Partisans of the World
For many people who risked their lives to defeat Nazism, aiding the post-war movements against a dying but vicious colonialism was the next step in the fight to realise their anti-fascist ideals.
Mário Pinto de Andrade, Ana Maria Cabral, Pedro Pires, and Basil Davidson in Praia, 1980 (Photo credit: FMSMB / Arquivo Mário Pinto de Andrade)
Though the cruelties of Buchenwald concentration camp left 22-year-old Jean Berthet with memory problems that were to dog him throughout his ninety-three years of life, it affirmed his humane values just as profoundly. Born in colonial Vietnam into a French mercantile family, the infant Jean was taught to adore the ‘civilisation’ exported by the French Empire and to despise the unpredictable working class of France.
After joining the Resistance in Paris, Berthet was arrested and deported in 1944. Adapting to an existence defined by a negative equality of shabby clothing, starvation diets, and unpredictable violence, his perceptions of social decency altered dramatically. The calm and generosity shown by proletarian inmates he’d once have considered savages harshly contrasted with the behaviour of the ‘well-manicured’, who stole from others and looked after only themselves. After liberation, his abandonment of Christianity and embrace of communism was so emphatic that his mother attempted to commit him to an asylum.
These nascent emancipatory passions prompted a re-examination of all Berthet’s held beliefs — not least his jingoism. Had he lived in a neighbouring country, he would have still fought the Nazis, since ‘it was first and foremost a fight against oppression, against humiliation’. As 1945 wore on, and it became clear that France was preparing to reimpose such a situation on a Vietnamese people who had also suffered for fighting Hitler’s allies, he couldn’t have felt clearer about where he stood. ‘Returning from deportation,’ he later told the historian Martin Evans, ‘I was at one with the Vietminh.’
Such miserable scenarios were happening across the continent. As Nazi Germany was defeated on 8 May 1945, French soldiers in Algeria massacred independence demonstrators in Sétif and Guelma, making their mark with mass graves, summary executions of children, and forced cremations of victims’ bodies. In Ghana three years later, British authorities murdered ‘native’ veterans of Britain’s armed forces demanding benefits duly owed to them. In South Africa, progressive soldiers in the Springbok Legion faced attack by Nazi-sympathising mobs who felt victory in the pro-apartheid National Party’s election in 1948. British rule in Kenya relied on what historian Caroline Elkins called a ‘murderous campaign to eliminate’ the Kikuyu people, prompting independence leader Jomo Kenyatta to draw comparisons with Nazism.
This moment of colonialism’s brute reassertion was a political clarifier to a generation of colonised peoples who had fought for the Allies on the assumption that they would be rewarded with national independence — particularly since the war demonstrated the fragility of older empires in the initial confrontation with Nazi Germany. But the same was also true for many Europeans who had belonged to the ‘resistance generation’ against Nazi and fascist occupation, and for whom the acceptance of such political realities was a personal affront to the values for which they’d risked their lives and seen so many of their loved ones and compatriots die.
The Continuity of Refusal
As a teenage commander in the communist-led Francs-tireurs et partisans (FTP) in Paris, Madeleine Riffaud’s war record was a heroic one. After shooting a Nazi soldier twice in the head by the Seine, she had been prevented from turning her gun on herself by a local fascist eager to collect his reward for turning in a ‘terrorist’ to the Gestapo. Having been sentenced to death, she was freed in a prisoner exchange brokered by the Swedish consulate and returned to Paris, where she immediately rejoined her comrades and spent her twentieth birthday besieging a train containing eighty Nazi soldiers and massive amounts of munitions.
Her revulsion at the French Communist Party’s participation in the post-war government led to the collapse of her marriage to a prominent young party member, and Riffaud decided to ‘make it a profession’ to expose injustice. After having befriended witnesses of colonial brutality in Algeria and Vietnam, she directed her energy ‘especially against colonialism: I didn’t want France to do elsewhere what the Nazis wanted to do here’. This unambiguous positioning, not least her work decrying French crimes in Algeria (and against the maquis of Vietnam), from a Resistance heroine of impeccable standing led to much ire from the French far right, and an assassination attempt by pied noir settlers partially blinded her.
Such commitment was also written into Adolfo Kaminsky. Born in 1925 into a Jewish family with Bundist loyalties, the teenage Kaminsky was a prolific forger for Paris’ various resistance cells and saved the lives of approximately 14,000 Jews with his false identification work. Having joined the French intelligence services under the command of a young François Mitterrand, Kaminsky’s joy at Nazism’s downfall was followed by immediate dismay at his next pressing order — to design a meticulous map of Vietnam for the French army. ‘If the insurrection of the Indo-Chinese were to take place,’ he thought, ‘shouldn’t I see it as comparable to what the Resistance had been for the French? The word didn’t exist at the time, but I was deeply anti-colonialist.’
After quitting the army, his instincts were reinforced by the daily indignities he witnessed working in Algeria as a photographer, feeling revulsion at what Algerians were forced to accept. Following the uprising of the National Liberation Front (FLN) in 1954, a conversation with the filmmaker and Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor Marceline Loridan led to his recruitment into a pro-FLN underground network she was active in. The network was organised by Francis Jeanson, a fellow Resistance fighter who wrote that disrupting the French in Algeria was just for Algerians and also necessary in order to ‘liberate France’ from a regime of torture and a society which, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s eyes, brought to mind ‘the refusal of yesteryear’s Germans vis-à-vis Dachau and Buchenwald to denounce what they hadn’t seen with their own eyes’.
Belonging to Jeanson’s porteurs de valises, which included dozens of French political activists and ex-Resistance members, Kaminsky excelled. After Jeanson jokingly tested Kaminsky’s reputation by asking for two Swiss passports, he mastered these allegedly unforgeable documents in forty-eight hours. He took weapons from his former Resistance arms dump and organised with the FLN leadership for a surreptitious handover. Some friends and Resistance comrades with now-divergent views were used imaginatively: he chose the far-right sympathising son of an old friend to act as a paper director for his fake company and asked a pro–pied noir friend whose life he’d saved to hide an FLN fugitive (the friend was furious that he had been asked since he despised their politics, yet owed Kaminsky). Soon, the friend greatly warmed to the FLN militant, commenting to Kaminsky that the Algerian was merely ‘doing resistance, just like us’.
In this regard, he wasn’t alone. In Jeanson’s network was Madeleine Baudoin, a Resistance veteran who, being ‘all for selective terrorism’, moved wartime-era weapons to the FLN and contacted old comrades such as Jacques Meker to supply safe houses for FLN members on the run. Adolf Spitzer, who was active in the communist underground as a fugitive Parisian Jew, felt little differentiation between his work with the FLN and against the Nazis, since most of his comrades who liberated France were of foreign origin and not therefore ‘serving their own country’ either.
The Jeanson network dissolved in 1960, following a mass arrest of much of its membership. Tried for high treason in absentia, Jeanson declared that it allowed them ‘to announce to the whole of France the birth of a new Resistance in this country’. Several managed to escape, successfully evading arrest until an amnesty arrived following the victory of the FLN in 1962. For those closer to the action, thinking in similar terms of solidarity and action, the price was harsher: in the Algerian mountains, Maurice Laban and Georges Raffini — two Algerian veterans of the International Brigades and the Resistance to Vichy France — died in the war.
Towards the African Stalingrad
Across Africa, millions of people watched the Algerian struggle enthusiastically, attempting to consider the FLN’s victory with regard to their own conditions. There were few places where this was more true than South Africa, where the anti-apartheid movement’s decade of organising mass movements of peaceful non-compliance had culminated in the movement’s mass criminalisation, the massacre of ninety-one demonstrators outside the Sharpeville police station in 1960, and the suppression of the African National Congress (ANC) in the same year.
From this repression, the ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP) — banned a decade earlier — concluded that appealing to decency or applying regular democratic pressures were futile. After Sharpeville, 23-year-old Ronnie Kasrils reflected that ‘in virtually all our minds was the need to hit back’ and ‘take off the gloves’. When Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the movement’s armed wing, emerged in December 1961, Kasrils was reading ‘just about everything you could’ about guerrilla warfare. ‘Che was important to us,’ he tells Tribune, but so was Julius Fučík, the Czech resistance fighter who, while awaiting execution in a Nazi dungeon, smuggled his last writings out with the help of a sympathetic warden. ‘You could find Notes from the Gallows lying about in many older comrades’ houses — it was real guerrilla literature.’
Liberated Algeria assisted MK from the beginning, with Nelson Mandela receiving FLN military training on the Moroccan border. But MK’s initial structures were reliant on communists who had volunteered to fight in the Second World War: Wolfie Kodesh and Fred Carneson, MK explosives officer Jock Strachan, Mandela’s fellow Rivonia triallist Rusty Bernstein, and Joe Slovo, who had lied about his age to fight the fascists in Italy. Kasrils remembers his mentor Jack Hodgson, a former miner who faced a court martial for defending the Soviet Union against his commanding officer who described Hitler’s military might with gleeful relish as the Nazi invasion began — yet ridiculously, Kasrils remembers, it was Hodgson who faced the charge of ‘undermining morale’.
After the first wave of MK activity led to further suppression, the organisation began reorganising the struggle in exile. Beginning in 1963, hundreds of MK soldiers were sent to undergo military and political training in the Soviet Union. Trained in Odessa in a building used by the Nazis as a place to murder anti-fascists, most instructors were veterans of Stalingrad, Leningrad, and the bitter partisan war. Kasrils remembers how MK leaders like Joe Modise were ‘hugely inspired’ by figures like Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, a teenage partisan tortured and murdered by the Nazis. The Soviet communist Vladimir Shubin remembers that in Odessa, a commander who served as a partisan would take MK soldiers to the mountains and forests of Crimea to show them the trenches and fields where his national struggle was fought.
To Shubin, who was responsible for organising Soviet political and practical support to MK in the 1980s, the Soviet veterans’ sympathy for their students was clear and obvious. ‘They could easily understand their situation,’ he told Tribune. ‘The whole idea was very connected — that this struggle against colonialism, against imperialism, it was the extension of their struggles in the 1940s.’ For revolutionaries far from home, these figures were living proof that no matter the harshness of the struggle, victory was inevitable. ‘They reminded us,’ Kasrils told Tribune, ‘that the Nazis had once printed tickets for dinners to be held in Leningrad; they were so confident they were going to sweep through the Soviet Union.’
Shubin also recalled how the experience of the 1940s generation helped mould a historical dimension to the language used by a new generation of fighters, remembering an Indian MK soldier who would introduce himself to locals as ‘a South African anti-fascist’. This sense of usefulness in the previous experience clearly carried on into the 1970s and 1980s, as the liberation movements approached victory. In 1985, the SACP guide for training underground cadres, How to Master Secret Work, drew a historical continuity between the nineteenth-century Zulu chief Bhambatha’s methods in organising anti-colonial revolt in the Kandla forests and the ‘vigilance and self-control’ of the French Resistance. Even today, the movements now governing Angola, Namibia, and South Africa celebrate the Battle of Cuito Canavale — a pivotal defeat for white rule in Southern Africa — as the African Stalingrad.
The Common Surge of Hope
When reflecting on his three decades of work for national liberation and anti-fascist movements across several continents, Adolfo Kaminsky told his daughter that ‘many people can’t understand any commitment to causes after the end of the Second World War’. Such a sentiment undoubtedly applies to countless people who perceive the struggle of that conflict as a temporary disruption of normality, choosing to mentally relocate or simply discard the notion that anyone else can dare to conduct a similarly righteous insurgency against their own national subjugation.
This applies today. In February 2025, the French journalist Jean-Michel Aphatie compared the Nazi slaughter of 643 French people in the village of Oradour-sur-Glane to French colonial atrocities. ‘The massacre of an entire village — we have committed hundreds of these in Algeria — are we aware of this?’ It was not even as uncomfortable as mentioning direct historical continuities in France’s fascist and imperialist projects, such as the spectre of Maurice Papon, the police chief responsible for both the mass deportation of Parisian Jewry to concentration camps in 1943 and the drowning of hundreds of protesting Algerians in the Seine in 1961 — even simple comparisons are still impermissible. After a furore, Aphatie stepped down, refusing to take back his own words.
In his Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire wrote how Europe’s colonial rulers could not accept that Nazism ‘applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for colonised populations’. Inversely, it couldn’t have accepted Europe’s colonial ruled learning the lessons of how Europe overturned such ‘crowning barbarism’ on their own shores.
But in the post-war era that Malcolm X described as the ‘tidal wave of colour’, the genie was out of the bottle. For Basil Davidson, whose wartime experiences in the Italian and Yugoslav partisan groups saw him narrowly and repeatedly avoid death and organise a partisan uprising which forced the Nazi surrender in Genoa, his striking memory was the desire among liberated Europeans for a normality free of ‘all the despair at the bottom of the heap’. In Davidson’s post-war life as a writer reporting from different national liberation struggles across Africa, he saw the same aspirations across a continent ‘united by a common surge of hope’. His writings, all too overlooked today, earned praise from figures such as the Bissau-Guinean revolutionary Amilcar Cabral, who praised his writings as having ‘stimulated those who had decided to go ahead’ to fight the occupying Portuguese and ‘appreciably encouraging the hesitant’.
As the last figures who forcibly ended fascism in Europe leave us, this is the vital ‘Resistance legacy’ — that many veterans of the anti-fascist Resistance, after having beaten imperialism’s most aggressive strain in the figure of Adolf Hitler, did not retire from the political arena but continued to play a far from insignificant role in aiding the struggles of peoples across the world. ‘For thirty years, I fought a reality that was too harrowing to observe or suffer without doing anything about it,’ Adolfo Kaminsky reflected. ‘My involvement in all these struggles was just the logical reflection of what I’d done during the Resistance.’ Or to put it in Madeleine Riffaud’s closing words in one of the final interviews she gave before her death in 2024, ‘After what we’d been through, we couldn’t live like other people.’