[ This day in 1945, Nazi Germany finally surrendered. Faced with
revisionist attempts to claim the war was a struggle between “twin
totalitarianisms,” we should remember the working-class partisans
who resisted the fascist violence ] [[link removed]]

ON VE DAY, WE REMEMBER THE PARTISANS WHO RISKED EVERYTHING FOR
FREEDOM  
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Adam J Sacks
May 8, 2021
Jacobin
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_ This day in 1945, Nazi Germany finally surrendered. Faced with
revisionist attempts to claim the war was a struggle between “twin
totalitarianisms,” we should remember the working-class partisans
who resisted the fascist violence _

Soviet sniper Lyudmila Pavlochenko was one of the one million women
who fought the Nazis on the front line.,

 

Idols of white supremacy are today heading into the twilight, as the
dark side of long-vaunted “heroes” finally comes under scrutiny.
This goes not just for the United States’ founding fathers, but also
some of those who joined the fight against Nazism and the Holocaust.
Men like Churchill, Stauffenberg, and Schindler did eventually turn
against fascism — but they were themselves implicated in imperial
conquest and rapacious exploitation.

Hollywood has in recent years served up all manner of fantastical
exploits portraying resistance to Nazism, from _Inglourious Basterds_
to _Jojo Rabbit_. Yet such movies are perversely untroubled by the
concern to spread awareness of real-world examples. The other side
doesn’t seem to share this memory loss: around the world, monuments
to the Nazis and their collaborators still number in the thousands
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When establishment press does turn to overlooked accounts of
resistance fighters to fascism, they are too often cloaked in
identitarianism and voided of the participants’ real politics
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These politically conscious anti-fascist fighters fought for future
generations. But they remain buried under the weight of Cold War
narratives writing them out of history — and often overlapping with
fascist anti-communism. The actual historical record is filled not
with opportunistic and compromised imperialists of the likes of
Churchill, but the courage and bravery of women, children, disabled
people, and ethnic minorities. Marked for either total subjugation or
murder by the Nazis and their allies, they joined the struggle against
fascism. True paragons of virtue really are there to be found — if
only the lingering Cold War shadows had not prevented light from being
shone in the right places.

The histories of female, child, disabled, and ethnic minority fighters
against fascism underlines the folly of “totalitarian theory.” For
all the crimes of Stalinism and the purges, the claim that the war was
fought between twin totalitarianisms elides the willfully ageist,
sexist, and racist character of fascism. It deliberately targeted
entire categories of humans — especially women, children, and the
disabled — in a way that Soviet communism never did. The following
examples taken from Soviet memory culture in fact reveal that those
most celebrated, emphasized, and remembered were women, children,
minorities, and the disabled — partisans who fought for their own
liberation and for that of everyone else.

Targets, but Fighters, Too

Well into our own day, popular representations from films to podcasts
continue to slight and marginalize the memory of such fighters who
came from attacked and vulnerable groups.

While the Nazi genocide of the Romani people and mass murder of the
differently abled remain underemphasized, perhaps even less well known
were genocidal plans that targeted East Europeans and envisioned the
near absolute subjugation and removal of women from public life. The
Generalplan Ostintended a “clearing” of 80 percent of the native
inhabitants of Eastern Europe. Even within Germany itself, the Nazi
regime began to bar women from judgeships from the start, gradually
moving on to prohibit higher education for women. By the late 1930s,
even new grammar schools would not take on women as students.

Perhaps it is all the more significant, then, that some of the
sharpest swords in the arsenal against fascism were wielded by women.
In their roles as snipers and fighter pilots, whom the German army
notoriously nicknamed “the night witches,” women met and exceeded
the level of achievement of their male counterparts.

Most legendary was Lyudmila Pavlichenko, one of the one million women
that fought in frontline positions. With her many hundreds of kills,
“Lady Death” toured the West during the war to drum up support for
the Allies to form a second front in France against the Nazis — help
that was notoriously unforthcoming until close to the end of the
conflict, especially from the British. Pavlichenko became the first
Soviet citizen received by any US president. But the US press hardly
laid the groundwork for memorializing her achievements — it
preferred to quiz her skirt length
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and the color of her underwear.
Behind the front lines in occupied countries, women played a leading
role as partisans. In fact, these crews were not only the most
effective resistance to fascism but ended up as one of the most
gender-equal institutions in modern European history. These partisans
didn’t have a bird’s-eye view over battle, and many enjoyed
neither direct state support nor connections with a more powerful
ally. Often, they were individuals with their back against the wall,
willing to take up arms and make a contribution to a global struggle.
Decisive were the twenty-five divisions of partisans who fought on
Soviet territory behind German lines. But there were also independent
or small units who actively fought back, even faced with harrowing
odds.

There was Roza Papov, a Sephardic Jew from Sarajevo, already a doctor
before World War II. Serving among Josip Broz Tito’s Communist-led
partisans in Yugoslavia — the one European country where
anti-fascists succeeded in liberating themselves from the Nazis —
she was put in charge of recruitment and the network of field
hospitals. Later, after the war, she was promoted to general — the
first ever woman to take up such a role in the Balkans.

The cartoonish fantasies of Quentin Tarantino’s _Inglourious
Basterds_, populated by swashbuckling Americans, distort history and
miss the real-life stories of underground squads that really did
target fascists. One notable fighter was the Sephardic woman Violeta
Jakova from Sofia, who took out a Nazi-allied Bulgarian general as
well as the Bulgarian chief of police. Violeta was only captured after
a fierce gun battle.

On the other side of Europe, in the Netherlands, Hannie Schaft was a
member of a resistance council where she helped obtain IDs sorely
needed for Jews in hiding. Also a member of an assassination squad
that often traveled by bicycle, Hannie refused any actions that could
jeopardize the lives of children. She personally assassinated the
Dutch collaborator that handed over the entire registry of Jews from
the city of Haarlem. Barely two weeks out from the end of war, she was
captured and identified by the red roots of her hair. Executed at
close range, when at first only wounded, she told her killers, “I
shoot better
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Even the youngest women distinguished themselves as partisans. Hailing
from Leningrad, fifteen-year-old Zina Portnova was waylaid at her
grandmother’s in Vitebsk, Belarus, over her summer holiday in 1941,
at the moment Adolf Hitler launched his invasion. In this Soviet
republic, a quarter of whose population was killed during the war, she
joined the Young Avengers and got a job as a dishwasher at the local
German officer’s mess hall. She managed to poison the soup of over
one hundred fascists — and survive sipping some herself under
examination to evade imprisonment.

After she was nursed back to health by her grandmother, her entire
unit was betrayed and almost all thirty members were murdered. When
she set out to find the traitor, she was seized. During interrogation,
she grabbed the Mauser of the Gestapo that abducted her and shot him
and two other officers. Zina was then shot trying to escape.
Imprisoned and tortured for months, she even had her eyeballs pried
out. Blinded, she tried to throw herself under a car, but was attended
to by German doctors so the torture could be continued. But she never
turned on her comrades.

The Black Bread of History

Cases like Zina’s were almost entirely unique to the Eastern Front,
where the child populations of entire countries were robbed of
innocence and forced to live in everyday terror. These child fighters
are what the Soviets would come to commemorate as “pioneer
heroes,” adolescents who managed to hold back the fascist assault on
their world. With none of the egoism, airs, or petty conflicts of
adults, their record, largely unknown in the West, forms what some
have called “the black bread of history.” Their indomitable will
to hold up signs of resistance was, as their adopted slogan said,
“for their friends.”

There was Marat Mazey from Minsk who survived his father’s purging
in the 1930s and then his mother’s hanging by the Germans in 1942.
He carried on after her example, sheltering and tending to partisans.
Marat’s size aided in escaping through enemy lines for
reinforcements, and survivors remembered how, even wounded, this
teenager would exhort soldiers on to fight. Finally, off on a scouting
mission, he and his commander were surrounded by Germans. The adult
was instantly shot, but they wanted to take the boy alive. At the age
of fourteen, the boy raised a grenade over his head, protecting his
comrades, and took some fascists with him into the beyond.

Another form of resistance was more spiritual than material, of which
there are undoubtedly countless cases never recorded. It illustrates
how the Holocaust is so deeply embedded as to be indivisible from the
war history of Soviet lands, in a way that the Anglosphere struggles
to grasp.

Abram Pinkerson, a Jewish boy from Bessarabia, one of many musical
child prodigies among East European Jews, was a violin virtuoso from
age five. Descended from the very first doctor of his area, the boy
was without his father, who was also doctor, then serving with Soviet
forces. In 1942, Abram was gathered along with his community to be
executed by Nazi death squads after the invasion. Local villagers were
brought as bystanders to scare them into paralysis. As his group was
driven to the edge of the mass grave, eleven-year-old Abram took out
his violin and began to play the “Internationale,” a song of
hope,in an act that is remembered as a fearless thrust in the face of
the enemy for one too young to hold a weapon.
Within the ranks of the Red Army, numerous minorities were mobilized
from across Central Asia and Siberia to roll back the fascist tide. At
the time, they were demonized as “barbaric Asiatic hordes.” But it
is to these various small nationalities, largely unknown in the West,
to which most of Europe owes its freedom — and the reality that
casualties were not far worse. To mention just one extraordinary case:
Mikhail Devyataev, an ethnic Mordvin, was shot down and imprisoned
first in Lodz and then Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he
managed to obtain the identity of a deceased Soviet soldier. Pressed
into slave labor at the V-2 ballistic missile plant at Peenemünde, he
and a group of fellow Soviet prisoners managed to take down a guard.
They used his uniform to not only escape but commandeer the
commandant’s H22 bomber. Flying off the island, fending off German
and then Soviet defenses, Devyataev and his crew managed to provide
critical intelligence about the V-1 and V-2 “revenge” rockets that
claimed the lives of several thousand British civilians.

Finally, given that the Nazis systematically murdered the differently
abled, there is some poetic justice that there were several cases of
distinguished Soviet pilots who carried on after being maimed for
life. The Soviet fighter ace Aleksey Maresyev survived an eighteen-day
escape journey on foot after being shot down behind enemy lines.
Marked as a hopeless case due to blood poisoning and gangrene, he
suffered the amputation of both legs. Incredibly, Mareseyev returned
to flight barely over a year later, wearing prosthetic devices and
completing another eighty combat sorties.

Writing these heroes out of the story of the “greatest generation”
is yet another form of pernicious revisionism. Together they form not
only a message in a bottle for the continuing battle against fascism,
but a lodestar of feminism, childhood empowerment, and anti-fascist
internationalism. When too many preferred to look away, they set a
lesson for posterity of true solidarity. They formed small sparkles of
light amid the darkness, leaving us a legacy of men and women who
fought for a better humanity.

Adam J Sacks holds an MA and PhD in history from Brown University and
an MS in education from the City College of the City University of New
York.

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