The German Resistance was the opposition by individuals and groups in Nazi Germany to the regime of Adolf Hitler 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 July 20 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) French 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 coup 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 Courts, 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.
The German Resistance movement consisted of several disparate 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 Democrats (SPD) and Communists (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 Leber, who was an active resistance figure. There was also resistance from the anarcho-syndicalist union, the Freie Arbeiter Union (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 Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller (the latter after having initially supported Hitler), and the Catholic Bishop Clemens von Galen, and their example inspired some acts of overt resistance, such as that of the White Rose student group in Munich. The Catholic Church as a whole opposed the regime only when its own deepest values were challenged, as in opposition to the Nazi T4 "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.
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 Youth 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 Abwehr. 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 Stalingrad 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. |
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