page_title: Anti-partisan operations in World War II
section_title: Axis
hierarchical_section_title: Anti-partisan operations in World War II / Overall policy / Axis
caption_attribution_description: English: The execution of 56 Polish citizens in Bochnia, near Kraków, during German occupation of Poland, December 18, 1939 in a reprisal for an attack on a German police office two days earlier by the underground organization "White Eagle". Deutsch: Erschießung von 56 polnischen Geiseln im polnischen Bochnia (nahe Krakau / Krakowa) durch deutsche Besatzungstruppen am 18. Dezember 1939 als Vergeltung für einen Angriff auf einen deutschen Polizieioffizier, den die Untergrundorganisation "Weißer Adler" zwei Tage zuvor verübt hatte. Polski: Egzekucja 56 Polaków w Bochni koło Krakowa 18 grudnia 1939 roku.
context_page_description: Anti-partisan operations during World War II were counter-insurgency operations against the various partisan resistance movements. During World War II those operations were primarily carried out by the invading and occupying Axis powers, although with changing fortune of the wars, the Soviet Union and the Allied powers also had to deal with partisans.
  Resistance movements and corresponding anti-partisan operations by occupying authorities were a common occurrence during the war, particularly in the territories occupied by Nazi Germany. Specifically on the Eastern Front, the term "partisan" was applied by Nazi Germany's security apparatus to Jews and Communist officials, Red Army stragglers and others. Anti-partisan operations of Nazi security warfare were often massacres of innocent civilians.
context_section_description: The forms of resistance varied depending on place and time, and so did the Germans' countermeasures. Both the scale of resistance and the severity of German reprisals were much more limited in the West than in the East. While Germans were much more likely to treat the entire local populace as enemies in the East, they were much less ideologically driven in the West, where, for example, women and children were only rarely killed by SS troops (while being a much more common target in the East). In the East, some scholars noted that the anti-partisan operations gave Germans a pretext for ideologically motivated ethnic cleansing.
  The Germans concentrated on short-term victories against the partisans and were able, in some cases, to defeat the partisans militarily, but on the whole their atrocities against civilians in the East resulted in a continuous flow of volunteers joining the partisan ranks.
  The first resistance movements were created as early as in late 1939 in occupied Poland. As the war progressed and the number of Nazi-occupied territories grew, so did the number and strength of resistance movements.
  Throughout the war, regular formations of German army, auxiliary police formations (Ordnungspolizei) and their helpers (Schutzmannschaft or Hilfspolizei) would be used in anti-partisan operations.
  Overall, the Germans were able to achieve military successes but were never able to end the partisan threat; the struggle of Germans versus the partisans can be described as a stalemate – eventually ended by the German military defeat in the regular war.
  After the war, brutal German tactics used against the partisans were one of the charges presented at the Nuremberg Trials (see legality of the Commando Order and Hostages Trial).
caption: The execution of 56 Polish citizens in Bochnia, near Kraków, during German occupation of Poland, December 18, 1939, in a reprisal for an attack on a German police office two days earlier by the underground organization "White Eagle"
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