By June 6, 1944, French partisans had received enough arms through airdrops to fully equip 20,000 resisters, and partially equip another 50,000. Large stocks of guns, ammunition and explosives were in the hands of the partisans for a do-or-die effort to assist the Allied invasion.[24] Italian partisan activity also assumed impressive proportions in the northern part of Italy after Mussolini’s collapse in 1943. However, this Italian partisan activity, which included many Jews, developed at a time and place where the Germans were well positioned to contest its growth. In March 1944, for example, a partisan attack on a German column marching through Rome caused many German casualties. Germans were confronted by armed resistance groups in at least 24 ghettoes in western and central Poland: Warsaw, Krakow, Czestochowa, Wlodawa, Sosnowice, Tomaszow Lubelski, Kielce, Iwaniska, Chmielnik, Sandomierz, Jozefow, Opatow, Kalwaria, Ozialoszica, Markuszew, Rzeszow, Miedzyrzec Podlaski, Opoczno, Tarnow, Pilica, Radom, Radzyn, Sokolow Podlaski, and Zelechow. In northeastern Poland, there were 63 armed underground groups in 110 ghettoes or other Jewish concentrations. The existence of some form of organization is also indicated by armed actions in another 30 ghettoes.[26]
In August 1944, an estimated 2,500 Jewish fighters participated in a national uprising in Slovakia. After the defeat of this uprising, some 2,000 Jewish fighters joined 15,000 partisans in the Tatra mountains. Jews participated in underground activities in Bulgaria, in the Greek partisan movement, and about 6,000 Jews also fought with the Tito partisans in Yugoslavia.[27] German anti-partisan reprisals were usually effective in reducing partisan activity in Western Europe during the war. German reprisals against partisan activity frequently prevented opposition from surfacing over much of occupied Europe, and broke up opposition when it became visible. There were few places in Western Europe where the Germans were overwhelmed by partisan activities for very long. Only in the Soviet Union did German anti-partisan reprisals fail.[28]
Conclusion Judy Batalion writes concerning the extensive involvement of Jewish women in resistance efforts against Germany during World War II:[29] "Despite years of Jewish education, I’d never read accounts like these, astonishing in their details of the quotidian and extraordinary work of woman’s combat. I had no idea how many Jewish women were involved in the resistance effort, nor to what degree. Why, I kept asking myself, had I never heard these stories? Why had I not heard about the hundreds, even thousands, of Jewish women who were involved in every aspect of this rebellion, often at its helm?" It is this author’s opinion that Judy Batalion had never heard of the extensive involvement of Jewish women in resistance efforts against Germany because such involvement has intentionally been kept quiet. If the extensive murderous female participation in these resistance organizations were widely known, then people would get closer to understanding one reason why Hitler interned Jews in camps and ghettos. Jews were not interned because Hitler hated Jews. Rather, Jews were interned in camps and ghettoes to a large degree because the German authorities considered Jewish civilians, both male and female, a serious threat to German military operations during World War II. - John Wear of Inconvenient History reports.
