partisan resistance - 2001 - Resistance: Untold Stories of Jewish Partisans

Resistance: Untold Stories of Jewish Partisans
Seth Kramer
Great Projects Film Company Inc
2001

Resistance: Untold Stories of Jewish Partisans is a short television documentary from PBS highlighting the existence of Jewish armed resistance units in Germany during the Third Reich. There is a lot of media commemorating or dramatizing the WWII-era partisan fighters in France and other occupied countries but much less about armed resistance within Germany, let alone about Jewish resistance. Direct resistance adds another mode of Jewish response to the atrocities of the Third Reich, that of sabotage and armed direct action, in addition to the more widely historicized accounts of submission, hiding, passing for German, receiving protection from sympathetic Nazis such as Oskar Schindler, and emigration to democratic countries.

The documentary consists of a familiar pattern of showing interview subjects recalling anecdotes from their experiences interspersed with archival footage and photographs representing the referred era. This kind of subject matter provides an alternative kind military history which I am very interested in delving into further, and a quick survey has revealed that there's quite a bit of material about Jewish resistance, and this film is not the only to claim to be telling an 'untold story' in its title. Generally I ignore the military history sections of bookstores entirely but now that I am aware of the tradition of partisan fighters and oppressed populations taking up arms and developing strategies for engaging their enemies in warfare, I consider this a new topic to research within the field of counterculture studies.

To summarize the documentary briefly, the stories these former fighters tell reveal the fact that significant damage was done to the Reich by Jewish partisan fighters. They describe escaping from the ghettos to live in the woods, acquiring guns from a farmer, executing German soldiers and informers, and sabotaging the infrastructure of Hitler's Germany. It is stated during the documentary that there was an estimated 20 to 30,000 such partisans who fought in Germany, a large fighting force that must have made a significant contribution towards weakening Nazi control in Germany. The documentary's primary purpose is to oppose myths that there was no real Jewish opposition to Nazi oppression.