Fighting Back: Armed Uprisings and Collective Solidarity
Note
This article addresses the following inquiry question: How did collective protest, armed uprisings, and solidarity between groups respond to Nazi persecution and mass murder?
Jewish resistance to the Holocaust took both armed and unarmed forms. Armed resistance faced extraordinary obstacles: fighters in ghettos had almost no weapons, no outside support, no territory to retreat to, and faced reprisals against civilian populations. Despite these conditions, uprisings occurred in at least 19 ghettos and in death camps at Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz. Non-Jewish solidarity also saved lives: the Danish rescue of October 1943 and the work of the Polish Zegota network showed that collective action could dramatically alter outcomes.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April-May 1943)
The ZOB takes up arms. By April 1943 most of the ghetto's pre-deportation population had been killed. The remaining 60,000-70,000 Jews included members of the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB, Jewish Combat Organisation), led by 23-year-old Mordecai Anielewicz. On 19 April 1943, when the SS entered the ghetto to conduct the final deportation, ZOB fighters opened fire. Fighters had acquired a small number of pistols and home-made bombs through smuggling operations and contacts with the Polish Armia Krajowa (Home Army).
Suppression. The uprising lasted almost a month, far longer than German commanders had anticipated. The SS ultimately suppressed it by systematically burning down the ghetto block by block. SS Commander Jurgen Stroop declared that "the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw no longer exists." Anielewicz died in a bunker on 8 May 1943.
Case study
The Stroop Report
SS Commander Jurgen Stroop compiled a detailed illustrated report of the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, titled "The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More!"
The report documented the operation in clinical military language, listing buildings burned, bunkers destroyed, and Jews "caught" or "killed while resisting."
It became crucial evidence at Stroop's war crimes trial (he was executed in 1951) and is one of the most detailed surviving documents of the genocide from the perpetrator's perspective.
Interactive question
Which armed uprising inside a Nazi ghetto lasted almost a month, from April to May 1943, before German forces suppressed it?
Markscheme
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April-May 1943), led by the Jewish Combat Organisation (ZOB), held out for almost a month against a far better-armed German force before its final suppression.
Death Camp Uprisings: Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz
Treblinka, 2 August 1943. Approximately 300 prisoners seized weapons from the camp arsenal and set fire to several buildings before making a break for the perimeter fence. Around 200 escaped. Most were recaptured and killed, and approximately 50-70 survived the war. Within weeks the Germans began dismantling Treblinka to destroy evidence of its purpose.
Sobibor, 14 October 1943. A revolt led by Soviet Jewish POW Alexander Pechersky and Polish Jewish prisoner Leon Feldhendler killed 11 SS men and enabled around 300 prisoners to escape. About 170 survived the immediate flight and approximately 50 survived the war. Like Treblinka, Sobibor was closed and dismantled shortly afterwards. Neither revolt stopped the Holocaust, but both demonstrated that organised collective action was possible even under the most extreme conditions.
Auschwitz-Birkenau, 7 October 1944. Members of the Sonderkommando, prisoners forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria, blew up Crematorium IV using explosives smuggled in by women working in a nearby armaments factory, killing several SS guards. Most participants were captured and executed, and it remained the only armed revolt at Auschwitz during the camp's entire operation.
Partisan Resistance: The Bielski Otriad
The Bielski brothers. Tuvia, Zus, and Asael Bielski, Polish Jews from the Naliboki forest region (in present-day Belarus), organised an armed partisan unit after their parents and other relatives were murdered in 1941. Unlike most partisan groups, the Bielski otriad prioritised rescuing Jewish civilians over military engagement, accepting anyone who reached the forest regardless of age or ability to fight.
Scale of the rescue. By 1944 the group had grown to more than 1,200 people, sustained through foraging, small workshops, and raids on local farms. It is considered the largest armed rescue of Jews by Jews carried out during the war.
Solidarity: Zegota and the Danish Rescue
The Polish Zegota network. The Rada Pomocy Zydom (Council to Aid Jews, known as Zegota), an underground organisation established in December 1942, provided forged documents, financial support, hiding places, and medical care for Jews in hiding. Funded partly by the Polish government-in-exile, it helped approximately 4,000-4,500 people survive the war, including many of the children smuggled out by Irena Sendler.
The Danish rescue, October 1943. When German occupation authorities ordered the deportation of Danish Jews on the night of 1-2 October 1943, Danish civil society organised within hours. Fishermen, clergy, and ordinary citizens hid Jews and ferried approximately 7,000 of Denmark's 8,000 Jews across the Oresund to neutral Sweden. Danish police refused to cooperate with the roundup. German diplomat Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz first carried word of the plan to Danish Social Democratic politicians, and the German commanding officer in Denmark, Werner Best, appears to have deliberately allowed this warning to leak, possibly to avoid a confrontation that could destabilise his administration.
Theory of Knowledge
Why Denmark was different: The Danish rescue raises questions about why solidarity varied so much across occupied Europe. Historians point to Denmark's relatively recent and less deeply rooted tradition of antisemitism, the small size and high integration of the Jewish community, Danish national identity, the particular political calculation of the German occupation administration, and the geographical accident of proximity to neutral Sweden. No single factor explains it, but together they show that collaboration was not inevitable. Bulgaria offers a partial comparison: sustained political and religious pressure inside the country blocked the deportation of Jews from Bulgaria's prewar territory, even though Bulgarian authorities still deported Jews from occupied Thrace and Macedonia.
Historiography
Yehuda Bauer: argues that Jewish armed resistance, though militarily insignificant, refutes the myth of passivity and shows resistance took many forms beyond combat, including the rescue of communities.
Michael Marrus: situates the Danish rescue as an exception that proves the rule: most occupied societies did not act collectively to protect Jewish neighbours, and Denmark's particular conditions rarely existed elsewhere.
Nechama Tec: writing on Jewish partisans, stresses that units like the Bielski otriad show rescue and resistance were not separate categories: saving lives was itself a form of defiance.
Judgement: Collective resistance and solidarity could not defeat the machinery of genocide, but where conditions allowed a coordinated response, as in Denmark and in the forests with the Bielski partisans, the death toll fell dramatically, showing that outcomes were not predetermined.
Key Idea
Armed resistance was militarily hopeless but historically significant anyway. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising held out for nearly a month against a far better armed force, and historians such as Yisrael Gutman argue its significance lies less in military outcome than in reclaiming agency and dignity for people the Nazi system had tried to reduce to passive victims.
Rescue networks depended on pre-existing social trust. Zegota succeeded partly because it built on existing Polish underground state structures, while the Danish rescue worked because Danish society was small, cohesive, and had not been ideologically fractured by years of occupation propaganda the way Poland had.
Paper 3 preparation
Exam technique
Paper 3: 15 marks, To what extent: To what extent was collective resistance to Nazi persecution effective?
Build the argument: Separate armed uprisings (Warsaw, Treblinka, Sobibor) from acts of civilian solidarity (Zegota, Denmark, the Bielski partisans), and assess each against its own aims rather than the impossible standard of stopping the genocide.
Evaluate perspectives: Weigh military futility against symbolic and human significance, and use the Danish case to test what conditions made large-scale rescue possible elsewhere.
Active recall
Explain why the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising lasted longer than German commanders anticipated.
What was the immediate consequence of the Treblinka and Sobibor uprisings for those camps?
Describe the methods used by the Polish Zegota network to protect Jews.
Identify three reasons why the Danish rescue succeeded where other national responses failed.
What role did the Bielski partisans play and what made them distinctive?