Underground Resistance Movements

There’s a couple of good works on WW2 era clandestine networks and how they operated under occupation. These underground resistance movements were not as popular as the post-war popular culture made them appear. At that point everyone was keen to look back on their behavior favorably. Indeed, there was a “spirit of ‘44” where after the d-day invasion and the German retreat, recruitment to the underground swelled. Everyone knew the war was won and it was time to join the winning side.

What’s remarkable about the resistance movements in occupied Europe is mostly how loose they were with security. The recruitment process was primarily through existing social ties, for example church groups or sports associations. As a result, you get things like entire church groups starting a resistance cell, or a football team joining up at once. This makes for very easy security vetting of the new recruits (they knew each other already, frequently for their whole lives) but it makes operational security much more difficult. The cell size is too big and it is impossible to compartment smaller as everyone knows each other already. This is a problem that has been pointed out before.

The neat cell compartments are frequently impossible in practice because recruitment has to follow existing social ties and those are messy. These days, I believe, there is a key difference. The Internet allows social ties to exist over a much greater distance than in the past. This allows people to know each other socially without getting their immediate social circles involved, or even aware.

Here’s a paper on underground group management: http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?AD=ADA280391

Here’s a book on underground groups in general: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/436353.pdf