During the Allied invasion of France in June 1944 they helped to provide information on German troop movements.
• In Belorussia in the Soviet Union, 140,000 men served in 150 partisan units. Here, German brutality drove many into these resistance groups, while others were communists ideologically opposed to the Nazis’ fascism. Operating from an area known as the Pripet Marshes, they attacked German supply lines, causing the Nazis to consider draining the marshes to flush them out.
• The resistance in Poland came in the form of the Home Army. In August 1944, as Soviet troops approached Warsaw, the Home Army rose up and attempted to liberate the city. They expected Soviet troops to join them, but their advance stopped short of the city and the revolt was brutally crushed by the Germans after 63 days of fighting.
• Across Europe, partisan and resistance groups were helped by the undercover British Special Operations Executive and US undercover agents. Their most spectacular success was the assassination in Prague of the leading Nazi Reinhard Heydrich in May 1942 by the Czech resistance. In retaliation, the Nazis arrested 13,000 people and destroyed the Czech village of Lidice.

Bystanders

Many Europeans neither actively collaborated with, nor actively resisted, the Nazi occupiers. They simply got on with their lives, doing what they needed to do to survive.