Introduction

Who were the heroes of World War II? Winston Churchill, the British prime minister, who refused to surrender while the mighty German air force tried to bomb Great Britain into submission? Jean Moulin, a man who worked tirelessly to unify the French Resistance and died under torture rather than betray his fellow resisters? Or were the heroes of World War II the thousands of Allied troops who stormed the beaches of Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944, and helped put an end to the Nazi occupation of Europe? All these men were heroes. Without their courageous acts, Nazi Germany certainly would not have been defeated.

But there were other heroes in World War II, many whose names are not as familiar as those of U.S. generals Patton and Eisenhower but whose courageous actions helped win the war. These are the women heroes of World War II. A few of them were already quite famous before the war, and some of them became so afterward, but many more were simply ordinary. They were hairdressers and watchmakers, social workers and university students, teenagers and housewives, all of them very different women who had one thing in common: they were outraged at Hitler’s actions.

Hitler’s troops invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, which officially began World War II. Shortly after Hitler invaded Poland, France and Great Britain—technically allies of Poland—declared war on Germany, and Hitler in turn declared war on both of them. But France and Great Britain did not come to Poland’s aid, and for eight months after the Polish invasion nothing happened between Great Britain, France, and Germany during this peaceful but tense period called the Drôle de Guerre (French for “strange” or “funny” war).

Then, on April 9, 1940, German troops invaded Denmark and Norway, claiming to be protecting them from a possible Allied invasion (but in fact using them as buffers against a possible British attack on Germany). On May 10, 1940, German troops simultaneously invaded France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium.

Although there was some initial defensive fighting from each of these countries, by the end of June 1940 the Germans had conquered most of Western Europe. Hitler could now attempt to implement the ideas he had written about years earlier in his rambling memoir, Mein kampf (My Struggle). In the book he described his desire to make Germany the dominant culture in Europe. Hitler planned to eventually “Germanize” those he had conquered from “Aryan” countries (whose populations had Germanic features; very generally, blue-eyed blonds), forcing them to forsake their own culture for that of Germany. As for the Slavic peoples (whom he considered to be inferior to the Aryans) such as the Soviets and the Poles, he planned to destroy or enslave them and then take their lands and goods for Germans and Germanized Aryans.

Hitler seized the occupied countries’ farmlands, oil fields, mines, and factories. Then, depending on their owners’ race, he either murdered them, shipped them off to forced labor camps, or left them behind to keep the country running and survive on what they could manage through strict ration cards.