Resistance: The Underground War in Europe, 1939-1945

"We liked it for the same reasons you did! It’s comprehensive, and that’s very important because a problem with history writing in general, but particularly with resistance, is that it tends to be written from a nation-centric point of view. Everybody wants to tell “their” story and how great they were or how terrible things were for them. That’s the framework through which most of these stories get told. Certainly, the Resistance memoir literature, which is vast, is almost all nation-centred. But this was a pan-European movement and what she does really well is to identify first of all the commonalities. In all of these countries, when you look at underground resistance movements, similar things happened. They had clandestine literature, they collected intelligence, later on they started engaging in sabotage and armed conflict. All of this is happening at different moments and in different ways, but it is happening across Europe. But looking at it across Europe gives you a sense that geography, too, matters. What happens in Eastern Europe is different from Western Europe. That’s the other big takeaway from the book. The Nazis, beyond a certain point in the East, simply regarded these territories as fodder. They wanted to enslave the local populations. It was an incredibly dumb strategy because one of its consequences was to render any kind of collaboration impossible. In Western Europe, the regime was different. They didn’t treat these countries in the same manner. They were brutal but not genocidal. That difference also has an impact on the kinds of resistance movements which emerged in different parts of Europe. It’s also the remarkable feat of reading all this material in so many different languages. The book is an extraordinary achievement in that respect. Speaking personally, I think it’s also a topical book because we’re talking about resistance at the moment. This is a book that helps us think about some of the obvious issues and also some of the awkward ones. We need to think carefully, because some of the organisations that in recent times we’ve called terrorists go on to become seen as freedom fighters. That was what was happening in Europe in the Second World War. The Nazis were calling all of these resistance organisations terrorists, and now we think of them differently. Yes, and here I can speak with a little bit more authority. A lot of it is about France, and because I’ve studied this period in detail, I know what a phenomenally complicated story it is. The French Resistance is three things: it’s Gaullism, it’s communism, and it’s the so-called internal resistance. The relationship among them is complex at any one time and over the six-year period, and at no point in the book does she put a foot wrong in writing about it. That she is able to get everything right in that way is very impressive and I am sure it’s the same for the other countries she is writing about."