Without Weapons,
Facing the Nazis

September 1939.  The Dean of the University of Bromberg and others, awaiting execution. The Polish universities, closed by the Nazis, continued secretly to accept hundreds of students.

In effect, civil resistance was fundamental (in the literal sense of the word) because very often it was the first form of resistance to appear :  those who began to resist had no weapons. It played an important role in shaping the process of resistance, by way of political, economic or cultural action. Moreover, civil resistance showed itself to be of some effectiveness, above all when it became a mass resistance. Then, while using repression, the occupying forces had to compromise, and sometimes even to give way.

Movements of mass civil resistance began in 1940 or 1941. Their secret organisation and their ability to obstruct or to exert pressure on the occupying forces grew little by little to become fully developed, in general, from 1943 onwards. The development of secret education in Poland and the struggle of the doctors in the Netherlands are typical of such an evolution.

In addition to the uprising of the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw in 1943 and then of Warsaw itself in 1944, it is necessary to emphasize the diversity of the Polish fight, which succeeded in building a genuine secret State, whose educational sector was the most extensive, the teachers being paid by the government-in-exile in London.

One of the first measures in the “Germanization” of occupied Poland was to be the destruction of its intelligentsia and of its culture. In November 1939, with the exception of primary schools and certain craft training centres, all teaching establishments were closed. Numerous teachers were arrested and the teaching of Polish, history and geography was forbidden. Scientific institutes, radio stations, and theatres were closed.

Secret education then spontaneously developed, especially in the territory of the Government-General, the central region of Poland, the part which had not been integrated into either Germany or the Soviet Union. Primary schools being allowed to remain open, the teaching programmes were completed with the forbidden subjects, especially Polish. Called komplety, these secret lessons were usually held in people's homes outside official class hours. Thus, in 1943-44 about 37,000 pupils, or one in every three, attended komplety, which were conducted by 2,352 teachers. Moreover, of the 90,000 pre-War high school students, 60,000 were able secretly to continue their studies and 18,000 passed the matriculation exam.

The underground universities are the best known aspect of the teaching. Warsaw University was the first to reorganise :  in turn the Faculties of Theology, of Law, of Medicine and of Literature “re-opened”. Lecturers and students met in private homes or in buildings belonging to the Church, or even in official buildings. All of the universities accepted several hundred students, issued degrees, and continued to publish scientific works.

Overall, nearly 100,000 students attended secret courses, which, taking into account the reign of terror throughout the country, was a remarkable achievement. “Secret teaching at all educational levels was the most admirable work accomplished by Polish society,” wrote one of its leaders, Kozniewski. “Neither the propaganda leaflets, nor the assassination attempts, nor the sabotage were as fruitful as this expression of national conscience. In effect, it saved our society from a catastrophe at least equal to the destruction of Warsaw :  the loss of five years' output of graduates, engineers, architects, doctors and teachers.

Civil resistance offered a first-rate method of digging a ditch between military domination, which was a material fact, and political submission, which is a question of spirit. In this sense, civil resistance expressed a fight for values, whether in education, religion, or health.

The little-known struggle of the Dutch doctors is also exemplary. The Reich Commissioner, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, had plans to create a professional organisation, the Dutch Chamber of Doctors, whose object was to apply National-Socialist (Nazi) doctrine to the practice of medicine. This project, which would notably result in the exclusion of their Jewish colleagues, caused certain doctors to establish a secret organisation, Medisch Contact (MC), to resist all interference in their profession. Created on the 14th September 1941, most of the country's doctors joined MC, which quickly started a sort of administrative guerrilla campaign by sending thousands of protest letters to the occupation authorities.

The Chamber of Dutch Doctors was nonetheless created by decree on the 19th December 1941 and all the doctors throughout the country were required to join. MC then called for a boycott of the organisation by refusing to fill in the membership form and refusing to pay the membership subscription. Several doctors were arrested in 1942, but the non-cooperation movement continued.

On the 15th January 1943 every doctor not a member of the Chamber was fined 1,000 florins (the equivalent in 2007 of about 5,000 euros) and was subject to prosecution. If the doctor concerned continued to refuse to become a member a further fine of 1,000 florins was imposed on him and that as many times as necessary until he gave in. This tactic risked breaking the movement, even though MC guaranteed to pay the fine. But for how long could it continue to pay ?

The organisation then had the idea of relying on one of the articles of the decree of 19th November 1941 which said that a doctor had the right to leave the profession. In this way losing his right to practise medicine and to call himself a doctor, he could no longer be obliged to pay the fines to the Dutch Chamber of Doctors, to which he was no longer responsible. On the 24th March 1943, thousands of doctors therefore sent their letter of withdrawal from the profession, while continuing secretly to practise medicine.

Public opinion and the Churches showed their support, and to make the action publicly known, the doctors covered up the brass notices of their profession on the front of their houses, to show their “retirement” from medicine. More than 6,700 doctors, almost all the doctors in the country, took part in this action.

In April, negotiations with the German administration ended with an agreement :  on condition they uncovered their notices, the doctors were no longer obliged to become a member of the Chamber. However, the Germans did not keep their word, and announced on the 18th May that membership of the Chamber was compulsory.

In addition, 360 doctors were arrested and their clinics were closed. A number of their colleagues then went into hiding, and the health service of the country was seriously disrupted.

New talks were begun during the month of July, leading to the same compromise as before. While the Chamber still continued to exist, no doctor was obliged to be a member and all those who had been arrested were freed during the summer of 1943.

This example shows that when a profession is united by a high moral view of its practice or by traditions relating to national identity, it develops a team spirit which, in a crisis situation such as foreign occupation of the country, can prove a serious obstacle to all attempts at control. However there are forms of civil resistance which can involve several professional or social classes at the same time, so testifying to a wider fighting spirit of civil society.

It is in this way that the conscription of people to be sent to Germany for forced labour caused a great social disturbance, especially in Western Europe. It was in the Netherlands that the reaction was most spectacular, since there then took place the greatest strike in the history of the Nazi occupation of Europe. In effect, to meet its need for labour, the German government had the idea of “recalling for service” the tens of thousands of Dutch soldiers who had been taken prisoner in 1940 and later freed.

From the moment that the decision was announced by General Christiansen, on the 29th April 1943, a spontaneous strike began in the region of Hengelo, then spread to the mining district of Limbourg and the Philips factories at Eindhoven. The movement continued to spread and, something unusual, the farmers also took part. By the 30th April nearly half a million people had stopped working.

The Germans declared a state of siege :  several dozen people were executed after appearing before courts-martial. The movement weakened from the 3rd May but lasted until the 8th in Friesland and North Brabant. From now on, there was a complete break between public opinion and those in power.

In Belgium, resistance to the conscription of forced labour took, to start with, an institutional form through the declarations of Cardinal Van Roey. In a public letter of protest, dated 15th March 1943, he wrote: “They tell us that these measures are necessary to protect European society. But [...] is it not rather to destroy it that methods are enforced which violate the basic principles of every civilisation ? Human reason and Christian morals condemn and consider criminal these wicked and barbarous methods ; any collaboration in carrying out these measures is seriously unlawful in conscience.”

The strength of this assertion was such that the head of military administration, Eggert Reeder, complained to someone close to the Cardinal: “I must state that his letter is causing very serious repercussions; since it was published, we are meeting a considerable increase in active resistance, the number of draft-dodgers has increased enormously, protests are occurring everywhere. Civil servants are objecting and resisting, saying it is for reasons of conscience ; it is the same in the world of industry and commerce.” It is in this way that the attitude of the Belgian religious authorities evolved from caution to public opposition.

In France, protests against the Forced Labour Service, which began on the 16th February 1943, was less spectacular but equally far-reaching. During the spring and above all the summer of 1943, some tens of thousands of those conscripted refused to go. For sure, disobedience is not resistance :  their decision was not inspired by great political or strategic considerations. The idea of going to work in Germany was simply abhorrent.

However, the multiplication of these individual acts of refusal were evidence that French public opinion was changing. Some draft-dodgers were able to get help from people working in town halls or government offices who gave them false identity papers so they could avoid being rounded up. Certain inspectors in the Department of Employment sometimes took great risks in screwing up the conscription procedures or in finding for those called up places in factories where the workers were exempt from forced labour, for example mines and armaments factories.

In a similar way, some business managers ignored the conscription orders that targeted their workers. It is also known that some policemen warned those concerned that they had received orders to arrest them, allowing them the opportunity to go into hiding; and some farmers sheltered those who had been called up. Briefly stated, civil society was now ready to disobey the collaborationist State of Vichy France, weaving a protective coat of careful solidarity.

Civil resistance was a question of survival :  it sought to save what could be saved. It changed into a liberation resistance as the hope of getting rid of the Nazi regime became more and more real—and in this respect, with the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, 1943 was a turning-point. Did civil resistance then tend to decline ?  No, for survival was still a major issue, up until the liberation. But it became more and more integrated with military and paramilitary planning.