The Myth of the Resistance: A Selection from Tony Judt’s Postwar (2005)

“In 1941 the Germans were able to run occupied Norway with just 806 administrative personnel. The Nazis administered France with just 1,500 of their own people. So confident were they of the reliability of the French police and militias that they assigned (in addition to their administrative staff) a mere 6,000 German civil and military police to ensure the compliance of a nation of 35 million. The same was true in the Netherlands. In post-war testimony the head of German security in Amsterdam averred that ‘the main support of the German forces in the police sector and beyond was the Dutch police. Without it, not 10 percent of the German occupation tasks would have been fulfilled.’ Contrast Yugoslavia, which required the unflagging attention of entire German military divisions just to contain the armed partisans. . . .

In marked contrast to the still living memory of the Great War in many places, there was in 1945 little of which to be proud and much about which to feel embarrassed and more than a little guilty. . . . Most Europeans experienced the war passively—defeated and occupied by one set of foreigners and then liberated by another. The only source of collective national pride were the armed partisan resistance movements that had fought the invader—which is why it was in western Europe, where real resistance had actually been least in evidence, that the myth of Resistance mattered most.”—Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (2005)