How did people respond to persecution and murder under Nazi occupation?

The spectrum of response: armed resistance, spiritual resistance, and survival

Under Nazi occupation, victims confronted persecution and mass murder through three primary categories of response: armed resistance, spiritual resistance, and daily survival. Armed resistance meant using force against German troops, seen in partisan units like the Bielski partisans in Eastern European forests or the armed revolts in ghettos and death camps. These fighters knew military victory was impossible; their goal was to strike the enemy and die on their own terms.

Spiritual resistance preserved human dignity, moral solidarity, and cultural identity without weapons. In ghettos across Poland and Lithuania, banned schools operated in secret, religious services took place in attics, and underground archivists documented atrocities. In Warsaw, historian Emanuel Ringelblum created the Oneg Shabbat archive, burying diaries and official notices in metal milk cans beneath the ghetto streets to preserve the historical record.

Daily survival was itself an act of resistance against starvation. In the Warsaw Ghetto, official Nazi rations allocated only 180 to 220 calories per day to Jewish residents. Over 80 percent of the food consumed inside the ghetto was brought through underground sewers and narrow wall crevices by young smugglers, despite immediate execution if caught.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943

Between July and September 1942, Nazi authorities deported roughly 265,000 Jews from Warsaw to the Treblinka extermination camp. When the remaining 50,000 to 60,000 residents realized deportation meant death in gas chambers, youth movements formed underground combat groups, notably the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB) led by 24-year-old Mordechaj Anielewicz, and the Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy (ZZW).

On April 19, 1943, German forces entered to liquidate the remaining ghetto. Jewish fighters ambushed the column with hand grenades and homemade Molotov cocktails, forcing an initial retreat. SS General Juergen Stroop then ordered the ghetto burned block by block with flamethrowers and artillery. The defenders held out for 27 days until Stroop blew up the Great Synagogue on May 16, 1943, marking the end of the uprising.

Why rescue succeeded in some nations and failed in others

Rescue depended heavily on local geography, political autonomy, and social solidarity rather than individual goodwill alone. In Denmark, where internal institutions retained autonomy until August 1943, ordinary citizens mobilized fishing boats in October 1943 to ferry roughly 7,200 Jews across the narrow Oresund strait to neutral Sweden, saving 99 percent of Danish Jews. In France, the mountain village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon sheltered between 3,000 and 5,000 refugees through communal secrecy and difficult mountain terrain.

In contrast, rescue proved far more difficult in the Netherlands and occupied Poland. In the Netherlands, flat geography offered no natural hiding terrain, civil registries were thorough, and German SS rule was direct, resulting in the murder of about 75 percent of the Jewish population. In Poland, the regime imposed an automatic death penalty on rescuers and their families. Even so, the Polish underground council Zegota provided thousands with forged identification, and Irena Sendler's network smuggled roughly 2,500 children to safety.

Allied knowledge, inaction, and the role of bystanders

By late 1942, Allied governments possessed verified reports of mass murder. Polish underground courier Jan Karski traveled to London and Washington in 1942 and 1943, briefing British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In December 1942, eleven Allied nations issued a joint declaration condemning the ongoing extermination. Yet governments maintained strict immigration limits, such as Britain's 1939 White Paper quotas for Mandatory Palestine and unfilled US visa allocations.

Requests to bomb railway lines leading to Auschwitz-Birkenau were repeatedly rejected by the US War Department, which argued that all air resources had to focus on military targets. Meanwhile, the vast majority of occupied Europe remained bystanders. While some local civil services and auxiliary police battalions actively collaborated in roundups and shootings, widespread public passivity permitted Nazi authorities to carry out deportations across the continent.