resistance, in European history, any of various secret and clandestine groups that sprang up throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II to oppose Nazi rule. The exact number of those who took part is unknown, but they included civilians who worked secretly against the occupation as well as armed bands of partisans or guerrilla fighters. Their activities ranged from publishing clandestine newspapers and assisting the escape of Jews and Allied airmen shot down over enemy territory to committing acts of sabotage, ambushing German patrols, and conveying intelligence information to the Allies.
The resistance was by no means a unified movement. Rival organizations were formed, and in several countries deep divisions existed between communist and noncommunist groups. Initially, the communists took a pacifist line, but, after Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, they joined the underground and in some areas became dominant in it. In Yugoslavia the Serbian nationalist Chetniks under Dragoljub Mihailović and the communist Partisans under Josip Broz Tito fought each other as well as the Germans, and the two major Greek movements, one nationalist and one communist, were unable to cooperate militarily against the Germans. A similar division emerged in Poland, where the Soviet Union backed the communist resistance movement and allowed the Polish nationalist underground, the Home Army, to be destroyed by the Germans in the Warsaw Uprising of autumn 1944. In the Ukraine, where the Germans were at first welcomed as liberators, the Nazi treatment of the Slavic peoples as inferior races provoked a national resistance movement that fought not only the Germans but also the partisans organized by the Soviets to harass the long German supply lines to the Eastern Front.
In Belgium a strong communist-dominated resistance movement coexisted with a resistance group constituted by former army officers. The main Norwegian and Dutch organizations, on the other hand, were closely linked with the royal governments-in-exile. The Germans’ dismissal of the legal Danish government in 1943 gave rise to a unified council of resistance groups that was able to mount considerable interference with the retreat of German divisions from Norway the following winter. Communists dominated the resistance movement in northern (occupied) France, although both there and in southern France (ruled by the puppet Vichy regime) other resistance groups were formed by former army officers, socialists, labour leaders, intellectuals, and others. In 1943 the clandestine National Council of the Resistance (Conseil National de la Résistance) was established as the central organ of coordination among all French groups. Early the following year, various belligerent forces known as maquis (named from the underbrush, or maquis, that served as their cover) were formally merged into the French Forces of the Interior (Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur [FFI]).
Many of the resistance groups were in contact with the British Special Operations Executive, which was in charge of aiding and coordinating subversive activities in Europe; and the British, Americans, and Soviets supported guerrilla bands in Axis-dominated territories by providing arms and air-dropping supplies. After the Allied landing in France on June 6, 1944, the FFI undertook military operations in support of the invasion, and it participated in the August uprising that helped liberate Paris. Resistance forces in other northern European countries also undertook military actions to assist the Allied forces.