If you were to think of the great moral heroes of the twentieth century, the Second World War Resistance would surely make the list. They did, after all, oppose the Nazis at great risk to themselves and their families. It’s worthwhile, however, to think about exactly who resisters fought against.

At first glance the simplest case appears to be the armed resisters such as the French maquis or FFI (French Forces of the Interior), who took up arms to liberate their country from Nazi occupiers. Sometimes that happened, but just as often, the partisans were fighting their own countrymen who had chosen collaboration with the Nazis, giving these shoot-outs the aspect of civil war.

To further complicate matters, many resisters never carried weapons. The men and women of Dutch-Paris, for instance, did their best not to engage the Nazis or their collaborators. They certainly never killed anyone. And yet the Gestapo considered them dangerous enough to torture and deport to concentration camps.

Dutch-Paris opposed the basic tenets of Nazism by undoing or undermining the practical, real world consequences of Nazi ideas. The Nazis believed that not all humans are equal to the extent of organizing the mass murder of millions of civilian men, women and children. The resisters of Dutch-Paris, on the other hand, believed that all humans share equally in the dignity due to all human being just because they are humans. Some of them acted from a religious belief that we are all God’s children. Others drew their beliefs from the long European tradition of humanism. For whatever reason, they were willing to risk their own lives in defense of the principle of the inherent dignity and value of each and every human being.

As the logical application of their racist ideas, the Nazis rounded up their victims and either killed them nearby or deported them to extermination camps such as Auschwitz. In defense of their diametrically opposed principles, the men and women of Dutch-Paris sheltered some of the intended victims, spiriting some of them out of danger to the neutral countries of Spain and Switzerland.

Many other resistance groups did similar rescue work. There were also resistance networks that fought Nazism in print by exposing its lies and its crimes in underground newspapers.

The enemy of the Resistance, therefore, was not just the black garbed Nazis who were swaggering around Europe committing crimes against humanity. The resistance’s enemy was also these dangerous individuals’ philosophy and worldview, Nazism. And their enemy was everyone who collaborated with the Nazis or Nazism.