An in-depth look at an aspect of World War II often ignored in popular works - the active resistance to Nazi regimes throughout occupied parts of Europe. Recommended for readers interested in a thoroughly-researched deep dive. While accessible for the lay reader, scholars will find this book of immense value as well.

While there are countless books about the Nazi era, and many about the resistance to the Nazis and German occupation, I’m not aware of another book that attempts to cover the entire landscape of these resistance movements. This is a massive undertaking, so it’s no surprise that it takes nearly 1,000 pages to tell the tale—and that’s without taking into account resistance movements inside Germany. Kochanski takes the view that inside-Germany opposition isn’t properly categorized as resistance, so she doesn’t include that in her history. I suppose some people may object to her categorization, but I don’t she has a political agenda in her decision.

Kochanski posits that the speed of development, strength, and motivation of resistance movements was largely dependent on how Germany treated the particular country’s population. In “Aryan” countries, the German occupiers let life go on much as it had previously. In Slavic countries, they were far more heavy-handed, especially in Poland. In the better-treated countries, organized resistance grew slowly, while in Poland it was strong from the start. And, of course, as the Nazis tightened the screws, slower-to-develop resistance movements responded accordingly.

Though obviously there are these differences in how the resistance began and operated from country to country, Kochanski doesn’t organize her book by country. Her broad topics are:

Part One: Why Resist?
Part Two: Growing the Resistance
Part Three: Resistance in Action

This is essentially a chronological organization. Of course, within her chronology Kochanski focuses on the particular events within each country, but she also draws many parallels, such as in how passive resistance methods spread via graffiti that were strikingly similar across occupied countries.

Particularly interesting are the examples of how resistance movements often battled their countrymen as much as the Germans. Collaborators and resisters fought, and some resistance factions fought each other, such as communist groups against nationalist groups, Slavs against Jews.

Resistance is a thoroughly researched, well-documented and exhaustively detailed history. It’s a tremendous undertaking and should be a great resource for anybody doing further research.

It's a long, dense flyover account that aims to gather in one single volume all the disparate and spread out resistances against the Nazis that existed during WWII in all the occupied countries, as the aim stated in the introduction goes, and to that purpose groups the historical development of resistance activities in three parts: the first deals with the motivation to resist in spite of the costs of resisting ("Why Resist?"), the second part addresses the foreign assistance, coordination and logistics support for the newborn resistances through government agencies such as SOE and OSS from the UK and US ("Growing the Resistance"), and the last part is about the resistances's full blown scale of sabotage and cooperation bearing fruit to the benefit of the Allied war effort.

It's informative and helpful for getting a big picture view of the resistance against Nazi Germany as a whole instead of a per country basis, trying to establish a link throughout the diverse national resistances, although it's a dry account and rather limited in its scope despite its pretensions to be all-encompassing. Mainly because, for all that the book's goal to avoid nationalistic bias and self-aggrandising national narratives by taking a big picture view, it's still markedly partial to Britain and it's a bias that is going to be obvious the deeper one dives into the contents, to the point you might get the impression this is a narrative of pan-European resistance filtered through the British's own lionising national narrative. And not just because of how much the SOE contributed to resistance in several countries in the continent; it's still very much an Anglo-centric narrative with little in the way of other national resistances outside this sphere. And also because the self-imposed limitations harms the objective of an all-encompassing narrative of resistance, as the book purposefully excludes anti-Soviet resistance and German opposition at home.

Whilst I agree that anti-Soviet resistance merits its own volume because it did indeed outlive the war well into and up to the fall of the Soviet Union, I don't think that excluding the part of it that took place during the war proper is conducive to a proper understanding of resistance to WWII totalitarian powers, and believe it could have been worked into the global picture. How can you pretend to present a global narrative and then purposely chop a big chunk off of it with the excuse that that specific resistance lasted too long? At one point, countries were fighting both the Nazis and the Soviets. I'm aware that Kochanski has written another book on the Polish case, but they weren't the only ones that found themselves in this quandary as other Eastern European countries did too, and to exclude them with such an unconvincing argument does the book no favours. Best to have given them their own separate section, and stated by the end that the section would conclude with WWII because post-WWII is beyond the scope of the book.

Another case is Jewish resistance, which Kochanski claims are "often excluded from general histories of resistance." Are they, really? I can name a few books that deal with Jewish resistance myself, it's probably the most popular topic in books about anti-Nazi resistance besides the much-lionised French Résistance. But if the implication is that they're deliberately ignored, I don't believe that's the case, because they are generally separate and have their own dedicated books because they are a special case, as Jewish resisters had sometimes to fight both the Nazis and their own countrymen who, driven by anti-Semitism, would deal harshly with them. The Holocaust affected both victims and bystanders, Kochanski also claims, when the latter were exposed to the barbarity of Nazi rule, and I'm not sure I can go along this "us too" attempt at diluting the very specific and very targeted tragedy of the Holocaust by spreading its effects to the rest of victims. There were millions of non-Jewish victims of Nazism, but they were targeted differently and had context that's different to that of the Jews. Honestly, this sounds suspiciously like the arguments over the Holocaust in Poland that walk around uncomfortable facts that don't conflate victims and perpetrators/bystanders as neatly as some would like. The Jewish case is unique, always has been, and anyhow their inclusion here isn't exactly thorough or has much onpage-time but rather an overview.

But the third aspect that was most negatively surprising was this passage:
The German ‘resistance’ is another matter and is not covered in this book. Germany was neither invaded nor occupied and in that sense there was nothing to resist. Much of the German opposition
to Hitler was not anti-German and it did not want Germany to lose the war. Indeed, the aim of the actual plots against Hitler was to make Germany win, or at least save it from losing.

If there were any remaining doubts this book doesn't hide its biases, this should make it clear. Not only is the wording unnecessarily snooty and dismissive but the claims are questionable themselves. Why put "resistance" in air quotes in the first place if you don't intend to imply there was none or none worth the mention? I would've understood it if the author had stated the internal opposition was outside the scope of her book because this book is about armed resistance to Nazi invasion, and it'd be perfectly legitimate. The author could even have said German internal opposition is not her field of expertise so she can't dive into that, and it'd also be understandable. She could even have left it at "it's a different matter" that deserves its own book, and it'd have been fine. But this display of condescension only goes to show bias and a troubling approach to fighting totalitarianism that only considers armed resistance and wanting your country to lose a war as valid resistance, as that's what the line will imply. "Nothing" to resist? We know the Germans who resisted were few, that there could've been more they should've done to oppose Hitler, but to say that there was nothing to resist just because Germany wasn't invaded is misleading and false. There was a lot to resist, and many did, more than Kochanski and others are willing to acknowledge. And furthermore, applying the case of plots by the Abwehr and the Wehrmacht officers to the entirety of resistance groups in Germany is disingenous and disinformative, as that was by no means universal to all resisters and ignores those who did want Germany to lose early on, if wanting Germany to lose is the criteria the author needs to qualify something as legitimate resistance, sans dismissive quoting marks. And I'm not sure the "nothing in common" between domestic resistance and foreign resistance is true either. Yes, they're very different, but there are points of overlap: in one passage, Kochanski is praising the resistance carried out by Danish boys, apparently oblivious to the fact that this same thing was also done by German youths, and that just one example.

It wasn't a book that brought much new or intriguing to the table, as all of the information it contains is going to be well known to those interested in WWII resistance history, internal and by occupied populations. There's far more in-depth studies that focus on individual/national resistance that bring more to the table than this collage made of bits and pieces from here and there, and I imagine this also would answer the question of why there wasn't a general history of resistance before, a fact the blurb claims is "shocking": because the topic is complex, and as this book proves, can't exactly be contained in one single volume without falling into a number of pitfalls, omissions, overgeneralisations, and blanket judgments. My own thoughts are that a general history would've been better split in two volumes, and divided in more inclusive sections: the Anglo-assisted sphere of resistance, the Eastern resistance (and include the Soviets here), the Jewish resistance, and the German domestic resistance. Now, that would've been a great, fair, and thorough account for me.