It is good to be reminded of just how many risked imprisonment or execution for hiding Jews under the racialized jurisdiction of the occupiers.

This is the most comprehensive and best account of resistance I have read. It addresses the story with scholarly objectivity and an absolute lack of sentimentality. So much romantic twaddle is still published, especially about Britain’s Special Operations Executive and particularly about its female agents, that it is marvellous to read a study of such breadth and depth, which reaches balanced judgments.

... thorough and well-researched.

... comprehensive.

... compendious.

... enormous, but eminently readable.

Kochanski, after first surveying the breadth of Germany’s conquests, details the growth of resistance movements in all their manifestations, from sabotage to assassination. Preexisting local disputes, sheer economic necessity, and racist ideologies complicated these responses. She also casts revealing light in chapters devoted to both the Christian and Jewish responses to the Holocaust. In this massive work of research, Kochanski brings together individual stories and larger historical forces to document how ordinary people successfully challenged what seemed overwhelming military might..

The book’s organization is thematic, chronological, and geographic, which is important in a work of this scope.

... a saga of epic heroism.

Amagisterial doorstop of a history that is well worth the effort.