Second half of September 1942. When you are oppressed in your own country,
and then you’re threatened by invasion, or even invaded by a foreign power, do you
overlook your oppression and support the national defense, or do you consider your enemy’s
enemy your friend? Or maybe you just choose to fight your own
war regardless? - these are the choices facing millions of people in India, Yugoslavia, and
the Soviet Union in 1942. This is War Against Humanity, a sub-series
of World War Two in Real-Time. I’m Spartacus Olsson. Last episode, we saw the Vichy French government
impose forced labor laws on its citizens, succumbing to German demands for more workers. As a result resistance operations began to
organize themselves more effectively. In Eastern Europe, the massacre of Jews continued,
but more and more Jews stood up to fight back. It was a new beginning for anti-Nazi resistance In late September 1942 an Allied country,
Great Britain also faces rising resistance by people they have subjugated. Since Burma fell a few months ago, the Japanese
Imperial Army is on the the doorstep of British India. The situation inside India is politically,
economically, and ethnically complicated. The British Raj rule is ostensibly pan-Indian,
but in practice it is a complicated quilt of various degrees of autonomy, quasi self
ruled regions, and direct British rule. Demands for some form of independence for
all of India have gone largely unanswered. Attempts at rebellions have been brutally
quelled on several occasions in the past three decades. But ever since Mahatma Gandhi’s peaceful
protest in the Salt march of 1930, the calls for independence have grown. Gandhi, and Jawaharlal Nehru another leader
of the Hindu independence movement of the Indian National Congress Party fell out after
the Salt March failed to lead to dominion status, the same independence that for instance
Canada, Australia New Zealand and South Africa have achieved. But at the outbreak of war both Gandhi and
Nehru, separately backed the British war effort and called for cooperation. A third leader of the Congress Party, Subhas
Chandra Bose then split form them and called for massive civil disobedience to protest
any involvement of Indians in the war, and make renewed calls for immediate independence. The British arrested him, but soon released
him. Bose then fled to Germany- his idea was that
his enemy’s enemy must be his ally. In September 42 he is still in Berlin and
has set up the Free India Legion where over 3,000 Indians captured by the Germans when
fighting for Britain, and some volunteer Indian expatriates in Europe have now changed sides
and are fighting under the Wehrmacht. Bose finds himself in awkward position though
- with Socialist sympathies he is an admirer of the Soviet system and the USSR - whom the
forces he has rallied are now fighting - but that is a story for another day. Back in India the country continues to divide
- the upper classes benefit from the war economy, but the vast majority of Indians in the farming
classes are pressed with more and more taxes to finance the war, while their crops are
being sold at regulated prices to the army. In Bengal and Assam there is real fear of
a Japanese Invasion, driving some there towards the side of the British. In the North, the Muslims are generally supportive
of the British for reasons of their own. Back in 1940, the British indicated to the
Muslim Nationalists that they could get their own nation in the Pakistan Declaration. The Muslim nationalists have since vocally
supported the British war effort. Nehru and Gandhi rightly saw this as a rule
by division by the British, reunited and jointly called for limited acts of civil disobedience. They still stood with the British in the war
though, seeing the Axis as the greater threat. In the summer of 42, they finally get hope
for Dominion status again when Prime Minister Churchill sends the Leader of the House of
Commons, Stafford Cripps to India to negotiate. But by July 1942 negotiations have broken
down and Gandhi and Nehru abandon the ideas of cooperation with the British. On August 8, they publicly call for the British
to quit India altogether, and rally hundreds of thousands of Indians to join in peaceful
civil disobedience. While the mass protests assemble across the
country on August 9, the British promptly arrest the Congress Party leaders . Ghandi
and several of them are put under house arrest at the Aga Kahn palace. But the protests don’t abate. With the party decapitated violence and vandalism
erupts. Until September 21, 550 post offices and 250
railway stations are attacked, many rail lines dug up, and 2,500 telegraph lines cut, 70
police stations are destroyed, and 85 other government buildings burned down or wrecked. In the city of Balia, the protestors even
overthrow the local administration, break the local Congress Party leaders out of jail,
and proclaim the city independent. The Government deploys 57 battalions of British
troops to restore order. Around a thousand protestors are killed by
gunfire or in stampedes as the military and police charge the assemblies. Soon over 100,000 are held as political prisoners. Massive fines are levied at protestors, and
systematic public floggings of rioters are instituted to dissuade further unrest. On September 29, the situation comes to another
showdown. In the town of Tamluk in West Bengal, some
6,000 Quit India protestors are marching into the town to picket the the police station. Most of them are women, and their leader is
71 year old Matangini Hazra, affectionally known as Gandhi buri - Bengali for Old Lady
Gandhi. There’s a heavily armed roadblock ahead,
and Matangini, carrying the flag of the Indian Congress steps out ahead of the procession
urging them to stay peaceful, but she marches on. The Police open fire at her. The next day Biplabi newspaper reports: “she continued to advance with the tri-colour
flag, leaving all the volunteers behind. The police shot her three times. She continued marching despite wounds to the
forehead and both hands.” As the bullets hit her she keeps chanting
Vande Mataram, "hail to the Motherland” but she is mortally wounded. Still holding the flag high, she falls to
the street. Her death, and that of another thousand will
not dissuade the protestors. And despite virtually all of their leaders
now imprisoned; protests, and the creation of parallel governments will continue in the
months to come. To the north-west, In Eastern Europe even
bloodier crackdowns by the Germans on their occupied subjects are also not doing any better
to curb resistance. Slipping through forests, swamps and mountains,
under protection of the lengthening autumn nights, the Partisans disrupt the German war
effort by laying mines and blowing up infrastructure. There is little the Germans can do - by the
time they can scramble a response, the combatants are long gone. So the German and local collaborationist police
step up their violence against local civilians in an attempt to cut Partisan support. Hitler’s August order to pick up anti-partisan
activities increases those actions once again. At the same time, in sudden raids and ambushes,
the Partisans have been assassinating German and non-German administrators and collaborators. Anyone not actively working for the Partisans
has been suspected of contributing to German stability is a target for murder: mayors,
teachers, farmers, and their families. In the Soviet Union, local partisans trying
to protect their own local population by entering temporary truces with the Germans to allow
their families and friends to flee, have even been labeled Enemies of the Socialist State
and actively persecuted by Stalin’s regime. So, anyone not actively working for one or
the other side is with the enemy, as well as anyone actually working for the other side,
effectively condemning any civilians to die no matter what. Now, since the Axis invasion in many parts
of Eastern Europe, for reasons of Communist, or ethnic pre-war oppression large parts of
the population have been unwilling to support the resistance, in many cases even prone to
support the Germans. If you’re in the Soviet Union, and you’re
not a Communist, or happen to be part of the many ethnic minorities Stalin sees as enemies
of the Socialist State, the Germans might look like liberators. If you’re in Yugoslavia, and you happen
to not be a Croat in the Croat led Nazi client state - the NDH, or you’re not a Serb in
the occupied part of the country, even after invasion you’re also faced with oppression
by the regional majority. So while the Communist nature of Soviet Partisans
has worked to their disadvantage, in Yugoslavia Tito’s partisans have benefited from being
ethnically blind so to say. In any case, the situation for the average
civilian is that they have been caught between a hard spot and a rock, or several rocks if
you like. But that is about to change. OK, so I’m going to use the situation in
Belarus in September 1942 as an example today, but what is happening there is also happening
to varying degrees in occupied Yugoslavia, the rest of the Soviet Union, and in Poland. All over these territories the Nazis keep
on stepping up their retaliatory actions. So, for example, in Belarus on September,
22 and 23, Battalion 310 of the Ordnungspolizei - Orpo, eradicates the civilian population
of three villages. In Borki, 203 men, 372 women, and 130 children
are marched out of the town, forced to dig their own graves and shot. In Zabloitse, 284 people are shot in a local
school. In Borysovka, 169 more are killed. So far the vicious circle of violence has
worked slightly to the advantage of the Partisans, but recruitment has still been relatively
slow. At the beginning of 1942 the number of partisans
in Belarus is barely over 20,000, by early summer it has more than doubled, Still not
enough to actively fight the vast German occupying forces though. On September 5, Stalin makes a 180 degree
turn in policy by instructing the People’s Commissariat of Defence (NKO) to issue Order
189. This labels the Partisan war as a People’s
War, and changes the primary objective into protecting the homeland and civilian population,
rather than to fight an insurgent guerrilla war against the occupying Germans and their
collaborators. It immediately changes the relationship to
local civilians, and will lead the Byelorussian Partisan ranks to swell to over 100,000 until
the end of the year. Already now in September, they are organized
as a regular Soviet fighting force behind enemy lines, complete with central Staff,
communication lines, and infrastructure. In more and more regions like Klichev, and
Mogilev Oblast it is not the German occupiers, but the secretive, hidden Partisans who wield
the actual military and political power. The Partisans are by now a collection of groups
of wide ranging ethnicities, with varying political beliefs who have only one thing
in common - they want to liberate themselves from Nazi terror. But while the Partisan struggle broadens,
it is the Nazi imaginary enemies of the Germans that German Führer Adolf Hitler thinks that
he is fighting. In a war that seems more and more challenging
for Germany on all fronts, he remains convinced of the racial delusions that led him to start
this war - that Germany is invincible, as long as they can just kill all the Jews. On September 30 he address the German people
from the Sportpalast in Berlin. “On September 1, 1939, we made two pronouncements
in the Reichstag session of that date: First, that now that the Jews have forced this war
upon us no amount of military force and no length of time will ever be able to conquer
us; and second, that if Jewry is starting an international world war to eliminate the
Aryan nations of Europe, then it won't be the Aryan nation which will be wiped out but
Jewry. They have drawn nation after nation into this
war. The men who pull the strings of this demented
man in the White House have managed actually to draw one nation after the other into this
war. But to just the same degree a wave of anti-Semitism
has swept over nation after nation. And it will move on farther. State after state that enters this war will
one day become anti-Semitic. In Germany too, the Jews once laughed at my
prophecies. I don't know whether they are still laughing,
or whether they have already lost the inclination to laugh, but I can assure you that everywhere
they will stop laughing. With these prophecies, I shall prove to be
right.” And so, as September 1942 comes to an end
it is millions of men, women, and children who have never even thought of fighting against
Germany, let alone fight anyone who continue to be the most numerous victims of Nazi madness. On September 21, Yom Kippur, the last of the
254,000 Jews form the Warsaw Ghetto are taken to Treblinka to be murdered in the gas chambers. The last transport with 2,200 people are the
Jewish Ghetto police and their families. In the past two months it was they who helped
the nazis, to round up the rest of their community. They too must now join the more than 800,000
who have been murdered in Operation Reinhard across the extermination factories in only
two months. More than half as many as were murdered in
the first year of the holocaust, bringing the total of innocent people assassinated
to around 2,3 million. That is 4,946 people slaughtered every day
since the beginning of the Holocaust. If they were victims of airplane crashes,
that would be 12 large airliners crashing every day for 465 days. But despite the unimaginable horror, it looks
more and more like Hitler might be wrong. Sure, the neighborhood in Warsaw that became
the Ghetto is a shell of its former self. The whole city is a near ghost town, almost
all shops are closed, all vibrant energy that once characterized the Polish capital is all
but disappeared. But not all Jewish Poles are gone from Warsaw. Not all Gentile Poles have been broken. There, like in Belarus, the Baltic States,
in Yugoslavia, all across Europe, what Hitler has truly done is not to defeat anyone, but
to sow the seeds of resistance. Seeds, that while he screams out his deluded
lies are sprouting in the shadows, sending roots shooting into the bloodied ground, slowly
building a hidden network under the stomping boots of the Nazi forces. Seeds that might very well grow into powerful,
determined forces of resistance made up of those who have nothing more to lose, and will
fight until they are either free or have joined their loved ones in the afterlife. Never Forget
