p The nazi "new order" rested on the assumption that hyperbolised terror and the physical extermination of millions of people would bend the survivors to its will. And the slavish 60 servility of the Quislings and Petains. seemed to bear this out. But the events soon dispelled the illusion.

p Powerful popular movements, later named the Resistance, began in all nazi-occupied countries. And the nazi dream of a vanquished Europe went up in the flames lit by the Resistance.

p From the first days Czechoslovakia was occupied, before the outbreak of the world war, the people resisted the arrogant invader. In 1940 a wave of strikes swept Slovakia. And from the beginning of September a resistance movement gradually gained momentum in Poland.

p The French surrender sparked a broad movement of national resistance. One trend in the movement consisted of sections of the bourgeoisie and “middle” classes who had had no part in treason and the cowardly capitulation. They responded to General de Gaulle, who issued his first appeal for resistance from London on June 18, 1940. The other trend was that of the working people, bqrn of their patriotic determination to save the nation from extinction. Political and economic resistance combined with a gradually mounting armed struggle.

p Historians of the French Resistance tell of its beginnings. In the back room of a small café in Dechy (Nord department) a dozen people gathered at the beginning of August 1940 to swear vengeance. Heading this group was a ao-year-old Italian, Eusebio Ferrari, and FeUicien Joly, a Frenchman, also aged 20, was made his deputy. A red cloth streamer inscribed "Courage and Faith”, the slogan of the first French Resistance groups, appeared the following day on the pilon of a power transmission line. The Ferrari group began by attacking nazi soldiers and organising sabotage in war factories. In Debember 1946 they derailed a German military train and blew up a power station.

p Pierre Georges, a legendary Resistance fighter subsequently known as Fabien, organised young people in Lyons, then Marseilles, then Corsica. Jean MeYot did the same in Toulon. One of the most battle-steeled fighters, Charles Debarge, began with a handful of followers. His small band blew up a catering establishment filled with Germans, following up with raids on German posts and with a few larger acts of diversion. On May 15, 1941, he and a few other Resistance fighters led the strike of 100,000 miners in Nord Department. The following episode, described by Charles Tillon, shows the kind of strike it was. "In Bruay, on June 8, a nazi emissary asked the miners: 61 ’You have enough bread, enough meat and soap; what more do you want?’ A worker shouted: ’We want rifles!’ ”  [61•1 

p The Resistance movement in France originated on French soil, in the thick of the people. It was the beginning of a full-scale war of liberation by civilians against invaders. Similar developments were seen in Belgium, Norway and other nazi-occupied European countries.

p On April 6, 1941, Hitler made his sneak attack on Yugoslavia and Greece. What had happened in the West somewhat earlier, was repeated: Yugoslavia surrendered on April 18 and Greece on April 27. The surrenders were signed by delegates of the governments and military commands, and were not accepted by the people.

p The Yugoslav workers and peasants began collecting arms and the first partisan groups formed in the mountains and forests, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Early in May 1941 Communist Party leaders conferred in Zagreb at a secret meeting-place of the Central Committee, adopting the decision to prepare for an armed rising.

p The people in Greece rose to the occasion, with detachments of insurrectionists forming in the country and committing the first acts of diversion. Manolis Glezos, a man of courage beyond compare, performed his deathless feat: on May 31, 1941, risking his life, he tore down the nazi flag from the Acropolis, replacing it with the Greek national flag. It was a bold call to arms.

p A distinctly new factor came into evidence. The general crisis of capitalism, which had prompted the national betrayal of the big bourgeoisie and landowners in the nazi-attacked countries, saw the masses rising against the aggressors. The war gradually became a people’s war, a just war of liberation.

p The liberative aims of the Resistance movement and its identity with the national interest and international duty attracted more and more people, exerting a powerful influence on the nature of the war. The Communists played a prominent part in this, being always to the fore of the Resistance in all countries.

p The nature of the war changed completely after the Soviet Union, attacked by the nazis, was drawn into it.

This was the main factor, making it a just war of liberation.