The importance and nature of resistance to
the Nazis within Germany itself and in Nazi-
dominated Europe varied enormously. Conspira-
torial by necessity, it came into the open in acts of
violent sabotage and several attempts on Hitler’s
life, the most spectacular – the 20 July 1944 plot
- almost succeeding when an explosive charge
went off a few feet from Hitler at his headquarters
in East Prussia. The composition of the resistance
ranged from members of the pre-Nazi Weimar
political parties to individuals moved by moral
considerations. Thus in Munich a small group of
students and teachers who called themselves the
White Rose distributed, until they were caught
and executed, thousands of leaflets condemning
the barbarities of the Nazis. But the only resis-
tance that had the power actually to remove Hitler
came from within the army and culminated in the
bomb plot of 20 July 1944. The officers involved
saw clearly that the war was lost and hoped by
removing Hitler to be able to make peace with the
Western allies while keeping the Russians out of
Germany. Others were less materialistically moti-
vated. Had Hitler been killed, the plot might have
succeeded, though Britain and America would
certainly have refused to make peace on any terms
other than unconditional surrender.
Successful armed resistance, tying down con-
siderable numbers of German troops, was carried
out by Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia. And in
France, while Pétain and the Vichy regime
enjoyed overwhelming support, a sizeable minor-
ity joined the French resistance, undertaking
sabotage and supplying a ‘secret army’ which
returned aircrew shot down in France and
Belgium on an escape route back to England by
way of neutral Spain. In the east, Russian partisans
acted as auxiliaries of the Red Army and inter-
rupted the supply routes of the Wehrmacht. But in
occupied Europe there was not one simple strug-
gle against Nazi Germany. Among the resistance
fighters themselves there was conflict after the
communists joined the resistance after Hitler’s
invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
The struggle in Yugoslavia between the royal-
ist Colonel Mihailovic and the communist leader,
Tito, led to civil war between them as well as war
against the Germans. In Poland, the Home Army
was as bitterly opposed to the Polish communist
partisans as to the common German enemy. Here270 THE SECOND WORLD WAR
Holocaust victims and survivorsVictims Survivors (after 1939)
Germany 165,000 20,000
(Austria) 65,000 6,000
France 76,000 230,000
Belgium 28,500 36,000
Netherlands 102,000 38,000
Denmark 116 7,380
Norway 760 1,000
Italy 6,500 29,500
Greece 59,000 12,700
Poland pre-1939 frontier 2,700,000
post-1939 frontier 1,600,000 50,000
Soviet Union pre-1939 frontier 1,000,000
post-1939 frontier 2,100,000
Czechoslovakia 1937 frontier 260,000 40,000
(Slovakia) 65,000 20,000
Romania 211,200 381,200
Bulgaria 11,000 50,000
Yugoslavia 65,000 14,500
Hungary 550,000 290,000