10 Nonviolent Actions Against the Nazis That Proved Effective

“Nonviolence is a weapon of the strong.” Mahatma Gandhi practiced what he preached and utilized this weapon to overthrow an empire and give freedom to India. It is the less costly alternative to military confrontation and has been proven to work time and again. From ousting a dictator, as in the People Power Revolution of 1986 in the Philippines, to taking down communism in bloodless revolutions in Eastern Europe later in the decade, nonviolence has scored many victories.

But could it have worked against the Nazis, known for their bestiality and disregard for human life? The question is still being debated, and while a military solution may have been inevitable, there were many instances when the Nazis were held in check by nonviolent action. The scale of peaceful resistance varied—from single individuals to small groups to practically an entire nation.

Related: Top 10 Lesser-known Nazis Found Long After WWII Ended

10 A Nation of Heroes

The Germans invaded the Netherlands in May 1940 and quickly conquered the flat, virtually defenseless country in five days. The ultimate Nazi plan was to transform the Netherlands into a fascist state and incorporate it into Germany. As much as possible, they did not want to alienate the Dutch, whom they regarded as of superior racial stock. The Dutch, in turn, knew that their very culture, values, identity, and way of life were in existential danger. However, as they had followed a neutral policy since World War I, the Dutch did not have much military experience to resist the Germans. They had to fight back with nonviolent means.

Nonviolent passive resistance characterizes, in large part, the Dutch response to occupation. Though such measures were usually dealt with harshly and seemed to accomplish nothing in the short term, the cumulative effect of non-cooperation and disobedience thwarted the Nazi goal of reshaping the Dutch into their own image.

Queen Wilhelmina refused the protection of the Reich and fled to London with her family. On Prince Bernard’s birthday on June 29, 1940, bouquets of carnations, his favorite flower, flooded the streets and homes. In the fall, students and staff at the Universities of Leiden and Delft went on strike to protest attacks on Dutch Jewish professors. In February 1941, shipyard workers also struck, successfully preventing the deportation of fellow workers to Germany for forced labor. On its heels followed the massive strike of 300,000 out of Amsterdam’s 800,000 residents to protest the deportation of Jews.

Dutch from all walks of life gave the Nazis a figurative middle finger. Physicians refused to join the German doctors’ guild, giving up their practice if need be. Teachers refused to submit their names for official approval. Artists shunned the cultural guild even if it meant they could not work. Farmers refused to pay the Nazis. Police refused to arrest Jews. Students refused to sign an oath of loyalty to the Nazi regime.

Thousands avoided service in the Arbeitsdienst, an occupation corps aimed at reclaiming the country for Germany. All the while, the Catholic Church and the Reformed Church continually reminded their congregations that resistance was a moral duty. In September 1944, as the Allied armies of liberation advanced towards Germany, railway workers went on strike to prevent the transport of Jews to concentration camps in the east and German troops from escaping the Allied net.

Of course, there were Dutch who cooperated willingly with the Nazis. But the majority would not sell their souls to the devil. Queen Wilhelmina called them “a nation of heroes.” In the five years of occupation, they showed the Nazis they were unwanted. The Netherlands survived with its culture and identity intact.^[1]

9 Corrie ten Boom’s Hiding Place

Cornelia ten Boom was the youngest of four children in the strict Dutch Calvinist family of Casper ten Boom, a jeweler and watchmaker, and his wife Cornelia, after whom Corrie was named. Growing up in Haarlem, Corrie was taught that her faith must be turned into serving and giving to others. Her family deeply respected the Jewish community in nearby Amsterdam as “God’s ancient people.”

In 1922, Corrie became the first licensed female watchmaker in the Netherlands and took charge of a youth group in the following decade. In May 1940, the German blitzkrieg overran the Low Countries, and the ensuing occupation turned the ten Boom family’s life upside down. With the facade of a watchmaker’s shop, the family home became a hiding place for Jews, students, and intellectuals being hunted by the Gestapo. A secret room that could hold six people was built behind a false wall in Corrie’s bedroom. Eventually, a network of other safe houses was established and overseen by Corrie.

In February of 1944, a tip-off alerted the Gestapo, which swooped down on the ten Boom home and arrested 35 people, including the entire ten Boom family. Fortunately, the Germans failed to detect the six Jews in the secret room, who were rescued by the Dutch underground three days later.

The ten Booms were imprisoned, where the 84-year-old Casper died. Corrie’s sister Betsie died in the Ravensbruck concentration camp, but miraculously, Corrie was set free due to a clerical mixup. For all their sacrifices, the ten Booms were able to save about 800 precious lives. After the war, Corrie was knighted by Queen Wilhelmina and honored by Jews as Righteous Among the Nations, alongside notables like Varian Fry and Oskar Schindler.

Corrie died on April 15, 1983, her 91st birthday. In Jewish tradition, only specially blessed people are given the privilege of dying on the day they were born.^[2]

8 Strike of the 100,000

On May 10, 1941, one year to the day since the Germans invaded Belgium, a group of women walked out of the Cockerill steelworks factory near Liege, the nation’s largest. The month before, the 33 pounds (15 kg) of potatoes supplied per month to the workers were slashed in half. Protesting the inadequate food provisions for their physically demanding labor, their actions prompted other workers across Belgium to put down their tools and strike.

It looked like they were up against a brick wall. The Nazis had forcibly merged all the unions into one under the Gleichschaltung (forced coordination) policy. The occupiers decreed that workers and employers must cooperate for the “advance of the nation.” The right to strike, won dearly by the unions before the war, was abolished, and wages were frozen.

However, with the potato supply dwindling to nothing and prices increasing by 100%, the workers demanded a 25% wage increase. The Communist Party got involved in preparing and organizing the strike. It was a direct threat to the German war machine, which lost 2,000 tons of steel every day the strike went on. But the Nazis were cautious not to antagonize the Communists, as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact was still in force between Germany and the USSR. As the ranks of the strikers swelled to 70,000, Adolf Hitler was forced to negotiate.

The workers won a substantial 8% wage increase and gained additional rights for trade unions and expanded social security. Only after the German invasion of the Soviet Union did the Nazis hunt down the perpetrators of the strike, arresting and incarcerating over a thousand militants.^[3]

7 Rescue by Sea

In the summer of 1943, three and a half years into the German occupation, the Danish resistance was growing ever bolder in their campaign of strikes and sabotage. The Germans had left the Danish Jews unmolested up to this point in the hopes of enlisting the cooperation of the Danes, whom they considered “racially valuable Aryans.” But with the rising opposition, they decided to teach the Danes a lesson and ordered the country’s 7,800 Jews to be rounded up.

SS General Werner Best wanted all Jews killed but was held back by the realization that going forward full throttle would be saying goodbye to all future reconciliation with the Danes. Procuring a Danish alliance was the priority—the Jews would be summarily taken care of after Germany’s victory. Best let a warning slip out to give them three days to escape.

In any case, the Jews would always be under a Damoclean sword if they remained in Denmark. The only way of escape was by sea to reach Sweden. How could thousands flee? In this dire moment of need, the Danes came together to provide the means. Within hours of receiving the warning, they had organized a rescue operation.

Soon, they had the Jews converging on the coastal fishing towns where boats would ferry them across the Øresund Strait to Sweden. The Gestapo caught around 80 to 90 Jews hiding in a village church loft, deporting them to the Theresienstadt camp in Czechoslovakia. In all, 482 Jews were arrested, mostly the sick and elderly who were unable to travel.

But the rest of the refugees, nearly all of Denmark’s Jewish population, escaped. The Germans had underestimated the extent of the Danish response, the resourcefulness, courage, and resolve of ordinary people steeped in a sense of community, solidarity, and Christian values. This remarkable sealift rescue remains unparalleled in history.^[4]

6 Opposing School Nazification

From April 9, 1940, it only took the German blitz two months to crush Norwegian military resistance. They installed a puppet government under the traitor Vidkun Quisling, geared to transform Norway into a fascist state. Against the might of the enemy, the only option for most Norwegians was nonviolent resistance, and people engaged in subtle acts of defiance. One of these was using paper clips as a symbol for staying united. Another was to wear flowers on the exiled king’s birthday to show support.

In more overt acts of resistance, bishops resigned to protest the formation of a compulsory fascist Youth Front. The high point of nonviolent opposition came when Quisling attempted to transform the educational system into a tool for indoctrination in fascist ideology. In February 1942, Quisling formed the Norwegian Teachers Union under Nazi control and required all teachers to join. The response was immediate: Between 8,000 to 10,000 teachers issued their refusal to join, courageously affixing their names and addresses onto their statements.

For a month, schools remained closed, with teachers continuing their lessons in private homes. A thousand male teachers were arrested and jailed, and 499 were sent to a concentration camp in Kirkenes, in the freezing Arctic. As the prisoners’ train made its way to Kirkenes, throngs of students and farmers lined the tracks to sing and offer food to the teachers in a display of solidarity. In the camp’s harsh conditions, the teachers formed choirs and gave lectures to keep their sanity. One teacher died, and several were injured from forced labor. No mistreatment by the Gestapo broke them down.

By mid-May, Quisling had given up. He realized that even though he could force the teachers to capitulate, his government would lose any legitimacy it had. The teachers were released in November, and for the duration of the occupation, the Norwegians gave Quisling such a hard time that he abandoned the idea of Nazifying the country altogether. Through nonviolent means, Norwegian identity and culture were saved.^[5]

5 Escape Networks

It is inevitable that soldiers get trapped in enemy territory during a war. In Nazi-occupied Europe, resistance groups organized escape networks for Allied airmen who found themselves in such a situation. One of these escape networks was overseen by a remarkable elderly Frenchwoman, Marie Louise Dissard.

In 1940, in the wake of the German invasion, Dissard, who had spent her 60-odd years working as a teacher and running a clothing business, joined the French Resistance. But she didn’t wield a gun or a bomb. She attended to an escape route based in her home city of Toulouse, which helped downed Allied airmen get back to England via the Pyrenees.

When their group head was captured, Dissard took over the leadership under the alias “Francoise.” The Gestapo never suspected that this old lady was a member of the Resistance as she went about arranging lodgings for the evaders and negotiating with the mountain guides who would smuggle them over into neutral Spain. When the line was betrayed by a traitor in 1943, Dissard founded safehouses along a new route, dubbed the Francoise Line.

In 1944, one of the guides was arrested, and in his notebook was found Dissard’s name. Dissard had to go into evasion mode herself, but even then, she still managed to help 110 Allied airmen. In total, Dissard successfully sent 250 back to England. At the end of the war, Marie Louise “Francoise” Dissard was awarded several decorations, including the Legion d’Honneur and the American Medal of Freedom.^[6]

4 The Town of Refuge

The Protestant pastor of the southern French village of Le Chambon, Andre Trocme, would always conclude his sermons with the injunction, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind and with all your strength and love your neighbor as yourself. Go practice it.” So, when the first Jews seeking refuge from the Nazis arrived, his wife Magda had no hesitation and no second thoughts: “There was no decision to make. The issue was: Do you think we are all brothers or not? Do you think it is unjust to turn in the Jews or not? Then let us try to help!”

Not just the Trocmes but the entire community of 5,000—Protestant and Catholic, adults and children—risked their lives to shelter Jews and non-Jews fleeing the Nazis. The villagers provided the refugees, mostly children, with food, shelter, and fake identity papers. Whenever a police raid was coming, they were hidden in the surrounding countryside, where an extended network of sympathizers could be summoned. The refugees would ultimately be guided across the Alps into Switzerland. When Vichy officials came and demanded a list of all Jews in town, Trocme told them, “I do not know what a Jew is. I know only human beings.”

Not one resident of Le Chambon informed authorities of what was going on. They had all taken Pastor Trocme’s words to heart: “We shall resist whenever our adversaries demand of us obedience contrary to the orders of the Gospel. We shall do so without fear but also without pride and without hate.”

Nevertheless, the Gestapo was becoming suspicious and arrested Trocme in February 1943. He was released after 28 days but kept under close surveillance. That summer, a reward was offered for his capture. Trocme was in hiding for ten months, and though many knew where he was, none betrayed him for the reward.

This remarkable collective effort between 1940 and 1944 saved 5,000 lives, 3,500 of which were Jewish. Le Chambon has the rare distinction of being honored as “Ville des Justes Parmi les Nations”—a “city of the righteous among the nations.”^[7]

3 Halting the Euthanasia Program

In 1939, Hitler’s euthanasia program was launched under Dr. Viktor Brack, which targeted the extermination of children who were deemed “mentally defective.” Non-Jewish children who were certified mentally ill, schizophrenic, or incapable of working were brought from all over Germany to a Special Psychiatric Youth Department where they were murdered by lethal injection or poison gas.

Later, the program went after adults. People were unaware of what was happening. Those with disabled relatives would only be informed of their sudden deaths. Sinister activities were only suspected behind the scenes—until a courageous priest exposed the horror for all of Germany to see.

The Catholic bishop of Munster, Count Clemens August von Galen, was a scion of a noble family. He had always spoken out against the Nazis from his pulpit. However, in a revelation delivered at St. Lambert’s Church in August 1941, Bishop von Galen sent shockwaves by disclosing the evidence he had collected that the Nazis were killing fellow Germans they considered “unworthy of life.”

The sermon spread like wildfire, and censorship could not halt its reprinting. Other nations learned of it, confirming the utter depravity of the regime. The Nazis were at a loss for what to do. To arrest the Count, the famed “Lion of Munster” might provoke an open rebellion. Protests began to mount, led by doctors and clergy. Some even wrote to Hitler directly, condemning the program as barbaric.

Heinrich Himmler lamented that he and his SS were not given charge over the affair, saying ominously, “We know how to deal with it correctly without causing useless uproar among the people.” But Hitler didn’t want any more bad publicity. On August 24, 1941, he ended the euthanasia program.^[8]

2 Rosenstrasse Protest

In a rare and surprisingly successful nonviolent protest in the Third Reich itself, 6,000 mostly women demonstrators forced the Nazis to free incarcerated Jews.

On February 27, 1943, the Gestapo began rounding up the last remaining Jews in Berlin. Those married to Germans and other non-Jews were forcibly separated from their spouses and children and taken to a holding center in Rosenstrasse in central Berlin before being sent to concentration camps in Poland. Soon, the street began to fill with relatives of the prisoners and many German wives looking for their husbands. As the hours passed, the crowd swelled into thousands, demanding the release of their loved ones.

Threats of being gunned down did not intimidate the women. In the sub-zero temperatures, they remained yelling and chanting in protest. It was all spontaneous—unarmed, unorganized, and leaderless—and dragged on for a week. Reich propaganda minister and Gauleiter of Berlin Joseph Goebbels was worried that a violent dispersal might provoke more unrest. After all, these were women and Germans at that time, some with influential connections.

Public morale had to be preserved, as well as the secrecy of the Final Solution. With the international press looking on, negative publicity was the last thing Goebbels wanted. With Hitler’s assent, Goebbels relented and released the almost 2,000 Jews detained at Rosenstrasse. He also returned 25 who had already been sent to Auschwitz. Hitler planned to deal with the Jews later. He never got around to it. Germany lost the war, and almost all the Rosenstrasse prisoners survived the conflict.^[9]

1 The Graffiti Wars

The Nazis considered the Poles an inferior race and wanted Polish territory for their Lebensraum policy of eastward expansion to acquire more land and material resources for Germans. To achieve the eradication of Polish culture, the Nazis closed down the prestigious Cracow University and dispatched its faculty to concentration camps. Secondary schools and scientific institutions were also closed, and teaching Polish history and language was abolished. Residents were expelled en masse from their villages, which were repopulated with ethnic Germans.

This policy made the Poles more determined that their way of life must survive. Polish culture went underground. Lessons were taught clandestinely, and even entire university courses were taught on law, medicine, the arts, and theology. Eighteen thousand students, sworn to secrecy, took their baccalaureate exam and were awarded degrees in this underground university.

Academic papers continued publication. In fact, an entire Underground State still operated, complete with parliament, political parties, civil service, and courts. They had a Directorate of Civil Resistance aimed to “depress and dishearten the Germans” through “demonstrations of patriotic feelings.”

Forged orders confused and disrupted German administration and factory schedules. One such forgery ordered the registration of cats, which Nazi officials began to obey before they realized they had been pranked. Another of the Directorate’s successful programs was the making of graffiti, which proclaimed Polish power, territory, and identity. The Nazis were well aware of the threat this posed to their policy and made the writing of graffiti punishable by death.

Graffiti writers would edit German propaganda posters to change their meaning. One that read “Deutschland siegt an allen Fronten” (“Germany wins on all fronts”) had the “s” in siegt replaced with an “l,” changing the meaning to “Germany is flat on her face on all fronts.”

A poster of SS General von Model was altered to turn his name into Mörder, or “murderer.” “Deutschland verloren,” or “Germany is lost,” frequently appeared. It was a battle fought on city walls that undermined German morale and gave hope to the Polish nation.^[10]