OCCUPIED EUROPE: The Wall & the Scaffold

Last week hundreds of Europeans marched to Nazi execution because they dared to revolt against the New Order. Some were young, as heroes are supposed to be. Some were not. Plump men of middle years sprawled on their blindfolded faces in front of bullet-pocked walls. Worn grey bodies hung by their corded necks in public squares.

The Nazis admitted executing 1,000 in the past few weeks of European revolt. The number was probably a gross understatement.

Yugoslavia. Serbian Chetniks kept up their wild guerrilla fight against Adolf Hitler and Ante Pavelitch, his Croatian stooge. Yugoslav rebels warned the Nazi commander in Belgrade that they would slaughter 650 German prisoners if he killed any more Yugoslav patriots.

So violent was the Yugoslav revolt that the Nazis were reported sending a whole panzer division of 12,000 men toward Belgrade. To dislodge Yugoslavs from four towns the Nazis had to resort to shelling with 155-mm. guns and dive-bombing. The fight went on, although the Nazis and Stooge Pavelitch’s brown-shirted Ustashi lined Yugoslavs up by the dozens and riddled them. In the Banat region 42 bodies swung in a market place for a day and a night. Hangmen noosed the young neck of Gaysin Grodza, a girl of 21 who had bombed a German store.

Czecho-Slovalcia. Firing squads moved with equal celerity against the saboteurs of the Skoda munitions works and other Czech industries. Hitler’s chief executioner, cold, bloody Reinhard Heydrich, was in Berlin reporting his accomplishments. Berlin admitted that his assistants accomplished 123 executions during the week. Among those rushed to the wall of death were Czech Generals Josef Bily, Hugo Votja and Franz Horacek, retired Generals Michael Dolezal and Josef Svatek, bald, pale Otokar Klapka, whom the Nazis had appointed Mayor of Prague. Deputy Premier Jaroslav Krejci was arrested, as were Minister of the Interior General Joseph Jezek and former Minister of Communications Dr. George Havelka. Berlin said the suicide rate was “appalling.”

Condemned to death was puppet Premier General Alois Elias, whose loyalties have frequently seemed dubious. When he was not promptly executed it was suspected that Premier Elias might have had something to exchange for clemency.

Rumania. The Nazis were combating revolt and sabotage. There was a rumor that Premier General Ion Antonescu had left his Premiership and his command beside the Nazis on the Russian front.

Bulgaria, too, fought sabotage. Police and military forces had to “reestablish” order as a result of Greek uprising in Bulgarian-occupied Macedonia.

Poland. It was announced in Berlin that 150 Poles had been executed since Germany’s attack on Russia. But this was only an infinitesimal part of the Polish horror described in a report issued in Vatican City. In this document Catholic clergy and laymen who had left Poland stated their belief that Adolf Hitler intended nothing less than the extermination of the Polish people. They estimated that in the past two years the Nazis had killed 40,000 Poles, jailed 60,000, forced 540,000 into Germany as laborers.

France. The best-known rebel in Europe was saved from death. Young Paul Collette, who in Paris six weeks ago wounded Pierre Laval and Marcel Déat, was condemned to death by a Vichy court. Marshal Henri Philippe Petain commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. Many observers of Vichy thought that the Marshal, knowing the rebellious temper of suppressed French millions, was too shrewd to risk the execution of a boy who had tried to kill two of Hitler’s best French friends.*

Berlin announced that thus far 71 Frenchmen had been executed. After German supply trains were dynamited last week, the Nazis shot 20 French hostages, mostly railway workmen, at Lille.

Norway. Two trade-union leaders, Viggo Hansteen and Rolf Vickstroen, refused to have their eyes bandaged, stared at the Nazi firing squad, sang the Norwegian anthem.

Significance. Europe’s revolt against Adolf Hitler was not one movement, but many. In Yugoslavia it was hot, open civil war, abetted by traditional Balkan Pan-Slavic sympathies. Soviet Russia even spared “a certain number” of bombers to aid the insurgents. In Czecho-Slovakia it was the discovered sabotage of highly organized underground rebels as the high rank of many of the condemned suggested. Widespread in Europe were examples of that single zealotry of which Paul Collette was the prime symbol.

There was no evidence of a single coordinating office—a General Staff of Revolt—located in Britain or anywhere else. There seemed no good reason to believe that Europe’s scattered plots and outbreaks would crucially affect Adolf Hitler in the near future. But the executed corpses that swung above, or lay crumpled upon, Europe’s tragic ground were stirring greater rebellions.

*Vichy erroneously reported last month that Déat had died of his wounds (TIME, Sept. 22)