1939–1940 and his unit in Poland in winter 1939 On 15 September 1939, a member of the Czech resistance movement, Ctibor Novák, planted explosive devices in Berlin. His first bomb detonated in front of the Ministry of Aeronautics, and the second detonated in front of police headquarters. Both buildings were damaged and many Germans were injured. On 28 October 1939 (the anniversary of the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918), there were large demonstrations against Nazi occupation in Prague, with about 100,000 Czechs. Demonstrators crowded the streets in the city. German police had to disperse the demonstrators, and began shooting in the evening. The first victim was baker Václav Sedláček, who was shot dead. The second victim was student Jan Opletal, who was critically injured, and died on 11 November. Another 15 people were badly injured and hundreds of people sustained minor injuries. About 400 people were arrested. In March 1940, a
partisan unit of the first
guerilla organization of the Second World War in Europe, the
Detached Unit of the Polish Army, led by Major
Henryk Dobrzański (Hubal), defeated a
battalion of German infantry in a skirmish near the Polish village of
Hucisko. A few days later in an ambush near the village of
Szałasy it inflicted heavy casualties upon another German unit. As time progressed, resistance forces grew in size and number. To counter this threat, the German authorities formed a special 1,000 man-strong anti-partisan unit of combined
SS-
Wehrmacht forces, including a
Panzer group. Although Dobrzański's unit never exceeded 300 men, the Germans fielded at least 8,000 men in the area to secure it. In 1940,
Witold Pilecki, of the
Polish resistance, presented to his superiors a plan to enter Germany's
Auschwitz concentration camp, gather intelligence on the camp from the inside, and organize inmate resistance. The
Home Army approved this plan and provided him with a false identity card, and on 19 September 1940 he deliberately went out during a street roundup in Warsaw-
łapanka, and was caught by the Germans along with other civilians and sent to Auschwitz. In the camp he organized the underground organization
Związek Organizacji Wojskowej (ZOW). From October 1940, ZOW sent the first reports about the camp and its
genocide to Home Army Headquarters in Warsaw through the resistance network organized in Auschwitz. On the night of January 21–22, 1940, in the Soviet-occupied
Podolian town of
Czortków, the
Czortków Uprising started. It was the first Polish uprising and the first anti-Soviet uprising of World War II. Anti-Soviet Poles, most of them teenagers from local high schools, stormed the local
Red Army barracks and a prison, in order to release Polish soldiers kept there. 1940 was the year of establishing the
Warsaw Ghetto and the infamous
Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp by the German Nazis in occupied Poland. Among the many activities of Polish resistance and Polish people was helping endangered Jews. Polish citizens have the world's highest count of individuals who have been recognized as
Righteous Among the Nations by
Yad Vashem as non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from extermination during the
Holocaust. One of the events that helped the growth of the French Resistance was the targeting of the French Jews, Communists, Romani, homosexuals, Catholics, and others, forcing many into hiding. This in turn gave the French Resistance new people to incorporate into their political structures. Around May 1940, a resistance group formed around the Austrian priest
Heinrich Maier, who until 1944 very successfully passed on the plans and production locations for
V-2 rockets,
Tiger tanks and airplanes (
Messerschmitt Bf 109,
Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet, etc.) to the Allies so that they could target these important factories for destruction; the group also planned for the Central European states' post-war. Very early on they passed on information about the mass murder of the Jews to the Allies. The
Special Operations Executive (SOE) was a British
World War II organisation. With
Cabinet approval, it was officially formed by
Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton on 22 July 1940, to develop a spirit of resistance in the occupied countries and to prepare a
fifth column of resistance fighters to engage in open opposition to the occupiers when the United Kingdom was able to return to the continent. To aid in the transport of agents and the supply of the resistance fighters, a
Royal Air Force Special Duty Service was developed. Whereas the
SIS was primarily involved in
espionage, the SOE and the resistance fighters were geared toward
reconnaissance of German defenses and
sabotage. In England the SOE was also involved in the formation of the
Auxiliary Units, a top secret
stay-behind resistance organisation which would have been activated in the event of a
German invasion of Britain. The SOE operated in all countries or former countries occupied by or attacked by the Axis forces, except where demarcation lines were agreed with Britain's principal allies (the
Soviet Union and the
United States). The organisation was officially dissolved on 15 January 1946.
1941 In February 1941, the
Dutch Communist Party organized a general strike in
Amsterdam and surrounding cities, known as the
February strike, in protest against
anti-Jewish measures by the Nazi occupying force and violence by fascist street fighters against Jews. Several hundreds of thousands of people participated in the strike. The strike was put down by the Nazis and some participants were executed. In April 1941, the
Liberation Front of the Slovene Nation was established in the
Province of Ljubljana. Its armed wing were the
Slovene Partisans. It represented both the working class and the Slovene ethnicity. From April 1941,
Bureau of Information and Propaganda of the
Union for Armed Struggle started in Poland
Operation N headed by
Tadeusz Żenczykowski. Action consisted of
sabotage,
subversion and
black-propaganda activities carried out by the
Polish resistance against
Nazi German occupation forces during
World War II Beginning in March 1941, Witold Pilecki's reports were being forwarded via the
Polish resistance to the
Polish government in exile and through it, to the British government in London and other Allied governments. These reports were the first information about the
Holocaust and the principal source of intelligence on Auschwitz for the Western Allies. In May 1941, the Resistance Team "
Elevtheria" (Freedom) was established in
Thessaloniki by politicians Paraskevas Barbas, Apostolos Tzanis, Ioannis Passalidis, Simos Kerasidis, Athanasios Fidas, Ioannis Evthimiadis and military officer
Dimitrios Psarros. Its armed wing comprised two armed forces;
Athanasios Diakos led by Christodoulos Moschos
(captain "Petros"), operating in
Kroussia; and
Odysseas Androutsos led by Athanasios Genios
(captain "Lassanis"), operating in
Visaltia.
The first anti-soviet uprising during World War II began on June 22, 1941 (the start-date of
Operation Barbarossa) in
Lithuania. On the same day, the
Sisak People's Liberation Partisan Detachment was formed in Croatia, near the town of Sisak. It was the first armed partisan unit in Croatia. Communist-initiated
uprising against Axis started in
German-occupied Serbia on July 7, 1941, and six days later in
Montenegro. The
Republic of Užice (Ужичка република) was a short-lived liberated Yugoslav territory, the first part of occupied Europe to be liberated. Organized as a military mini-state it existed throughout the autumn of 1941 in the western part of Serbia. The Republic was established by the Partisan resistance movement and its administrative center was in the town of Užice. The government was made of "people's councils" (''
), and the Communists opened schools and published a newspaper, Borba'' (meaning "Struggle"). They even managed to run a postal system and around of railway and operated an ammunition factory from the vaults beneath the bank in Užice. In July 1941,
Mieczysław Słowikowski (using the codename
"Rygor"—Polish for "Rigor") set up "
Agency Africa," one of World War II's most successful intelligence organizations. His Polish allies in these endeavors included Lt. Col.
Gwido Langer and Major
Maksymilian Ciężki. The information gathered by the Agency was used by the Americans and British in planning the amphibious November 1942
Operation Torch landings in North Africa. On 13 July 1941, in Italian-occupied
Montenegro, Montenegrin separatist
Sekula Drljević proclaimed an independent Kingdom of Montenegro as an Italian governorate, upon which a nationwide rebellion escalated raised by Partisans, Yugoslav Royal officers and various other armed personnel. It was the first organized armed uprising in then occupied Europe, and involved 32,000 people. Most of Montenegro was quickly liberated, except major cities where Italian forces were well fortified. On 12 August — after a major Italian offensive involving 5 divisions and 30,000 soldiers — the uprising collapsed as units were disintegrating; poor leadership occurred as well as collaboration. The final toll of July 13 uprising in Montenegro was 735 dead, 1120 wounded and 2070 captured Italians and 72 dead and 53 wounded Montenegrins. In response to the
Genocide of Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia, Serb civilians,
Chetniks and
Yugoslav Partisans instigated uprisings in
Eastern Herzegovina and the region of
Lika from June–September, 1941. In the
Battle of Loznica, 31 August 1941,
Chetniks attacked and freed the town of
Loznica in
German-occupied Serbia from the Germans. Several Germans were killed and wounded; 93 were captured. This marked the first time a town was liberated in occupied Europe. On 11 October 1941, in Bulgarian-occupied Prilep, Macedonians attacked post of the Bulgarian occupation police, which was the start of Macedonian resistance against the fascists who occupied Macedonia: Germans, Italians, Bulgarians and Albanians. The resistance finished successfully in August–November 1944 when the independent
Macedonian state was formed, which was later added to the
Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. At the time Hitler gave his anti-resistance
Nacht und Nebel decree – the very day of the
Attack on Pearl Harbor in the Pacific – the planning for Britain's
Operation Anthropoid was underway, as a resistance move to assassinate
Reinhard Heydrich, the
Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and the chief of the
Final Solution, by the
Czech resistance in Prague. Over fifteen thousand Czechs were killed in reprisals, with the most infamous incidents being the complete destruction of the towns of
Lidice and
Ležáky.
1942 On February 16, 1942, the Greek Communist Party (
KKE)-led
National Liberation Front gave permission to a communist veteran, Athanasios (Thanasis) Klaras (later known as
Aris Velouchiotis) to examine the possibilities of an armed resistance movement, which led to the formation of the
Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS). ELAS initiated actions against the German and Italian forces of occupation in Greece on 7 June 1942. The ELAS grew to become the largest resistance movement against the fascists in Greece. The
Luxembourgish general strike of 1942 was a passive resistance movement organised within a short time period to protest against a directive that incorporated the Luxembourg youth into the Wehrmacht. A national general strike, originating mainly in Wiltz, paralysed the country and forced the occupying German authorities to respond violently by sentencing 21 strikers to death. On 27 May 1942
Operation Anthropoid took place. Two armed Czechoslovak members of the army in exile (
Jan Kubiš and
Jozef Gabčík) attempted to assassinate the SS-
obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich was not killed on the spot but died later at the hospital from his wounds. He is the highest ranked Nazi to have been assassinated during the war. In September 1942, the Council to Aid Jews () was founded by
Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and
Wanda Krahelska-Filipowicz ("Alinka") and made up of Polish Democrats as well as other
Catholic activists. Poland was the only country in occupied Europe where there existed such a dedicated secret organization. Half of the Jews who survived the war (thus over 50,000) were aided in some shape or form by Żegota. The most known activist of Żegota was
Irena Sendler head of the children's division who saved 2,500
Jewish children by smuggling them out of the
Warsaw Ghetto, providing them false documents, and sheltering them in individual and group children's homes outside the ghetto. On the night of 7–8 October 1942,
Operation Wieniec started. It targeted rail infrastructure near
Warsaw. Similar operations aimed at disrupting German transport and communication in
occupied Poland occurred in the coming months and years. It targeted railroads, bridges and supply depots, primarily near transport hubs such as Warsaw and
Lublin. On 25 November, Greek guerrillas with the help of twelve British saboteurs carried out a successful operation which disrupted the German ammunition transportation to the German Africa Corps under
Rommel—the destruction of
Gorgopotamos bridge (
Operation Harling). On 20 June 1942, the most spectacular escape from
Auschwitz concentration camp took place. Four Poles, Eugeniusz Bendera,
Kazimierz Piechowski, Stanisław Gustaw Jaster and Józef Lempart made a daring escape. The escapees were dressed as members of the
SS-Totenkopfverbände, fully armed and in an SS staff car. They drove out the main gate in a stolen
Rudolf Hoss automobile
Steyr 220 with a smuggled report from
Witold Pilecki about the
Holocaust. The Germans never recaptured any of them. The
Zamość Uprising was an armed uprising of
Armia Krajowa and
Bataliony Chłopskie against the forced
expulsion of Poles from the
Zamość region (Zamość Lands,
Zamojszczyzna) under the
Nazi Generalplan Ost. Nazi Germans attempting to remove the local Poles from the Greater Zamosc area (through forced removal, transfer to forced labor camps, or, in rare cases, mass murder) to get it ready for German colonization. It lasted from 1942 to 1944, and despite heavy casualties suffered by the Underground, the Germans failed.
1943 group of the
Chkalov Brigade In early January 1943, the 20,000 strong main operational group of the
Yugoslav Partisans, stationed in western
Bosnia, came under ferocious attack by over 150,000 German and Axis troops, supported by about 200
Luftwaffe aircraft in what became known as the
Battle of the Neretva (the German codename was
"Fall Weiss" or
"Case White"). The Axis rallied eleven divisions, six German, three Italian, and two divisions of the
Independent State of Croatia (supported by
Ustaše formations) as well as a number of
Chetnik brigades. The goal was to destroy the Partisan HQ and main field hospital (all Partisan wounded and prisoners faced certain execution), but this was thwarted by the diversion and retreat across the
Neretva river, planned by the Partisan supreme command led by Marshal
Josip Broz Tito. The main Partisan force escaped into
Serbia. On 19 April 1943, three members of the
Belgian resistance movement were able to stop the
Twentieth convoy, which was the 20th prisoner transport in
Belgium organised by the Germans during
World War II. The exceptional action by members of the Belgian resistance occurred to free
Jewish and
Romani ("Gypsy") civilians who were being transported by train from the Dossin army base located in
Mechelen,
Belgium to the concentration camp
Auschwitz. The 20th train convoy transported 1,631 Jews (men, women and children). Some of the prisoners were able to escape and marked this particular kind of liberation action by the Belgian resistance movement as unique in the European history of the
Holocaust. One of the bravest and most significant displays of public defiance against the Nazis is
the rescue of the Danish Jews in October 1943. Nearly all of the Danish Jews were saved from concentration camps by the
Danish resistance. However, the action was largely due to the personal intervention of German diplomat
Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, who both leaked news of the intended round up of the Jews to both the Danish opposition and Jewish groups and negotiated with the Swedes to ensure Danish Jews would be accepted in Sweden. On 13 June 1943, the
Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), organized mainly by the
Banderite faction of the far-right
Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists which collaborated with the Nazis until July 1941, liberated a territory in Volyn from the Nazis and established the so-called
Kolky Republic. The UPA reopened the local power station, bakery, dairy, post office, school, and set up an administration. The "republic" existed until 3 November 1943, when it was liquidated by the Nazis with the help of paratroopers, aircraft and armored vehicles. in December 1943 The
Battle of Sutjeska from 15 May – 16 June 1943 was a joint attack of the Axis forces that once again attempted to destroy the main Yugoslav Partisan force, near the
Sutjeska river in southeastern Bosnia. The Axis rallied 127,000 troops for the offensive, including German,
Italian,
NDH,
Bulgarian and
Cossack units, as well as over 300 airplanes (under German operational command), against 18,000 soldiers of the primary Yugoslav Partisans operational group organised in 16 brigades. Facing almost exclusively German troops in the final encirclement, the Yugoslav Partisans finally succeeded in breaking out across the Sutjeska river through the lines of the German
118th Jäger Division, 104th Jäger Division and
369th (Croatian) Infantry Division in the northwestern direction, towards eastern Bosnia. Three brigades and the central hospital with over 2,000 wounded remained surrounded and, following Hitler's instructions, German commander-in-chief General
Alexander Löhr ordered and carried out their annihilation, including the wounded and unarmed medical personnel. In addition, Partisan troops suffered from a severe lack of food and medical supplies, and many were struck down by
typhoid. However, the failure of the offensive marked a turning point for
Yugoslavia during World War II.
Operation Heads started—an action of serial
assassinations of the Nazi personnel sentenced to death by the
Underground court for crimes against Polish citizens in
occupied Poland. The Resistance fighters of Polish
Home Army's unit
Agat killed
Franz Bürkl during
Operation Bürkl. Bürkl was a high-ranking Nazi German
SS and secret police officer responsible for the murder and brutal interrogation of thousands of Polish Jews and Polish resistance fighters and supporters. The
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto lasted from 19 April-16 May, and cost the Nazi forces 17 dead and 93 wounded by their own count, though some Jewish resistance figures claimed that German casualties were far higher. , 1943.
Italian partisans celebrating the liberation of
Naples On 30 September the
German forces occupying the
Italian city of
Naples were forced out by the townsfolk and the
Italian Resistance before the
arrival of the first Allied forces in the city on 1 October. This popular uprising is known as the
Four days of Naples. On October 9, 1943, the Kinabalu guerillas launched the
Jesselton Revolt against the
Japanese occupation of British Borneo. From November 1943,
Operation Most III started. The Armia Krajowa provided the Allies with crucial intelligence on the German
V-2 rocket. In effect, some of the most important parts of the captured V-2, as well as the final report, analyses, sketches and photos, were transported to
Brindisi by a
Royal Air Force Douglas Dakota aircraft. In late July 1944, the V-2 parts were delivered to
London.
1944 On 1 February 1944, the Resistance fighters of the Polish
Home Army's unit
Agat executed
Franz Kutschera,
SS and
Reich's Police Chief in
Warsaw in an action known as
Operation Kutschera. In the spring of 1944, a plan was laid out by the Allies to kidnap General Müller, whose harsh repressive measures had earned him the nickname "the Butcher of
Crete". The operation was led by Major
Patrick Leigh Fermor, together with Captain
W. Stanley Moss, Greek
SOE agents and
Cretan resistance fighters. However, Müller left the island before the plan could be carried out. Undeterred, Fermor decided to abduct
General Heinrich Kreipe instead. On the night of 26 April, General Kreipe left his headquarters in
Archanes and headed without escort to his well-guarded residence, "Villa Ariadni", approximately 25 km outside
Heraklion. Major Fermor and Captain Moss, dressed as German military policemen, waited for him before his residence. They asked the driver to stop and asked for their papers. As soon as the car stopped, Fermor quickly opened Kreipe's door, rushed in and threatened him with his guns while Moss took the driver's seat. After driving some distance the British left the car, with suitable decoy material being planted that suggesting an escape off the island had been made by
submarine, and with the General began a cross-country march. Hunted by German patrols, the group moved across the mountains to reach the southern side of the island, where a British
Motor Launch (
ML 842, commanded by Brian Coleman) was to pick them up. Eventually, on 14 May 1944, they were picked up (from Peristeres beach near Rhodakino) and transferred to Egypt. In April–May 1944, the
SS launched the daring airborne
Raid on Drvar aimed at capturing Marshal
Josip Broz Tito, the commander-in-chief of the
Yugoslav Partisans, as well as disrupting their leadership and command structure. The Partisan headquarters were in the hills near
Drvar,
Bosnia at the time. The representatives of the
Allies,
Britain's
Randolph Churchill and
Evelyn Waugh, were also present. Elite German SS parachute commando units fought their way to Tito's
cave headquarters and exchanged heavy gunfire resulting in numerous casualties on both sides.
Chetniks under
Draža Mihailović also flocked to the firefight in their own attempt to capture Tito. By the time German forces had penetrated to the cave, however, Tito had already fled the scene. He had a train waiting for him that took him to the town of
Jajce. It would appear that Tito and his staff were well prepared for emergencies. The commandos were only able to retrieve Tito's marshal's uniform, which was later displayed in
Vienna. After fierce fighting in and around the villager's cemetery, the Germans were able to link up with mountain troops. By that time, Tito, his British guests and
Partisan survivors were fêted aboard the
Royal Navy destroyer and her captain Lt. Carson, RN. An intricate series of resistance operations were launched in France prior to, and during,
Operation Overlord. On June 5, 1944, the
BBC broadcast a group of unusual sentences, which the Germans knew were code words—possibly for the invasion of Normandy. The BBC would regularly transmit hundreds of personal messages, of which only a few were really significant. A few days before D-Day, the commanding officers of the Resistance heard the first line of
Verlaine's poem, "
Chanson d'automne", ''"Les sanglots longs des violons de l'automne"
(Long sobs of autumn violins
) which meant that the "day" was imminent. When the second line "Blessent mon cœur d'une langueur monotone"
(wound my heart with a monotonous languor'') was heard, the Resistance knew that the invasion would take place within the next 48 hours. They then knew it was time to go about their respective pre-assigned missions. All over France resistance groups had been coordinated, and various groups throughout the country increased their sabotage. Communications were cut, trains derailed, roads, water towers and ammunition depots destroyed and German garrisons were attacked. Some relayed info about German defensive positions on the beaches of Normandy to American and British commanders by radio, just prior to 6 June. Victory did not come easily; in June and July, in the
Vercors plateau a newly reinforced maquis group fought more than 10,000 German soldiers (no Waffen-SS) under General Karl Pflaum and was defeated, with 840 casualties (639 fighters and 201 civilians). Following the
Tulle Murders, Major Otto Diekmann's Waffen-SS company wiped out the village of
Oradour-sur-Glane on 10 June. The resistance also assisted the later Allied invasion in the south of France (
Operation Dragoon). They started insurrections in cities such as
Paris when allied forces came close.
Operation Halyard, which took place between August and December 1944, was an Allied
airlift operation behind enemy lines during World War II conducted by
Chetniks in occupied Yugoslavia. In July 1944, the
Office of Strategic Services (OSS) drew up plans to send a team to Chetniks led by General
Draža Mihailović in the
German-occupied
Territory of the Military Commander in Serbia for the purpose of evacuating Allied airmen shot down over that area. It was the largest rescue operation of American Airmen in history. According to historian Professor
Jozo Tomasevich, a report submitted to the OSS showed that 417 Allied airmen who had been downed over occupied Yugoslavia were rescued by Mihailović's Chetniks, and airlifted out by the Fifteenth Air Force. According to Lt. Cmdr. Richard M. Kelly (OSS) grand total of 432 U.S. and 80 Allied personnel were airlifted during the Halyard Mission.
Operation Tempest launched in Poland in 1944 would lead to several major actions by
Armia Krajowa, most notable of them being the
Warsaw Uprising that took place in between August 1 and October 2, and failed due to the Soviet refusal, due to differences in ideology, to help; another one was
Operation Ostra Brama: the
Armia Krajowa or
Home Army turned the weapons given to them by the Nazi Germans (in hope that they would fight the incoming Soviets) against the Nazi Germans—in the end the Home Army together with the Soviet troops took over the Greater
Vilnius area to the dismay of the
Lithuanians. On 25 June 1944, the
Battle of Osuchy started—one of the largest battles between the Polish resistance and
Nazi Germany in
occupied Poland during
World War II, essentially a continuation of the
Zamosc Uprising. During
Operation Most III, in 1944, the Polish
Home Army or
Armia Krajowa provided the British with the parts of the
V-2 rocket. Norwegian
sabotages of the German nuclear program drew to a close after three years on 20 February 1944, with the saboteur bombing of the ferry
SF Hydro. The ferry was to carry railway cars with
heavy water drums from the
Vemork hydroelectric plant, where they were produced, across
Lake Tinn so they could be shipped to Germany. Its sinking effectively ended Nazi nuclear ambitions. The series of raids on the plant was later dubbed by the British
SOE as the most successful act of sabotage in all of World War II, and was used as a basis for the US war movie
The Heroes of Telemark. As an initiation of their uprising,
Slovakian rebels entered Banská Bystrica on the morning of 30 August 1944, the second day of the rebellion, and made it their headquarters. By 10 September, the insurgents gained control of large areas of central and eastern Slovakia. That included two captured airfields. As a result of the two-week-old insurgency, the Soviet Air Force was able to begin flying in equipment to Slovakian and Soviet partisans. On 9 September 1944, the Communist-led
partisan movement in Bulgaria organized to fight the Bulgarian pro-Axis authorities and the
Wehrmacht overthrew the pro-Axis government of Bulgaria. This led to Bulgaria switching sides in World War II from the Axis to the Allies and to the Soviet invasion of Bulgaria which resulted in the establishment of the Stalinist regime in Bulgaria after the war. Uprising defender.jpg|right|
Member of the Polish Home Army defending a barricade in
Warsaw's Powiśle district during the
Warsaw Uprising, August 1944 Warsaw_1944.jpg|right|Warsaw Uprising, August 1944 Members of the Maquis in La Tresorerie.jpg|right|Members of the
French resistance group
Maquis in
La Tresorerie, 14 September 1944,
Boulogne 101st with members of dutch resistance.jpg|right|Members of the
Dutch Resistance with troops of the US
101st Airborne Division in front of the Lambertus church in Veghel during
Operation Market Garden, September 1944 VemorkHydroelectricPlant.jpg|right|The Vemork hydroelectric plant in Norway, site of the
heavy water production, and a part of the German nuclear program,
sabotaged by Norwegians between 1942 and 1944 AK-soldiers Parasol Regiment Warsaw Uprising 1944.jpg|right|Polish resistance soldiers during 1944
Warsaw Uprising Stjepan Stevo Filipović.jpg|right|
Yugoslav Partisan fighter
Stjepan "Stevo" Filipović shouting "Smrt fašizmu sloboda narodu!" ("Death to fascism, freedom to the people!") (the Partisan slogan) seconds before plunging to his death Bulgarian partisans Khaldei.jpg|left|
Bulgarian partisans entering Sofia on 9 September 1944 Gedenktafel Hünensteig 6 (Stegl) Leo Borchard.jpg|right|Berlin memorial plaque,
Ruth Andreas-Friedrich () An Italian partisan in Florence, 14 August 1944. TR2282.jpg|right| An
Italian partisan in
Florence on August 14, 1944 I "tre Martiri" (Mario Cappelli, Luigi Nicolò, Adelio Pagliarani).jpg|right|Three Italian partisans executed by public hanging in
Rimini, August 1944
1945 Since January 1945, members of the anti-fascist
National Committee for a Free Germany (NKFD) had been allowed to form
companies which would participate as an as an auxiliary force of the Red Army in its military operations. The NKFD was formed in 1943 mostly of the German prisoners of war in the USSR which agreed to side the Red Army. While its leadership participated only in non-violent activities such as appeal to the German troops to surrender like during the
Battle of Korsun–Cherkassy, in December 1943, its members of lower ranks began forming Combat Groups (or Combat Units, ) were sent to the
Wehrmacht rear areas where they combined propaganda with collecting intelligence, performing military reconnaissance, sabotage and combat against the
Wehrmacht. Although until 1945
Kampfgruppen had been only small
commandos, in 1945, it was allowed for NKFD to form companies which would be sent at the front. They pretended to be scattered
Wehrmacht soldiers and attempted to enter behind the German lines, and if the latter was successful, they persuaded the troops besieged by the Red Army to surrender, and if the latter refused, they participated in combat and withdrew. There are clear evidences of the NKFD units participating in combat against the
Wehrmacht in the
Battle of Königsberg,
siege of Breslau and in the
Courland Pocket, as well as in the rather minor battles for Thorn and Graudenz and the
siege of Danzig. As
Otto Lasch wrote, "We could no longer think of a useful recipe for how our own soldiers should behave in such cases. The fight seemed to had become pointless if Germans were now fighting against Germans." There are several testimonies of the Germans who participated in the war that they saw members of the NKFD fighting alongside the Red Army during the
Battle of Berlin, however, there is no documentary evidence, at least yet, to support these claims. During the
Vienna offensive of the Red Army between March and April 1945, the
Austrian resistance groups in the army launched the led by major
Carl Szokoll, a plot to surrender Vienna to the Red Army and therefore save it from destruction. Although the plot had failed, Szokoll survived, and the city only saw moderate fighting and the inner districts saw practically no fighting. tanks during the
Prague uprising During the last days of the war, on 5 May 1945, the
Czech resistance launched the
Prague uprising as the Allied forces advanced to Prague. The uprising was supported by the 1st Division of the
Russian Liberation Army (ROA), a collaborationist unit formed mainly of ethnic Russian POWs in Germany. The ROA and the political movement behind it led by the Soviet defector general
Andrey Vlasov was itself, as
Martin Malia calls it, a "resistance" movement to Stalinism, but it achieved little but a
de-jure independent small Nazi-sponsored army headed by the
Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia, a political organization which presented a democratic political program despite the Nazi control of the Vlasov movement. Initially, the
Prague offensive of the Red Army which would liberate Czechoslovakia concurrently with the uprising, was set on 7 May, but as the uprising began the Red Army was ordered to advance the launch of its offensive to 6 May. The Western Allies did not participate in the liberation of Prague, and after the war the Stalinist regime was set up in Czechoslovakia. ==Resistance movements during World War II==