Jewish resistance movement
Encyclopedia
Jewish resistance leading up to and lasting throughout the Holocaust included a multitude of different social responses by those oppressed. Due to the careful organization and overwhelming military might of the Nazi German State
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...

 and its supporters, many Jews were unable to resist the killings. There were, however, many cases of attempts at resistance in one form or another, and over a hundred armed Jewish uprisings.

Types of resistance

In his book The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy, Martin Gilbert
Martin Gilbert
Sir Martin John Gilbert, CBE, PC is a British historian and Fellow of Merton College, University of Oxford. He is the author of over eighty books, including works on the Holocaust and Jewish history...

 describes the types of resistance:
"In every ghetto
Ghetto
A ghetto is a section of a city predominantly occupied by a group who live there, especially because of social, economic, or legal issues.The term was originally used in Venice to describe the area where Jews were compelled to live. The term now refers to an overcrowded urban area often associated...

, in every deportation train, in every labor camp
Labor camp
A labor camp is a simplified detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons...

, even in the death camps, the will to resist was strong, and took many forms. Fighting with the few weapons that would be found, individual acts of defiance and protest, the courage of obtaining food and water under the threat of death, the superiority of refusing to allow the Germans their final wish to gloat over panic and despair.

Even passivity was a form of resistance. To die with dignity was a form of resistance. To resist the demoralizing, brutalizing force of evil, to refuse to be reduced to the level of animals, to live through the torment, to outlive the tormentors, these too were acts of resistance. Merely to give a witness of these events in testimony was, in the end, a contribution to victory. Simply to survive was a victory of the human spirit."



This view is supported by Yehuda Bauer
Yehuda Bauer
Yehuda Bauer is a historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He is a Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.-Biography:...

 who wrote that resistance of the Nazis comprised not only physical opposition, but any activity that gave the Jewish people dignity and humanity in the most humiliating and inhumane conditions. Bauer disputes the popular view that most Jews went to their deaths passively. He argues that, given the conditions in which the Jews of Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...

 had to live under and endure, what is surprising is not how little resistance there was, but rather how much.

In ghettos

Between April and May 1943, Jewish men and women of the Warsaw ghetto
Warsaw Ghetto
The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of all Jewish Ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II. It was established in the Polish capital between October and November 15, 1940, in the territory of General Government of the German-occupied Poland, with over 400,000 Jews from the vicinity...

 took up arms and revolted against the Nazis after it became clear that the Germans were deporting remaining Ghetto inhabitants to the Treblinka extermination camp
Treblinka extermination camp
Treblinka was a Nazi extermination camp in occupied Poland during World War II near the village of Treblinka in the modern-day Masovian Voivodeship of Poland. The camp, which was constructed as part of Operation Reinhard, operated between and ,. During this time, approximately 850,000 men, women...

. Warsaw Jews of the Jewish Combat Organization, and the Jewish Military Union attacked the Germans with a handful of small arms and Molotov cocktails. After fierce fighting, vastly superior German forces pacified the Warsaw Ghetto and either murdered or deported all of the remaining inhabitants to the Nazi killing centers.
Stroop Report
Stroop Report
The Stroop Report was an official 75-page report prepared in May 1943 by Jürgen Stroop of the Waffen SS, commander of the German forces which liquidated the Warsaw ghetto, to Heinrich Himmler. It documented the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising...

There were a total of seven major ghetto uprisings, as well as armed struggles during the final liquidations of seven more ghettos.

In concentration camps

There were also major resistance efforts in three of the extermination camps.
  • In August 1943, an uprising took place at the Treblinka extermination camp
    Treblinka extermination camp
    Treblinka was a Nazi extermination camp in occupied Poland during World War II near the village of Treblinka in the modern-day Masovian Voivodeship of Poland. The camp, which was constructed as part of Operation Reinhard, operated between and ,. During this time, approximately 850,000 men, women...

    . The participants obtained guns and grenades after two young men used forged keys and snuck into the weapons store. The weapons were then distributed around the camp in garbage bins. However, during the distribution of arms, a Nazi guard stopped a prisoner and found contraband money on him. Fearing that the prisoner would be tortured and give away the plan, the organizers decided to launch the revolt ahead of schedule without completing the distribution of weapons, and set off a single grenade - the agreed-upon signal for the uprising. The prisoners then attacked the Nazi guards with guns and grenades. Several German and Ukrainian guards were killed, a fuel tank was set on fire, barracks and warehouses were set burned, military vehicles were disabled, and grenades were thrown at the SS headquarters. The guards replied with machine-gun fire, and 1,500 inmates were killed, though 70 inmates escaped to freedom. The guards chased those who had escaped on horseback and in cars, but some of those who escaped were armed, and returned the guards' fire. Gassing operations at the camp were interrupted for a month.

  • In October 1943, an uprising took place at Sobibór extermination camp
    Sobibór extermination camp
    Sobibor was a Nazi German extermination camp located on the outskirts of the town of Sobibór, Lublin Voivodeship of occupied Poland as part of Operation Reinhard; the official German name was SS-Sonderkommando Sobibor...

    , led by Polish-Jewish prisoner Leon Feldhendler and Soviet-Jewish POW Alexander Pechersky
    Alexander Pechersky
    Alexander Aronovich Pechersky was the chief organizer and leader of the most successful uprising and mass-escape of Jews from a Nazi extermination camp during World War II; this occurred at the Sobibor extermination camp on 14 October 1943.-Early life:...

    . The inmates covertly killed 11 German SS officers, including the deputy commander, and a number of guards. Although the plan was to kill all of SS members and walk out of the main gate of the camp, the guards discovered the killings and opened fire. The inmates then had to then run for freedom under fire, with roughly 300 of the 600 inmates in the camp escaping alive. All but 50-70 of the inmates were killed in the surrounding minefields or recaptured and executed by the Germans. The escape forced the Nazis to close the camp.

  • On October 7, 1944, the Jewish Sonderkommando
    Sonderkommando
    Sonderkommandos were work units of Nazi death camp prisoners, composed almost entirely of Jews, who were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims during The Holocaust...

    s (those inmates kept separate from the main camp and put to work in the gas chamber
    Gas chamber
    A gas chamber is an apparatus for killing humans or animals with gas, consisting of a sealed chamber into which a poisonous or asphyxiant gas is introduced. The most commonly used poisonous agent is hydrogen cyanide; carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide have also been used...

    s and crematoria) at Auschwitz staged an uprising. Female inmates had smuggled in explosives from a weapons factory, and Crematorium IV was partly destroyed by an explosion. At this stage they were joined by the Birkenau One Kommando
    Kommando
    Kommando is a generic German word meaning unit or command. During World War II it was also the basic unit of organisation of slave labourers in German concentration camps....

    , which also overpowered their guards and broke out of the compound. The inmates then attempted a mass escape, but were stopped by heavy fire. Three SS guards were killed in the uprising, including one who was pushed alive into an oven. Almost all of the 250 escapees were killed. There were also international plans for a general uprising in Auschwitz, coordinated with an Allied
    Allies of World War II
    The Allies of World War II were the countries that opposed the Axis powers during the Second World War . Former Axis states contributing to the Allied victory are not considered Allied states...

     air raid
    Airstrike
    An air strike is an attack on a specific objective by military aircraft during an offensive mission. Air strikes are commonly delivered from aircraft such as fighters, bombers, ground attack aircraft, attack helicopters, and others...

     and a Polish resistance
    Armia Krajowa
    The Armia Krajowa , or Home Army, was the dominant Polish resistance movement in World War II German-occupied Poland. It was formed in February 1942 from the Związek Walki Zbrojnej . Over the next two years, it absorbed most other Polish underground forces...

     attack from the outside.

Partisan groups

There were a number of Jewish partisan groups operating in many countries. Jewish partisans were most numerous in Eastern Europe. See Eugenio Calò
Eugenio Calò
Eugenio Calò is a national hero of Italy. Born in Pisa to an old Sephardi family, he was posthumously awarded the Gold Medal for Military Valour, Italy's highest honor for heroism. Eugenio Calò was an Italian partisan, second in command of the Pio Borri partisan division that fought the Germans in...

 for the story of a Jewish Italian partisan. Jewish volunteers from Mandate Palestine, most famously Hannah Szenes
Hannah Szenes
Hannah Szenes , often anglicized as Hannah Senesh was a Hungarian Jew, one of 37 Jews from the British Mandate for Palestine that were trained by the British army to parachute into Yugoslavia during the Second World War in order to help save the Jews of Hungary, who were about to be deported to...

, parachuted into Europe in an attempt to organize resistance.

In Germany

Jewish resistance within Germany itself during the Nazi era took a variety of forms, from sabotage and disruptions to providing intelligence to Allied
Allies of World War II
The Allies of World War II were the countries that opposed the Axis powers during the Second World War . Former Axis states contributing to the Allied victory are not considered Allied states...

 forces, distributing anti-Nazi propaganda, as well as participating in attempts to assist Jewish emigration out of Nazi-controlled territories. It has been argued that, for Jews during the Holocaust, given the intent of the Nazi regime to exterminate Jews, survival itself constituted an act considered a form of resistance. Jewish participation in the German resistance
German Resistance
The German resistance was the opposition by individuals and groups in Germany to Adolf Hitler or the National Socialist regime between 1933 and 1945. Some of these engaged in active plans to remove Adolf Hitler from power and overthrow his regime...

 was largely confined to the underground activities of left-wing Zionist groups such as Werkleute, Hashomer Hatzair
Hashomer Hatzair
Hashomer Hatzair is a Socialist–Zionist youth movement founded in 1913 in Galicia, Austria-Hungary, and was also the name of the group's political party in the Yishuv in the pre-1948 British Mandate of Palestine...

 and Ha-bonim, and the German Social Democrats
Social Democratic Party of Germany
The Social Democratic Party of Germany is a social-democratic political party in Germany...

, Communists
Communist Party of Germany
The Communist Party of Germany was a major political party in Germany between 1918 and 1933, and a minor party in West Germany in the postwar period until it was banned in 1956...

, and independent left-wing groups such as New Beginning
New Beginning
New Beginning is the fourth album by singer/songwriter Tracy Chapman, released in 1995 . According to Nielsen Soundscan it is her biggest-selling recording with 3.8 million copies sold, and has shipped a total of five million copies throughout the United States according to the RIAA.According to...

. Much of the non-left wing and non-Jewish opposition to Hitler in Germany (i.e., conservative and religious forces), although often opposed to the Nazi plans for extermination of German and European Jewry, in many instances itself harbored anti-Jewish sentiments.

A celebrated case involved the arrest and execution of Helmut Hirsch
Helmut Hirsch
Helmut Hirsch was a German Jew who was executed for his part in a bombing plot intended to destabilize the German Reich...

, a Jewish architectural student originally from Stuttgart
Stuttgart
Stuttgart is the capital of the state of Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany. The sixth-largest city in Germany, Stuttgart has a population of 600,038 while the metropolitan area has a population of 5.3 million ....

, in connection with a plot to bomb Nazi Party headquarters in Nuremberg
Nuremberg
Nuremberg[p] is a city in the German state of Bavaria, in the administrative region of Middle Franconia. Situated on the Pegnitz river and the Rhine–Main–Danube Canal, it is located about north of Munich and is Franconia's largest city. The population is 505,664...

. Hirsch became involved in the Black Front
Black Front
The Black Front was a group formed by Otto Strasser after his expulsion from the Nazi Party in 1930. Strasser believed the original anti-capitalist nature of the NSDAP had been betrayed by Adolf Hitler...

, a breakaway faction from the Nazi Party led by Otto Strasser
Otto Strasser
Otto Johann Maximilian Strasser was a German politician and 'left-wing' member of the National Socialist German Workers Party. Strasser was part of the ‘left-wing’ faction of the party, along with his brother Gregor Strasser, and broke from the party due to disputes with the ‘Hitlerite’ faction...

. After being captured by the Gestapo
Gestapo
The Gestapo was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Beginning on 20 April 1934, it was under the administration of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his position as Chief of German Police...

 in December 1936, Hirsch confessed to planning to murder Julius Streicher
Julius Streicher
Julius Streicher was a prominent Nazi prior to World War II. He was the founder and publisher of Der Stürmer newspaper, which became a central element of the Nazi propaganda machine...

, a leading Nazi official and editor of the virulently anti-Semitic Der Stürmer
Der Stürmer
Der Stürmer was a weekly tabloid-format Nazi newspaper published by Julius Streicher from 1923 to the end of World War II in 1945, with brief suspensions in publication due to legal difficulties. It was a significant part of the Nazi propaganda machinery and was vehemently anti-Semitic...

newspaper, on behalf of Strasser and the Black Front. Hirsch was sentenced to death on March 8, 1937, and on June 4 was beheaded with an axe.

Perhaps the most significant Jewish resistance group within Germany for which records survive was the Berlin-based Baum Group
Herbert Baum
Herbert Baum was a Jewish member of the German resistance against National Socialism.Baum was born in Mosina, Province of Posen; his family moved to Berlin when he was young...

 (Baum-Gruppe), which was active from 1937 to 1942. Largely young Jewish women and men, the group disseminated anti-Nazi leaflets, and organized semi-public demonstrations. Its most notable action was the bombing of an anti-Soviet exhibit organized by Joseph Goebbels
Joseph Goebbels
Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. As one of Adolf Hitler's closest associates and most devout followers, he was known for his zealous oratory and anti-Semitism...

 in Berlin's Lustgarten
Lustgarten
The Lustgarten is a park on Museum Island in central Berlin, near the site of the former Berliner Stadtschloss of which it was originally a part...

. The action resulted in mass arrests, executions, and reprisals against German Jews. Because of the reprisals it provoked, the bombing led to debate within opposition circles similar to those that took place elsewhere where the Jewish resistance was active—taking action and risking murderous reprisal
Reprisal
In international law, a reprisal is a limited and deliberate violation of international law to punish another sovereign state that has already broken them. Reprisals in the laws of war are extremely limited, as they commonly breached the rights of civilians, an action outlawed by the Geneva...

s vs. being non-confrontational with the hopes of maximizing survival.

Netherlands

In the Netherlands, the only pre-war group that immediately started resistance against the German occupation
Dutch resistance
Dutch resistance to the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands during World War II can be mainly characterized by its prominent non-violence, summitting in over 300,000 people in hiding in the autumn of 1944, tended to by some 60,000 to 200,000 illegal landlords and caretakers and tolerated knowingly...

 was the communist party
Communist Party of the Netherlands
The Communist Party of the Netherlands was a Dutch communist political party. The CPN is one of the predecessors of the GreenLeft.- Foundation :...

. During the first two war years, it was by far the biggest resistance organization, much bigger than all other organizations put together. A major act of resistance was the organisation of the February strike
February strike
The 1941 February Strike, also known as 'The Strike of February 1941', was a general strike organized during World War II in the Netherlands against the anti-Jewish measures and activities of the Nazis. Its direct causes were the pogroms held by the Germans in the Jewish neighbourhood of Amsterdam....

 in 1941, in protest against anti-Jewish measures. In this resistance, many Jews participated. About 1.000 Dutch Jews took part in resisting the Germans, and of those, 500 perished in doing so. In 1988, a monument to their memory was unveiled by the then mayor of Amsterdam, Ed van Thijn
Ed van Thijn
Eduard "Ed" van Thijn is a retired Dutch politician of the Labour Party . He served as a Member of the House of Representatives from February 23, 1967 until September 11, 1981. When Joop den Uyl became Prime Minister, Van Thijn became the Parliamentary leader in the House of Representatives,...

.

Among the first Jewish resisters was the German fugitive Ernst Cahn, owner of an ice cream parlor. Together with his partner, Kohn, he had an ammonia
Ammonia
Ammonia is a compound of nitrogen and hydrogen with the formula . It is a colourless gas with a characteristic pungent odour. Ammonia contributes significantly to the nutritional needs of terrestrial organisms by serving as a precursor to food and fertilizers. Ammonia, either directly or...

 gas cylinder installed in the parlor to stave off attacks from the militant arm of the fascist NSB
National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands
The National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands was a Dutch fascist and later national socialist political party. As a parliamentary party participating in legislative elections, the NSB had some success during the 1930s...

, the so called "Weerafdeling"("WA"). One day in February 1941 the German police forced their entrance into the parlor, and were gassed. Later, Cahn was caught and on March 3rd, 1941 he became the first civilian to be executed by a Nazi firing squad in the Netherlands.

Benny Bluhm, a boxer, organized Jewish fighting parties consisting of members of his boxing school to resist attacks. One of these brawls led to the death of a WA-member, H. Koot, and subsequently the Germans ordered the first Dutch razzia of Jews as a reprisal. That in turn led to the Februaristaking, the February Strike
February strike
The 1941 February Strike, also known as 'The Strike of February 1941', was a general strike organized during World War II in the Netherlands against the anti-Jewish measures and activities of the Nazis. Its direct causes were the pogroms held by the Germans in the Jewish neighbourhood of Amsterdam....

. Bluhm's group was the only Jewish group resisting the Germans in Holland and the first active group of resistance fighters in Holland. Bluhm survived the war, and strove for a monument for the Jewish resisters that came about two years after his death in 1986.

Numerous Jews participated in resisting the Germans. The Jewish director of the assembly center in the "Hollandsche Schouwburg", a former theatre, Walter Susskind
Walter Susskind
Jan Walter Susskind was a Czech-born British conductor.-Biography:Susskind was born in Prague, Austria–Hungary, now the Czech Republic. His father was a Viennese music critic and his Czech mother was a piano teacher. At the State Conservatorium he studied under composer Josef Suk, the son-in-law...

, was instrumental in smuggling children out of his centre. He was aided by his assistant Jacques van de Kar and the director of the nearby crèche, Mrs Pimentel.

Within the underground communist party, a militant group was formed: de Nederlandse Volksmilitie (NVM, Dutch Peoples Militia). The leader was the Jewish Sally (Samuel) Dormits, who had military experience from guerrilla warfare in Brazil and participation in the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...

. This organisation was formed in The Hague
The Hague
The Hague is the capital city of the province of South Holland in the Netherlands. With a population of 500,000 inhabitants , it is the third largest city of the Netherlands, after Amsterdam and Rotterdam...

 but became mainly located in Rotterdam
Rotterdam
Rotterdam is the second-largest city in the Netherlands and one of the largest ports in the world. Starting as a dam on the Rotte river, Rotterdam has grown into a major international commercial centre...

. It counted about 200 (mainly Jewish) participants. They made several bomb attacks on German troop trains and arson attacks on cinemas, which were forbidden for Jews. Dormits was caught after stealing a handbag off a woman in order to obtain an identification card for his Jewish girlfriend, who also participated in the resistance. Dormits committed suicide in the police station by shooting himself through the head. From a cash ticket of a shop the police found the hiding place of Dormits and discovered bombs, arson material, illegal papers, reports about resistance actions and a list of participants. The Gestapo
Gestapo
The Gestapo was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Beginning on 20 April 1934, it was under the administration of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his position as Chief of German Police...

 was warned immediately and that day two hundred people were arrested, followed by many more connected people in Rotterdam, The Hague and Amsterdam
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...

. The Dutch police participated in torturing the Jewish communists. After a trial more than 20 were shot to death; most of the others died in concentration camps or were gassed in Auschwitz. Only a few survived. The war grave of Dormits has recently been destroyed by municipal authorities in Rotterdam.

Belgium

In Belgium, Jewish resistance started in early 1941 when Jewish communists committed many actions against Belgian collaborators. After the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 actions of sabotage and urban warfare
Urban warfare
Urban warfare is combat conducted in urban areas such as towns and cities. Urban combat is very different from combat in the open at both the operational and tactical level...

 was initiated against German troops. The "military" branch of the main Belgian resistance movement, the "Front de l'Interieur" (F.I.) were the "Partisans Armes" (P.A.-M.O.I) build around a large nucleus of Jewish foreigners, so were 3 companies (together around 100 men) active in the larger Brussels area. They shot the Jew responsible for the transportation lists to the east, Holtzinger, and destroyed documents in the head branch of the A.J.B., the local "Judenrat" which was created on German order.
On April 19, 1943, an attack was perpetrated against the 20th Transport train from Mechelen to Auschwitz, a unique feat in the Holocaust in Europe. George (Yura) Lifshitz, a young Jewish doctor with two brave Belgian students, Robert Maistriau and Jean Franklemon, acted on their own initiative, in spite the fact all three of them were members of resistance groups. 17 Jews escaped from the train, another 115 escaped due to their own efforts before the attack.
The C.D.J. or "Comite de Defence des Juifs", was created in the summer of 1942 by Gert (Hertz) Jospa, a Jewish communist together with Chaim Perelman, professor at the Free University of Brussels, and Abush Verber leader of a left Zionist organization. Their objective was to help and find hiding places for as many Jews as possible. Obtaining the assistance of Yvonne Nevejean
Yvonne Nevéjean
Yvonne Feyerick Nevéjean was one of the leaders of an organisation that helped hide Jewish children in Nazi-occupied Belgium during World War II. She was instrumental in hiding about 4000 children, many with Catholic families and institutions. After the war she was honoured inside and outside...

, head of the O.N.E. (Office National de l'Enfance) more than 3000 Jewish children were hidden in orphanages, private homes and Catholic institutions, as well as many adults. Some 40,000 Jews survived the war in Belgium. 28,900 were deported to Auschwitz (nearly 26,000 from Belgian territory together with 350 Roma), of these only 1200 survived the death camps.

Assassination

On 4 February 1936, the leader of the NSDAP(Nazi) party in Switzerland Wilhelm Gustloff
Wilhelm Gustloff
Wilhelm Gustloff was the German leader of the NSDAP party in Switzerland; he founded the Swiss branch of the party at Davos in 1932., which grouped Nazi party members who lived outside the German Reich....

 was assassinated by David Frankfurter
David Frankfurter
David Frankfurter was a Croatian Jew known for assassinating Swiss branch leader of the German NSDAP Wilhelm Gustloff in 1936 in Davos, Switzerland.-Background, family and education:...

.

On 9 November 1938, Nazi diplomat Ernst vom Rath
Ernst vom Rath
Ernst Eduard vom Rath was a German diplomat, remembered for his assassination in Paris in 1938 by a Jewish youth, Herschel Grynszpan. The assassination triggered Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass"....

 was assassinated in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 by a Jewish youth, Herschel Grynszpan
Herschel Grynszpan
Herschel Feibel Grynszpan was a Polish Jew and political assassin. Grynszpan's assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath on November 7, 1938, after the deportation of his family, provided the excuse for the Nazi Kristallnacht, the antisemitic pogrom of November 9–10, 1938...

.

Organizations

  • American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
    American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
    The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee is a worldwide Jewish relief organization headquartered in New York. It was established in 1914 and is active in more than 70 countries....

  • Antyfaszystowska Organizacja Bojowa
    Antyfaszystowska Organizacja Bojowa
    Antyfaszystowska Organizacja Bojowa was an underground organization formed in 1942 in the Ghetto in Białystok by former officers of the Polish Land Forces...

  • Betar
    Betar
    The Betar Movement is a Revisionist Zionist youth movement founded in 1923 in Riga, Latvia, by Vladimir Jabotinsky. It has been traditionally linked to the original Herut and then Likud political parties of Israel, and was closely affiliated with the pre-Israel Revisionist Zionist splinter group...

  • Fareinigte Partizaner Organizacje
    Fareinigte Partizaner Organizacje
    The Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye was a Jewish resistance organization based in the Vilna Ghetto that organized armed resistance against the Nazis during World War II...

  • HaShomer HaTzair
    Hashomer Hatzair
    Hashomer Hatzair is a Socialist–Zionist youth movement founded in 1913 in Galicia, Austria-Hungary, and was also the name of the group's political party in the Yishuv in the pre-1948 British Mandate of Palestine...

  • Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
    Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
    The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was formed on Joseph Stalin's order in Kuibyshev in April 1942 with the official support of the Soviet authorities...

  • Zionist youth movement
    Zionist youth movement
    A Zionist youth movement is an organization formed for Jewish children and adolescents for educational, social, and ideological development, including a belief in Jewish nationalism as represented in the State of Israel...

  • Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa
    Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa
    The Jewish Combat Organization was a World War II resistance movement, which was instrumental in engineering the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. ŻOB took part in a number of other resistance activities as well...

  • Zydowski Zwiazek Walki

Jewish resistance fighters

  • Mordechaj Anielewicz
    Mordechaj Anielewicz
    Mordechaj Anielewicz was the leader of Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa , also known as ŻOB, during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from January to May 1943.-Biography:Anielewicz was born into a poor family in the small town of Wyszków near Warsaw...

  • Dawid Apfelbaum
  • Paweł Frenkiel
  • Yitzhak Arad
    Yitzhak Arad
    Yitzhak Arad , is an Israeli historian, retired IDF brigadier general and a former Soviet partisan who has served as director of Yad Vashem from 1972 to 1993...

  • Herbert Baum
    Herbert Baum
    Herbert Baum was a Jewish member of the German resistance against National Socialism.Baum was born in Mosina, Province of Posen; his family moved to Berlin when he was young...

  • Bielski partisans
    Bielski partisans
    The Bielski partisans were an organisation of Jewish partisans who rescued Jews from extermination and fought against the Nazi German occupiers and their collaborators in the vicinity of Nowogródek and Lida in German-occupied Poland...

  • Masha Bruskina
    Masha Bruskina
    Masha Bruskina was a 17-year-old Soviet Jewish partisan who was a volunteer nurse. She was arrested on October 14, 1941, by members of the Wehrmacht's 707 Infantry Division and the 2nd Schutzmannschaft Battalion; Lithuanian auxiliary troops under the command of Major Antanas Impulyavichus...

  • Eugenio Calò
    Eugenio Calò
    Eugenio Calò is a national hero of Italy. Born in Pisa to an old Sephardi family, he was posthumously awarded the Gold Medal for Military Valour, Italy's highest honor for heroism. Eugenio Calò was an Italian partisan, second in command of the Pio Borri partisan division that fought the Germans in...

  • Franco Cesana
    Franco Cesana
    Franco Cesana was an Italian Jew born on September 20, 1931 in the northern city of Mantova, shortly before Benito Mussolini came to power.His father was Felice , his mother was Ada Basevi . Franco had two brothers: Ermanno, born in 1918, and Lelio, born in 1920. The family moved to Roma, then to...

  • Icchak Cukierman
    Icchak Cukierman
    Icchak Cukierman , also known by his nom de guerre "Antek", or by the anglicised spelling Yitzhak Zuckerman, was one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during World War II.Cukierman was born in Vilnius, Lithuania into a Jewish family...

  • Szymon Datner
    Szymon Datner
    Szymon Datner was a Polish historian of Jewish descent, best known for his studies of Nazi war crimes committed against the Jewish population of the Białystok area after the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941.Datner settled into Białystok in 1928...

  • Sally Dormits
  • Marek Edelman
    Marek Edelman
    Marek Edelman was a Jewish-Polish political and social activist and cardiologist.Before World War II, he was a General Jewish Labour Bund activist. During the war he co-founded the Jewish Combat Organization. He took part in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, becoming its leader after the death of...

  • Abba Kovner
    Abba Kovner
    Abba Kovner was a Lithuanian Jewish Hebrew poet, writer, and partisan leader. He became one of the great poets of modern Israel. He was a cousin of the Israeli Communist Party leader Meir Vilner.-Biography:...

  • Zivia Lubetkin
    Zivia Lubetkin
    Zivia Lubetkin was one of the leaders of the Jewish underground in Nazi-occupied Warsaw and the only woman on the High Command of the resistance group Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa .-Pre-World War II:...

  • Dov Lopatyn
    Dov Lopatyn
    Dov Lopatyn was the head of the Judenrat in Łachwa, Poland in 1941-1942. He refused the demand of the Einsatzgruppen that the Lakhva Ghetto inhabitants line up for deportation, and on September 3, 1942, he led one of the first ghetto uprisings of the war.More than half of the ghetto population was...

  • Moše Pijade
  • Haviva Reik
    Haviva Reik
    Haviva Reick was one of 32 or 33 Palestinian Jewish parachutists sent by the Jewish Agency and Britain's Special Operations Executive on military missions in Nazi-occupied Europe....

  • Hannah Szenes
    Hannah Szenes
    Hannah Szenes , often anglicized as Hannah Senesh was a Hungarian Jew, one of 37 Jews from the British Mandate for Palestine that were trained by the British army to parachute into Yugoslavia during the Second World War in order to help save the Jews of Hungary, who were about to be deported to...

  • Lelio Vittorio Valobra
    Lelio Vittorio Valobra
    Lelio Vittorio Valobra is a Jewish Italian lawyer and was the chairman of DELASEM, an exponent of the Jewish resistance. In 1935, Valobra was a leading member of the Jewish community of Genoa, and was the keynote speaker at the new synagogue in the city, stating: "The pride of being able to raise...

  • Dawid Wdowiński
    Dawid Wdowinski
    Dawid Wdowiński was a psychiatrist and doctor of neurology. He was a member of the right-wing Jewish organization Hatzohar and political leader of the Żydowski Związek Wojskowy resistance organization before and during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.Before World War II, Wdowiński was a chairman of...

  • Yitzhak Wittenberg
    Yitzhak Wittenberg
    Yitzhak Wittenberg was a Jewish resistance fighter in Vilna during World War II. He became famous as the leader of the Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye, a resistance group in the Vilna Ghetto. When the Germans learned about the existence of the group, they requested from the head of the Jewish...

  • Shalom Yoran
    Shalom Yoran
    Shalom Yoran is a survivor of the Holocaust and a former Jewish partisan. His World War II memoir, The Defiant. A True Story of Jewish Vengeance and Survival, was published in 2003....

  • Simcha Zorin
    Simcha Zorin
    Shalom Zorin was a Jewish Soviet partisan commander in Minsk.Many Jewish partisans in Belorussia had their own units that operated as part of the general Belorussian partisan movement and the overall Jewish resistance movement fighting the Nazis in occupied Europe, although some of these Jewish...


See also

  • Anti-fascism
    Anti-fascism
    Anti-fascism is the opposition to fascist ideologies, groups and individuals, such as that of the resistance movements during World War II. The related term antifa derives from Antifaschismus, which is German for anti-fascism; it refers to individuals and groups on the left of the political...

  • History of the Jews during World War II
    History of the Jews during World War II
    World War II is the most tragic period in Jewish history.-German Nazi occupied Europe:By World War II, nearly all Jewish companies had either collapsed under financial pressure and declining profits, or had been forced to sell out to the Nazi-German government as part of the "Aryanization" policy...

  • Jewish Brigade
    Jewish Brigade
    The Jewish Infantry Brigade Group was a military formation of the British Army that served in Europe during the Second World War. The brigade was formed in late 1944, and its personnel fought the Germans in Italy...

  • Resistance during World War II
    Resistance during World War II
    Resistance movements during World War II occurred in every occupied country by a variety of means, ranging from non-cooperation, disinformation and propaganda to hiding crashed pilots and even to outright warfare and the recapturing of towns...

  • Rosenstrasse protest
    Rosenstrasse protest
    The Rosenstrasse protest was a nonviolent protest in Rosenstraße in Berlin in February and March 1943, carried out by the non-Jewish wives and relatives of Jewish men who had been arrested for deportation. The protests escalated until the men were released...

  • Special Interrogation Group
    Special Interrogation Group
    The Special Interrogation Group was a unit of the British Army during World War II. It was organized from German-speaking Jewish volunteers from the British Mandate of Palestine...

     (SIG)
  • Ilse Stanley
    Ilse Stanley
    Ilse Stanley , , was a German Jewish woman who, with the collusion of a handful of people ranging from Nazi members of the Gestapo to other Jewish civilians, secured the release of 412 Jewish prisoners from concentration camps between 1936 and 1938.During that time she also helped countless others...

  • Palestinian Jewish Parachutists
    Palestinian Jewish Parachutists
    Jewish Parachutists of Mandate Palestine were a group of Jewish men and women from the British Mandate for Palestine who had volunteered to join the British army parachuted into German-occupied Europe between 1943 and 1945....

  • Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
    Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
    The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the Jewish resistance that arose within the Warsaw Ghetto in German occupied Poland during World War II, and which opposed Nazi Germany's effort to transport the remaining ghetto population to Treblinka extermination camp....

  • Jewish Military Organization
    Jewish Military Organization
    The Jewish Military Organization was an outgrowth of the Betar movement in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe. After Menahem Begin fled to Soviet Union territory, Jewish veterans of the Polish Army and the National Military Organisation networked with Polish military officers to prepare for the...

  • Inglourious Basterds

External links

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