French Resistance

The French Resistance is the name used for resistance movements that fought military occupation of France by Nazi Germany and the Vichy France undemocratic regime during World War II after the government and the high command of France surrendered in 1940. Resistance groups included groups of armed men (usually referred to as the maquis), publishers of underground newspapers or even cinematography and escape networks that helped allied soldiers. French Resistance cooperated with Allied secret services (see Special Operations Executive), especially in providing intelligence on the Atlantic Wall and coordinating sabotages and other actions to contribute to the success of Operation Overlord.

Risks involved

The German occupation authorities did not hesitate to employ brutal means in order to subdue the French population. The risks were high for those involved in resistance and also for those surrounding them, since the Germans soon established practices of retaliations against innocents to punish anti-German activity.

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• The German military authorities would execute caught resistants.
• They would take hostages in the general population to be executed should some act of sabotage or other act of resistance occur, executing several French people for a single German death. Sometimes, the hostages were taken within the same group as the presumed resistants or saboteurs (e.g. railroad workers for railroad sabotage); otherwise, they were just random people who had the bad luck of being caught.
• German services such as the Gestapo and the SS tortured resistants and sent them to concentration camps. Threats would also be made on the relatives of caught resistants; for instance, the Gestapo may threaten parents of torturing their children or sending off their daughters as sex slaves in a military brothel.
• Occasionally, German troops would engage in massacres, such as the destruction of Oradour-sur-Glane where an entire village was razed and the population killed for resistance activities in the vicinity.

In addition, the Vichy Regime had established paramilitary groups, such as the Milice, in order to fight the Resistance. These groups, collaborating closely with the Nazis, were very brutal and did not hesitate to use torture and other methods.

Related Topics:
Vichy Regime - Milice

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