What Caused the Expansion and Escalation of Paramilitarisation?

After the outbreak of World War II, paramilitary violence spread across the European continent. The regions that were most obviously affected by paramilitarism during the first year of the war were Spain (where Republican guerrillas, the Spanish Maquis, continued to fight the regime of Francisco Franco), Poland (where unsurrendered soldiers of the Polish army, like Henryk Dobrzański, melted into the forest and continued the armed resistance to Nazi rule), and the Caucasus (where organised resistance to Soviet rule had begun even before the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941). Between 1940 and 1942, paramilitary violence emerged in those parts of Europe that had been conquered by the Axis powers, namely France and the Low Countries (1940), Albania (1940), Yugoslavia and Greece (1941), and the Soviet Union (1941–1942). The culmination of the process of paramilitarisation was reached in the years 1943 to 1945, when partisan bands, militias, and various kinds of independent armed bands became active in almost every country of continental Europe. In parts of southern and eastern Europe, paramilitarism became so widespread that the state monopoly over the use of organised violence collapsed altogether.