The Resistance

by Matthew Cobb

  The British radio has called on people to write V for victory everywhere, and they are all over the place, even on shop-fronts. They are also written on blackboards, on tables – everywhere. Even better, there’s a new badge: a V made with two crossed pins and worn on the lapel. Yvette and I counted seventy-five in five minutes! . . . On the Rue d’Astorg, I scribbled a V on a German car. I heard the sound of boots behind me, and moved off quickly. The Hun came up to us, looked at the mark on the car, turned towards Yvette and gave a huge grin. My God! We scribbled hundreds and hundreds of Vs! I would never have believed that it was so easy in broad daylight.166

  Micheline’s story is not as unlikely as it might sound. The German rank-and-file conscript soldiers were not all committed fascists – prior to Hitler’s triumph in 1933, Germany had the largest Communist and Socialist Parties in the world. Some of those millions of left-minded workers were now in Paris, wearing the grey-green uniform of the Wehrmacht. Indeed, at the beginning of 1941 the Paris Gestapo reported: ‘We can state with utter certainty that, among the soldiers of the Paris garrison and in the Paris region, there are many ex-Communists who, without any aid, are encouraging the work of demoralization.’167

  Resistance Vs appeared all over the country,168 while the BBC’s adoption of the Morse code for V (ba-ba-ba-bom) as its signature provided an aural equivalent to the scrawled V. Teenager Marcel Gramme, riding home one evening on his bicycle, whistled ‘ba-ba-ba-bom’ as he went, and counted fourteen replies from open windows and passers-by.169 The V campaign meant ordinary people could feel they were doing something, however symbolic, to protest against the Occupation.170 The Nazi propagandists soon tried to turn this campaign to their own benefit and plastered the capital – including the side of the Eiffel Tower – with their own Vs, referring to Nazi victory.171 But as Jean Guéhenno noted in his diary in mid-August:

  German propaganda has vainly tried to take possession of the Vs. The battle continues, and there is no possible confusion. The German Vs are few in number, but are colossal; they sprawl over public buildings, on flags, on posters. The Vs of the Resistance, however, are tiny, but countless: Métro tickets folded into a V, matches broken into a V. . .172

  Scrawling V, listening to the BBC or reading a Resistance publication was the closest most French men and women came to fighting the Nazis. People tried to lead ordinary lives, but the Occupation made that virtually impossible. Apart from the big issues – hundreds of thousands of Nazi troops occupying the north of the country, a nation split in two, nearly 2 million fathers and husbands locked up in Nazi prison camps – there was also the more immediate question of simply surviving. Hundreds of thousands of people had been made unemployed as war and the Occupation threw the country into a major economic crisis. At the beginning of the cold winter of 1940–41 there were 537,000 jobless in the Paris region alone. By the end of January there were 100,000 more. For those lucky enough to be in work, salaries were between twenty and forty per cent lower than 1939

  levels.173

  Low pay eventually led to one of the first signs of wide-scale opposition to the effects of the Nazi Occupation – a miners’ strike that swept through the Nord-Pas-de-Calais in May to June 1941.174 Before the war the region produced two-thirds of France’s coal and twenty per cent of its electricity. When coal imports from Britain ceased after June 1940 – these had formed forty per cent of French annual consumption – coal from the Nord-Pas-de-Calais became even more important. The Nazis needed French industry to churn out food, supplies and equipment for the German armed forces. That in turn meant coal: to meet Berlin’s targets, production had to increase by a quarter over 1938 levels. All that extra tonnage was to come from the huge coalfield that stretched in a 120-kilometre band between Lille and Arras. This whole region had been annexed by the Nazis and was under the direct control of their military headquarters in Brussels.

  Today the mines are shut, and the spoil-heaps have been turned into ski slopes or secured and left like the pyramids of a dead civilization. But nearly sixty years ago the region was peppered with hundreds of pitheads, each surrounded by a pit village with a set of identical miners’ cottages, dwarfed by the spoil-heaps. A spiderweb of railway lines spread across the flat land, taking the coal from pithead to coke plant and power station or off to coal-hungry industry. At the heart of this key part of the French economy were 140,000 miners with traditions of struggle that went far back into the nineteenth century.

  The strike began when the mining companies tried to change the way in which miners’ pay was calculated, junking over fifty years of wage agreements. The miners objected, adding to their grievances simple demands such as more soap and washing powder.175 On Tuesday 27 May, at 11 a.m., workers 350 metres down in pit number 7 of the Dahomey colliery stopped work. Then the afternoon shift refused to get in the cage lifts. In less than a week the whole of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais coalfield was on strike. A hundred thousand miners were refusing to obey the managers and their Nazi masters. Coal supplies halted, and within ten days gas supplies to the Paris region were affected. All of French industrial production was threatened. Even more dangerously for the Nazis, local ceramic and engineering factories came out in solidarity, together with thousands of women textile workers and workers in the railway workshops.176 What had begun as a minor economic issue was turning into a massive confrontation with the occupier.

  When the Germans realized the scale of the movement, they brought in troops to protect the phone lines and electricity transformers. At the same time, intimidation was used across the region: troops occupied the pitheads; hundreds of random arrests terrorized the community; cafés, restaurants and cinemas were shut; and the sale of alcohol and tobacco was banned. Despite these measures, the strike was hugely popular. Calls for solidarity were spread by leaflets, word of mouth and above all by stickers – ‘Live working or die fighting, that’s also the slogan of the miners’. ‘Arrests! The bosses who starve the workers should be arrested. For the workers, the right to strike is the right to life.’177 There was nothing about the strike in the press, and even the BBC remained silent, although they knew about the movement. London apparently thought that this was a mere industrial conflict, with no implications for the war. They were wrong. Although the strike had begun over purely economic issues, with no political resonance and certainly no link to any Resistance group, everything about the movement – from its demands, through the way it was organized, to its implications – was shaped by the harsh reality of the Occupation and led implicitly to resistance against the Nazis who controlled the region.

  Nazi repression caused the strike leaders to go into hiding. During a local strike earlier in the year, the miners’ delegates had been arrested by Nazi troops when they tried to negotiate a settlement. To avoid this danger, the organizers of the May strike held secret meetings in the woods, communicated only through declarations signed in the name of miners who were no longer in the region, and above all did not appear in public. Since the men were threatened with arrest, miners’ wives and daughters formed strike pickets at the pit gates and on the roads out of the miners’ estates. The women intimidated strike-breakers in novel ways, trashing their gardens, or grabbing them and stripping them to their underwear. In response, the Nazis banned women from leaving their houses half an hour before and after each shift change. When the troops came to break up the pickets, they drove lorries into the crowds, shooting at the women demonstrators, wounding some. On other occasions they drenched the women with fire hoses, herded them into fields and made them stand under the baking summer sun for hours on end without food or water.178 To help the Nazis break the strike, the mining companies used spies to record the names of women demonstrators; these lists were then handed to the Germans, who arrested the women and hauled them in front of emergency courts where many were sentenced to deportation. Conditions in the Nazi prison camps meant that this was often a death sentence.179

  Despite the high levels of intimidation, the strike was so popul
ar that the Nazi chain of control in the region began to break down. The French gendarmes became unreliable – for example, when a woman slapped a foreman at Mazingarbe, they stood by:

  Faced with the crowd of angry people who were present, we felt it was impossible to arrest this person . . . Given the agitation that continues to dominate the miners’ estates, it seems unlikely that she will be arrested later. It is to be feared that the population would come and protest violently at the Commissariat.180

  Local government leaders began to waver. Many refused to post Nazi declarations about the strike, and only one mayor in the whole region backed Vichy’s call for a return to work. Although not strictly speaking an act of resistance, the strike not only undermined war production and united a community against the occupier, it also showed that the Nazis’ grip on France could be weakened.

  Unable to intimidate the miners back to work, the Nazis used the oldest strike-breaking technique: hunger. Special miners’ rations were restricted to non-strikers, and pay for the second half of May was withheld. Whole villages began to suffer as shopkeepers, intimidated by the Nazis, refused credit to strikers. Having resisted the hundreds of arrests and deportations that destroyed families all over the coalfield, having even braved Luftwaffe planes swooping over the pit villages in threatening displays, the miners were eventually starved back to work.181 By the night of 6 June the miners’ leaders realized that the movement was crumbling and organized a mass return to work four days later. The Nazis refused any immediate concessions to the workers, while the mining companies were compensated by Vichy for their lost profits during the strike.182 Eventually, food rations for the miners improved, and they also received extra soap and clothing. Finally, a week after the end of the strike, the Vichy government awarded a pay rise to all French workers, hoping to prevent any similar movements.

  The mining community paid a terrible price for these meagre gains. Over 400 men and women had been arrested, of whom 270 were deported to Germany on the first of hundreds of trains that deported more than 150,000 French résistants and Jews to the concentration camps. Around half of the deported miners and their wives never returned. The strike showed that a profound change had taken place. A struggle over wages had revealed the grim reality of the Occupation. Throughout the strike the mining companies had worked hand in glove with the Nazis – they were more concerned with profits than with the German Occupation. Miners’ leader Julien Hapiot wrote in an underground union paper: ‘From now on, the Occupier knows that workers who suffer in misery will not always accept the yoke of national oppression.’183 This view was shared by a Vichy civil servant who visited the region a month after the end of the strike and reported back glumly:

  The day the tide turns against the government, a large number of weapons will appear in the hands of people who have been stocking them. The insurrection which would then take place would be both social and national.184

  *

  Less than two weeks after the end of the miners’ strike, there was a dramatic change in the war. Early in the morning of 22 June Hitler launched Operation BARBAROSSA, his long-planned attack against the Soviet Union which would lead to the deaths of around 20 million Soviet citizens and millions of Germans. Nearly seventy years later, the scale of the onslaught is still mind-boggling. The blitzkrieg against France was successful partly because of the audacity of the Nazi commanders and the concentration of mechanized power. The attack on the Soviet Union was to succeed by sheer weight of numbers. Over 3 million Axis soldiers attacked the USSR – over two-thirds of them from Nazi Germany – supported by 600,000 motor vehicles and around 625,000 horses.185 The initial results were almost as spectacular as in France, but on a gargantuan scale. By the end of August 300,000 Soviet soldiers had been imprisoned after the fall of Minsk; a further 500,000 were killed or captured in mid-September following the fall of Kiev and the subsequent Nazi occupation of the Ukraine and the Donetz industrial basin. Things were going Hitler’s way.

  As Churchill instantly realized, Stalin was now the enemy of Britain’s enemy, and was therefore her ally. An Anglo-Soviet treaty was duly signed on 12 July. Three days after the beginning of Operation BARBAROSSA, Roosevelt decreed that the Neutrality Act no longer applied to the USSR, enabling the US to begin arms sales. Ordinary people throughout Occupied Europe rejoiced, believing that Hitler, like Napoleon, would inevitably be defeated in Russia. Micheline Bood’s diary entry was typical: ‘From 5h05 this morning, Germany and Russia are at war. Isn’t that fantastic? That’s a mouthful it’ll take the Huns a while to digest. Hope is reborn . . .’186

  The thousands of French Communists were relieved they could finally oppose the Occupation openly.187 Since the beginning of the war, many Communist Party members had been disorientated by the Stalin–Hitler pact. In June 1940, at Moscow’s suggestion, their leaders had tried to get the Nazis to legalize the Party’s newspaper, L’Humanité. Even the most loyal members were horrified. Young Communist Maroussia Naïtchenko was ‘stupefied . . . stunned . . . nauseated’188 when she heard about the discussions.189 The terms ‘Nazi’ and ‘fascist’ were banished from Party publications in September 1939 (they began to reappear only at the beginning of 1941), while L’Humanité did not even mention the demonstrations of 11 November 1940.190 As tensions grew between Stalin and Hitler in the first half of 1941, subtle shifts began to appear in the policies of the underground Communist Parties throughout Occupied Europe. By May L’Humanité was calling on the French people to fight for ‘national liberation’ and argued for the creation of ‘a National Front for the independence of France’.191 However, the Party remained completely hostile to de Gaulle, arguing he was a puppet of the British, with reactionary and colonialist aims.192

  As the Nazis made deep advances into Soviet territory in the summer of 1941, Moscow encouraged the Communist Parties in Occupied Europe to do all they could to disrupt the Nazi war effort. As L’Humanité put it on 29 July:

  What is required to help the USSR and Britain crush Hitler? To hasten the liberation of France? Sabotage, again sabotage and once again sabotage. Sabotage in the factories, in the stations, in the countryside, sabotage to stop the enemy from taking anything from our country.193

  For most French Communists, this was hard to swallow. There was a long anarchist tradition in France of sabotaging machines and killing policemen, which the Communists had always fiercely opposed. The key thing, they said, was the class struggle, not individual actions. Now the Party leadership was proposing exactly the tactics they had argued against, and at a time when the vast majority of the population would not understand such a policy. Faced with the Party faithful’s refusal to cooperate, the leadership turned to a group it could be certain would respond enthusiastically to the new line: the Party’s youth section, the Jeunesses Communistes. Untrained in Marxist traditions, eager to take action, a few dozen Paris teenagers would show the older members of the Party how to fight the Nazi Occupation. They would also represent an important change in the social composition of the embryonic Resistance. Not only were they young, but they were also predominantly poor and working class – very different from the officers, academics, journalists and teachers who made up most of the early Resistance groups.

  In the hot summer of 1941 these young activists carried out a series of daring street actions, during which a handful of militants would throw leaflets in the air or march briefly along the street shouting slogans. Their first attempt, on 13 July, in the working-class district of Belleville on the hilly eastern side of Paris, was a complete failure. They barely had enough time to get their leaflets out before the police turned up and the dozen teenagers had to flee.194 The next day was Bastille Day, and the Nazis had banned all the traditional patriotic demonstrations. Nevertheless, the youngsters met in small groups of two or three and made their way to the Place de la République, boys and girls both wearing red, white and blue clothes. One of the participants, Liliane Lévy-Osbert, twenty-three years old at the time, remembered:

/>   The experience of the previous day – still fresh – put us on our guard, making us suspicious and circumspect. And above all, worried.195

  This time things went slightly better – they were able to run along the street for about a kilometre, shouting and throwing leaflets in the air. Eventually the police caught up and arrested a few demonstrators, who were extremely lucky to get away with only four months’ imprisonment.

  Over the next two weeks the Jeunesses Communistes carried out a number of these stunts, always in the working-class districts in the north and east of Paris. Each time the police got closer. Liliane Lévy-Osbert recalled the end of a demonstration on 27 July when the police nearly caught the youngsters:

  We ran in all directions, then regrouped and exchanged information. Phew! No damage done, but what a scare! I can still sense the bitter taste that filled my mouth, the nervous trembling that shook my body, the sharp, shallow breaths that lifted my chest. My heart was beating so fast, my legs were jelly, I was shaking like I was freezing. Finally, I calmed down. I looked at my friends. My God! They were barely in a better state than me. Panting, pale-faced, hollow-eyed – we’d had a close shave.196

  On 13 August the biggest demonstration yet took place: up to a hundred young militants were to march from the Saint-Lazare station, or was it to be the Boulevard Saint-Denis? – different messages suggested different starting points.197 All afternoon, small bands of confused demonstrators wandered around the north of Paris, hoping to meet up and find out where the demonstration was starting from. Then it began: