the symbol of the resistance the Cross of Lorraine. before the Comintern appeal that followed the German attack to the Soviet Union. Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, the only major female leader in the Resistance, headed the Alliance network. [104] The Germans claimed three were killed and 42 wounded; this let them execute more hostages, as Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle demanded three hostages be shot for every dead German and two for each of the wounded. De Gaulle not only kept the patriotic resistance alive; he also did everything possible to re-establish the French claim to independence and sovereignty. (1966), "the role of the resistant was revalued according to [de Gaulle's] political trajectory". [157], All over France, the maquis attempted to seize towns in June 1944, expecting the Allies to be there soon, often with tragic results. The upper cross-piece, usually shorter than the lower one, recalled the titulus, on which the writing I.N.R.I. [165] The SAS commandos had jeeps armored with machine guns that they used to travel across French countryside and ambush German convoys. The maquis were careful about concealing fires and could usually avoid aerial detection. [61] For these reasons, forgery became a key skill for the resistance as the Germans regularly required the French to produce their papers, and anyone whose papers seemed suspicious would be arrested. The Deep Church Revealed – An Enemy Within, The Present Crisis of the Holy See – Tested by Prophecy, Your purchases help support Virgó Sacráta mission: “. This burden amounted to about 20 million German Reichsmarks per day, a sum that, in May 1940, was approximately equivalent to four hundred million French francs. [168], In early August 1944, Hitler ordered Field Marshal Günther von Kluge to launch Operation Lüttich against the Americans. Réfractaires, it is not your duty to die uselessly.[126]. [101] One Jewish Frenchwoman, Madame Rado, who was arrested with her four children, noted about the watching bystanders: "Their expressions were empty, apparently indifferent. [81], The military strength of the communists was still relatively feeble at the end of 1941, but the rapid growth of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), a radical armed movement, ensured that French communists regained their reputation as an effective anti-fascist force. [267] [67] The milieu established smuggling networks bringing in rationed goods over the Pyrenées from Spain, and it was soon learned that for the right price, they were also willing to smuggle people out of France like Allied airmen, refugees, Jews, and résistants. [177] All over Paris, the outlawed tricolore started to fly over schools, mairies and police stations, an open challenge to German power, and a sign that the French civil service was shifting its loyalty. In September 1940, the poet Robert Desnos published an article titled "J'irai le dire à la Kommandantur" in the underground newspaper Aujourd'hui appealing to ordinary French people to stop denouncing each other to the Germans. [2][21][22], The labour shortage was worsened by the fact that a large number of the French were also held as prisoners of war in Germany. The experience of the Occupation was a deeply psychologically disorienting one for the French as what was once familiar and safe became strange and threatening. "Horizontal collaboration" was widespread, with 85,000 illegitimate children fathered by Germans born by October 1943. In France, the Cross of Lorraine (seen here in the background) is the symbol of the Resistance Movement of World War II and the liberation of France from Nazi Germany. [73] The SOE provided weapons, bombs, false papers, money and radios to the resistance, and the SOE agents were trained in guerrilla warfare, espionage and sabotage. The Cross of Lorraine was originally held to be a symbol of Joan of Arc, who was from Lorraine. [86] On 27 March 1942, the first French Jews were rounded up by the French authorities, sent to the camp at Drancy, then on to Auschwitz to be killed. 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Some of them bared their heads as if in the presence of the dead". Made to dig his gave. [322], It is estimated that FFI killed some 2,000 Germans, a low estimate based on the figures from June 1944 only. Another BCRA appendage was called Gallia, a fact-gathering network specialising in military intelligence and police activities. [179] On 24 August, French soldiers entered Paris, which led to some hours of intense fighting before Choltitz surrendered on 25 August, though pockets of German and milice forces fought on for several more days as Choltiz simply did not inform his forces of his plans to surrender. But the powerful appeal of French nationalism drove others to engage in resistance against occupying German forces. Charles de Gaulle spoke of "French resistance" in his broadcast on 18 June 1940. [46] A further difficulty was the shortage of weapons, which explained why early resistance groups founded in 1940 focused on publishing journals and underground newspapers as the lack of guns and ammunition made armed resistance almost impossible. [78] The underground press created what Ousby called "the rhetoric of resistance to counter the rhetoric of the Reich and Vichy" to inspire people, using sayings from the great figures of French history. One of the most renowned figures of the Free French Forces was Prince Dimitri Amilakhvari, who participated in every important operation that involved French forces until 1942 and led the Légion étrangère into battle in the Norwegian and later African campaigns against Erwin Rommel's Africa Corps. I saw his face all right, but there was no skin on it, and he could not see me. [50] The execution of Bonsergent, a man guilty only of being a witness to an incident that was in itself only very trivial, brought home to many of the French the precise nature of the "New Order in Europe". [119], After the Battle of Stalingrad, which ended with the destruction of the entire German 6th Army in February 1943, many had started to doubt the inevitability of an Axis victory, and most French gendarmes were not willing to hunt the down the maquis, knowing that they might be tried for their actions if the Allies won. [268] The only distinguishable difference between the men of the Maquis and the men of the country from they had sprung was the pistol cocked aggressively from the trouser tops, the rifle on the shoulder, the Sten on the back or the string of grenades depending on the belt. On 23 June 1944, Koenig began to operate, giving orders to all the SOE and OSS agents via the Special Forces Headquarters. The ribbon is bicolor, black and green for mourning and hope, respectively. [73], De Gaulle disapproved of the truce as he used the uprising to order on 22 August General Philippe Leclerc's 2nd Armored Division to liberate Paris, stating he did not want the Communists to liberate the city. Thus of the 120,000 Spaniards who fled the Franco regime in 1939, many joined the Resistance on the grounds that this was a continuation of their anti-fascist struggle. D-Day: Operation Neptune [181] De Gaulle told Landes, who was wearing the uniform of a British Army officer that he was not welcome in France and had two hours to leave the city and two days to leave France. Most clandestine newspapers were not consistent in their editorial stance and often consisted of only a single sheet, because the sale of all raw materials—paper, ink, stencils—was prohibited. [17] The sight of French women consorting with German soldiers infuriated many French men, but sometimes it was the only way they could get adequate food for their families. [158] The Germans burned down several small villages in the Mont Mouchet region and executed 70 peasants suspected of aiding the maquis. [106] After her arrest, Sansom was tortured for several months, which she recounted in the 1949 book Odette: The Story of a British Agent. [50] On 10 September 1940, the military governor of France, General Otto von Stülpnagel announced in a press statement that no mercy would be granted to those engaging in sabotage and all saboteurs would be shot. The adage, “An enemy of my enemy is my friend” was true to the word in this case. [179] On the afternoon of August 25, 1944 de Gaulle returned to Paris, a city he not set foot in since June 1940, to be greeted by vast cheering crowds as he walked down the Champs-Élysées. The plans for the Resistance in Operation Overlord were: General de Gaulle himself was only informed by Churchill on 4 June 1944 that the Allies planned to land in France on 6 June. [152], The spring of 1944 is remembered in France as time of the mentalité terrible, the period of la guerre franco-française when the Milice and the Maquis fought one another without mercy. [80] Nevertheless, communists had a more prominent role in the resistance only after June 1941. [165] A SAS officer, Ian Wellsted described the maquis band in which operated with as: It was hard to tell what they had been before German labour laws threw them all together in the depths of the wild woods. [228][274] Although over half of these had been repatriated to Spain (or elsewhere) by the time Pétain proclaimed the Vichy régime in 1940,[46] the 120,000 to 150,000 who remained[275] became political prisoners, and the foreign equivalent to the Service du Travail Obligatoire, the Compagnies de Travailleurs Étrangers (Companies of Foreign Workers) or CTE, began to pursue them for slave labour. There was a majority from the SFIO in Libération-Nord, one of the eight great networks to make up the National Council of the Resistance, and in the Brutus network. Wear a warm suit, a beret, a raincoat, a good pair of hobnailed boots.[128]. [177] Faced with an urban uprising that he was unprepared for, Choltitz arranged a truce with Parodi via the Swedish consul Raoul Nordling, marking the first time that the Germans had treated the resistance as a legitimate opponent. [180], As various cities, towns and villages were liberated in France, the Resistance was usually the most organized force that took over. ", gathering about 2,700 men, who formed the Maquis du Mont Mouchet. This was not the case with all movements, since some refused civil action and preferred armed resistance by groups such as CDLR and CDLL. [129] Regardless whether they had served in the military, the maquis chefs soon started calling themselves capitaines or colonels. It became a symbol of France’s stand against the Nazis, and also played a role in several resistance movements in France and abroad. In 1942, Le Populaire, newspaper of the SFIO from 1921 to 1940, was publishing again, clandestinely. [130] To support themselves, the maquis took to theft with bank robbery and stealing from the Chantiers de Jeunesse (the Vichy youth movement) being especially favored means of obtaining money and supplies. Armenians living in France took the arms and fought the resistance against the Axis forces. [181] Miliciens were usually shot without the bother of a trial, and at least 10,000 miliciens were shot in 1944. However, this study is very much a history of the Resistance in metropolitan France. [107] The MUR recognised General de Gaulle as the leader of France and selected General Charles Delestraint (codename Vidal) as the commander of the AS. [247], Georgians living in France and the French colonies and people of Georgian ethnicity played an active and symbolic role in the French resistance. The 1942 novel Le Silence de la Mer ("The Silence of the Sea"), by Jean Bruller, quickly became a symbol of mental resistance through its story of how an old man and his niece refused to speak to the German officer occupying their house. [48] In January 1944, following extensive lobbying by the SOE, Churchill was persuaded to increase by 35 the number of planes available to drop in supplies for the maquis. In 1942, after an ambiguous period of collaboration, the former leader of Croix de Feu, François de La Rocque, founded the Klan Network, which provided information to the British intelligence services. [91] Frenay and Renouvin wanted to "blind" and "deafen" the French police by assassinating informers who were the "eyes" and "ears" of the police. François Camel and Marx Dormoy were assassinated, while Jean-Baptiste Lebas, Isidore Thivrier, Amédée Dunois, Claude Jordery and Augustin Malroux died during their deportation. Following the lift of the siege, the cross became extremely popular in Lorraine. One maquisard fighting in the Haute-Savoie wrote in his diary about the fate of a milicien taken prisoner in July 1944: Aged twenty-nine, married three months ago. [329], The official épuration légale ("legal purge") began following a June 1944 decree that established a three-tier system of judicial courts:[330] a High Court of Justice which dealt with Vichy ministers and officials; Courts of Justice for other serious cases of alleged collaboration; and regular Civic Courts for lesser cases of alleged collaboration. [184] For many resistance leaders who gave themselves the title of captain or colonel, it was quite a comedown to be reduced to a private. On 17 September 1944, in Bordeaux, the SOE agent Roger Landes, who become the leader of the Resistance in Bordeaux after André Grandclément, the previous leader had been exposed as a Gestapo informer, was taking part in the celebrations of the liberation of Bordeaux when General de Gaulle motioned to him to come aside for a chat. Upon return to his homeland, he was imprisoned by Soviet authorities on charges of high treason but two commanders of the French Resistance testified to his commitment in the fight against Nazi Germany.[252]. [93] In April 1942, the PCF created an armed wing of its Main d'Oeuvre Immigrée ("Migrant Workforce") representing immigrants called the FTP-MOI under the leadership of Boris Holban [ro], who came from the Bessarabia region, which belonged alternately to either Russia or Romania. [59] The German Military Governor General Otto von Stülpnagel had three people shot in retaliation, none of whom were connected to his killing. Among those who actively fought in the Resistance, a number died for it – for instance the writer Jean Prévost, the philosopher and mathematician Jean Cavaillès, the historian Marc Bloch, and the philosopher Jean Gosset;[371] among those who survived and went on to reflect on their experience, a particularly visible one was André Malraux. It was up to use to organize them and give them a sense of their role in the struggle.[107]. [297] In the southern zone, François de Menthon's newspaper Liberté merged with Henri Frenay's Vérité to form Combat in December 1941, which grew to a circulation of 200,000 by 1944. [137] On 9 June 1943, General Delestraint was arrested by the Gestapo following a tip-off provided by the double agent Hardy and was sent to the Dachau concentration camp. [234], A militant Jewish Zionist resistance organisation, the Jewish Army (Armée Juive), was founded in 1942. The Milice hit squads pretended to be the Maquis; the Maquis hit squads pretended to be the Milice. The CAS-Sud became the secret SFIO in March 1943. On 10 September 1873, the last Prussian soldiers left the part of Lorraine which would remain French. Some had been shopkeepers, artisans, young sons of wealthy parents. Dutch-Paris built an important network in France to help resistants, Jews and allied pilots to cross the Pyrenees and flee to Britain. They were Lieutenants Mansion, Saint-Jacques and Corvisart and Colonel Rémy, and didn't hesitate to get in touch with the anti-Germans within the Vichy military such as Georges Loustaunau-Lacau and Georges Groussard. The motto (Patriam servando victoriam tulit) proclaims the fatherland service and announces the victory. [49], The first résistant executed by the Germans was a Polish Jewish immigrant named Israël Carp, shot in Bordeaux on 28 August 1940 for jeering a German military parade down the streets of Bordeaux. [60] Punctuality was key to meetings in public as the Germans would arrest anyone who was seen hanging around in public as if waiting for someone. The British Special Operations Executive also parachuted tons of explosives to its agents in France for essential sabotage missions. These efforts continued until La Cagoule could be infiltrated and dismantled in 1937.[217]. [112] The underground press gave much coverage to the conditions at the Dora works, pointing out those Frenchmen who went to work in Germany were not paid the generous wages promised by the Organisation Todt and instead were turned into slaves, all of which the underground papers used as reasons for why the French should not go to work in Germany. It was established and led by Abraham Polonski, Eugénie Polonski, Lucien Lublin,[235] David Knout and Ariadna Scriabina[236] (daughter of the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin). [323] For perspective, the best estimate is that 86,000 were deported from France without racial motive, overwhelmingly comprising resistance fighters and more than the number of Gypsies and Jews deported from France. Although it is again difficult to gauge their effectiveness precisely, popular anti-German demonstrations, such as general strikes by the Paris Métro, the gendarmerie and the police, took place, and fighting ensued. As the Riom trial began in 1942, the fervour and the number of socialists in the Resistance grew. Saved by Ross Muir. Though the maquis caused the Germans much difficulty, the guerrillas tended not to fare well in sustained combat. In 1942, one resistance leader claimed that the movement received support from four groups: the "lower middle" and "middle middle" classes, university professors and students, the entire working class and a large majority of the peasants.[188]. A man within feet of me slumped to the ground with blood spurting two feet into the air from the side of his neck ... We had anticipated an infantry assault-possibly backed up with light armour, but snipers, a threat we had not met before, were difficult to counter. [142] The Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) had rejected this plan under the grounds that the disparity between the firepower and training of the Wehrmacht vs. the maquisards meant that the Resistance would be unable to hold their own in sustained combat. [101] Some 100 Jews warned by friends in the police killed themselves, while 24 Jews were killed resisting arrest. According to the historian Jean-François Muracciole, "Throughout the war, how to communicate remained the principal difficulty of intelligence networks. The Resistance's men and women came from all economic levels and political leanings of French society, including émigrés, academics, students, aristocrats, conservative Roman Catholics (including priests and nuns), Protestants, Jews, Muslims, liberals, anarchists and communists. Also participating were the painter Sándor Józsa, the sculptor István Hajdú (Étienne Hajdu), the journalists László Kőrös and Imre Gyomrai; the photographers Andor (André) Steiner, Lucien Hervé and Ervin Martón. He fought the Nazis directly, as in an April 1944 battle in Saint-Étienne-Vallée-Française in which his soldiers destroyed a Feldgendarmerie unit, or in an ambush of the Waffen-SS on June 5, 1944. [155] In the south of France, the Maquis had started to form an alternative government to Vichy, which still controlled the French civil service. [165] In June 1944, the Resistance destroyed French railroads at 486 different points and by 7 June 1944, the day after D-Day, the Wehrmacht complained that due to sabotage that the main railroad lines between Avranches and St. Lô, between Cherbourg and St. Lô and between Caen and St. Lô were now out of action. [48] The ORA was headed by General Aubert Frère and recognized General Henri Giraud as France's leader. [312][313][314] To complement these missions, smaller plans were drafted: Plan Rouge (Red) for German ammunition depots, Plan Jaune (Yellow) for German command posts, Plan Noir (Black) for German fuel depots and Plan Tortue (Tortoise) for road traffic. [137] After his arrest, Hardy was turned by the Gestapo as Bastien tearfully told him that she and her parents would all be sent to a concentration camp if he did not work for the Gestapo. They are lads from the mining areas...they have been hunted; they have been imprisoned; they have been tortured by miliciens whom they now recognize. Totally Faithful to the Sacred Deposit of Faith entrusted to the Holy See in Rome, we promote and defend Authentic Catholic Mass, Doctrine, and Moral Teaching. [91] Renouvin taught his men military tactics at a secret boot camp in the countryside in the south of France and led the Groupes Francs in a series of attacks on collaborators in Lyon and Marseilles. [94] The RAF instead hit the neighborhood next to the factory, killing hundreds of French civilians. Muselier recalled the Cross of Lorraine he had seen several times as a patriotic symbol during his childhood in Lorraine. The Anti-Fascist Underground Patriotic Organization was also commanded by Armenian officiers. [62] One corbeaux written by a Frenchwoman, typical of the self-interested motives of the cobeaux writers, read: Since you are taking care of the Jews, and if your campaign is not just a vain word, then have a look at the kind of life led by the girl M.A, formerly a dancer, now living at 41 Boulevard de Strasbourg, not wearing a star. [81] In retaliation the Wehrmacht shot 50 unconnected French people in Nantes, and announced that if the assassin did not turn himself in by midnight of 23 October, another 50 would be shot. [142] The maquis unaware of this tried to seize "redoubts" several times in 1944 with disastrous results. [81] Tillon later wrote that between June–December 1941 the RAF carried out 60 bombing attacks and 65 strafing attacks in France, which killed a number of French people, while the FTP, during the same period, set off 41 bombs, derailed 8 trains and carried out 107 acts of sabotage, which killed no French people. Armenian-French writer Louise Aslanian (1906–1945), another French Resistance activist, was arrested among with her husband Arpiar Aslanian on July 24, 1944, taken to the Nazi concentration camps[243] by Nazis and killed in 1945. That legislation was spontaneous and autonomous. As a leader, the American and British governments preferred the less popular, but less abrasively vindictive, General Giraud to de Gaulle, but for the French population de Gaulle was almost universally recognised as the true leader in their victory. [258][259] Not all of the women involved in the Resistance limited themselves to subordinate roles. [173] Speaking of an atrocity committed outside of Nice in July 1944, one man testified at Nurnberg: Having been attacked ... by several groups of Maquis in the region, by way of reprisals, a Mongolian detachment, still under the SS, went to a farm where two French members of the Resistance had been hidden. Made to drink warm salted water. [42] Barthelt recalled: "I recognized him only by his hat. Many people, perhaps even most people, were indifferent. During his trip to London in April 1942, the BCRA entrusted him with the creation of two new intelligence systems, Phalanx and Cohors-Asturies. [138] The American and British officers at SHAEF distrusted the Resistance with the OSS agent William J. Casey writing that many in the Resistance appeared more interested in post-war politics than in fighting the Germans. After the incorporation of a great part of Lorraine to Germany following the 1870 war, the Cross of Lorraine became a symbol of memory and resistance. Their symbol was the white gamma, the zodiacal sign of the Ram, symbolising renewal and power. Joseph Epstein was assigned responsibility for training Resistance fighters across the city, and his new commandos of fifteen men perpetrated a number of attacks that could not have been carried out before. [44] The Musée de l'Homme was founded by two professors, Paul Rivet and the Russian émigré Boris Vildé in July 1940. The division played a critical role in Operation Cobra, the Allies' "breakout" from its Normandy beachhead, where it served as a link between American and Canadian armies and made rapid progress against German forces. "[27] During the occupation, an estimated 30,000 French civilian hostages were shot to intimidate others who were involved in acts of resistance. [94] Freney, who had emerged as a leading résistant, recruited the engineer Henri Garnier living in Toulouse to teach French workers at factories producing weapons for the Wehrmacht how best to drastically shorten the lifespan of the Wehrmacht's weapons, usually by making deviations of a few millimetres, which increased strain on the weapons; such acts of quiet sabotage were almost impossible to detect, which meant no French people would be shot in reprisal. [356], After General de Gaulle's return to power in 1958, the portrayal of the Resistance returned to its earlier résistancialisme. [94], To maintain contact with Britain, Resistance leaders crossed the English Channel at night on a boat, made their way via Spain and Portugal, or took a "spy taxi", as the British Lysander aircraft were known in France, which landed on secret airfields at night. [112] Under the law of 16 February 1943, all able-bodied Frenchmen aged 20–22 who were not miners, farmers or university students had to report to the STO to do two years labour in Germany. The French Resistance began to unify in 1941. Finished off with a blow in the stomach from a spade. [181] Many résistants were disgusted by the mass influx of new members in the dying days of the struggle, contemptuously calling them the FFS (Forces Françaises de Septembre-French Forces of September) or the Septemberists for short, as all these people had conveniently only discovered their French patriotism in September 1944. [136] These statistics do not completely tell the story as Resistance sabotage attacks on the rail system in the first half of 1944 were so pervasive that the Germans had to import workers from the Reichsbahn (the German state railroad) and put soldiers on trains as they no longer trusted the Cheminots. [106], On 26 May 1943, in Paris, Moulin chaired a secret meeting attended by representatives of the main resistance groups to form the CNR (Conseil National de la Résistance-National Council of the Resistance). One American officer, Ralph Ingersoll who served in SHEAF wrote in his book Top Secret: what cut the ice with us was the fact that when we came to France the Resistance was so effective that it took half a dozen real live German divisions to contend with it, divisions which might otherwise have been on our backs in the Bocage.

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