The
German Resistance was the opposition by individuals and groups in
Nazi GermanyNazi Germany and the Third Reich are the common English names for Germany between 1933 and 1945, while it was led by Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Worker's Party . The name Third Reich refers to the state as the successor to the Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages and the German...
to the regime of
Adolf HitlerAdolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , popularly known as the Nazi Party...
between 1933 and 1945. Some of these engaged in active plans to remove Hitler from power and overthrow his regime. Their plans culminated in the unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1944 (the 20 July plot).
The term German Resistance should not be understood as meaning that there was a united resistance movement in Germany at any time during the Nazi period, analogous to the more coordinated (for example) Polish Underground State or
French ResistanceThe French Resistance is the collective name used for the French resistance movements which fought against the Nazi German occupation of France and the collaborationist Vichy Regime during World War II...
or Italian Resistance. The German resistance consisted of small and usually isolated groups. They were unable to mobilize political opposition to Hitler, and their only real strategy was to persuade leaders of the German Army to stage a
coupA coup d'état , or coup for short, is the sudden unconstitutional deposition of a legitimate government, usually by a small group of the existing state establishment—typically the military—to replace the deposed government with another, either civil or military...
against the regime: the 1944 assassination plan was intended to trigger such a coup.
Between 1933 and 1945 more than 3 million Germans had been in concentration camps or prison for political reasons, and approximately 77,000 Germans were killed for one or another form of resistance by
Special CourtsSpecial Courts were the underground courts organized by the Polish Government in Exile during World War II in occupied Poland...
, courts martial, and the civil justice system. Many of these Germans had served in government, the military, or in civil positions, which enabled them to engage in subversion and conspiracy while involved.
Introduction
The German Resistance movement consisted of several disparate political and ideological strands, which represented different classes of German society and were seldom able to work together – indeed for much of the period there was little or no contact between the different strands of resistance.
One strand was the underground networks of the banned
Social DemocratsThe Social Democratic Party of Germany is Germany's oldest political party. The party governed at the federal level in a grand coalition with the Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union until conceding defeat in the federal election of September 2009...
(SPD) and
CommunistsThe Communist Party of Germany was a major political party in Germany between 1918 and 1933, and a minor party in West Germany in the postwar period...
(KPD). These networks might better be described as "opposition" rather than "resistance," since they engaged in little overt resistance activity against the regime apart from incitement of strikes, but rather sought to keep their parties alive in the hope of being able to take advantage of a political change in the future. An exception was the SPD activist
Julius LeberJulius Leber was a German politician of the SPD and a member of the German Resistance against the Nazi régime.-Early history:...
, who was an active resistance figure. There was also resistance from the anarcho-syndicalist union, the
Freie Arbeiter UnionThe Free Workers' Union of Germany was an anarcho-syndicalist trade union, which existed from the renaming of the Free Association of German Trade Unions on September 15, 1919 to its official disbandment in January 1933 after the NSDAP came into power, although many of its members continued to be...
(FAUD) which distributed anti-Nazi propaganda and assisted people in fleeing the country.
Another strand was resistance based on minorities within the Christian churches, both Catholic and Protestant. Their role was mostly symbolic – a small minority of Christian clergy spoke out against the regime, such as the Protestant pastors
Dietrich BonhoefferDietrich Bonhoeffer Dietrich Bonhoeffer Dietrich Bonhoeffer ( (February 4, 1906 – April 9, 1945) was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian. He was also a participant in the German Resistance movement against Nazism, a founding member of the Confessing Church...
and
Martin NiemöllerFriedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller was a prominent German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor. He is best known as the author of the poem First they came.......
(the latter after having initially supported Hitler), and the Catholic Bishop
Clemens von GalenBlessed Clemens August Graf von Galen was a German count, Bishop of Münster, and Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. He received his education in Austria at the Stella Matutina . After his ordination he worked in Berlin at Saint Matthias, where he became close friends with Nuncio Eugenio...
, and their example inspired some acts of overt resistance, such as that of the
White RoseThe White Rose was a non-violent/intellectual resistance group in Nazi Germany, consisting of students from the University of Munich and their philosophy professor...
student group in
MunichMunich is the capital city of Bavaria, Germany. It is located on the River Isar north of the Bavarian Alps. Munich is the third largest city in Germany, after Berlin and Hamburg...
. The Catholic Church as a whole opposed the regime only when its own deepest values were challenged, as in opposition to the Nazi
T4Action T4 was a program, also called Euthanasia Program, in Nazi Germany spanning October 1939 until August 1941, during which physicians killed 70,273 people specified in Hitler's secret memo of September 1, 1939 as suffering patients "judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination", but...
"euthanasia" program. The Protestant churches never directly opposed the regime (or lacked the institutional hierarchy to do so creedally), although a number of Protestant ministers did so. See the English Wikipedia article on the
Confessing ChurchThe Confessing Church was a Protestant schismatic church in Nazi Germany that arose in opposition to government-sponsored efforts to nazify the German Protestant church.-Demographics:...
.
A third strand might be called the "unorganized resistance" — individual Germans or small groups of people acting in defiance of government policies or orders, or in ways seen as subversive of the Nazi system. Most notably, these included a significant number of Germans who helped Jews survive the Nazi Holocaust by hiding them, obtaining papers for them or in others ways aiding them. More than 300 Germans have been recognised for this kind of activity. It also included, particularly in the later years of the regime, informal networks of young Germans who evaded serving in the
Hitler YouthThe Hitler Youth was a paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party. It existed from 1922 to 1945. The HJ was the second oldest paramilitary Nazi group, founded one year after its adult counterpart, the Sturmabteilung .-Origins:The first NSDAP-related organization of German youth was the Jugendbund...
and defied the cultural policies of the Nazis in various ways.
Finally there was the resistance network within the German state machinery itself, centered in the Army, the Foreign Office and the military intelligence organisation, the
AbwehrThe Abwehr was a German military intelligence organisation from 1921 to 1944. The term Abwehr was used as a concession to Allied demands that Germany's post-World War I intelligence activities be for "defensive" purposes only...
. These groups hatched conspiracies against Hitler in 1938 and again in 1939, but for a variety of reasons were unable to take action. After the German defeat in the
Battle of StalingradThe Battle of Stalingrad was a battle of World War II between Nazi Germany and its allies and the Soviet Union for control of the city of Stalingrad in southwestern Russia. The battle took place between 17 July 1942 and 2 February 1943....
in 1942, they were able to make contact with a significant number of Army officers who were convinced that Hitler was leading Germany to disaster, although fewer who were willing to engage in overt resistance. Active resisters were drawn largely from the old Prussian aristocracy, since this was the only social class which had not been successfully penetrated by Nazi ideology.
Almost every community in Germany had members taken away to concentration camps, as early as 1935 there were jingles warning:
- "Dear Lord God, keep me quiet, so that I don't end up in Dachau
Dachau concentration camp was the first Nazi concentration camp opened in Germany, located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory near the medieval town of Dachau, about 16 km northwest of Munich in the state of Bavaria which is located in southern Germany.Opened in March 1933, it...
." (It almost rhymes in German: Lieber Herr Gott mach mich stumm / Daß ich nicht nach Dachau komm.)http://www.jstor.org/pss/2770938 (the cited source offers an inappropriately literal translation of the doggerelDoggerel is a derogatory term for verse considered of little literary value. The word probably derives from dog, suggesting either ugliness, or unpalatability .Doggerel might have any or all of the following failings:...
)
Prewar resistance 1933–39
There was almost no organized resistance to Hitler’s regime in the period between his appointment as Chancellor in January 1933 and the crisis over
CzechoslovakiaCzechoslovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
in 1938. By July 1933 all other political parties and the trade unions had been suppressed, the press and radio brought under state control, and most elements of
civil societyCivil society is composed of the totality of voluntary civic and social organizations and institutions that form the basis of a functioning society as opposed to the force-backed structures of a state and commercial institutions of the market.-Definition:There are myriad definitions of civil...
neutralised. The July 1933
Concordat between Germany and the Holy SeeThe Reichskonkordat is the concordat between the Holy See and Germany. It was signed on July 20, 1933 by Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli and Franz von Papen on behalf of Pope Pius XI and President Paul von Hindenburg respectively...
ended any possibility of systematic resistance by the Catholic Church. The largest Protestant Church, the
German Evangelical ChurchThe Protestant Reich Church was formed by Adolf Hitler in 1933 by an attempt to merge 28 regional churches into one church...
, was generally pro-Nazi, although a minority tendency resisted this position. The breaking of the power of the
SAThe , abbreviated SA , functioned as a paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party...
in the “
Night of the Long KnivesThe Night of the Long Knives or "Operation Hummingbird", was a purge that took place in Nazi Germany between June 30 and July 2, 1934, when the Nazi regime carried out a series of political executions, most of those killed being members of the Sturmabteilung , the paramilitary Brownshirts.Hitler...
” in July 1934 ended any possibility of a challenge from the “socialist” wing of the Nazi Party, and also brought the Army into closer alliance with the regime.
All sources agree that Hitler’s regime was overwhelmingly popular with the German people during this period. The failures of the
Weimar RepublicThe Weimar Republic is the name given by historians to the parliamentary republic established in 1919 in Germany to replace the imperial form of government, named after Weimar, the place where the constitutional assembly took place. Its official name was still Deutsches Reich , however...
had discredited
democracyDemocracy is a system of government in which either the actual governing is carried out by the people governed , or the power to do so is granted by them...
in the eyes of the majority of Germans. Hitler’s apparent success in restoring full employment after the ravages of the
Great DepressionThe Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
(achieved mainly through the reintroduction of
conscriptionConscription is a general term for involuntary labor demanded by an established authority. It is most often used in the specific sense of requiring citizens to serve in the armed forces...
, a policy advocating that women stay home and raise children, a crash re-armament program, and the incremental removal of Jews from the workforce as their jobs were tendered to Gentiles), and his bloodless foreign policy successes such as the reoccupation of the
RhinelandThe Rhineland is the general name for the land on both sides of the river Rhine in the west of Germany. After the collapse of the French Empire in the early 19th century, the German and Dutch speaking regions at the middle and lower course of the Rhine were annexed to the kingdom of Prussia...
in 1936 and the annexation of
AustriaAustria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.3 million people in Central Europe. It borders both Germany and the Czech Republic to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west...
in 1938, brought him almost universal acclaim.
During this period, the SPD and the KPD managed to maintain underground networks, although the legacy of pre-1933 conflicts between the two parties meant that they were unable to co-operate. These networks were frequently infiltrated by the
GestapoThe was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Beginning in April 1934, it was under the overall administration of the Schutzstaffel under Heinrich Himmler in his position as leader of the SS and Chief of German Police...
and the rate of arrests and executions of SPD and KPD activists was high, but the networks continued to be able recruit new members from the industrial working class, who resented the stringent labour discipline imposed by the regime during its race to rearm. The
exiled SPD leadershipSopade was the name of the exile organization of the Social Democratic Party of Germany . It operated in Prague from 1933 to 1938, from 1938 to 1940 in Paris and till 1945 in London/USA....
in
PraguePrague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Nicknames for Prague have included "the mother of cities" , "city of a hundred spires", or Stověžatá Praha in Czech and "the golden city" or Zlaté město in Czech.Situated on the River Vltava in central Bohemia, Prague has been the...
was able to receive and publish accurate reports of events inside Germany. But beyond maintaining their existence and fomenting industrial unrest, sometimes resulting in short-lived strikes, these networks were able to achieve little.
There remained, however, a substantial base for opposition to Hitler’s regime. Although the Nazi Party had taken control of the German state, it had not completely destroyed and rebuilt the state apparatus in the way the
BolshevikThe Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903...
regime had done in the
Soviet UnionThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. The name is a translation of the , tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated СССР, SSSR. The common short name is Soviet Union, from , Sovetskiy Soyuz...
. Institutions such as the Foreign Office, the intelligence services and, above all, the Army, retained some measure of independence, while outwardly submitting to the new regime. The independence of the Army was eroded in 1938, when both the War Minister, General
Werner von BlombergWerner Eduard Fritz von Blomberg was a leading member of the German Army until January 1938.-Early life:Born in Stargard, Pomerania, Prussia , Werner von Blomberg joined the army at a young age and attended Germany's Kriegsakademie in 1904...
, and the Army Chief, General
Werner von FritschWerner Freiherr von Fritsch was a prominent Wehrmacht officer, member of the German High Command, and the second German general to be killed in the Second World War.-Early life:...
were removed from office, but an informal network of officers critical of the Nazi regime remained.
In 1936, thanks to an informer, the Gestapo raids decimated
Anarcho-syndicalistAnarcho-syndicalism is a branch of anarchism which focuses on the labour movement. Syndicalisme is a French word, ultimately derived from the Greek, meaning "trade unionism" hence, the "syndicalism" qualification. Syndicalism is an alternative co-operative economic system...
groups all over Germany, resulting in the arrest of 89 people. Most ended up either imprisoned or murdered by the regime. The groups had been encouraging industrial action (such as strikes), printing and distributing anti-Nazi propaganda and recruiting people to fight the Nazi's fascist allies during the
Spanish Civil WarThe Spanish Civil War was a major conflict that devastated Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939. It began after an attempted coup d'état by a group of Spanish Army generals against the government of the Second Spanish Republic, then under the leadership of president Manuel Azaña...
.
As part of the agreement with the conservative forces by which Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, the non-party conservative
Konstantin von NeurathKonstantin Freiherr von Neurath was a German diplomat, Foreign Minister of Germany and Reichsprotektor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia . Neurath remained titular Protector until 1943.- Early life :He was born in Vaihingen an der Enz, Kingdom of Württemberg, the son of minor Swabian...
remained Foreign Minister, a position he retained until 1938. During his period in the Foreign Office, with its network of diplomats and access to intelligence, became home to an active circle of resistance, under the discreet patronage of the Under-Secretary of State
Ernst von WeizsäckerErnst Freiherr von Weizsäcker was a German diplomat and convicted war criminal. Weizsäcker was the father of politician Richard von Weizsäcker, who was President of Germany 1984-94, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, famous physicist and philosopher...
. Prominent in this circle were the Ambassador in
RomeRome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated municipality , with over 2.7 million residents in , while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat to be 3.46 million. The metropolitan area of Rome is estimated by OECD to have a population of 3.7 million...
Ulrich von HassellUlrich von Hassell was a German diplomat during World War II. A member of the German Resistance against German dictator Adolf Hitler, Hassell was executed in the aftermath of the failed July 20 plot.- Life :...
, the Ambassador in
MoscowMoscow is the capital and the largest city of Russia. It is also the largest metropolitan area in Europe, and ranks among the largest urban areas in the world. Moscow is a major political, economic, cultural, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the world, a...
Friedrich Graf von der SchulenburgFriedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg was a German diplomat who served as the last German ambassador to the Soviet Union before Operation Barbarossa. He began his diplomatic career before the First World War, serving as consul and ambassador in several countries.-Diplomatic career:Schulenberg...
, and officials
Adam von Trott zu SolzAdam von Trott zu Solz was a German lawyer and diplomat who opposed the Nazi regime.-Life:Born in Potsdam, Germany, he was the fifth child of Emilie Eleonore and leading Prussian civil servant August von Trott zu Solz...
,
Erich KordtErich Kordt , was a German diplomat who was involved in the German Resistance to the regime of Adolf Hitler.-Career:...
and Hans-Bernd von Haeften. This circle survived even when the ardent Nazi
Joachim von RibbentropUlrich Friedrich Wilhelm Joachim von Ribbentrop was Foreign Minister of Germany from 1938 until 1945. He was later hanged for war crimes after the Nuremberg Trials.- Early life :...
succeeded Neurath as Foreign Minister.
The most important centre of opposition to the regime within the state apparatus was in the intelligence services, whose clandestine operations offered an excellent cover for political organisation. The key figure here was Colonel
Hans OsterHans Oster was a German Army general, deputy head of the Abwehr under Wilhelm Canaris, and one of the earliest and most determined opponents of Adolf Hitler and Nazism. He was a driving force of German resistance from 1938 to 1943.-Early career:He was born in Dresden, Saxony in 1887, the son of an...
, head of the Military Intelligence Office from 1938, and a convinced anti-Nazi as early as 1934. He was protected by the
AbwehrCounterintelligence refers to efforts made by intelligence organizations to prevent hostile or enemy intelligence organizations from successfully gathering and collecting intelligence against them. National intelligence programs, and, by extension, the overall defenses of nations, are vulnerable...
chief, Admiral
Wilhelm CanarisWilhelm Franz Canaris was a German admiral, head of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, from 1935 to 1944 and member of the German Resistance.- Early life and World War I :...
. Oster was able to build up an extensive clandestine network of potential resisters in the Army and the intelligence services. He found an early ally in Hans-Bernd Gisevius, a senior official in the Interior Ministry.
Hjalmar SchachtDr. Horace Greeley Hjalmar Schacht was the Currency Commissioner and President of the Reichsbank under the Weimar Republic, and President of the Reichsbank between 1933 and 1939...
, the governor of the
ReichsbankThe Reichsbank was the central bank of Germany from 1876 until 1945. It was founded on 1 January 1876 . The Reichsbank was a privately owned central bank of Prussia, under close control by the Reich government. Its first president was Hermann von Dechend...
, was also in touch with this opposition.
The problem these groups faced, however, was what form resistance to Hitler could take in the face of the regime’s successive triumphs. They recognised that it was impossible to stage any kind of open political resistance. This was not, as is sometimes stated, because the repressive apparatus of the regime was so all-pervasive that public protest was impossible – as was shown when Catholics protested against the removal of crucifixes from Bavarian schools in 1941, and the regime backed down. Rather it was because of Hitler’s massive support among the German people. While resistance movements in the occupied countries could mobilise patriotic sentiment against the German occupiers, in Germany the resistance risked being seen as unpatriotic, particularly in wartime. Even many Army officers and officials who detested Hitler had a deep aversion to being involved in “subversive” or “treasonous” acts against the government.
As early as 1936 Oster and Gisevius came to the view that a regime so totally dominated by one man could only be brought down by eliminating that man – either by assassinating Hitler or by staging an Army coup against him. But it was a long time before any significant number of Germans came to accept this view. Many clung to the belief that Hitler could be persuaded to moderate his regime, or that some other more moderate figure could replace him. Others argued that Hitler was not to blame for the regime’s excesses, and that the removal of
Heinrich HimmlerHeinrich Luitpold Himmler , one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany, served as Chief of the German Police and Minister of the Interior...
and the reduction in the power of the
SSThe , abbreviated SS- or - was a major Nazi organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. The SS grew from a small paramilitary unit to a powerful force that served as the Führer's "Praetorian Guard," the Nazi Party's "Shield Squadron" and a force that, fielding almost a million men ,...
was needed. Some oppositionists were devout Christians who disapproved of assassination as a matter of principle. Others, particularly the Army officers, felt bound by the personal oath of loyalty they had taken to Hitler in 1934.
The opposition was also hampered by a lack of agreement about their objectives other than the need to remove Hitler from power. Some oppositionists were liberals who opposed the ideology of the Nazi regime in its entirety, and who wished to restore a system of parliamentary
democracyDemocracy is a system of government in which either the actual governing is carried out by the people governed , or the power to do so is granted by them...
. Most of the Army officers and many of the civil servants, however, were conservatives and nationalists, and many had initially supported Hitler’s policies – Carl Goerdeler, the Lord Mayor of
LeipzigLeipzig is, with a population of 515,459, the largest city in the federal state of Saxony, Germany.-Origins:Leipzig's name is derived from the Slavic word Lipsk, which means "settlement where the lime trees stand"....
, was a good example. Some favoured restoring the Hohenzollern dynasty, others favoured an authoritarian, but not Nazi, regime. Some saw no problem with Hitler's anti-Semitism and ultra-nationalism, and opposed only his apparent reckless determination to take Germany into a new world war. In these circumstances the opposition was unable to form a united movement, or to send a coherent message to potential allies outside Germany.
Resistance in the Army 1938–42
Despite the removal of Blomberg and Fritsch, the Army retained considerable independence, and senior officers were able to discuss their political views in private fairly freely. In May 1938 the Army leadership was made aware of Hitler’s intention of invading
CzechoslovakiaCzechoslovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
, even at the risk of war with
BritainThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
,
FranceFrance , officially the French Republic , is a country located in Western Europe, with several overseas islands and territories located on other continents. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean...
and/or the
Soviet UnionThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. The name is a translation of the , tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated СССР, SSSR. The common short name is Soviet Union, from , Sovetskiy Soyuz...
. The Army Chief of Staff, General
Ludwig BeckLudwig August Theodor Beck was a German general and Chief of the General Staff of High Command of the Army during the early years of the Nazi regime in Germany before World War II....
, regarded this as not only immoral but reckless, since he believed that Germany would lose such a war. Oster and Beck sent emissaries to Paris and London to advise the British and French to resist Hitler’s demands, and thereby strengthen the hand of Hitler’s opponents in the Army. Weizsäcker also sent private messages to London urging resistance. The British and French were extremely doubtful of the ability of the German opposition to overthrow the Nazi regime and ignored these messages. An official of the British Foreign Office wrote on August 28, 1938: "We have had similar visits from other emissaries of the
Reichsheer, such as Dr. Goerdeler, but those for whom these emissaries claim to speak have never given us any reasons to suppose that they would be able or willing to take action such as would lead to the overthrow of the regime. The events of June 1934 and February 1938 do not lead one to attach much hope to energetic action by the Army against the regime" The British Prime Minister
Neville ChamberlainArthur Neville Chamberlain was a British Conservative politician and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1937 to 1940...
has been energetically defended against the charge of responsibility for the failure of Germans to overthrow their Führer in 1938 by the American historian
Gerhard WeinbergGerhard Ludwig Weinberg is a German-born American diplomatic and military historian noted for his studies in the history of World War II. Weinberg currently is the William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been a member of the...
. Weinberg has argued that the three visits to London in the summer of 1938 by three different messengers from the German opposition, each bearing the same message that if only a firm British stand was made in favor of Czechoslovakia, then a
putsch would remove the Nazi regime, and each ignorant of the other messengers' existence presented an impression of a group of people apparently not very well organized, and that it is unreasonable for historians to have expected Chamberlain to stake all upon the uncorroborated words upon such a badly disorganized group
Writing of the 1938 conspiracy, the German historian Klaus-Jürgen Müller observed that the conspiracy was a loosely organized collection of two different groups. One group comprising the Army’s Chief of Staff General
Ludwig BeckLudwig August Theodor Beck was a German general and Chief of the General Staff of High Command of the Army during the early years of the Nazi regime in Germany before World War II....
, the
AbwehrThe Abwehr was a German military intelligence organisation from 1921 to 1944. The term Abwehr was used as a concession to Allied demands that Germany's post-World War I intelligence activities be for "defensive" purposes only...
chief, Admiral
Wilhelm CanarisWilhelm Franz Canaris was a German admiral, head of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, from 1935 to 1944 and member of the German Resistance.- Early life and World War I :...
, and the Foreign Office's State Secretary, Baron
Ernst von WeizsäckerErnst Freiherr von Weizsäcker was a German diplomat and convicted war criminal. Weizsäcker was the father of politician Richard von Weizsäcker, who was President of Germany 1984-94, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, famous physicist and philosopher...
were the "anti-war" group in the German government, which was determined to avoid a war in 1938 that it felt Germany would lose. This group was not necessarily committed to the overthrow of the regime, but was loosely allied to another, more radical group, the "anti-Nazi" fraction centered around Colonel
Hans OsterHans Oster was a German Army general, deputy head of the Abwehr under Wilhelm Canaris, and one of the earliest and most determined opponents of Adolf Hitler and Nazism. He was a driving force of German resistance from 1938 to 1943.-Early career:He was born in Dresden, Saxony in 1887, the son of an...
and
Hans Bernd GiseviusHans Bernd Gisevius was a German diplomat and intelligence officer during World War II. A strong opponent of the Nazi regime, he served as a liaison in Zürich between Allen Dulles, station chief for the American OSS and the German Resistance forces in Germany.-Pre World War II:Gisevius was born...
, which wanted to use the crisis as an excuse for executing a
putsch to overthrow the Nazi regime. The divergent aims between these two factions produced considerable tensions.
In August Beck spoke openly at a meeting of Army Generals in Berlin about his opposition to a war with the western powers over Czechoslovakia. When Hitler was informed of this, he demanded and received Beck’s resignation. Beck was highly respected in the Army and his removal shocked the officer corps. His successor as Chief of Staff,
Franz HalderFranz Ritter Halder was a German General and the head of the Army General Staff from 1938 until September, 1942, when he was dismissed after frequent disagreements with Adolf Hitler.-Early life:...
, remained in touch with him, and was also in touch with Oster. Privately, he said that he considered Hitler “the incarnation of evil.” During September, plans for a move against Hitler were formulated, involving General
Erwin von WitzlebenJob-Wilhelm Georg Erwin von Witzleben was a German army officer and in the Second World War an Army commander and a conspirator in the July 20 Plot.- Early years :...
, the Army commander of the Berlin Military Region and thus well-placed to stage a coup.
Oster, Gisevius and Schacht urged Halder and Beck to stage an immediate coup against Hitler, but the Army officers argued that they could only mobilize support among the officer corps for such a step if Hitler made overt moves towards war. Halder nevertheless asked Oster to draw up plans for a coup. Weizsäcker and Canaris were made aware of these plans. The conspirators disagreed on what to do about Hitler in the event of a successful Army coup – eventually most overcame their scruples and agreed that he must be killed if the majority of Army officers were to be freed from their oath of loyalty. It was agreed that Halder would instigate the coup when Hitler committed an overt step towards war. During the planning for the 1938
putsch,
Carl Friedrich GoerdelerCarl Friedrich Goerdeler was a monarchist conservative German politician, executive, economist, civil servant, and first a servant of and later an opponent of the Nazi regime...
was in contact via the intermediary of General
Alexander von FalkenhausenAlexander Ernst Alfred Hermann Freiherr von Falkenhausen was a German general. He was the head of the military government of Belgium from 1940–44 during its occupation by Germany in World War II....
with Chinese intelligence Most German conservatives favoured Germany’s traditional informal alliance with China, and were strongly opposed to the volte-face in Germany’s Far Eastern policies effected in early 1938 by
Joachim von RibbentropUlrich Friedrich Wilhelm Joachim von Ribbentrop was Foreign Minister of Germany from 1938 until 1945. He was later hanged for war crimes after the Nuremberg Trials.- Early life :...
, who abandoned the alliance with China for an alignment with Japan. As a consequence, agents of Chinese intelligence supported the proposed
putsch as a way of restoring the Sino-German alliance.
Remarkably, the Army commander, General
Walther von BrauchitschHeinrich Alfred Hermann Walther von Brauchitsch was a German field marshal and the Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht Heer in the early years of World War II.-Biography:...
, was well aware of the coup preparations. He told Halder he could not condone such an act, but he did not inform Hitler, to whom he was outwardly subservient, of what he knew. This was a striking example of the code of silent solidarity among senior German Army officers, which was to survive and provide a shield for the resistance groups down to, and in many cases beyond, the crisis of July 1944.
On 13 September, the British Prime Minister,
Neville ChamberlainArthur Neville Chamberlain was a British Conservative politician and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1937 to 1940...
, announced that he would visit Germany to meet Hitler and defuse the crisis over Czechoslovakia. This threw the conspirators into uncertainty. When, on 20 September, it appeared that the negotiations had broken down and that Chamberlain would resist Hitler’s demands, the coup preparations were revived and finalised. All that was required was the signal from Halder.
On 28 September, however, Chamberlain backed down and agreed to a
meeting in MunichThe Munich Agreement was an agreement permitting German annexation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland. The Sudetenland were areas along borders of Czechoslovakia, mainly inhabited by Czech Germans. The agreement was negotiated at a conference held in Munich, Germany, among the major powers of Europe...
, at which he accepted the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. This plunged the resistance into demoralisation and division. Halder said he would no longer support a coup. The other conspirators were bitterly critical of Chamberlain, but were powerless to act. This was the nearest approach to a successful conspiracy against Hitler before the 20 July plot of 1944.
As war again grew more likely in mid 1939, the plans for a pre-emptive coup were revived. Oster was still in contact with Halder and Witzleben, although Witzleben had been transferred to Frankfurt am Main, reducing his ability to lead a coup attempt. At a meeting with Goerdeler, Witzleben agreed to form a network of Army commanders willing to take part to prevent a war against the western powers. But the level of support in the officer corps for a coup had dropped sharply since 1938. Most officers, particularly those from Prussian landowning backgrounds, were strongly anti-Polish and saw a war to regain Danzig and other lost eastern territories as justified. Just before the invasion of
PolandPoland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe . Poland is bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
in August 1939 one of the officers involved in the abortive
putsch of September 1938 wrote in a letter to his wife: “We believe we will make quick work of the Poles, and in truth, we are delighted at the prospect. That business
must be cleared up" (Emphasis in the original) The German historian
Andreas HillgruberAndreas Fritz Hillgruber was a conservative West German historian.Hillgruber was, for most of his life, widely influential within historical circles as a military and diplomatic historian. At his death in 1989, the American historian Francis L...
commented that in 1939 the rampant anti-Polish feelings in the German Army officer corps served to bind the military together with Hitler in supporting Fall Weiss in a way that
Fall GrünBefore World War II, Fall Grün was a German plan for an aggressive war against Czechoslovakia. The first draft of the plan was made in late 1937, with new versions coming as the military situation and requirements changed...
did not.
This nevertheless marked an important turning point. In 1938 the plan had been for the Army as a whole, led by Halder and if possible Brauchitsch, to depose Hitler. Now it was recognised that this was not possible, and a conspiratorial organisation was to be formed in the Army and civil service instead.
The opposition once again urged Britain and France to stand up to Hitler: Halder met secretly with the British Ambassador Sir
Nevile HendersonSir Nevile Meyrick Henderson, KCMG was the Ambassador of Great Britain to Germany from 1937 to 1939. He believed that Adolf Hitler could be controlled and pushed toward peace and cooperation with the Western powers...
to urge resistance. The plan was again to stage a coup at the moment Hitler moved to declare war. But although Britain and France were now prepared to go to war over Poland, as war approached Halder lost his nerve. Schacht, Gisevius and Canaris developed a plan to confront Brauchitsch and Halder and demand that they depose Hitler and prevent war, but nothing came of this. When Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September, the conspirators were unable to move.
The outbreak of war made the further mobilization of resistance in the Army more difficult. Halder continued to vacillate. In late 1939 and early 1940 he opposed Hitler’s plans to attack France, and kept in touch with the opposition via General
Carl-Heinrich von StülpnagelCarl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, was a German general and a member of the July 20 Plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.-Early life:...
, an active oppositionist. Talk of a coup again began to circulate, and for the first time the idea of killing Hitler with a bomb was taken up by the more determined members of the resistance circles, such as Oster and Erich Kordt, who declared himself willing to do the deed. At the Army headquarters at
ZossenZossen is a German town in the district of Teltow-Fläming in Brandenburg, south of Berlin, and next to the B96 highway. Zossen consists of several smaller municipalities, which were grouped together in 2003 to form the city.-Geography:...
, south of Berlin, a group of officers called Action Group Zossen was also planning a coup.
When in November 1939 it seemed that Hitler was about to order an immediate attack in the west, the conspirators persuaded General
Wilhelm Ritter von LeebWilhelm Ritter von Leeb was a German Field Marshal during World War II.- Youth :Born in Landsberg am Lech, Bavaria as Wilhelm Leeb, he joined the Bavarian Army in 1895 as an officer cadet. After being commissioned a lieutenant of artillery, Leeb served in China during the Boxer Rebellion...
, commander of Army Group C on the Belgian border, to support a planned coup if Hitler gave such an order. At the same time Oster warned the Dutch and the Belgians that Hitler was about to attack them – his warnings were not believed. But when Hitler postponed the attack until 1940, the conspiracy again lost momentum, and Halder formed the view that the German people would not accept a coup. Again, the chance was lost.
The failed plots of 1938 and 1939 showed both the strength and weakness of the officer corps as potential leaders of a resistance movement. Its strength was its loyalty and solidarity. As
Istvan DeakIstván Deák is a Hungarian-born American historian, author and academic.Deak was born at Székesfehérvár, Hungary. He was educated at a Catholic gymnasium in Budapest and began his university studies in 1945 at the University of Budapest....
noted: “Officers, especially of the highest ranks, had been discussing, some as early as 1934… the possibility of deposing or even assassinating Hitler. Yet it seems that not a single one was betrayed by a comrade-in-arms to the Gestapo.” Indeed it is remarkable that in over two years of active plotting, this quite widespread and loosely structured conspiracy was never detected. One explanation is that at this time Himmler was still preoccupied with the traditional enemies of the Nazis, the SPD and the KPD (and, of course, the Jews), and did not suspect that the real centre of opposition was within the state itself. Another factor was Canaris’s success in shielding the plotters, particularly Oster, from suspicion.
The corresponding weakness of the officer corps was its conception of loyalty to the state and its horror of mutiny. This explains the vacillations of Halder, who could never quite bring himself to take the decisive step. Halder hated Hitler, and believed that the Nazis were leading Germany to catastrophe. He was shocked and disgusted by the behaviour of the SS in occupied Poland, but gave no support to his senior officer there, General
Johannes BlaskowitzJohannes Albrecht Blaskowitz was a German general during World War II.-Early years:Johannes Blaskowitz was born on July 10, 1883, in Peterswalde, Kreis Wehlau , now in Kaliningrad Oblast. His father was a Lutheran pastor. In 1894, Blaskowitz joined cadet school at Köslin and also afterwards at...
, when the latter officially protested to Hitler about the atrocities against the Poles and the Jews. In both 1938 and 1939, he lost his nerve and could not give the order to strike against Hitler. This was even more true of Brauchitsch, who knew of the conspiracies and assured Halder that he agreed with their objectives, but would not take any action to support them.
The first assassination attempt
The first resolute attempt to remove Hitler during this period was led by Oster from the Abwehr, but no shot was fired. In November 1939, however,
Georg ElserJohann Georg Elser was a German opponent of Nazism. He is remembered for his unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1939.-Vocational career and social life :...
, a carpenter from
WürttembergWürttemberg , formerly known as Wirtemberg, is an area and a former state in southwestern Germany, including parts of the regions Swabia and Franconia....
, acting completely on his own, developed a plan to assassinate Hitler. Elser had been peripherally involved with the KPD before 1933, but his exact motives for acting as he did remain a mystery. He read in the newspapers that Hitler would be addressing a Nazi Party meeting on 8 November, in the
BürgerbräukellerThe Bürgerbräukeller was a large beer hall located in Munich, Germany. It was one of the large beer halls of the Bürgerliches Brauhaus company, and after Bürgerliches merged with Löwenbräu, the hall was transferred to that company...
, a beer hall in
MunichMunich is the capital city of Bavaria, Germany. It is located on the River Isar north of the Bavarian Alps. Munich is the third largest city in Germany, after Berlin and Hamburg...
where Hitler had launched the
Beer Hall PutschThe Beer Hall Putsch was a failed attempt at revolution that occurred between the evening of 8 November and the early afternoon of 9 November 1923, when Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler, Generalquartiermeister Erich Ludendorff, and other heads of the...
on the same date in 1923. Stealing explosives from his workplace, Elser built a powerful time-bomb. For over a month, he managed to stay inside the Bürgerbräukeller after closing hours each night, during which time he hollowed out the pillar behind the speaker's rostrum to place the bomb inside.
On the night of 7 November, Elser set the timer and left for the Swiss border. Unexpectedly, because of the pressure of wartime business, Hitler made a much shorter speech than usual and left the hall ten minutes before the bomb went off, killing eight people. Had Hitler still been speaking, the bomb almost certainly would have killed him, with consequences which can only be guessed. Elser was arrested at the border, sent to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, and then in 1945 moved to the
Dachau concentration campDachau concentration camp was the first Nazi concentration camp opened in Germany, located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory near the medieval town of Dachau, about 16 km northwest of Munich in the state of Bavaria which is located in southern Germany.Opened in March 1933, it...
. Elser was executed two weeks before the liberation of Dachau KZ. This attempt on Hitler’s life set off a witch-hunt for potential conspirators which intimidated the opposition and made further action more difficult.
Catholic resistance
The outbreak of war served to rally the German people around the Hitler regime, and the sweeping early successes of the German Army – occupying Poland in 1939, Denmark and Norway in April 1940, and swiftly defeating France in May and June 1940, stilled virtually all opposition to the regime. In particular, the opposition to Hitler within the Army was left isolated and apparently discredited, since the much-feared war with the western powers had apparently been won by Germany within a year and at very little cost. This mood continued well into 1941, although beneath the surface popular discontent at mounting economic hardship was apparent.
Even at the height of Hitler’s popularity, however, one issue quite unexpectedly provoked powerful and successful resistance to his regime. This was the program of so-called “
euthanasiaEuthanasia refers to the practice of ending a life in a painless manner. Many different forms of euthanasia can be distinguished, including animal euthanasia and human euthanasia, and within the latter, voluntary and involuntary euthanasia...
” – in fact a campaign of mass murder – directed at people with mental illness and/or severe physical disabilities which had begun in 1939 under the code name T4. By 1941 more than 70,000 people had been killed under this program, many by gassing, and their bodies incinerated.
This policy aroused strong opposition across German society, and especially among Catholics. Opposition to the policy sharpened after the German attack on the
Soviet UnionThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. The name is a translation of the , tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated СССР, SSSR. The common short name is Soviet Union, from , Sovetskiy Soyuz...
in June 1941, because the war in the east produced for the first time large-scale German casualties, and the hospitals and asylums began to fill up with maimed and disabled young German soldiers. Rumours began to circulate that these men would also be subject to “euthanasia,” although in fact no such plans existed.
Catholic anger was further fuelled by actions of the
GauleiterA Gauleiter was the party leader of a regional branch of the NSDAP or the head of a Gau or of a Reichsgau.-Etymology:...
of
Upper BavariaUpper Bavaria is one of the seven administrative regions of Bavaria, Germany, located in the south of Bavaria, around the city of Munich. It is subdivided into four regions : Ingolstadt, Munich, Bayerisches Oberland , and Südostoberbayern...
,
Adolf WagnerAdolf Wagner was a German soldier and high-ranking Nazi Party official from Algringen, Alsace-Lorraine.He served in World War I as an officer in the German Army...
, a militantly anti-Catholic Nazi, who in June 1941 ordered the removal of crucifixes from all schools in his Gau. This attack on Catholicism provoked the first public demonstrations against government policy since the Nazis had come to power, and the mass signing of petitions, including by Catholic soldiers serving at the front. When Hitler heard of this he ordered Wagner to rescind his decree, but the damage had been done – German Catholics had learned that the regime could be successfully opposed. This led to more outspoken protests against the “euthanasia” program.
In July the Bishop of Münster in
WestphaliaWestphalia is a region in Germany, centred on the cities of Arnsberg, Bielefeld, Bochum, Detmold, Dortmund, Gelsenkirchen, Hagen, Minden and Münster and included in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia....
,
Clemens August Graf von GalenBlessed Clemens August Graf von Galen was a German count, Bishop of Münster, and Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. He received his education in Austria at the Stella Matutina . After his ordination he worked in Berlin at Saint Matthias, where he became close friends with Nuncio Eugenio...
(an old aristocratic conservative, like many of the anti-Hitler Army officers), publicly denounced the “euthanasia” program in a sermon, and telegrammed his text to Hitler, calling on “the Führer to defend the people against the Gestapo.” Another Bishop, Franz Bornewasser of
TrierTrier is a city in Germany on the banks of the Moselle River. It is the oldest city in Germany, founded in or before 16 BC. Trier is not the only city claiming to be Germany's oldest, but it is the only one that bases this assertion on having the longest history as a city, as opposed to a mere...
, also sent protests to Hitler, though not in public. On 3 August Galen was even more outspoken, broadening his attack to include the Nazi persecution of religious orders and the closing of Catholic institutions. Local Nazis asked for Galen to be arrested, but Propaganda Minister
Joseph GoebbelsPaul Joseph Goebbels was a German politician and Reichsminister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945...
told Hitler that if this happened there would be an open revolt in Westphalia.
By August the protests had spread to Bavaria. Hitler himself was jeered by an angry crowd at
HofHof may refer to:In places:* Hof, Germany, a city in Bavaria, Germany** Hof , a district in Bavaria* Hof, Rhineland-Palatinate, a municipality in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany* Hof, Iceland, a small village in Iceland...
, near
NurembergNuremberg is a city in the German state of Bavaria, in the administrative region of Middle Franconia. It is situated on the Pegnitz river and the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal and is Franconia's largest city. It is located about 170 kilometres north of Munich, at 49.27° N 11.5° E. The population is...
– the only time he was opposed to his face in public during his 12 years of rule. Despite his private fury at the Catholic Church, Hitler knew that he could not afford a confrontation with the Church at a time when Germany was engaged in a life-and-death two-front war. (It needs to be remembered that following the annexations of
AustriaAustria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.3 million people in Central Europe. It borders both Germany and the Czech Republic to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west...
and the
SudetenlandSudetenland is the German name used in English in the first half of the 20th century for the western regions of Czechoslovakia inhabited mostly by ethnic Germans, specifically the border areas of Bohemia, Moravia, and those parts of Silesia associated with Bohemia.The name is derived from the...
, nearly half of all Germans were Catholic.) On 24 August he ordered the cancellation of the T4 program, and also issued strict instructions to the Gauleiters that there were to be no further provocations of the churches for the duration of the war.
However, the
deportationDeportation means the expulsion of a person or group of people from a place or country. The expulsion of natives is also called banishment, exile, or penal transportation. Deportation is an ancient practice: Khosrau I, Sassanid King of Persia, deported 292,000 citizens, slaves, and conquered people...
of
PolishThe Second Polish Republic, Second Commonwealth of Poland or interwar Poland refers to Poland between the two world wars; from the creation of an independent Polish state in the aftermath of World War I, to the invasion of Poland in 1939 by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Slovak Republic,...
and
DutchThe Dutch people are the dominant ethnic group of the Netherlands.Dutch people, or descendants of Dutch people, are also found in migrant communities world wide, notably in Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and the United States....
priestA priest or priestess is a person having the authority or power to administer religious rites; in particular, rites of sacrifice to, and propitiation of, a deity or deities. Their office or position is the priesthood, a term which may also apply to such persons collectively.Priests and priestesses...
s by the occupying Nazis by 1942 — after Polish resistance acts and the Dutch Catholic bishops' conference's official condemnation of anti-Semitic persecutions and deportations of Jews by the Nazis — also terrified ethnic German clergy in Germany itself, some of whom would come to share the same fate because of their resistance against the Nazi government in racial and social aspects, among them Fr.
Bernhard LichtenbergBlessed Bernhard Lichtenberg was a German Catholic priest and theologian.Lichtenberg was born in Ohlau , Prussian Silesia, near Breslau , and studied theology in Innsbruck, Austria. He was then ordained priest in 1899.Lichtenberg began his ministry in Berlin in 1900 as parson in Charlottenburg...
.
Himmler'sHeinrich Luitpold Himmler , one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany, served as Chief of the German Police and Minister of the Interior...
1941
Aktion Klostersturm (Operation Attack-the-Monastery) had also helped to spread fear among regime-critical Catholic clergy.
The nadir of resistance: 1940–42
The sweeping success of Hitler’s attack on France in May 1940 made the task of deposing him even more difficult. The majority of Army officers, their fears of a war against the western powers apparently proved groundless, and gratified by Germany’s revenge against France for the defeat of 1918, reconciled themselves to Hitler’s regime, choosing to ignore its darker side. The task of leading the resistance groups for a time fell to civilians, although a hard core of military plotters remained active.
Carl Goerdeler, the former Lord Mayor of Leipzig, emerged as a key figure. His associates included the diplomat Ulrich von Hassell, the Prussian Finance Minister
Johannes PopitzJohannes Popitz was a Prussian finance minister and a member of the German Resistance against Nazi Germany.- Life :...
, and
Helmuth James Graf von MoltkeHelmuth James Graf von Moltke was a German jurist, a member of the opposition against Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany, and a founding member of the Kreisau Circle resistance group...
, heir to a famous name and the leading figure in the
Kreisau CircleThe Kreisau Circle was the name the Nazi Gestapo gave to a group of German dissidents centered on the Kreisau estate of Helmuth James, Graf von Moltke. The Kreisauer Kreis is celebrated as one of the few instances of German resistance to the Nazi regime...
of Prussian oppositionists, which included other young aristocrats such as
Adam von Trott zu SolzAdam von Trott zu Solz was a German lawyer and diplomat who opposed the Nazi regime.-Life:Born in Potsdam, Germany, he was the fifth child of Emilie Eleonore and leading Prussian civil servant August von Trott zu Solz...
and
Peter Yorck von WartenburgPeter Graf Yorck von Wartenburg was a German jurist and a member of the German Resistance against Nazism.- Biography :...
, and later
Gottfried Graf von Bismarck-SchönhausenGottfried Graf von Bismarck-Schönhausen was a German politician and German Resistance figure.Born in Berlin, he was a grandson of the Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. He was a member of the Nazi Party and in 1933 he was elected to the Reichstag as a Nazi member...
, who was a Nazi member of the Reichstag and a senior officer in the SS. Goerdeler was also in touch with the SPD underground, whose most prominent figure was
Julius LeberJulius Leber was a German politician of the SPD and a member of the German Resistance against the Nazi régime.-Early history:...
, and with Christian opposition groups, both Catholic and Protestant.
These men saw themselves as the leaders of a post-Hitler government, but they had no clear conception of how to bring this about, except through assassinating Hitler – a step which many of them still opposed on ethical grounds. Their plans could never surmount the fundamental problem of Hitler’s overwhelming popularity among the German people. They preoccupied themselves with philosophical debates and devising grand schemes for postwar Germany. The fact was that for nearly two years after the defeat of France, there was very little scope for effective opposition activity.
In March 1941 Hitler revealed his plans for a “war of annihilation” against the Soviet Union to selected Army officers in a speech given in
PosenPosen may refer to:Places in Europe:* Poznań, Poland * Grand Duchy of Posen, autonomous province of Prussia, 1815–1848* Province of Posen, Prussian province, 1848–1918...
. In the audience was Colonel
Henning von TresckowMajor General Herrmann Karl Robert Henning von Tresckow was a Major General in the German Wehrmacht who organized German resistance against Adolf Hitler. He attempted to assassinate Hitler in March 1943 and drafted the Valkyrie plan for a coup against the Nazi regime...
, who had not been involved in any of the earlier plots but was already a firm opponent of the Nazi regime. He was horrified by Hitler’s plan to unleash a new and even more terrible war in the east. As a nephew of Field Marshal
Fedor von BockFedor von Bock was an officer in the German military from 1898 to 1945, attaining the rank of Generalfeldmarschall during World War II. As a leader who lectured his soldiers about the honor of dying for the German Fatherland, he was nicknamed "Der Sterber"...
, he was very well connected. Assigned to the staff of his uncle’s command, Army Group Centre, for the forthcoming
Operation BarbarossaOperation Barbarossa was the code name for Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II that began on 22 June 1941. Over 4.5 million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along a 2,900 km front...
, Tresckow systematically recruited oppositionists to the Group’s staff, making it the new nerve centre of the Army resistance.
Little could be done while Hitler’s armies advanced triumphantly into the western regions of the Soviet Union through 1941 and 1942 – even after the setback before
MoscowMoscow is the capital and the largest city of Russia. It is also the largest metropolitan area in Europe, and ranks among the largest urban areas in the world. Moscow is a major political, economic, cultural, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the world, a...
in December 1941 that brought about the dismissal of both Brauchitsch and Bock. In December 1941 the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
entered the war, persuading some more realistic Army officers that Germany must ultimately lose the war. But the life-and-death struggle on the eastern front posed new problems for the resistance. Most of its members were conservatives who hated and feared
communismCommunism is a socioeconomic structure and political ideology that promotes the establishment of an egalitarian, classless, stateless society based on common ownership and control of the means of production and property in general. Karl Marx posited that communism would be the final stage in human...
and the Soviet Union. How could the Nazi regime be overthrown and the war ended without allowing the Soviets to gain control of Germany or the whole of Europe? This question was made more acute when the Allies adopted their policy of demanding Germany’s “unconditional surrender” at the
Casablanca ConferenceThe Casablanca Conference was held at the Anfa Hotel in Casablanca, Morocco, then a French protectorate, from January 14 to 24, 1943, to plan the European strategy of the Allies during World War II. Present were Franklin D...
of January 1943.
During 1942 the tireless Oster nevertheless succeeded in rebuilding an effective resistance network. His most important recruit was General
Friedrich OlbrichtGeneral Friedrich Olbricht was a German general and one of the plotters involved in the attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler at the Wolfsschanze in East Prussia on 20 July 1944.- Life :...
, head of the General Army Office headquartered at the
BendlerblockThe Bendlerblock is a building in Berlin, located on the Stauffenbergsstraße , south of the Tiergarten. The building was erected between 1911 and 1914 for the Imperial German Navy Offices. During the Weimar Republic it additionally served as the seat of the Reichswehr Command...
in central Berlin, who controlled an independent system of communications to reserve units all over Germany. Linking this asset to Tresckow’s resistance group in Army Group Centre created what appeared to a viable structure for a new effort at organising a coup. Bock’s dismissal did not weaken Tresckow’s position. In fact he soon enticed Bock’s successor, General
Hans von KlugeGünther “Hans” von Kluge was a German military leader. He was born in Posen into a Prussian military family. Kluge rose to the rank of Field Marshal in the Wehrmacht.-Early career:...
, at least part-way to supporting the resistance cause. Tresckow even brought Goerdeler, leader of the civilian resistance, to Army Group Centre to meet Kluge – an extremely dangerous tactic.
Communist resistance
The entry of the Soviet Union into the war had certain consequences for the civilian resistance. During the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the
KPDThe Communist Party of Germany was a major political party in Germany between 1918 and 1933, and a minor party in West Germany in the postwar period...
’s only objective inside Germany was to keep itself in existence: it engaged in no active resistance to the Nazi regime. After June 1941, however, all Communists were expected to throw themselves into resistance work, including sabotage and espionage where this was possible, regardless of risk. A handful of Soviet agents, mostly exiled German Communists, were able to enter Germany to help the scattered underground KPD cells organise and take action. This led to the formation in 1942 of two separate communist groups, usually erroneously lumped together under the name Rote Kapelle (“Red Orchestra”), a codename given to these groups by the Gestapo.
The first “Red Orchestra” was an espionage network based in Berlin and coordinated by
Leopold TrepperLeopold Trepper was an organizer of the Soviet spy ring Rote Kapelle prior to and during World War II....
, a
GRUGRU or Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye is the acronym for the foreign military intelligence directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation,...
agent sent into Germany in October 1941. This group made reports to the Soviet Union on German troop concentrations, air attacks on Germany, German aircraft production, and German fuel shipments. In France, it worked with the underground
French Communist PartyThe French Communist Party is a political party in France which advocates the principles of communism.Although its electoral support has declined in recent decades, it is the forth french party and remains the largest party in France advocating communist views, and retains a large membership The...
. Agents of this group even managed to tap the phone lines of the Abwehr in Paris. Trepper was eventually arrested and the group broken up by the spring of 1943.
The second and more important “Red Orchestra” group was entirely separate and was a genuine German resistance group, not controlled by the NKVD. This group was led by
Harro Schulze-BoysenHeinz Harro Max Wilhelm Georg Schulze-Boysen was a German officer, commentator, and German Resistance fighter against German dictator Adolf Hitler's Nazi régime.- Early life :...
, an intelligence officer at the
Reich Air MinistryThe Reich Air Ministry was a government department during the period of Nazi Germany . It is also the original name of a building in Wilhelmstraße in central Berlin, the capital of Germany, which now houses the German Finance Ministry .thumb|300px|The [[Reich Air Ministry Building]], December...
, and
Arvid HarnackArvid Harnack was a German jurist, economist, and resistance fighter in Nazi Germany.- Early years :...
, an official in the Ministry of Economics, both self-identified communists but not apparently KPD members. The group however contained people of various beliefs and affiliations. It included the theatre producer
Adam KuckhoffAdam Kuckhoff was a German writer, journalist, and resistance fighter in the Third Reich....
, the author Günther Weisenborn, the journalist John Graudenz and the pianist
Helmut RoloffHelmut Roloff was a German pianist and teacher.Roloff entered the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin in 1935, studying with Richard Rüssler...
. It thus conformed to the general pattern of German resistance groups of being drawn mainly from elite groups.
The main activity of the group was collecting information about Nazi atrocities and distributing leaflets against Hitler rather than espionage. They passed what they had learned to foreign countries, through personal contacts with the U.S. embassy and, via a less direct connection, to the Soviet government. When Soviet agents tried to enlist this group in their service, Schulze-Boysen and Harnack refused, since they wanted to maintain their political independence. The group was betrayed to the Gestapo in August 1942 by Johann Wenzel, a member of the Trepper group who also knew of the Schulze-Boysen group and who informed on them after being arrested. Schulze-Boysen, Harnack and other members of the group were arrested and secretly executed.
Meanwhile, another Communist resistance group was operating in Berlin, led by a Jewish electrician,
Herbert BaumHerbert Baum was a Jewish member of the German resistance against National Socialism.Baum was born in Mosina, Province of Posen; his family moved to Berlin when he was young...
, and involving up to a hundred people. Until 1941 the group operated a study circle, but after the German attack on the Soviet Union a core group advanced to active resistance. In May 1942, the group staged an arson attack on an anti-Soviet propaganda display at the
LustgartenThe Lustgarten is a park on Museum Island in central Berlin, near the site of the former Berliner Stadtschloss of which it was originally a part...
in central Berlin. The attack was poorly organised and most of the Baum group was arrested. Twenty were sentenced to death, while Baum himself "died in custody." This fiasco ended overt Communist resistance activities, although the KPD underground continued to operate, and emerged from hiding in the last days of the war.
The aeroplane assassination attempt
In late 1942 Tresckow and Olbricht formulated a plan to assassinate Hitler and stage a coup. On 13 March 1943, returning from his easternmost headquarters FHQ
WehrwolfFührerhauptquartier Wehrwolf was the codename used for one of Adolf Hitler's World War II Eastern Front military headquarters located in a pine forest about north of Vinnytsia in Ukraine that was used between 1942 and 1943...
near
VinnitsaVinnytsia is a city located on the banks of the Southern Buh River, in central Ukraine. It is the administrative center of the Vinnytsia Oblast , as well as the administrative center of the surrounding Vinnytskyi Raion within the oblast...
to Wolfschanze in East Prussia, Hitler was scheduled to make a stop-over at the headquarters of
Army Group CentreArmy Group Centre was the name of two distinct German strategic army groups that fought on the Eastern Front in World War II. The first Army Group Centre was created on 22 June 1941, as one of three German Army formations assigned to the invasion of the Soviet Union...
at
SmolenskSmolensk is a Russian city and the administrative centre of Smolensk Oblast, located on the Dnieper River. Situated west-southwest of Moscow, this walled city was destroyed several times throughout its long history since it was on the invasion routes of both Napoleon and Hitler. Today, Smolensk...
. For such an occasion, Tresckow had prepared three options:
http://www.geschichtsthemen.de/attentate_chronik.htm
- Major Georg von Boeselager
Georg Freiherr von Boeselager
was a German nobleman and an officer of the Wehrmacht, who ultimately reached the rank of Colonel of Cavalry....
, in command of a cavalry honor guard, could intercept Hitler in a forest and overwhelm the SS bodyguard and the Führer in a fair fight; this course was rejected because of the prospect of a large numbers of German soldiers fighting each other, and a possible failure regarding the unexpected strength of the escort.
- A joint assassination could be carried out during dinner; this idea was abandoned as supporting officers abhorred the idea of shooting the unarmed tyrant.
- Finally, as a last resort, a bomb could be smuggled on Hitler's plane.
Tresckow asked Lieutenant Colonel
Heinz BrandtOberst Heinz Brandt was a German Wehrmacht staff officer who served during World War II as an aide to Generalleutnant Adolf Heusinger, who was the head of the operations unit of the General Staff...
, on Hitler's staff and usually on the same plane that carried Hitler, to take a parcel with him, supposedly the price of a bet won by Tresckow's friend
General StieffHelmuth Stieff was a German general and a member of the OKH during World War II. He took part in attempts by the German resistance to assassinate Hitler, on July 7 and on July 20, 1944....
. It concealed a bomb, disguised in a box for two bottles of cognac. Tresckow's aide, Lieutenant
Fabian von SchlabrendorffFabian Ludwig Georg Adolf Kurt von Schlabrendorff , was the son of Carl Ludwig Ewald von Schlabrendorff and wife Ida Freiin von Stockmar , a great-great-granddaughter of William I, Elector of Hesse by his mistress Rosa Dorothea...
, set the fuse and handed over the parcel to Brandt who boarded the same plane as Hitler.
http://www.lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de/Chronik/1943.htm
It was expected that Hitler’s Focke-Wulf 200
Condor should explode about 30 minutes later near
MinskMinsk is the capital and largest city in Belarus, situated on the Svislach and Niamiha rivers. Minsk is also a headquarters of the Commonwealth of Independent States . As the national capital, Minsk has a special administrative status in Belarus and is also the administrative centre of Minsk...
, close enough to the front to be attributed to Soviet fighters. Olbricht was to use the resulting crisis to mobilise his Reserve Army network to seize power in Berlin, Vienna, Munich and in the German Wehrkreis centres. It was an ambitious but credible plan, and might have worked if Hitler had indeed been killed, although persuading Army units to fight and overcome what could certainly have been fierce resistance from the SS could have been a major obstacle.
But, as with Elser’s bomb in 1939 and all other attempts, luck favoured Hitler again, which was attributed to "Vorsehung" (
providenceIn theology, Divine Providence, or simply Providence, is the sovereignty, superintendence, or agency of God over events in people's lives and throughout history.-Etymology:...
). The British-made chemical
pencil detonatorA pencil detonator or time pencil is a time fuze designed to be connected to a detonator or short length of safety fuse. They are about the same size and shape as a pencil, hence the name. They were introduced during World War II,- No. 10 delay switch :...
on the bomb had been tested many times and was considered reliable. It went off, but the bomb did not. The
Percussion capThe percussion cap, introduced around 1830, was the crucial invention that enabled muzzle-loading firearms to fire reliably in any weather. Before this development, firearms used flintlock ignition systems which produced flint-on-steel sparks to ignite a pan of priming powder and thereby fire the...
apparently became too cold as the parcel was carried in the unheated cargo hold.
Displaying great
sangfroid, Schlabrendorff took the next plane to retrieve the package from Colonel Brandt before the content was discovered. The blocks of plastic explosives were later used by Gersdorff and Stauffenberg.
The suicide bombing attempts
A second attempt was made a few days later on 21 March 1943, when Hitler visited an exhibition of captured Soviet weaponry in Berlin's
ZeughausThe Zeughaus of Berlin is the oldest structure on the Unter den Linden. It was founded by the Brandenburg Elector Frederick III and erected between 1695 and 1730 in the baroque style, to be used as an artillery arsenal...
. One of Tresckow’s friends, Colonel
Rudolf Christoph Freiherr von GersdorffRudolf Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff was a military officer in Germany’s Weimar-period Reichswehr and Nazi-period Wehrmacht. He attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler by suicide bombing, and he discovered the mass graves of the Katyn massacre...
, was scheduled to explain some exhibits, and volunteered to carry out a suicide bombing using the same bomb that had failed to go off on the plane, concealed on his person. But the only new chemical fuse he could obtain was a ten-minute one. Hitler once again left prematurely after hurrying through the exhibition much quicker than the scheduled 30 minutes. Gersdorff had to dash to a bathroom to defuse the bomb to save his life, and more importantly, prevent any suspicion. This second failure temporarily demoralised the plotters at Army Group Centre. Gersdorff reported about the attempt after the war, the footage is often seen on German TV documentaries ("Die Nacht des Widerstands" etc.), including a photo showing Gersdorff and Hitler.
Axel von dem Bussche, member of the elite Infantry Regiment 9, volunteered to kill Hitler with hand grenades in November 1943 during a presentation of new winter uniforms, but the train containing them was destroyed by Allied bombs in Berlin, and the event had to be postponed. A second presentation scheduled for December at the
WolfsschanzeWolf's Lair is the standard English name for Wolfsschanze, Adolf Hitler's first World War II Eastern Front military headquarters, one of several Führerhauptquartier or FHQs located in various parts of Europe...
was canceled on short notice as Hitler decided to travel to Berchtesgaden.
In January 1944, Bussche volunteered for another assassination attempt, but then he lost a leg in Russia. On February 11 another young officer, Ewald Heinrich von Kleist tried to assassinate Hitler in the same way von dem Bussche had planned. However Hitler again canceled the event which would have allowed Kleist to approach him.
On 11 March 1944
Eberhard von BreitenbuchEberhard von Breitenbuch was a German cavalry officer who served in Army Group Centre of the Wehrmacht during World War II with the rank of Rittmeister and took part in the military-based conspiracy against Adolf Hitler that culminated in the July 20 Plot.He was born in Dietzhausen near Suhl,...
volunteered for an assassination attempt at the
BerghofThe Berghof was Adolf Hitler's home in the Obersalzberg of the Bavarian Alps near Berchtesgaden, Germany. Next to the Wolfsschanze this was the place where Hitler spent the most time during World War II and it was also one of the most widely known of Hitler's headquarters which were located...
using a 7.65 mm Browning pistol concealed in his trouser pocket. He was not able to carry out the plan because guards would not allow him into the conference room with the
FührerThe word Führer is 'leader' or 'guide' in the German language, derived from the verb , a cognate of the Old English words faran and fær and the Modern English words derived from the older terms such as now mostly used in compounds such as wayfarer and sea-faring...
.
The next occasion was a weapons exhibition on July 7 at
Schloss KlessheimSchloss Klessheim is a palace situated 4 km west of Salzburg in the Austrian commune of Wals-Siezenheim.-History:Originally, the Kleshof was a small house acquired by bishop Johann Ernst Graf Thun in 1690...
near Salzburg, but
Helmuth StieffHelmuth Stieff was a German general and a member of the OKH during World War II. He took part in attempts by the German resistance to assassinate Hitler, on July 7 and on July 20, 1944....
did not trigger the bomb.
Stalingrad and White Rose
At the end of 1942 Germany suffered a series of military defeats, the first at
El AlameinThe Second Battle of El Alamein marked a major turning point in the Western Desert Campaign of World War II. The battle lasted from 23 October to 5 November 1942. The First Battle of El Alamein had stalled the Axis advance...
, the second with the successful Allied landings in North Africa (
Operation TorchOperation Torch was the British-American invasion of French North Africa in World War II during the North African Campaign, started 8 November 1942....
), and the third the disastrous defeat at
StalingradThe Battle of Stalingrad was a battle of World War II between Nazi Germany and its allies and the Soviet Union for control of the city of Stalingrad in southwestern Russia. The battle took place between 17 July 1942 and 2 February 1943....
, which ended any hope of defeating the Soviet Union. Most experienced senior officers now came to the conclusion that Hitler was leading Germany to defeat, and that the result of this would be the Soviet conquest of Germany – the worst fate imaginable. This gave the military resistance new impetus.
Halder had been dismissed in 1942 and there was now no independent central leadership of the Army. His nominal successors, Field Marshal
Wilhelm KeitelWilhelm Bodewin Gustav Keitel was a German field marshal . As head of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht and de facto war minister, he was one of Germany's most senior military leaders during World War II...
and General
Alfred JodlAlfred Jodl was a German military commander, attaining the position of Chief of the Operations Staff of the Armed Forces High Command during World War II, acting as deputy to Wilhelm Keitel. At Nuremberg he was tried, sentenced to death and hanged as a war criminal...
, were no more than Hitler’s messengers. Tresckow and Goerdeler tried again to recruit the senior Army field commanders to support a seizure of power. Kluge was by now won over completely. Gersdorff was sent to see Field Marshal
Erich von MansteinErich von Manstein served the German military as a lifelong professional soldier. He became one of the most prominent commanders of Germany's World War II armed forces...
, the commander of Army Group South in the
UkraineUkraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east; Belarus to the north; Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary to the west; Romania and Moldova to the southwest; and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south. The city of Kiev is both the capital and the largest city of...
. Manstein agreed that Hitler was leading Germany to defeat, but told Gersdorff that “Prussian field marshals do not mutiny.” Field Marshal
Gerd von RundstedtKarl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt was a Generalfeldmarschall of the German Army during World War II. He held some of the highest field commands in all phases of the war...
, commander in the west, gave a similar answer. The prospect of a united German Army seizing power from Hitler was as far away as ever. Once again, however, neither officer reported the fact that they had been approached in this way.
Nevertheless, the days when the military and civilian plotters could expect to escape detection were ending. After Stalingrad, Himmler would have had to be very naïve not to expect that conspiracies against the regime would be hatched in the Army and elsewhere. He already suspected Canaris and his subordinates at the Abwehr. In March 1943 two of them, Oster and
Hans von DohnanyiHans von Dohnanyi was a German jurist, rescuer of Jews, and resistance fighter against the Nazi Germany régime.-Early life:...
, were dismissed on suspicion of opposition activity, although there was as yet insufficient evidence to have them arrested. On the civilian front,
Dietrich BonhoefferDietrich Bonhoeffer Dietrich Bonhoeffer Dietrich Bonhoeffer ( (February 4, 1906 – April 9, 1945) was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian. He was also a participant in the German Resistance movement against Nazism, a founding member of the Confessing Church...
was also arrested at this time, and Goerdeler was under suspicion.
The Gestapo had been led to Dohnanyi following the arrest of Wilhelm Schmidhuber, a smuggler and currency speculator who had helped Dohnanyi with information and with smuggling Jews out of Germany. Under interrogation, Schmidhuber gave the Gestapo details of the Oster-Dohnanyi group in the Abwehr and also Goerdeler and Beck's involvement in opposition activities. The Gestapo reported all this to Himmler, with the observation that Canaris must be protecting Oster and Dohnanyi and the recommendation that he be arrested. Himmler passed the file back with the note "Kindly leave Canaris alone." Either Himmler felt Canaris was too powerful to tackle at this stage, or he wanted him and his oppositional network protected for reasons of his own. Nevertheless, Oster's usefulness to the resistance was now greatly reduced. But the Gestapo did not have information about the full workings of the resistance. Most importantly, they did not know about the resistance networks based on Army Group Centre or the Bendlerblock.
Meanwhile, the disaster at Stalingrad, which cost Germany 400,000 casualties, was sending waves of horror and grief through German society, but causing remarkably little reduction in the people’s faith in Hitler and in Germany’s ultimate victory. This was a source of great frustration to the military and civil service plotters, who virtually all came from the elite and had privileged access to information, giving them a much greater appreciation of the hopelessness of Germany’s situation than was possessed by the German people.
The only visible manifestation of opposition to the regime following Stalingrad was an unexpected and completely spontaneous outbreak of anti-war sentiment among a small number of university students, organised by a group called the
White RoseThe White Rose was a non-violent/intellectual resistance group in Nazi Germany, consisting of students from the University of Munich and their philosophy professor...
, centered in Munich but with connections in Berlin, Hamburg, Stuttgart and Vienna. In January 1943 they launched a campaign of antiwar handbills and graffiti in and around
Ludwig Maximilians UniversityThe Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich , also known as LMU, is a university in Munich and, with more than 44,000 students, is the second-largest university in Germany....
in Munich. Inevitably, they were soon detected and arrested. The three ringleaders,
Hans SchollHans Fritz Scholl was a core and founding member of the White Rose resistance movement in Nazi Germany.-Biography:...
,
Sophie SchollSophia Magdalena Scholl was active within the White Rose non-violent resistance group in Nazi Germany. She was convicted of high treason after having been found distributing anti-war leaflets at the University of Munich with her brother Hans...
and
Christoph ProbstChristoph Hermann Probst was a student of medicine and a member of the White Rose resistance group.- Background :...
, were given perfunctory trials and executed, as was
Kurt HuberKurt Huber was a member of the White Rose group, which carried out resistance against Nazi Germany.-Early life:...
, a professor of music and philosophy accused of inspiring their actions, and several others.
This outbreak was surprising and worrying to the Nazi regime, because the universities had been strongholds of Nazi sentiment even before Hitler had come to power. By the same token, it gave heart to the scattered and demoralised resistance groups. But White Rose was not a sign of widespread civilian disaffection from the regime, and had no imitators elsewhere. The underground SPD and KPD were able to maintain their networks, and reported increasing discontent at the course of the war and at the resultant economic hardship, particularly among the industrial workers and among farmers (who suffered from the acute shortage of labour with so many young men away at the front). But there was nothing approaching active hostility to the regime. Most Germans continued to revere Hitler and blamed Himmler or other subordinates for their troubles. And from late 1943 fear of the advancing Soviets and prospects of a military offensive from the Western Powers eclipsed resentment at the regime and if anything hardened the will to resist the advancing allies.
Unorganized resistance
It cannot be disputed that many Germans supported the regime until the end of the war. But beneath the surface of German society there were also currents of resistance, if not always consciously political. The German historian
Detlev PeukertDetlev Peukert was a left-wing German historian, noted for his studies of the relationship between what he called the "spirit of science" and the Holocaust and in social history and the Weimar Republic. Peukert taught modern history at the University of Essen and served as director of the...
, who pioneered the study of German society during the Nazi era, called this phenomenon "everyday resistance." His research was based partly on the regular reports by the Gestapo and the SD on morale and public opinion, and on the "Reports on Germany" which were produced by the exiled SPD based on information from its underground network in Germany and which were acknowledged to be very well informed.
Peukert and other writers have shown that the most persistent sources of dissatisfaction in Nazi Germany were the state of the economy and anger at the corruption of Nazi Party officials — although these rarely affected the personal popularity of Hitler himself. The Nazi regime is frequently credited with "curing unemployment," but this was done mainly by conscription and rearmament — the civilian economy remained weak throughout the Nazi period. Although prices were fixed by law, wages remained low and there were acute shortages, particularly once the war started. To this after 1942 was added the acute misery caused by Allied air attacks on German cities. The high living and venality of Nazi officials such as
Hermann GöringHermann Wilhelm Göring was a German politician, military leader and a leading member of the Nazi Party. Among many offices, he was Hitler's designated successor and commander of the Luftwaffe...
aroused increasing anger. The result was "deep dissatisfaction among the population of all parts of the country, caused by failings in the economy, government intrusions into private life, disruption of accepted tradition and custom, and police-state controls."
Opposition based on this widespread dissatisfaction usually took "passive" forms — absenteeism, malingering, spreading rumours, trading on the black market, hoarding, avoiding various forms of state service such as donations to Nazi causes. But sometimes it took more active forms, such as warning people about to be arrested, hiding them or helping them to escape, or turning a blind eye to oppositionist activities. Among the industrial working class, where the underground SPD and KPD networks were always active, there were frequent if short-lived strikes. These were generally tolerated, at least before the outbreak of war, provided the demands of the strikers were purely economic and not political.
Another form of resistance was assisting the persecuted German Jews. By mid 1942 the deportation of German and Austrian Jews to the extermination camps in Poland was well under way. As recent writers have shown, the great majority of Germans were indifferent to the fate of the Jews, and a substantial proportion actively supported the Nazi program of extermination But a minority persisted in trying to help Jews, even in the face of serious risk to themselves and their families. This was easiest in Berlin (where in any case the Jews were progressively concentrated by the regime), and easiest for wealthy and well-connected people, particularly women.
Aristocrats such as
Maria von MaltzanMaria Helene Françoise Izabel Gräfin von Maltzan, Freiin zu Wartenberg und Penzlin was a aristocratic member of the German Resistance against Adolf Hitler who also saved many Jews.-Biography:...
and Marie Therese von Hammerstein obtained papers for Jews and helped many to escape from Germany. In Wieblingen in Baden,
Elisabeth von ThaddenElisabeth Adelheid Hildegard von Thadden was a German educator who founded a private school that now bears her name, and an outspoken critic of the Nazi régime...
, a private girls' school principal, disregarded official edicts and continued to enroll Jewish girls at her school until May 1941 when the school was nationalized and she was dismissed (she was executed in 1944, following the
Frau Solf Tea PartyThe Solf Circle was an informal gathering of German intellectuals involved in the resistance against Nazi Germany. Most members were arrested and executed after attending a tea party held near Heidelberg on September 10, 1943, at the residence of Elisabeth von Thadden...
). A Berlin Protestant Minister, Heinrich Grüber, organised the smuggling of Jews to the
NetherlandsThe Netherlands is a country in Northwestern Europe, constituting the major portion of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It is a parliamentary democratic constitutional monarchy. The Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east...
. At the Foreign Office, Canaris conspired to send a number of Jews to Switzerland under various pretexts. It is estimated that 2,000 Jews were hidden in Berlin until the end of the war.
Martin GilbertSir Martin John Gilbert CBE D.Litt. is a British historian and the author of over eighty books, including works on the Holocaust and Jewish history. He has been a pioneer of historical atlases, and is best known as the official biographer of Sir Winston Churchill.-Biography:Martin Gilbert was born...
has documented numerous cases of Germans and Austrians, including officials and Army officers, who saved the lives of Jews.
There was only one public manifestation of opposition to the Nazi persecution of the German Jews, the
Rosenstrasse protestThe Rosenstrasse protest was a nonviolent protest in Rosenstrasse in Berlin in February and March 1943, carried out by the non-Jewish wives and relatives of Jewish men who had been arrested for deportation. The protests escalated until the men were released...
of February 1943, sparked by the arrest and threatened deportation to death camps of 1,800 Jewish men married to non-Jewish women. Before these men could be deported, their wives and other relatives rallied outside the building in Rosenstrasse where the men were held. An estimated 6,000 people, mostly women, rallied in shifts in the winter cold for over a week. Eventually Himmler, worried about the effect on civilian morale, gave in and allowed the arrested men to be released. Some who had already been deported and were on their way to Auschwitz were actually brought back. There was no retaliation against the protesters, and most of the Jewish men survived the war. This incident was remarkable both for its success and its uniqueness, and again raises the question of what might have happened if more Germans had been willing to protest against the deportations.
Nazism had a powerful appeal to German youth, particularly middle-class youth, and German universities were strongholds of Nazism even before Hitler came to power. The
Hitler YouthThe Hitler Youth was a paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party. It existed from 1922 to 1945. The HJ was the second oldest paramilitary Nazi group, founded one year after its adult counterpart, the Sturmabteilung .-Origins:The first NSDAP-related organization of German youth was the Jugendbund...
sought to mobilise all young Germans behind the regime, and apart from stubborn resistance in some rural Catholic areas, was generally successful in the first period of Nazi rule. After about 1938, however, persistent alienation among some sections of German youth began to appear. This rarely took the form of overt political opposition — the
White RoseThe White Rose was a non-violent/intellectual resistance group in Nazi Germany, consisting of students from the University of Munich and their philosophy professor...
group was a striking exception, but was striking mainly for its uniqueness. Much more common was what would now be called "dropping out" — a passive refusal to take part in official youth culture and a search for alternatives. Although none of the unofficial youth groups amounted to a serious threat to the Nazi regime, and although they provided no aid or comfort to those groups within the German elite who were actively plotting against Hitler, they do serve to show that there were currents of opposition at other levels of German society.
Examples were the so-called
EdelweisspiratenThe Edelweiss Pirates were a loose group of youth culture in Nazi Germany. They emerged in western Germany out of the German Youth Movement of the late 1930s in response to the strict regimentation of the Hitler Youth...
("Edelweiss Pirates"), a loose network of working-class youth groups in a number of cities, who held unauthorised meetings and engaged in street fights with the Hitler Youth; the
MeutenThe Leipzig Meuten, die Meuten were anti-Nazi gangs of children, teenagers and young adults in Germany. Similar to the Edelweiss Pirates, but coming from more organised socialist or communist traditions. Between 1937 and 1939 die Meuten in Leipzig had an estimated 1500 members....
group in
LeipzigLeipzig is, with a population of 515,459, the largest city in the federal state of Saxony, Germany.-Origins:Leipzig's name is derived from the Slavic word Lipsk, which means "settlement where the lime trees stand"....
, a more politicised group with links to the KPD underground, which had more than a thousand members in the late 1930s; and, most notably, the
SwingjugendThe Swing Kids were a group of jazz and Swing lovers in Germany of the 1930s, mainly in Hamburg and Berlin. They were composed of 14- to 18-year old boys and girls in high school, most of them middle- or upper-class students, but some apprentice workers as well...
, middle-class youth who met in secret clubs in Berlin and most other large cities to listen to
swingSwing music, also known as swing jazz or simply swing, is a form of jazz music that developed in the early 1930s and had solidified as a distinctive style by 1935 in the United States...
,
jazzJazz is a musical art form which originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States from a confluence of African and European music traditions....
and other music deemed "degenerate" by the Nazi authorities. This movement, which involved distinctive forms of dress and gradually become more consciously political, became so popular that it provoked a crackdown: in 1941 Himmler ordered the arrest of Swing activists and had some sent to concentration camps.
In October 1944, as the American and British armies approached the western borders of Germany, there was a serious outbreak of disorder in the bomb-ravaged city of
CologneCologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the German Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants...
, which had been largely evacuated. The
Edelweisspiraten linked up with gangs of deserters, escaped prisoners and foreign workers, and the undergrounds KPD network, to engage in looting and sabotage, and the assassination of Gestapo and Nazi Party officials. Explosives were stolen with the objective of blowing up the Gestapo headquarters. Himmler, fearing the resistance would spread to other cities as the Allied armies advanced into Germany, ordered a savage crackdown, and for days gunbattles raged in the ruined streets of Cologne. More than 200 people were arrested and dozens were hanged in public, among them six teenaged
Edelweisspiraten, including Bartholomäus Schink.
Allied encouragement
The Allied doctrine of
unconditional surrenderUnconditional surrender is a surrender without conditions, in which no guarantees are given to the surrendering party except for those provided by international law. Announcing that only unconditional surrender is acceptable puts psychological pressure on a weaker adversary...
meant that "... those Germans-and particularly those German generals-who might have been ready to throw Hitler over, and were in a position to do so, were discouraged from making the attempt by their inability to extract from the Allies any sort of assurance that such action would improve the treatment meted out to their country."
On December 11,
OSSThe Office of Strategic Services was a United States intelligence agency formed during World War II. It was the wartime intelligence agency, and it was the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency .-Origins and activities:...
operative
William DonovanMajor General William Joseph Donovan, USA, GCSS, KBE was an American soldier, lawyer and intelligence officer, best remembered as wartime head of the Office of Strategic Services . He is also widely known as the "father" of today's Central Intelligence Agency .-Early life:Donovan was born in...
sent U.S. President Roosevelt a telegraph message from Bern, warning him of the consequences that the knowledge of the
Morgenthau planThe Morgenthau Plan was a plan for the occupation of Germany after World War II that advocated measures intended to remove Germany's ability to wage war...
had had on German resistance; by showing them that the enemy planned the enslavement of Germany it had welded together ordinary Germans and the regime; the Germans continue to fight because they are convinced that defeat will bring nothing but oppression and exploitation. The message was a translation of a recent article in the
Neue Zürcher ZeitungThe Neue Zürcher Zeitung is a major German language Swiss daily newspaper based in Zürich.It is one of the oldest newspapers still published, appearing as Zürcher Zeitung, edited by Salomon Gessner, from January 12 1780, and renamed to Neue Zürcher Zeitung in 1821...
.
So far, the Allies have not offered the opposition any serious encouragement. On the contrary, they have again and again welded together the people and the Nazis by statements published, either out of indifference or with a purpose. To take a recent example, the Morgenthau plan gave Dr. Goebbels the best possible chance. He was able to prove to his countrymen, in black and white, that the enemy planned the enslavement of Germany. The conviction that Germany had nothing to expect from defeat but oppression and exploitation still prevails, and that accounts for the fact that the Germans continue to fight. It is not a question of a regime, but of the homeland itself, and to save that, every German is bound to obey the call, whether he be Nazi or member of the opposition. http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/psf/box32/t298m01.html
On July 20, 1945 — the first anniversary of the failed attempt to kill Hitler — no mention what-so ever was made of the event. This was because reminding the German population of the fact that there had been active German resistance to Hitler would undermine the Allied efforts to instill a sense of collective guilt in the German populace.
Towards July 20
By mid 1943 the tide of war was turning decisively against Germany. The last great offensive on the eastern front,
Operation CitadelThe Battle of Kursk refers to German and Soviet operations on the Eastern Front of World War II in the vicinity of the city of Kursk in July and August 1943. It remains both the largest series of armoured clashes, including the Battle of Prokhorovka, and the costliest single day of aerial warfare...
, ended in the defeat at
KurskKursk is a city and the administrative center of Kursk Oblast, Russia, located at the confluence of the Kur, Tuskar, and Seym Rivers. Kursk was a key turning point of the Russian-German war during World War II and the site of the largest tank battle in World War II...
, and in July
MussoliniBenito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini,
KSMOM GCTE was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism. He became the Prime Minister of Italy in 1922 and began using the title Il Duce by...
was overthrown. The Army and civilian plotters became more convinced than ever that Hitler must be assassinated so that a government acceptable to the western Allies could be formed and a separate peace negotiated in time to prevent a Soviet invasion of Germany. This scenario, while more credible than some of the resistance’s earlier plans, was based on a false premise: that the western Allies would be willing to break with Stalin and negotiate a separate peace with a non-Nazi German government. In fact both
ChurchillSir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill KG, OM, CH, TD, FRS, PC was a British politician known chiefly for his leadership of the United Kingdom during World War II. He served as Prime Minister from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. A noted statesman and orator, Churchill was also an officer...
and
RooseveltFranklin Delano Roosevelt , the only U.S. President elected to more than two terms, was a central figure in world events during the mid-20th century, leading the United States during a time of worldwide economic crisis and world war...
were committed to the “unconditional surrender” formula.
Since the Foreign Office was a stronghold of resistance activists, it was not difficult for the conspirators to make contact with the Allies via diplomats in neutral countries. Theo Kordt, based in the German Embassy in Bern, and advised by the Foreign Officers resisters Ulrich von Hassell and Adam von Trott zu Solz, communicated with the British via intermediaries such as Willem Visser’t Hooft, secretary-general of the
World Council of ChurchesThe World Council of Churches is an international Christian ecumenical organization. Based in Geneva, Switzerland , it is a fellowship of about 340 churches of which 157 are members...
, based in
GenevaGeneva, is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie...
. The Kreisau Circle sent
Dietrich BonhoefferDietrich Bonhoeffer Dietrich Bonhoeffer Dietrich Bonhoeffer ( (February 4, 1906 – April 9, 1945) was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian. He was also a participant in the German Resistance movement against Nazism, a founding member of the Confessing Church...
and Helmut von Moltke to meet
George BellGeorge Kennedy Allen Bell was an Anglican theologian, Dean of Canterbury , Bishop of Chichester, member of the House of Lords and a pioneer of the Ecumenical Movement.-Early career:...
,
Bishop of ChichesterThe Bishop of Chichester is the Ordinary of the Church of England Diocese of Chichester in the Province of Canterbury. The diocese covers the Counties of East and West Sussex. The see is in the City of Chichester where the seat is located at the Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity...
, at a church conference in
Stockholm' is the capital and largest city of Sweden. It is the site of the national Swedish government, the Riksdag , and the official residence of the Swedish Monarch as well as the prime minister. The Monarch resides at Drottningholm Palace outside of Stockholm since 1980 and uses the Royal Palace of...
. Bell passed their messages and plans on to Foreign Secretary
Anthony EdenRobert Anthony Eden, 1st Earl of Avon, KG, MC, PC was a British Conservative politician, who was Foreign Secretary for three periods between 1935 and 1955, including during World War II...
. An American journalist,
Louis P. LochnerLouis P. Lochner was a Pulitzer Prize winning American journalist at the Associated Press. He headed the Berlin bureau along with Wes Gallagher. Lochner was awarded the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for correspondence for his reporting from Nazi Germany in Berlin...
, carried coded messages out of Germany and took them to Roosevelt. Other envoys worked through Vatican channels, or via diplomats in
LisbonLisbon is the capital and largest city of Portugal. It is also the seat of the district of Lisbon and the main city of the Lisbon region...
– a recognised site for indirect communication between Germany and the Allied countries.
All of these overtures were rejected, and indeed they were usually simply ignored. The western Allies would give the German resistance no assistance or even recognition. There were several reasons for this. Firstly, they did not know or trust the resisters, who seemed to them to be a clique of Prussian reactionaries concerned mainly to save their own skins now that Germany was losing the war. This attitude was encouraged by visceral anti-Germans such as Lord Vansittart, Churchill’s diplomatic adviser, who regarded all Germans as evil. Second, Roosevelt and Churchill were both acutely aware that the Soviet Union was bearing the brunt of the war against Hitler, and were aware of Stalin’s constant suspicions that they were doing deals behind his back. They thus refused any discussions that might be seen as suggesting a willingness to reach a separate peace with Germany. Third, the Allies were determined that in
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, unlike in
World War IWorld War I , also known as the First World War, the Great War, and the War to End All Wars, was a global military conflict which involved most of the world's great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances: the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance...
, Germany must be comprehensively defeated in the field if another
"stab in the back” mythThe Stab-in-the-Back Legend was a social theory popular in Germany in the period after World War I and before World War II, which attributed Germany's losing the war not to its inability to continue fighting, but to the public's failure to respond to its "patriotic calling" and the intentional...
was not to arise in Germany.
Olbricht now put forward a new strategy for staging a coup against Hitler. The Reserve Army had an operational plan called Operation Valkyrie, which was to be used in the event that the disruption caused by the Allied bombing of German cities caused a breakdown in law and order, or a rising by the millions of slave labourers from occupied countries now being used in German factories. Olbricht suggested that this plan could be used to mobilise the Reserve Army for the purpose of coup. In the autumn of 1943, Tresckow revised Valkyrie plan and drafted supplemental orders to take control of German cities, disarm the SS and arrest the Nazi leadership after Hitler's assassination. Operation Valkyrie could only be put into effect by General
Friedrich FrommFriedrich Fromm was a German army officer.-Early life:Fromm was born in Charlottenburg. He served as a lieutenant during World War I.-20 July Plot:...
, commander of the Reserve Army, so he must either be won over to the conspiracy or in some way neutralised if the plan was to succeed. Fromm, like many senior officers, knew in general about the military conspiracies against Hitler but neither supported them nor reported them to the Gestapo.
In August 1943 Tresckow met a young staff officer, Colonel
Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg was a German army officer and Catholic aristocrat who was one of the leading members of the failed 20 July plot of 1944 to kill German dictator Adolf Hitler and remove the Nazi Party from power in World War II Germany...
, for the first time. Badly wounded in North Africa, Stauffenberg was a devout Catholic, a political conservative and a zealous German nationalist with a taste for philosophy. He had at first welcomed the Nazi regime but had become rapidly disillusioned. By 1942 he shared the widespread conviction among Army officers that Germany was being led to disaster and that Hitler must be removed from power. For some time his religious scruples had prevented him from coming to the conclusion that assassination was the correct way to achieve this. After Stalingrad, however, he decided that
not assassinating Hitler would be a greater moral evil.
During late 1943 and early 1944 there were a series of attempts to get one of the military conspirators near enough to Hitler for long enough to kill him with a bomb or a revolver. But the task was becoming increasingly difficult. As the war situation deteriorated, Hitler no longer appeared in public and rarely visited Berlin. He spent most of his time at his headquarters in East Prussia, with occasional breaks at his Bavarian mountain retreat in
BerchtesgadenBerchtesgaden is a municipality in the German Bavarian Alps. It is located in the south district of Berchtesgadener Land in Bavaria, near the border with Austria, some 30 km south of Salzburg and 180 km southeast of Munich...
. In both places he was heavily guarded and rarely saw people he did not already know and trust. Himmler and the Gestapo were increasingly suspicious of plots against Hitler, and specifically suspected the officers of the General Staff, which was indeed the place where most of the young officers willing to sacrifice themselves to kill Hitler were located. All these attempts therefore failed, sometimes by a matter of minutes.
Further blows came in January and February 1944 when first Moltke and then Canaris were arrested. By the summer of 1944 the Gestapo was closing in on the conspirators. On 4 July Julius Leber, who was trying to establish contact between his own underground SPD network and the KPD’s network in the interests of the “united front,” was arrested after attending a meeting which had been infiltrated by the Gestapo. There was a sense that time was running out, both on the battlefield, where the eastern front was in full retreat and where the Allies had landed in France on
6 JuneD-Day is a term often used in military parlance to denote the day on which a combat attack or operation is to be initiated. "D-Day" often represents a variable, designating the day upon which some significant event will occur or has occurred; see Military designation of days and hours for similar...
, and in Germany, where the resistance’s room for manoeuvre was rapidly contracting. The belief that this was the last chance for action seized the conspirators. Few now believed that the Allies would agree to a separate peace with a non-Nazi government, even if Hitler was assassinated. Leber in particular had argued that “unconditional surrender” was inevitable and the only question was whether it would be before or after the Soviets invaded Germany.
By this time the core of the conspirators had begun to think of themselves as doomed men, whose actions were more symbolic than real. The purpose of the conspiracy came to be seen by some of them as saving the honour of themselves, their families, the Army and Germany through a grand, if futile, gesture, rather than actually altering the course of history. Tresckow said to Stauffenberg through one of his aides, Lieutenant
Heinrich Graf von Lehndorff-SteinortHeinrich Ahasverus Graf von Lehndorff-Steinort was a member of the July 20 Plot against Adolf Hitler.Born in Hanover, Germany, Heinrich studied economics and business administration in Frankfurt am Main, and in 1936, took on the management of the family assets Steinort in East Prussia...
: “The assassination must be attempted,
coûte que coûte [whatever the cost]. Even if it fails, we must take action in Berlin. For the practical purpose no longer matters; what matters now is that the German resistance movement must take the plunge before the eyes of the world and of history. Compared to that, nothing else matters.”
In retrospect it is surprising that these months of plotting by the resistance groups in the Army and the state apparatus, in which dozens of people were involved and of which many more, including very senior Army officers, were aware, apparently totally escaped the attentions of the Gestapo. In fact, as was noted earlier, the Gestapo had known since February 1943 of both the Abwehr resistance group under the patronage of Canaris and of the Goedeler-Beck circle. If all these people had been arrested and interrogated, the Gestapo might well have uncovered the group based in Army Group Centre as well and the July 20 assassination attempt would never have happened. This raises the possibility that Himmler knew about the plot and, for reasons of his own, allowed it to go ahead.
Himmler had in fact had at least one conversation with a known oppositionist when, in August 1943, the Prussian Finance Minister Johannes Popitz came to see him and offered him the support of the opposition if he would make a move to displace Hitler and secure a negotiated end to the war. Nothing came of this meeting, but Popitz was not arrested and Himmler apparently did nothing to track down the resistance network which he knew was operating within the state bureaucracy. It is possible that Himmler, who by late 1943 knew that the war was unwinnable, allowed the July 20 plot to go ahead in the knowledge that if it succeeded he would be Hitler's successor, and could then bring about a peace settlement. Popitz was not alone in seeing in Himmler a potential ally. General von Bock advised Tresckow to seek his support, but there is no evidence that he did so. Gordeler was apparently also in indirect contact with Himmler via a mutual acquaintance
Carl LangbehnCarl Langbehn was a German lawyer and member of the resistance to Nazism.He was born in Padang, Sumatra and opposed Nazism from the 1930s. He was an acquaintance of Heinrich Himmler as their daughters attended the same school. By 1943 he was aware that Himmler was interested in the idea of...
. Canaris's biographer
Heinz HöhneHeinz Höhne is a German journalist who specializes in Nazi and intelligence history. Born in Berlin in 1926 and educated there until he was called to fight during the last months of the Second World War. After the war, he studied journalism in Munich and went on to work for various newspapers as a...
suggests that Canaris and Himmler were working together to bring about a change of regime. All of this remains speculation.
Himmler in fact knew more about the real level of opposition to the Nazi regime than did the opposition itself. To the resistance activists it seemed that the German people continued to place their faith in Hitler no matter how dire the military and economic situation had become. But Himmler was receiving regular reports from the
SDThe Sicherheitsdienst was primarily the intelligence service of the SS and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany. The organization was the first Nazi Party intelligence organization to be established and was often considered a "sister organization" with the Gestapo, which the SS had infiltrated heavily...
(Security Service, the intelligence arm of the SS), about the real state of German morale. These were compiled by SS-Gruppenfüher
Otto OhlendorfOtto Ohlendorf was a German SS-Gruppenführer and head of the interior division of the SD. He was convicted of and executed for war crimes committed during World War II.-Early life:...
and were drawn from the SD's wide range of contacts all over Germany. They showed a sharp decline in civilian morale and in the level of support for the Nazi regime, beginning after Stalingrad and accelerating through 1943 as the military setbacks continued, the economic situation deteriorated and the Allied bombing of German cities grew more intense. By the end of 1943 Himmler knew that most Germans no longer believed that war could be won and that many, perhaps a majority, had lost faith in Hitler. But fear of the Gestapo meant that this disillusionment did not translate into political opposition to the regime — even though, as the
Rosenstrasse protestThe Rosenstrasse protest was a nonviolent protest in Rosenstrasse in Berlin in February and March 1943, carried out by the non-Jewish wives and relatives of Jewish men who had been arrested for deportation. The protests escalated until the men were released...
showed, it was possible even as late as 1943 for courageous opponents of Nazi policies to make public and successful protests.
Nevertheless organised resistance begun to stir during 1944. While the SPD and KPD trade unions had been destroyed in 1933, the Catholic unions had voluntarily dissolved along with the
Centre PartyThe German Centre Party was a Catholic political party in Germany during the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic...
. As a result Catholic unionists had been less zealously repressed than their socialist counterparts, and had maintained an informal network of activists. Their leaders,
Jakob KaiserJakob Kaiser was a German politician and resistance leader during World War II.Jakob Kaiser was born in the Franconian town of Hammelburg. In his younger years he was a bookbinder. He joined a Catholic trade union and the Catholic Centre Party. He was one of the most important union leaders during...
and Max Habermann, judged by the beginning of 1944 that it was time to take action. They organised a network of resistance cells in government offices across Germany, ready to rise and take control of their buildings when the word was given by the military that Hitler was dead.
To the bitter end
On 1 July Stauffenberg was appointed chief-of-staff to General Fromm at the Reserve Army headquarters on Bendlerstrasse in central Berlin. This position enabled Stauffenberg to attend Hitler’s military conferences, either in East Prussia or at Berchtesgaden, and would thus give him a golden opportunity, perhaps the last that would present itself, to kill Hitler with a bomb or a pistol. Conspirators who had long resisted on moral grounds the idea of killing Hitler now changed their minds – partly because they were hearing reports of the mass murder at Auschwitz of up to 400,000 Hungarian Jews, the culmination of the Nazi Holocaust. Meanwhile new key allies had been gained. These included General
Carl-Heinrich von StülpnagelCarl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, was a German general and a member of the July 20 Plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.-Early life:...
, the German military commander in France, who would take control in Paris when Hitler was killed and, it was hoped, negotiate an immediate armistice with the invading Allied armies.
The plot was now as ready as it would ever be. Twice in early July Stauffenberg attended Hitler's conferences carrying a bomb in his briefcase. But because the conspirators had decided that Himmler, too, must be assassinated if the planned mobilisation of Operation Valkyrie was to have any chance of success, he had held back at the last minute because Himmler was not present – in fact it was unusual for Himmler to attend military conferences. By 15 July, when Stauffenberg again flew to East Prussia, this condition had been dropped. The plan was for Stauffenberg to plant the briefcase with the bomb in Hitler's conference room with a timer running, excuse himself from the meeting, wait for the explosion, then fly back to Berlin and join the other plotters at the Bendlerblock. Operation Valkyrie would be mobilised, the Reserve Army would take control of Germany and the other Nazi leaders would be arrested. Beck would be appointed head of state, Gordeler Chancellor and Witzleben commander-in-chief. The plan was ambitious and depended on a run of very good luck, but it was not totally fanciful.
Again on 15 July the attempt was called off at the last minute, for reasons which are not known because all the participants in the phone conversations which led to the postponement were dead by the end of the year. Stauffenberg, depressed and angry, returned to Berlin. On 18 July rumours reached him that the Gestapo had wind of the conspiracy and that he might be arrested at any time – this was apparently not true, but there was a sense that the net was closing in and that the next opportunity to kill Hitler must be taken because there might not be another. At 10:00 hours on 20 July Stauffenberg flew back to Rastenburg for another Hitler military conference, once again with a bomb in his briefcase. It is remarkable in retrospect that despite Hitler’s mania for security, officers attending his conferences were not searched.
At about 12:10 the conference began. Stauffenberg, having previously activated the timer on the bomb, placed his briefcase under the table around which Hitler and more than 20 officers were seated or standing. After ten minutes, he made an excuse and left the room. At 12:40 the bomb went off, demolishing the conference room. Several officers were killed, but not Hitler. Possibly he had been saved because the heavy oak leg of the conference table, behind which Stauffenberg's briefcase had been left, deflected the blast. But Stauffenberg, seeing the building collapse in smoke and flame, assumed Hitler was dead, leapt into a staff car and made a dash for the airfield before the alarm could be raised. By 13:00 he was airborne.
By the time Stauffenberg’s plane reached Berlin at about 15:00, General
Erich FellgiebelFritz Erich Fellgiebel was a German officer and "July 20th" conspirator in the Third Reich.-Military career:...
, an officer at Rastenburg who was in on the plot, had rung the Bendlerblock and told the plotters that Hitler had survived the explosion. This was a fatal step (literally so for Fellgiebel and many others), because the Berlin plotters immediately lost their nerve, and judged, probably correctly, that the plan to mobilise Operation Valkyrie would have no chance of succeeding once the officers of the Reserve Army knew that Hitler was alive. There was more confusion when Stauffenberg’s plane landed and he phoned from the airport to say that Hitler was in fact dead. The Benderblock plotters did not know whom to believe. Finally at 16:00 Olbricht issued the orders for Operation Valkyrie to be mobilised. The vacillating General Fromm, however, phoned Keitel, who assured him that Hitler was alive, and demanded to know Stauffenberg’s whereabouts. This told Fromm that the plot had been traced to his headquarters, and that he was in mortal danger.
At 16:40 Stauffenberg arrived at the Bendlerblock. Fromm now changed sides and attempted to have Stauffenberg arrested, but Olbricht and Stauffenberg restrained him at gunpoint. By this time Himmler had taken charge of the situation and has issued orders countermanding Olbricht's mobilisation of Operation Valkyrie. In many places the coup was going ahead, led by officers who believed that Hitler was dead. The Propaganda Ministry on the Wilhelmstrasse, with
Joseph GoebbelsPaul Joseph Goebbels was a German politician and Reichsminister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945...
inside, was surrounded by troops. In Paris Stülpnagel issued orders for the arrest of the SS and
SDThe Sicherheitsdienst was primarily the intelligence service of the SS and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany. The organization was the first Nazi Party intelligence organization to be established and was often considered a "sister organization" with the Gestapo, which the SS had infiltrated heavily...
commanders. In Vienna, Prague and many other places troops occupied Nazi Party offices and arrested Gauleiters and SS officers.
The decisive moment came at 19:00, when Hitler was sufficiently recovered to make phone calls. By phone he personally empowered a loyal officer, Major Otto Remer, to regain control of the situation in Berlin. At 20:00 a furious Witzleben arrived at the Bendlerblock and had a bitter argument with Stauffenberg, who was still insisting that the coup could go ahead. Witzleben left shortly afterwards. At around this time the planned seizure of power in Paris was aborted when Kluge, who had recently been appointed commander-in-chief in the west, learned that Hitler was alive, changed sides with alacrity and had Stülpnagel arrested.
The less resolute members of the conspiracy in Berlin also now began to change sides. Fighting broke out in the Bendlerblock between officers supporting and opposing the coup, and Stauffenberg was wounded. By 23:00 Fromm had regained control, hoping by a show of zealous loyalty to save his own skin. Beck, realising the game was up, shot himself – the first of many suicides in the coming days. Fromm declared that he had convened a court-martial consisting of himself, and had sentenced Olbricht, Stauffenberg and two other officers to death. At 00:10 on 21 July they were shot in the courtyard outside. Others would have been executed as well, but at 00:30 the SS led by
Otto SkorzenyOtto Skorzeny was an SS-Obersturmbannführer in the German Waffen-SS during World War II. After fighting on the Eastern Front, he commanded a rescue mission that freed the deposed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini from captivity...
arrived on the scene and further executions were forbidden. Fromm went off to see Goebbels to claim credit for suppressing the coup. He was immediately arrested.
That was the end of the German resistance. Over the coming weeks Himmler’s Gestapo, driven by a furious Hitler, rounded up nearly everyone who had had the remotest connection with the July 20 plot. The discovery of letters and diaries in the homes and offices of those arrested revealed the plots of 1938, 1939 and 1943, and this led to further rounds of arrests, including that of Halder, who finished the war in a concentration camp. Under Himmler’s new
SippenhaftSippenhaft or Sippenhaftung was a form of collective punishment practiced in Nazi Germany towards the end of the Second World War. It was a legal practice whereby relatives of those accused of crimes against the state were held to be equally responsible and were arrested and sometimes executed...
(blood guilt) laws, all the relatives of the principal plotters were also arrested. Many people killed themselves, including Tresckow, Stülpnagel and Kluge.
Very few of the plotters tried to escape, or to deny their guilt when arrested. It was as if they felt that now that honour had been satisfied, there was nothing further to be done. Hassell, who was at home in Bavaria, returned to his office in Berlin and awaited arrest. Others turned themselves in. Some plotters did manage to get away – Gisevius to Switzerland, for example. Others survived by luck or accident. It appears that none of the conspirators implicated anyone else, even under torture. It was well into August before the Gestapo learned of the Kreisau Circle. Goerdeler was not arrested until August 12.
Those who survived interrogation were given perfunctory trials before the People’s Court and its bullying Nazi judge
Roland FreislerRoland Freisler was a prominent and notorious Nazi German judge. He became State Secretary of Adolf Hitler's Reich Ministry of Justice and President of the Volksgerichtshof , which was set up outside constitutional authority...
. Eventually some 5,000 people were arrested and about 200 were executed – not all of them connected with the July 20 plot, since the Gestapo used the occasion to settle scores with many other people suspected of opposition sympathies. After February 1945, when Freisler was killed in an air raid, there were no more formal trials, but as late as April, with the war weeks away from its end, Canaris’s diary was found, and many more people were implicated. Executions continued down to the last days of the war.
Historiography
Historiographical debates on the subject on
Widerstand have often featured intense arguments about the nature, extent and effectiveness of resistance in the Third Reich. In particular, debate has focused around what to define as
Widerstand (resistance).
Within both the
Federal Republic of GermanyWest Germany is a common English name for the period of the Federal Republic of Germany between its' formation in May 1949 to German reunification in October 1990, when the German Democratic Republic was dissolved and the five states on its territory joined the Federal Republic of Germany,...
and the German Democratic Republic, the memory of
Widerstand was harnessed after 1949 as a way of providing legitimacy to the two rival German states. In East Germany, the focus was unabashedly on celebrating the
KPDThe Communist Party of Germany was a major political party in Germany between 1918 and 1933, and a minor party in West Germany in the postwar period...
, which was represented as only the anti-fascist force in Germany; non-Communist resistance was either ignored or slighted. In East Germany, historical work on the subject of
widerstand was highly politicized and portrayed the KPD resistance as heroically as possible. The general tone of East German work on the subject was well summarized by the introduction to the 1974 book
Die deutsche antifaschistische Widerstandsbewegung, which stated: “The German anti-fascist resistance movement, especially the KPD and the forces allied to it, embodied the progressive line of German policy. The most consistent political force of this movement, the KPD, carried out from the first day of the fascist dictatorship, organized and, centrally directed the struggle against imperialism…The expression of the victory of the resolute anti-fascists after the smashing of fascism by the Soviet Union, and the other states of the Anti-Hitler coalition, and the defeat of German imperialism is the existence of the GDR in which the legacy of the best of the German people who gave their lives in the anti-fascist struggle was realized”.
In West Germany, the first works to appear on the subject, such as the books by
Hans RothfelsHans Rothfels was a conservative German-American nationalist historian.-Life:Rothfels was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Kassel, Hesse-Nassau. In 1910, he converted to Lutheranism. He was studying history and philosophy at Heidelberg University when World War I broke out in 1914. As a student,...
and
Gerhard RitterGerhard Albert Ritter was a conservative German historian.- Biography :Ritter was born in Bad Sooden-Allendorf, the son of an Lutheran clergyman. He was educated at a gymnasium in Gütersloh and at the universities of Munich, Heidelberg, and Leipzig...
, were intended both to rebut the "collective guilt" accusations against the German people by showing the existence of the "other Germany", and to prevent another
Dolchstoßlegende from emerging by portraying those involved in
Widerstand activities in as heroic light as possible. Under the influence of the
Cold WarThe Cold War was the continuing state of political conflict, military tension, and economic competition existing after World War II , primarily between the USSR and its satellite states, and the powers of the Western world, including the United States...
, starting in the late 1940s, and continuing throughout the 1950s, historiographical work on the subject in the Federal Republic came to increasing exclude the
KPDThe Communist Party of Germany was a major political party in Germany between 1918 and 1933, and a minor party in West Germany in the postwar period...
, and assigned a minor role to the
SPDThe Social Democratic Party of Germany is Germany's oldest political party. The party governed at the federal level in a grand coalition with the Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union until conceding defeat in the federal election of September 2009...
. In his biography of Goerdeler, Ritter drew a distinction between those Germans working for the defeat of their country, and those Germans working to overthrow the Nazi regime while being loyal to Germany. Thus, in Ritter’s view, Goerdeler was a patriot while those involved in the
Rote Kapelle were traitors who deserved to be executed. In general, West German historians in the 1950s came to define
Widerstand as only including national-conservatives involved in the July 20 plot, and a "monumentalization" and "heroicization" of
Widerstand occurred with those being involved being credited as acting from the highest possible ethical and moral motives. In the 1950s, resistance was depicted as middle-class and Christian with the emphasis on the heroic individual standing alone against tyranny.
Starting in the 1960s, a younger generation of West German historians such as
Hans MommsenHans Mommsen is a left-wingGerman historian. He is the twin brother of Wolfgang Mommsen.-Biography:He was born in Marburg, the son of the historian Wilhelm Mommsen and great-grandson of the Roman historian Theodor Mommsen. He studied German, history and philosophy at the University of Heidelberg,...
started to provide a more critical assessment of
Widerstand within German elites, and came to decry the "monumentalization" of the 1950s. In two articles published in 1966, Mommsen proved the claim often advanced in the 1950s that the ideas behind "men of July 20" were the inspiration for the 1949 Basic Law of the Federal Republic was false. Mommsen showed that the ideas of national-conservative opponents of the Nazis had their origins in the anti-Weimar right of the 1920s, that the system the national-conservatives wished to build in place of Nazism was not a democracy, and that national-conservatives wished to see a "Greater Germany" ruling over much of Central and Eastern Europe. As part of a critical evaluation of those involved in anti-Nazi work, the German historian Christof Dipper in his 1983 essay "
Der Deutsche Widerstand und die Juden" (translated into English as "The German Resistance and the Jews") argued that the majority of the anti-Nazi national-consevatives were anti-Semitic. Dipper wrote that for the majority of the national-conservatives "the bureaucratic, pseudo-legal deprivation of the Jews practiced until 1938 was still considered acceptable" Through Dipper noted no-one in the
Widerstand movement supported
the HolocaustThe Holocaust , also known as The Shoah is the term generally used to describe the genocide of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, a program of systematic state-sponsored extermination by Nazi Germany,...
, he also commented that the national-conservatives did not intend to restore civil rights to the Jews after the overthrow of Hitler Dipper went to argue that based on such views that for a "a large part of the German people...believed that a "Jewish Question" existed and had to be solved...". In response to Dipper's charges, the Canadian historian Peter Hoffmann in his 2004 essay "The German Resistance and the Holocaust" sought to disapprove Dipper's thesis. Hoffmann argued that the majority of those involved in the July 20th
putsch attempt were motivated in large part to moral objections to the
Shoah. In particular, Hoffmann used the example of
Claus von Stauffenberg Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg was a German army officer and Catholic aristocrat who was one of the leading members of the failed 20 July plot of 1944 to kill German dictator Adolf Hitler and remove the Nazi Party from power in World War II Germany...
's moral outrage to witnessing the massacre of Russian Jews in 1942, and of
Carl Friedrich GoerdelerCarl Friedrich Goerdeler was a monarchist conservative German politician, executive, economist, civil servant, and first a servant of and later an opponent of the Nazi regime...
's advice in 1938–39 to his contact with British intelligence, the industrialist A.P. Young that the British government should take a tough line with the Nazi regime in regards to its anti-Semitism.
Increasingly, West German historians started in the 1960s and 1970s to examine
Widerstand outside of elites, and by focusing on resistance by ordinary people to challenge the popular notion that had been "resistance without the people". An example of the changing trend in historical research was a series of local studies of varying degrees of quality on working-class resistance movements associated with the SPD and the KPD published in the 1970s, which shed much light on these previously little known movements. As the historical genre of
AlltagsgeschichteAlltagsgeschichte is a form of microhistory that was particularly prevalent amongst German historians during the 1980s.The name comes from German, where Alltag means "everyday life"; it can thus be roughly translated as "everyday history"....
(history of everyday life) started to enjoy increasing popularity as a research topic in the 1970s–80s, historians became more preoccupied with that they considered to be "everyday" resistance by individuals acting outside of any sort of organization". The so-called "Bavaria Project" of the 1970s, an effort made by the
Institute of Contemporary HistoryThe Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich was founded in 1949 under the name „Deutsches Institut für Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Zeit“ by the German state and the Free State of Bavaria, incited by the Allied Forces. It was renamed to the current name in 1952...
to comprehensively document "everyday life" in
BavariaBavaria , with an area of and almost 12.5 million inhabitants, is located in the southeast of Germany and is the largest state of Germany by area, forming almost 20% of the total land area of Germany...
during the Third Reich did much to spur research into this area. The first director of the "Bavaria Project", Peter Hüttenberger defined
Widerstand as "every form of rebellion against at least potentially total rule within the context of asymmetrical relations of rule". For Hüttenberger, "symmetrical" rule occurs when there is a "bargain" struck between the different interests of the rulers and ruled which leads more or less to a "balance"; "asymmetrical rule" occurs when there is no "bargain" and the state seeks total
Herrschaft (domination) over the ruled. For this reason, Hüttenberger discounted the East German claim that the KPD had been engaging in anti-Nazi resistance during the Weimar Republic. Hüttenberger argued that democracy is a form of "symmetrical" rule, and therefore merely being an opposition party under a democracy does not qualify as resistance.
Seen within this perspective as defined by Hüttenberger, any effort made to resist the claim of total
Herrschaft, no matter how minor was a form of
Widerstand. Thus, the six volumes which comprised the "Bavaria Project" edited by the project's second director,
Martin BroszatMartin Broszat was a German historian specializing in modern German social history whose work has been described by The Encyclopedia of Historians as indispenable for any serious study of the Third Reich. Broszat was born in Leipzig, Germany and studied history at the University of Leipzig and at...
depicted actions such as refusal to give the Nazi salute or regularly attending church as a type of resistance. Moreover, the emphasis upon resistance in "everyday life" in the "Bavaria Project" portrayed
Widerstand not as a total contrast between black and white, but rather in shades of grey, noting that people who often refused to behave as the Nazi regime wanted in one area often conformed in other areas; as an example the Bavarian peasants who did business with Jewish cattle dealers in the 1930s despite the efforts of the Nazi regime to stop these transactions otherwise often expressed approval of the anti-Semitic laws. Rather than defining resistance as a matter of intention, Broszat and his associates came to define
Widerstand as a matter of
Wirkung (effect) as a means of blocking the Nazi regime's total claim to control all aspects of German life, regardless of whatever the intentions were political or not.
Realizing that not every action that blocked the Nazi regime's total claims should be considered a form of
Widerstand, Broszat devised the controversial concept of
Resistenz (immunity). By
Resistenz, Broszat meant that certain sections of German society were able to more or less maintain their pre-1933 value system without seeking to fundamentally challenge the Nazi regime. The
Resistenz concept was often criticized by other historians for seeking to change the focus from "behavior" and intentions towards the Nazi regime towards the "effect" on one's actions on the regime. One of Broszat's leading critics, the Swiss historian Walter Hofer commented that in his view: "The concept of
Resistenz leads to a levelling down of fundamental resistance against the system on the one hand and actions criticizing more or less accidental, superficial manifestations on the other: the tyrannicide appears on the same plane as the illegal cattle-slaughterer". Moreover, Hofter noted that the things that Broszat labeled
Resistenz had no effect within the grander scheme of things on the ability of the Nazi regime to accomplish its objectives within Germany. Another of Broszat's critics, the German historian Klaus-Jürgen Müller argued that the term
Widerstand should apply only to those having a "will to overcome the system" and that Broszat's
Resistenz concept did too much to muddy the waters between by speaking of societal "immunity" to the regime. A more sympathetic appraisal of the
Resistenz concept came from the historians Manfred Messerschmidt and Heinz Boberach who argued that
Widerstand should be defined from the viewpoint of the Nazi state, and any activity that was contrary to the regime's wishes such as listerning to
jazzJazz is a musical art form which originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States from a confluence of African and European music traditions....
music should be considered as a form of
Widerstand.
Another viewpoint advanced in the debate was that of Mommsen, who cautioned against the use of overtly rigid terminology, and spoke of a wide type of "resistance practice" (
Widerstandspraxis), by which he meant that there were different types and forms of resistance, and that resistance should be considered a "process", in which individuals came to increasing reject the Nazi system in its entirety. As an example of resistance as a "process", Mommsen used the example of
Carl Friedrich GoerdelerCarl Friedrich Goerdeler was a monarchist conservative German politician, executive, economist, civil servant, and first a servant of and later an opponent of the Nazi regime...
, who initially supported the Nazis, became increasing disillusioned over Nazi economic policies while serving as Price Commissioner in the mid-1930s, and by the late 1930s was committed to Hitler's overthrow. Mommsen described national-conservative resistance as "a resistance of servants of the state", who over a period of time came to gradually abandoned their former support of the regime, and instead steadily came to accept that the only way of bringing about fundamental change was to seek the regime’s destruction. In regards to the idea of "resistance as a process", several historians have worked out typologies. The German historian
Detlev PeukertDetlev Peukert was a left-wing German historian, noted for his studies of the relationship between what he called the "spirit of science" and the Holocaust and in social history and the Weimar Republic. Peukert taught modern history at the University of Essen and served as director of the...
created a typology running from "nonconformity" (mostly done in private and not including total rejection of the Nazi system), "refusal of co-operation" (
Verweigerung), "protest", and finally, "resistance" (those committed to the overthrow of the regime). The Austrian historian Gerhard Botz argued for a typology starting with "deviant behavior" (minor acts of non-conformity), "social protest", and "political resistance"..
The British historian Sir
Ian KershawSir Ian Kershaw is a British historian of 20th-century Germany whose work has chiefly focused on the period of the Third Reich...
has argued that there are two approaches to the
Widerstand question, one of which he calls the
fundamentalist (dealing with those committed to overthrowing the Nazi regime) and the
societal (dealing with forms of dissent in "everyday life"). In Kershaw's viewpoint, the
Resistenz concept works well in an
AlltagsgeschichteAlltagsgeschichte is a form of microhistory that was particularly prevalent amongst German historians during the 1980s.The name comes from German, where Alltag means "everyday life"; it can thus be roughly translated as "everyday history"....
approach, but works less well in the field of high politics, and moreover by focusing only on the "effect" of one's actions, fails to consider the crucial element of the "intention" behind one's actions. Kershaw has argued that the term
Widerstand should be used only for those working for the total overthrow of the Nazi system, and those engaging in behavior which was counter to the regime's wishes without seeking to overthrow the regime should be included under the terms opposition and dissent, depending upon their motives and actions. Kershaw has used the
Edelweiss PiratesThe Edelweiss Pirates were a loose group of youth culture in Nazi Germany. They emerged in western Germany out of the German Youth Movement of the late 1930s in response to the strict regimentation of the Hitler Youth...
as an example of whose behavior initially fell under dissent, and who advanced from there to opposition and finally to resistance. Along the same lines, the American historian
Claudia KoonzClaudia Ann Koonz is an American feminist historian of Nazi Germany. Her principle area of interest is the experience of women during the Nazi era....
in her 1992 article "Ethical Dilemmas and Nazi Eugenics”, argued that those who protested against the
Action T4Action T4 was a program, also called Euthanasia Program, in Nazi Germany spanning October 1939 until August 1941, during which physicians killed 70,273 people specified in Hitler's secret memo of September 1, 1939 as suffering patients "judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination", but...
program, usually for religious reasons while remaining silent about
the HolocaustThe Holocaust , also known as The Shoah is the term generally used to describe the genocide of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, a program of systematic state-sponsored extermination by Nazi Germany,...
cannot be considered as part of any resistance to the Nazis, and these protests can only be considered as a form of dissent. In Kershaw's opinion, there were three bands ranging from dissent to opposition to resistance. In Kershaw's view, there was much dissent and opposition within German society, but outside of the working-class, very little resistance. Through Kershaw has argued that the
Resistenz concept has much merit, overall he concluded that the Nazi regime had a broad basis of support and consensus, and it is correct to speak of "resistance without the people".
Sources
This article is based mainly on the account in
Joachim FestJoachim Clemens Fest , German historian, journalist, critic and editor, is best known for his writings and public commentary on Nazi Germany, including an important biography of Adolf Hitler and books about Albert Speer and the German Resistance...
,
Plotting Hitler's Death: The German Resistance to Hitler, 1933-1945Plotting Hitler's Death: The German Resistance To Hitler, 1933-1945 is a 1994 book by historian Joachim Fest about the Germans, both civilian and military, who plotted to kill Adolf Hitler from 1933 onwards....
(English edition Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1996), with additional material from
Ian KershawSir Ian Kershaw is a British historian of 20th-century Germany whose work has chiefly focused on the period of the Third Reich...
’s two volumes
Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (W.W.Norton, 1998) and
Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (W.W.Norton, 2000) and various other works. Acknowledgment must be made also to
Roger ManvellRoger Manvell was born in England on October 10, 1909 and died on November 30, 1987. The co-founder and first director of the British Film Academy was also the author of many books on films and film-making, and authored and co-authored many books on Nazi Germany, including biographies of Adolf...
and Heinrich Frankel whose
The Canaris Conspiracy: The Secret Resistance to Hitler in the German Army (1969) was a pioneering work.
See also
- List of members of the 20 July plot
- Friedrich Olbricht
General Friedrich Olbricht was a German general and one of the plotters involved in the attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler at the Wolfsschanze in East Prussia on 20 July 1944.- Life :...
- Kurt Nehrling
Kurt Nehrling was a Russian informant and member of the Weimar Resistance, also known as the Social Democrats Against Hitler. During his membership in the German resistance, Nehrling was responsible for supplying information to the Russians and was most famously known for hiding banned books...
- Friedrich Kellner
August Friedrich Kellner was a mid-level official in Germany who worked as a justice inspector in Mainz and Laubach. During the First World War, Kellner was an infantryman in a Hessian regiment...
- Rudolf Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff
Rudolf Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff was a military officer in Germany’s Weimar-period Reichswehr and Nazi-period Wehrmacht. He attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler by suicide bombing, and he discovered the mass graves of the Katyn massacre...
- Friedrich Schlotterbeck
Friedrich Schlotterbeck was a German author who wrote prose fiction, plays, and radio plays, and was a local leader of the German Resistance during World War II. Born in Reutlingen, Baden-Württemberg, as the son of a metal worker, he joined the KJD, the German Communist Youth Party, in 1923, and...
- Werner Dankwort
Carl Werner Dankwort born in Gumbinnen, Germany, was a German diplomat who served a major role in bringing Germany into the League of Nations in 1926 prior to representing the German contingent in the Organization for European Economic Cooperation, the post-World War II effort known as the...
Literature
General
- Harold C. Deutsch "Symposium: New Perspectives on the German Resistance against National Socialism" pages 322–399 from Central European History, Volume 14, 1981.
- Fest, Joachim
Joachim Clemens Fest , German historian, journalist, critic and editor, is best known for his writings and public commentary on Nazi Germany, including an important biography of Adolf Hitler and books about Albert Speer and the German Resistance...
Plotting Hitler’s Death: The German Resistance to Hitler 1933–1945, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1996, ISBN 0297817744.
- Peter Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance 1933–1945, McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996 ISBN 0773515313.
- Martyn Housden, Resistance and Conformity in the Third Reich, London ; New York : Routledge, 1997, ISBN 0415121337.
- Ian Kershaw
Sir Ian Kershaw is a British historian of 20th-century Germany whose work has chiefly focused on the period of the Third Reich...
The Nazi Dictatorship Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, London: Arnold Press, 2000, ISBN 0340 76928 1
- Klemens von Klemperer, German Resistance Against Hitler:The Search for Allies Abroad 1938–1945, Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1992, ISBN 0-19-821940-7
- Richard Lamb, The Ghosts of Peace, 1935–45 Michael Russell Publishing, 1987, ISBN 0859551407.
- David Clay Large (editor) Contending with Hitler Varieties of German Resistance in the Third Reich, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1991, ISBN 0521466687.
- Annedore Leber, The Conscience in Revolt : Portraits of the German Resistance 1933–1945 collected and edited by Annedore Leber in cooperation with Willy Brandt
Willy Brandt, born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm , was a German politician, Chancellor of West Germany 1969–1974, and leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany 1964–1987....
and Karl Dietrich BracherKarl Dietrich Bracher is a German political scientist and historian of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. Born in Stuttgart, Bracher was awarded a Ph.D. in the Classics by the University of Tübingen in 1948 and subsequently studied at Harvard University between 1949–1950...
, Mainz : Hase & Koehler, 1994 ISBN 3-7758-1314-4.
- Hans Mommsen
Hans Mommsen is a left-wingGerman historian. He is the twin brother of Wolfgang Mommsen.-Biography:He was born in Marburg, the son of the historian Wilhelm Mommsen and great-grandson of the Roman historian Theodor Mommsen. He studied German, history and philosophy at the University of Heidelberg,...
, translated by Angus McGeoch Alternatives to Hitler: German Resistance Under the Third Reich Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-691-11693-8.
- Roger Moorhouse
Roger Moorhouse is a British historian and author. Though born in Stockport, Cheshire, he was raised in Hertfordshire and was educated at Berkhamsted School...
, Killing Hitler : The Plots, The Assassins, And The Dictator Who Cheated Death , New York : Bantam Books, 2006 ISBN 0-224-07121-1.
- Hans Rothfels
Hans Rothfels was a conservative German-American nationalist historian.-Life:Rothfels was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Kassel, Hesse-Nassau. In 1910, he converted to Lutheranism. He was studying history and philosophy at Heidelberg University when World War I broke out in 1914. As a student,...
The German Opposition to Hitler: An Assessment Longwood Pr Ltd: London 1948, 1961, 1963, 1970 ISBN 0-85496-119-4.
- Michael C. Thomsett The German Opposition To Hitler : the Resistance, the Underground, and Assassination Plots, 1938–1945 Jefferson, N.C. ; London : McFarland, 1997, ISBN 0786403721.
Themes
- Francis L. Carsten, German Workers and the Nazis, Aldershot, Hants, England : Scolar Press, 1995, ISBN 0859679985.
- Christoph Dippler "The German Resistance and the Jews" pages 51–93 from Yad Vashem Studies, Volume 16, 1984.
- Peter Hoffmann "The German Resistance and the Holocaust" pages 105–126 from Confront! Resistance in Nazi Germany edited by John J. Michalczyk, New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 2004, ISBN 0820463175
- Ian Kershaw
Sir Ian Kershaw is a British historian of 20th-century Germany whose work has chiefly focused on the period of the Third Reich...
Popular Opinion And Political Dissent In The Third Reich, Bavaria 1933–45, Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1983, ISBN 0198219229
- Tim Kirk, Nazism and the Working Class in Austria: Industrial Unrest and Political Dissent in the National Community, Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1996, ISBN 0521475015.
- Claudia Koonz
Claudia Ann Koonz is an American feminist historian of Nazi Germany. Her principle area of interest is the experience of women during the Nazi era....
"Ethical Dilemmas and Nazi Eugenics: Single-Issue Dissent in Religious Contexts" pages S8–S31 from Journal of Modern History, Volume 64, 1992.
- Manvell, Roger
Roger Manvell was born in England on October 10, 1909 and died on November 30, 1987. The co-founder and first director of the British Film Academy was also the author of many books on films and film-making, and authored and co-authored many books on Nazi Germany, including biographies of Adolf...
The Canaris Conspiracy: The Secret Resistance to Hitler in the German Army, New York: McKay, 1969,
- Alan Merson Communist Resistance in Nazi Germany, London : Lawrence and Wishart, 1985, ISBN 0391033662.
- Klaus-Jürgen Müller “The German Military Opposition before the Second World War” pages 61–75 from The Fascist Challenge and the Policy of Appeasement edited by Wolfgang Mommsen
Wolfgang Justin Mommsen was a German historian. He was the twin brother of Hans Mommsen.-Biography:He was born in Marburg, the son of the historian Wilhelm Mommsen. He was educated at the University of Marburg, University of Cologne and University of Leeds between 1951–1959...
& Lothar Lettenacke, George Allen & Unwin: London, United Kingdom, 1983, ISBN 0049400681.
- Klaus-Jürgen Müller "The Structure and Nature of the National Conservative Opposition in Germany up to 1940" pages 133–178 from Aspects of the Third Reich edited by H.W. Koch, Macmillan: London, United Kingdom, 1985 ISBN 0-333-35272-6.
- Timothy Mason
Timothy Wright Mason was a British Marxist historian of Nazi Germany.-Life and work:He was born in Birkenhead, the child of school-teachers and was educated at Birkenhead School and Oxford University. He taught at Oxford from 1971–1984 and was twice married. He helped to found the...
"The Workers' Opposition in Nazi Germany" pages 120–137 from History Workshop Journal, Volume 11, 1981.
- Jeremy Noakes "The Oldenburg Crucifix Struggle of November 1936 A Case Study in Opposition in the Third Reich" pages 210–233 from The Shaping of the Nazi State edited by Peter Stachura, London : Croom Helm ; New York : Barnes & Noble, 1978, ISBN 0856644714 1978.
- Detlev Peukert
Detlev Peukert was a left-wing German historian, noted for his studies of the relationship between what he called the "spirit of science" and the Holocaust and in social history and the Weimar Republic. Peukert taught modern history at the University of Essen and served as director of the...
Inside Nazi Germany : Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life London : Batsford, 1987 ISBN 0-7134-5217-X.
Biographies
- Fred Breinersdorfer
Fred Breinersdorfer is a prominent German screenwriter, producer and author.- Work :Fred Breinersdorfer studied law and worked as a lawyer before he debuted as an author of crime fiction in 1980, writing detective novels published by Rowohlt...
(Editor), Sophie Scholl — Die letzten Tage, 2005.
- Ulrich von Hassell, The Von Hassell Diaries 1938–1944 the Story of the Forces Against Hitler Inside Germany Doubleday, 1947, ISBN 0-404-16944-9. Reprint Greenwood Press, 1971, ISBN 0-8371-3228-2.
- Donald Goddard, The Last Days of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Harper and Roe,1976, ISBN 0-06-011564-5
- Gerhard Ritter
Gerhard Albert Ritter was a conservative German historian.- Biography :Ritter was born in Bad Sooden-Allendorf, the son of an Lutheran clergyman. He was educated at a gymnasium in Gütersloh and at the universities of Munich, Heidelberg, and Leipzig...
, The German Resistance : Carl Goerdeler's Struggle Against Tyranny, translated by R.T. Clark, Freeport, N.Y. : Books for Libraries Press, 1970.
- Gregor Schöllgen, A Conservative Against Hitler: Ulrich von Hassell, Diplomat in Imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich, 1881–1944 New York : St. Martin's Press, 1991, ISBN 0-312-05784-9.
- Helena P. Page, General Friedrich Olbricht: Ein Mann des 20. Julis, 1993, ISBN 3416025148
External links