In western Europe, provisional authorities took office pending new elections. And in every case the resistance movements were encouraged and eventually forced to hand in their weapons and disband their organizations. It is striking, in retrospect, how little resistance there was to this restoration of the institutional status quo. In Poland and parts of the western Soviet Union armed partisan groups survived for a few more years, but theirs was a specifically national and anti-Communist struggle. In Norway, Belgium, France and Italy the organized resistance merged peacefully into post-war
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