Solidarities of Conspiracy: Forced Labour as Catalyst

The aspirations of illegal newspapers in Western Europe were strengthened by the Nazi ban on radio sets and a relentless Nazification of occupied countries. The latter reached an apex of cruelty with the introduction of forced labour, and this in turn had an effect of enhancing thoughts about the way the post-Nazi, peacetime war world should be. In 1941, newspapers acted as the main way of conducting propaganda (Kedward, R. (2022) The French Resistance and its Legacy). This characteristic was further boosted in 1942, when as happened in Norway, the introduction by the Nazis of compulsory labour service (the STO) in Germany gave an enormous boost to resistance movements and therefore to their newspapers. Forced labour affected hundreds of thousands of people, but towards the end of the war, new forms of newspaper journalism had developed into a formidable weapon of resistance communication that sought to provide focused guidance on this issue through its content. This chapter takes some examples and discusses how far this newspaper advice was followed, and how far it mattered. The evidence that is analysed demonstrates that opposition to forced labour acted as a catalyst for enhanced newspaper activity, for it was the most painful and provocative of Nazi measures for non-Jewish people in occupied countries, and one that Jewish populations had long experienced. At the same time, it forced writers to focus on what kind of society they wanted for the future. In the aftermaths of Stalingrad, peoples’ thoughts began to focus increasingly on what this might mean in terms of post-war reconstruction and the future, prompting further new publications, launched exclusively to address the issue.