Starting in March 1942, the Germans staged three spectacular show trials and sentenced 50 activists from the Youth Battalions and OS groups to death; 16 were deported.
At the same time, the Nazis and their French collaborators continued their policy of executing hostages and exterminating Jews, but the Resistance against the enemy was growing stronger.
To make the response more effective, and following the first two sham trials, the French Communist Party unified the three organizations under its leadership: the Special Organization (OS), the Youth Battalions, and the Immigrant Labor Groups (M.O.I. groups).
The merger of these organizations gave rise to a single group in April 1942: the French Francs-Tireurs and Partisans (FTPF), or FTP. This highly structured armed Resistance force was immediately operational. It was open to non-Communists but remained under the Party’s authority.
Very quickly, groups of Francs-tireurs and M.O.I. partisans began to form in Paris under the military leadership of , and Boris Holban. With their very existence threatened and driven by their desire to liberate France from Nazism, Jewish fighters were led to carry out acts of resistance very early on.
The FTP-M.O.I. groups were formed from the highly active OS groups of the M.O.I. They comprised four main detachments. Romanian Jews made up the majority of the first detachment. The second, known as the “Jewish detachment,” consists mainly of Polish Jews. The third detachment is made up mostly of Italians, and the fourth, a mixed detachment, will come to specialize, over the course of several months, in derailing German military convoys.
The ferocity of the reprisals did nothing to dampen the fighters’ resolve. Among the FTP-M.O.I. resistance fighters were many veterans of the International Brigades who were well-versed in the use of weapons in Spain and in living underground in their home countries.
Alongside them, very young resistance fighters volunteered. Henri Krasucki, one of the leaders of the group of young Jewish communists, was tasked with selecting the 10 percent of them who would join the FTP-M.O.I.
In April 1942, two partisans were killed by an explosive device they were preparing to test. The police investigation led to the arrest and, following torture, the execution of numerous leaders of the underground Jewish section of the M.O.I.
It wasn’t always easy to obtain weapons, but the FTP-M.O.I. carried out numerous operations—including grenade attacks on enemy troops—as early as 1942: setting fire to garages and factories controlled by the Germans, and ransacking a hotel occupied by the Germans…
Being a member of the FTP-M.O.I. meant living in hiding and devoting oneself full-time to the armed struggle. The FTP-M.O.I. were relentlessly hunted down by the Nazis and their collaborators, first in Paris and later throughout France.
