A short history of European law: the last two and a half millennia

Abstract

resisters to hide people known as the Landelijke Organisatie voor Hulp aan Onderduikers, or LO (National Organization for Help to Those in Hiding). Before readers brush that off as mere domestic rearrangement, consider the logistical challenge of hiding three hundred thousand individuals in a densely urbanized, mostly flat country run by two Nazis, Arthur SeyssInquart and Hanns Rauter, who were later executed for crimes against humanity. For the single matter of food for the onderduikers, someone needed to forge or steal ration coupons, and different people, usually young women, needed to carry them past enemy soldiers to deliver them to those in hiding. Someone else had to go shopping for more people than were legally registered in his or her household—not once, but weekly or monthly. In fact, the leaders of the LO found they needed their own assault groups, the Landelijke Knokploegen (LKP), to destroy population registers and discourage overly enthusiastic collaborators. SOE’s reaction to all this popular ferment was to ignore it or deplore it as premature, meaning before Allied tanks arrived to protect the population. Allied strategists somehow decided that “the lethargy of the people” (282) in the Netherlands ruled out anything more than passive resistance. If one uses the broader definition of “resistance” as opposition to Nazi rule, however, one can only conclude that the Dutch Resistance had widespread popular support, engaged in energetic measures, and suffered high losses because of it. In addition to challenging long-standing myths about the Resistance, Wieviorka promises the first transnational history of the Resistance in Western Europe. Once again, though, we run into the problem of definition. This is a well-written and masterfully structured discussion of an international agency’s operations in six countries. But international is not the same as transnational. Nor does movement across borders and the participation of citizens of several nations make something transnational. International, surely, even global, but not necessarily transnational. It is entirely possible that some of the SOE agents parachuted behind enemy lines who spoke more than one language and went deeply undercover had transnational experiences in which national categories and boundaries blurred to the point of meaninglessness to them. But Wieviorka discusses only the higher-ups who dispatched such people from the United Kingdom. Even so, Wieviorka’s contention that, despite what Charles de Gaulle said, resistance did not adhere to strictly national groupings is correct. The big movements and the secret armies tended to be national in scope, but more homegrown opposition sometimes thought outside the national box. In December 1943, for example, French resisters who rescued the crew of a crashed American B-17 bomber passed the men to their Belgian neighbors because they knew the Germans searching for the men had more respect for the international border than they did. The Belgians passed the Americans to the Dutch-Paris escape line, a network of men and women spanning five nations. They thought of the landscape only in terms of “occupied” and “not occupied.” The Americans returned to their base thanks to a relay of civilians who belonged to homegrown resistance groups who shared a respect for the value of human life rather than a national identity. The circumstances of the war also meant that many people spent the occupation outside their home countries as expatriates or refugees. Some of these people made common cause with others in defense of the values of humanism against Nazism. In fact, in many instances, resistance offered the kind of harrowing defense of ideals that brought individuals into transnational communities and actions. Historians are now beginning to explore such transnational resistance. Wieviorka gives us an excellent history of SOE and of subversive warfare in Western Europe. The comparison of political reactions to events in several countries allows for judicious discussion of several longstanding myths. But his exceedingly narrow definition of “resistance” prevents him from writing a history of “the Resistance in Western Europe” as his title promises. MEGAN KOREMAN Independent Scholar