In Europe

the
Sonderkommando
who were standing around: ‘Tell our brothers, our people, that we are going to our death in full awareness and full of pride.’ Then they sang the Polish national anthem, the Jews sang the ‘Hatikva’, and together they sang the ‘Internationale’. ‘While they were still singing, the car from the Red Cross [in which the Zyklon B was transported] arrived and the gas was tossed into the room, and they all gave up the ghost in song and ecstasy, dreaming of brotherhood and a better world.’
    A little less than a year later, on 7 October, 1944, a massive uprising took place. A large group of prisoners tried to escape, but despite careful preparations, the plan failed. Four SS guards were killed, 12 were wounded, 455 prisoners were machine-gunned. As late as January 1945, four women were hanged for having smuggled explosives from the Union factory into the camp.
    Today a distinction is drawn between active resistance and ‘resistiveness’, that is to say, the widespread resistance to deportation and other forms of Nazi terror within a normal society. Often – as in the cases, for example, of France, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy – the measure of resistiveness was at least as essential to the Jews’ chances of survival as outright resistance.
    In Germany, courageous cells of communists and Christians continued to work underground, and several pockets of resistance arose within the
Wehrmacht
as well. The scope of this covert resistance should not be underestimated: an indication of it is found in the sheer number of German political prisoners who died in the concentration camps, well over 100,000 in all. The actual number of Germans who sabotaged the regime, in one way or another, must have been many times that.
    Yet in Germany there was no massive, grass roots popular resistance. Despite the success of the women's uprising on Berlin's Rosenstrasse, it remained the only demonstration of its kind there. The merciless Gestapo reprisals, especially after 1941, no doubt had something to do with it:the students of the White Rose were beheaded for passing out a few pamphlets. On the other hand, the Berlin policeman Wilhelm Krützfeld, who courageously defended the Great Berlin Synagogue against the SA during Kristallnacht, was never touched: five years later he retired at his own request, ‘with the Führer's thanks for service rendered’. Striking, too, was the attitude towards dissidents within Reserve Police Battalion 101. Approximately twenty per cent of the battalion refused to take part in the first mass murders in Poland. Those dissidents received, at most, extra sentry duty or unpleasant kitchen-police tasks, but otherwise ran no risk whatsoever. Christopher Browning has emphasised, as have others, that ‘not a single case has been documented of severe punishment for Germans who refused to kill unarmed citizens’. This means that the Germans who did take part in the mass murders must, for the most part, have done so voluntarily. That compliance was probably based in part on peer pressure, partly on typical German discipline, and partly on antiSemitism – although Battalion 101 also showed few scruples, for example, when ordered to destroy villages around Zamość populated only by Poles.
    Eric Johnson interviewed forty-five Jewish survivors from Krefeld. When asked whether they had received significant assistance or support from the local population, almost ninety per cent of them said they had not. The lack of systematic resistance is also evident from Victor Klemperer's diary; he did, however, make note of individual signs of sympathy – a handshake in public, for example – when he walked down the street wearing his Star of David. In the factory where he was forced to work from 1943, Klemperer detected not the slightest trace of anti-Semitism among the German workers. According to him, every Jew who survived ‘had an Aryan angel somewhere’.
    In other parts of Europe, the resistiveness of civilian society was much more pronounced. Resistance was seen in many circles as something normal, often even as one's civic duty, no matter how great the risks. At Auschwitz, Witold Pilecki, a courageous officer in the Polish underground resistance, succeeded in infiltrating the camp as early as September 1940, and organised resistance cells for a period of two years until his escape in 1943. In Amsterdam, the communist Piet Nak openly declared the February Strike. The bankers