In the past few posts we’ve talked about collaborators who supported and joined the Nazis because they believed in Nazism; economic collaborators who were essentially looking out for themselves and didn’t mind what happened to the everyone else with the Nazis in control; and collabos who supported the Nazis because they focused on only a single issue.

The Nazi propaganda machine brilliantly exploited this tunnel vision to a single issue, particularly the threat of Communist takeover and the Bolshevik’s atheism. The Nazis’ used people’s fear of Communist atheism to persuade influential people to support them. They used it to recruit people into their armed forces and police units. They used it to convince the ordinary people who were just trying to survive not to kick up too much of a fuss. After all, they said, it was either the Nazis or the Communists. And with the Nazis you could keep your private property and keep going to church.

But that was a spurious argument. The choice was not either Nazis or Bolsheviks. Democracy was also a choice, although one without much muscle in 1940. Resisters, however, rejected this false claim of either A or B. They fought for C, another vision of how politics and society could be organized. At the time, that other vision, option C, was democracy.

Would a member of Dutch-Paris have said in 1945 that he or she risked her life for democracy? Probably not. He or she probably would have said that they risked their lives because they believe that all human beings are equally valuable. But that is the foundation of democracy, and the only political form which even aspires to that ideal.

Resisters, whether they were fighting with guns to drive out the occupation forces, or using their pens to subvert Nazi propaganda, rejected both Nazis and Nazism. They also refused to be led by propaganda into false arguments and assumptions. They kept their liberty of thought even in the dark days when they had lost their civil liberties under a Nazi occupation regime.