Collaboration and Resistance
Hitler's "New Order"
- slogan by Joseph Goebbels to signify unification of Europe
- at first, only Nordic peoples recruited, but after 1941 non-Nordic forces allowed
- Major Vidkun Quisling served as pro-Nazi president of Norway.
- King Leopold continued to rule Belgium from his castle near Brussels.
- Leon Degrelle led a Walloon SS division that fled to Spain in 1945.
- Ante Pavelic and his Ustasha ruled new fascist state of Croatia and persecuted Serbs, killed 70,000 plus 20,000 Jews in the Jasenovac concentration camp.
- Admiral Miklos Horthy ruled Hungary with the fascist Arrow Cross movement of Ferenc Szalasi.
- Marshal Ion Antonescu of Rumania contributed oil reserves and 30 divisions to Hitler.
- Andrei Vlasov and his Russian Liberation Army of 56,000 were among the 2 million Russians who fought with Hitler on the Eastern front.
- only Poland did not contribute volunteers to Hitler.
- Albert Speer and Fritz Sauckel recruited 7 million foreign workers by 1945, 20% of total German labor force - were poorly treated; another 7 million worked in own countries; only 1.5 million of 5 million Russian POWs survived.
- Hitler took $40 billion in tribute from occupied countries, plus confiscation of Jewish property, any motor vehicles, art treasures.
Hitler's "Night and Fog"
- Hitler's "Night and Fog" decree of Dec. 7, 1941, ordered the ruthless execution of all resistance agents.
- Polish "Home Army" formed underground of 300,000 in Poland, led by exile government of Gen. Sikorski in London, vs. Soviet-trained Polish Committee of National Liberation.
- pro-Serb Chetniks of Col. Mihajlovic in Yugoslavia vs. pro-communist Partisans of Tito (Croatian Josip Broz).
- pro-British National Greek Democratic Union (FDES) of Col. Zervas in Greece vs. pro-communist National Liberation Front (EAM).
- DeGaulle and Henri Giraud joined in the French Committee of National Liberation (FCNL) to administer former Vichy colonies in North Africa Jan. 1943.
- DeGaulle unified French "Maquis" resistance under his National Resistance Council in May 1943.
- Varian Fry in France
- Churchill created Special Operation Executive (SOE) July 1940 to "set Europe ablaze" and sent thousands of agents into Europe.
- FDR created Office of Strategic Services (OSS) 1942 under William J. Donovan that sent 524 agents into occupied Europe during the war.
Hitler's "Final Solution"
- Reinhard Heydrich began deportation of Jews to Poland after Sept. 1939.
- extermination plan of Heydrich approved at Wannsee conference Jan. 20, 1941.
- death camps bulit in Poland: Auschwitz, Chelno, Belzec, Sobibor, Majdanek, Treblinka.
- Heinrich Himmler approved the use of Zyklon B gas; 12,000 per day at Auschwitz.
- Himmler ordered liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 and execution of the few that remained of the 400,000 residents.
- The 750 young Jews of the Z.O.B. resisitance began the Warsaw Uprising on Apr. 19, 1943, the event commemorated by Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
- Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania.
- by 1945, only 1 million Jews lived in Europe of 9 million in 1939.
- Hitler exterminated all Slavic peoples: Poles, Yugoslavs, Russians, Belorussians, Ukrainians; 9-10 million Slavs were killed in addition to the 6-7 million Jews.
- at Ravensbrueck camp, Nazi doctors experimented on Polish girls with gas and germs.
- at Buchenwald, Ilse Koch collected tattooed skin of inmates.
- in the Babi Yar ravine near Kiev in the Ukraine, 130,000 Slavs and 70,000 Jews died from the beginning of Nazi occupation Sept. 1941 until the Nazi withdrawal in 1943.
- Stalin followed a similar policy in occupied countries, executing 14,000 Polish officers in Katyn forest in April 1940; deporting to Siberia in Sept. 1941 the 500,000 "Volga Germans" who lived north of the Black Sea; mass deportations from Baltics and Ukraine and Caucasus and Crimean Tartars.
Links:
Newsreels:
- 1940/05/13 Silent Universal newsreel - "Nazi Invasion of Low Countries Shocks World"
- 1940/06/10 Silent Universal newsreel - "France: Tragedy and suffering in the wake of the Nazi invasion!"
- 1940/06/12 Silent Universal newsreel - "First pictures of the bombing of Paris!"
- 1940/06/17 Silent Universal newsreel - ""France Gives Up!"
- 1944/06/22 Universal newsreel of Tito in Yugoslavia
- 1944/11/02 Universal newsreel of Allies liberate Athens
- 1944/11/22 Universal newsreel - "Denmark Fights Back."
- 1945/07/09 Universal newsreel of Czechs Fight for Freedom