Combatants

Abstract

Those who engaged in resistance against the Nazi invasion of Europe from within the territories occupied by the Germans became combatants in a struggle that overturned the conventional distinctions between soldiers and civilians and between geographically separated battlefields and the home front. Article ten of the armistice convention signed on 22 June 1940 by General Keitel and the French government’s plenipotentiaries explicitly forbade French citizens from fighting against Germany or aiding countries at war with Germany. Continued resistance became illegal and resisters were liable to suffer summary justice as terrorists. In December 1941, Keitel, as head of the German armed forces, also promulgated the decree known as ‘Nacht und Nebel’, under the terms of which men and women guilty of committing hostile actions against the Reich in the occupied territories of France, Belgium, Holland and Norway could be either sentenced to death immediately or deported without any further contact with the outside world being permitted. Hitler is said personally to have chosen the Wagnerian expression ‘night and fog’ to evoke this disappearance into a living death which awaited at least 6000 French prisoners of the 65,000 deported for political offences including resistance (see La Martinière, 1989).