Historical and documentary exhibition

dedicated to the 85th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II:

«Citizens of the Kaluga Region as the participants in the European Resistance Movement»

«I am not a hero of war, I'm just a participant in it.»

From a letter from P.I. Shkadov, a member of the Resistance movement in Yugoslavia, who

was awarded two medals “For Courage”

INTRODUCTION

What is the Resistance Movement during World War II?

On the 1st of September the 85th anniversary of the sorrowful date, the beginning of World War II (1939–1945), was commemorated. During the first 2 years, most of the European countries were occupied by Nazi Germany with the support of Italy. The resistance was shown by Great Britain alone, and Switzerland managed to stay neutral. Some European countries, such as Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, became the allies of the Third Reich.

After the occupation, patriotic groups began to form in all European countries, and these groups used many methods and means to fight the invaders. They set up demonstrations, strikes, and acts of sabotage, distributed secretly printed newspapers and leaflets, refused to follow the orders of collaborationists’ governments and occupational administration, did surveillance work in favour of Allies of World War II, and arranged diversions. In some countries (Poland, Yugoslavia) the guerrilla groups and units started to form, and they waged an armed fight against the enemy. These forms of national liberation struggle are commonly known as the Resistance Movement. Its participants received active support from the countries participating in the future Anti-Hitler coalition: first from Great Britain, and then from the Soviet Union and the USA. — check Document 1.

Below, the history of the Resistance Movement in some European countries (where Kaluga region citizens (residents) participated in the guerrilla struggle) will be presented, but we have to give it in a shortened form. In each country, the Resistance had its specific characteristics because political parties formed their own units, and the system, in fact, was multi-party. As a result, the goals and tasks of the underground groups differed. There were also their political confrontations and even clashes. An inquisitive reader might be pleased to know that in 2025 it is scheduled to publish a book about the Resistance based on the materials of the State Archive of Documents of the Modern History of the Kaluga region. There, historical information on the countries will be given fully and with references to foreign researches (in our country, historians got interested in this topic only at the beginning of the XXI century, and there are not so many studies in Russian so far).

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Germany, which occupied European countries in the shortest possible time, thanks to carefully designed military operations with the massive use of aircraft and tanks in the main attacks, made a similar attempt against the USSR, attacking on June 22, 1941. However, the «blitzkrieg» (extremely rapid war) failed: the plan of German troops reaching the Ural Mountains line in the autumn of 1941 did not take place. In addition, the aggressor's losses in equipment and manpower were very high.

Such a turn of events forced the German governments to change the economic policy both in Germany and in occupied countries. Recruiting (conscription) into the army forced the Reich to use labour, first of prisoners of war held in camps (since 1942), and then (since 1943) of young people who were abducted, primarily from the territory of the Soviet Union. That’s how the citizens of the Soviet country took part in the European Resistance movement: prisoners of war who escaped from captivity and the youth who were abducted to Germany and the occupied European countries.

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The collection of our archive contains materials about the participation of 33 citizens of the Kaluga region in the European Resistance Movement, in particular, in such countries as Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy, France, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Germany. This exhibition is devoted to the fate of some of them.

And we have one more preliminary remark. — The story about the collectors of these documents will be the epilogue of the exhibition. The main work was done by the archive staff back in the first half of the 1960s: the idea was to publish the collected memoirs while the Resistance members were still alive. But it did not happen, for opportunistic political reasons, because the Stalinist attitude remained in the minds of some leaders: a person who surrendered to the enemy was a traitor. Therefore, books and articles about Soviet citizens who participated in the Resistance appeared only in the mid-1960s, after the return of the official Victory Day celebration in 1965. At the same time, articles about the Kaluga citizens who fought against Nazism and fascism in Europe during the occupation began to appear in the Kaluga press. And the time for a book about them has come only now, 60 years later.