Hans Scholl (left), Sophie Scholl (center), and Christoph Probst (right) were the leaders of the White Rose, a German student group dedicated to resisting Hitler and nazism. All three of these young people were tried and executed for their actions.

By 1942, Germans occupied all of France, helped in part by French Legionnaires and the new French government seated in Vichy led by World War I hero Marshall Petain. The Vichy government collaborated with the Nazi regime, in part by facilitating the expulsion of French Jews to Nazi concentration camps. Of the nearly 76,000 Jews that Vichy France turned over to the Nazis, only 2,000 survived. De Gaulle's Free French movement was the most organized of the resistance movements.

Jewish partisans in battle. Jews were often found fighting with the local resisters. These partisans, about whom little is known, fought against the Germans in France.

Other French groups like the Front National, the Maquis, and the French Communist party eventually united under de Gaulle's command. Resistance fighters made a big difference, especially during the Allies' D-Day invasion of France in June 1944. They engaged the Nazis in battle, blew up bridges and ammunition dumps, rescued downed airmen, and relayed important intelligence information to British and American forces. In neighboring Belgium, the "Secret Army" resistance movement engaged over 10,000 Belgians in planning military operations and collecting intelligence for the Allies.

Resistance in Scandinavia took various forms, influenced in part by geography. In Norway, army units conducted guerilla warfare against the Nazis in the mountains. In Denmark and the Netherlands, resistance involved sabotaging Nazi installations, rescuing Jews from deportation, and gathering intelligence for Allied forces. In one bold and dangerous act of defiance, members of the Danish underground smuggled nearly all of Denmark's 8,000 Jews into neighboring neutral Sweden, just before they were scheduled to be sent to Nazi concentration camps. In the Netherlands, resisters hid Anne Frank and her family until their discovery and deportation to camps. The young German girl captured her experiences in her diary, published after her death as the Diary of Anne Frank.

Image courtesy United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

With the concentrated efforts of the government, police, and citizenry, almost all Danish Jews were evacuated to Sweden. Only 51 Jews from Denmark perished in the concentration camps.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor who returned to Germany to help Lutherans resist the Nazis. He later became involved with resistance groups and was imprisoned. He was executed in the Flossenburg concentration camp in 1945.

Resistance in Eastern Europe was active, but it suffered from conflicts between communist and noncommunist resistance groups. In Yugoslavia, Marshal Tito's Partisan army eventually numbered 250,000, harassing Axis forces during the early years of the war and joining forces with the Soviet Red Army towards its end.

In Germany, resistance peaked after the June 1944 D-Day invasion of France. In July, an attempted assassination of Hitler, organized by German army officers, failed. Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg had placed a bomb in a conference room, but the explosion only slightly injured Hitler. The bombing ended organized German resistance to the Nazi regime. Hundreds of co-conspirators and suspects were tortured to death. One co-conspirator, Erwin Rommel, the revered Desert Fox, was given the option of suicide, which he took by ingesting poison.

Resistance also took other forms. Italians protested the war in paintings, publications, and with the arrest of Mussolini in 1943. Catholic Church officials protested Nazi euthanasia programs, though they said little about the persecution of Jews. German novelist Thomas Mann broadcast anti-Nazi messages to the German people from his exile in Switzerland.