The Maquis were rural guerrilla bands of French Resistance fighters, called maquisards, during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II. Initially, they were composed of young, mostly working-class, men who had escaped into the mountains and woods to avoid conscription into Vichy France's Service du travail obligatoire to provide forced labor for Germany. To avert capture and deportation to Germany, they became increasingly organized into active resistance groups.
Werwolf was a Nazi plan which began development in 1944, to create a resistance force which would operate behind enemy lines as the Allies advanced through Germany, in parallel with the Wehrmacht fighting in front of the lines. It is widely misconstrued as having been intended to be a guerrilla force to harass Allies forces after the defeat of Germany, but this misconception was created by Joseph Goebbels through propaganda disseminated through his "Radio Werwolf", which was not actually connected in any way with the military unit.
The French Resistance was a collection of organisations who fought the Nazi occupation of France and the collaborationist Vichy régime during the Second World War. Resistance cells were small groups of armed men and women who, in addition to their guerrilla warfare activities, were also publishers of underground newspapers, providers of first-hand intelligence information, and maintainers of escape networks that helped Allied soldiers and airmen trapped behind enemy lines. The Resistance's men and women came from all economic levels and political leanings of French society, including émigrés, academics, students, aristocrats, conservative Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, liberals, anarchists, and communists.
At the outset of World War II in September 1939, Denmark declared itself neutral. For most of the war, the country was a protectorate and then an occupied territory of Germany. The decision to occupy Denmark was taken in Berlin on 17 December 1939. On 9 April 1940, Germany occupied Denmark in Operation Weserübung. The Danish government and king functioned as relatively normal in a de facto protectorate over the country until 29 August 1943, when Germany placed Denmark under direct military occupation, which lasted until the Allied victory on 5 May 1945. Contrary to the situation in other countries under German occupation, most Danish institutions continued to function relatively normally until 1945. Both the Danish government and king remained in the country in an uneasy relationship between a democratic and a totalitarian system until the Danish government stepped down in a protest against German demands to institute the death penalty for sabotage.
The Danish resistance movements were an underground insurgency to resist the German occupation of Denmark during World War II. Due to the initially lenient arrangements, in which the Nazi occupation authority allowed the democratic government to stay in power, the resistance movement was slower to develop effective tactics on a wide scale than in some other countries.
Gwardia Ludowa or GL was a communist underground armed organization created by the communist Polish Workers' Party in German occupied Poland, with sponsorship from the Soviet Union. Formed in early 1942, within a short time Gwardia Ludowa became the largest clandestine fighting force on Polish soil which refused to join the structures of the Polish Underground State loyal to the London-based government-in-exile. In the January 1 of 1944 GL was incorporated into the communist Armia Ludowa.
Holger Danske was a Danish resistance group during World War II. It was created by veteran volunteers from the Winter War who had fought on the Finnish side against the Soviet Union. It was among the largest Danish resistance groups and consisted of around 350 volunteers towards the end of the war. The group carried out about 100 sabotage operations and was responsible for around 200 executions of informers who had revealed the identity and/or the whereabouts of members of the resistance. The group was named after the legendary Danish hero Holger Danske.
The Hvidsten Group was a Danish resistance group during World War II named after the Hvidsten Inn between Randers and Mariager in Jutland where it was formed.
The Danish Freedom Council was a clandestine body set up in September 1943 in response to growing political turmoil surrounding the occupation of Denmark by German forces during the Second World War.
The Geheime Feldpolizei, short: GFP, lit. 'Secret Field Police', was the secret military police of the German Wehrmacht until the end of the Second World War (1945). Its units carried out plain-clothed security work in the field - such as counter-espionage, counter-sabotage, detection of treasonable activities, counter-propaganda, protecting military installations and the provision of assistance to the German Army in courts-martial investigations. GFP personnel, who were also classed as Abwehrpolizei, operated as an executive branch of German military intelligence, detecting resistance activity in Germany and in occupied France. They were also known to carry out torture and executions of prisoners.
The Osvald Group was a Norwegian organisation that was the most active World War II resistance group in Norway from 1941 to the summer of 1944. Numbering more than 200 members, it committed at least 110 acts of sabotage against Nazi occupying forces and the collaborationist government of Vidkun Quisling. The organisation is perhaps best known for conducting the first act of resistance against the German occupation of Norway, when on 2 February 1942 it detonated a bomb at Oslo East Station in protest against Quisling's inauguration as Minister-President.
Schalburgtage was the popular name for the retaliation which Germans and their Danish collaborators carried out as revenge for resistance activity in the last part of the occupation of Denmark between 1944 and 1945. The word is partially a reference to sabotage and partially to the Schalburg Corps who carried out most of the actions.
A Clearing murder was a revenge killing of a known and popular Dane in the last part of the German occupation of Denmark during World War II. When a German or Danish soldier or informant was killed by the Danish resistance movement, the Peter group performed one or more clearing murder.
Jørgen Haagen Schmith, better known under the codename Citronen, was a renowned fighter in the Danish resistance movement during the German Occupation of Denmark of 1940-45. In 1951 he and his partner Bent Faurschou Hviid were posthumously awarded the United States Medal of Freedom by President Harry Truman.
The Samsing Group was a Danish resistance group in Aarhus, Denmark active from June 1943 until 6 June 1944. The group consisted of Willy Samsing, his three brothers and 10-12 other men. The group conducted some 60 large and small sabotage actions in and around Aarhus and were the driving force behind resistance operations in the city in the early years. In addition to sabotage the group collected weapons and supplies airdropped by the allies and supplied them to other groups in Jutland. In 1944 the group was dismantled by the German authorities and its members arrested. The group worked with a loosely based group of university students that had been active since 1942.
Maren Margrethe Thomsen, known as Maren Margrethe "Grethe" Bartram and "Thora", was a Danish woman who informed on at least 53 people from the Danish resistance movement during the Second World War, resulting in the early communist resistance groups being dismantled and many of their members being sent to Nazi concentration camps. Bartram informed on her brother, husband and close acquaintances.
5. Kolonne was an organization using violence and sabotage to oppose the occupation of Denmark by German forces during the Second World War. The organization was formed and based in Aarhus and with some 100 members it was one of the larger resistance groups in that area in the later years of the war. The group was created in response to the destruction of the resistance groups in Jutland by the Gestapo between late 1943 and the summer of 1944. The group functioned from June 1944 to the end of the occupation in May 1945.
The L-groups was a resistance group tasked with assassination of Danish collaborators and German forces occupying Denmark during the Second World War. The precursor to the group was established in 1940, but it was most active from 1944 to the end of the war. The group carried out at least 18 assassination operations and killed between 20 and 30 people. In 1945 the group was hard hit by arrests and killings of its members and further suffered a very high death-rate in the years immediately after the war with suicides and accidents killing a number of members. The group had strong ties to the Danish police, with 5 of its members being police officers.
When World War II started, Zagreb was the capital of the newly formed autonomous Banovina of Croatia within the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which remained neutral in the first years of the war. After the Invasion of Yugoslavia by Germany and Italy on 6 April 1941, German troops entered Zagreb on 10 April. On the same day, Slavko Kvaternik, a prominent member of the Ustaše movement, proclaimed the creation of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), an Axis puppet state, with Zagreb as its capital. Ante Pavelić was proclaimed Poglavnik of the NDH and Zagreb became the center of the Main Ustaša Headquarters, the Government of the NDH, and other political and military institutions, as well as the police and intelligence services.
Kai Henning Bothildsen Nielsen was a Danish national socialist who became a member of the Peter group in Denmark during the Second World War. He participated in numerous operations to murder and bomb civilians and public servants as collective punishment whenever the Danish resistance carried out an operation. Bothildsen was after the war convicted for 57 murders, 9 attempted murders and 116 sabotage events and given a death sentence which was eventually ratified by the Danish Supreme Court. He was executed on 9 May 1947 in Copenhagen.
