How much resistance to the Nazi regime was there in Germany?

Analyse the various forms of resistance inside Germany and assess their respective character and impact. Due to scarcity in pre-Nazi Germany and his enchanting charisma, Hitler was extremely popular and there was little resistance to the Nazi regime in Germany. The average German in the 1930s was impressed by Hitlers success in providing jobs and prosperity, restoring Germanys military might after the humiliating and suffocating Treaty of Versailles, and his continued success in his foreign policy (Shirer, 1991, p.212). During the Third Reich, many Germans did not care about underground resistance, and in any case, obstacles to organised resistance were enormous in a dictatorship with no freedom of speech or press. What is more, the Fahneneid sworn to Hitler by officers and men presented a moral dilemma for many, at a time when opposing the ever popular Fhrer would make you a traitor in the eyes of the people (Mommsen, 1999, p.273). The debate about how to define resistance is an ongoing one. Broszat says that every form of rebellion is a form of resistance, whereas Hofer argues that resistance can only be that which could have overthrown the Nazi rule. In spite of the terror of the Gestapo, forms of Resistenz and Widerstand were present throughout the Third Reich; from the simple refusal to attend Nazi meetings, to attempts to assassinate the Fhrer. Moorhouse (2006) says that despite being the vehicle for Hitlers progress, it was the army that provided Hitler with his most bitter opponents. Resistance formed by the military is said to have had an advantage over its civilian counterparts, as it was largely immune to infiltration from the Gestapo and SS; leaving its members to discuss their ideas with relative ease. The resistance in the military grew as the war went on. Initially, many of the would-be members of the resistance welcomed Hitlers rule (Moorhouse, 2006, p.209), but lost faith as defeat became inevitable. Allied landings in Normandy and high losses on the Eastern front convinced many of Hitlers generals that the war was lost. Field Marshall Rommel was one of a number of high ranking officers who was prepared to seize power by force. However, he refused to cooperate in any conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, on the grounds that death would turn Hitler into a martyr (Stackelberg, 2008, p.245). The most famous military resistance to the Nazi regime is widely known as the 20th July bomb blot; in which a number of disheartened Army Officers conspired to kill Hitler. Unknown to many, this group had unsuccessfully tried to assassinate Hitler several times previously as part of what they called Operation Spark. For example on 13 March 1943, Major General von Trewcow planted a bomb into the Fhrers private jet; a bomb which failed to go off. Equally, the attempt by Colonel von Gersdorff to blow himself up in the vicinity of Hitler during an exhibition of seized Soviet weapons. The final attempt on Hitlers life was executed by Lieutenant Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, a young officer who had become disillusioned after witnessing SS atrocities on the Eastern front, and after becoming badly injured in Tunisia in April 1943. It is believed that Stauffenberg remained in the army with the sole purpose of killing Hitler (Kramarz, 1970). To organise this assassination, von Stauffenberg became involved with the Beck-Goerdeler group, a bourgeois-conservative group at the forefront of the resistance in the army and civil service. The failure to kill Hitler in the 20 July bomb plot resulted in some 700 people being arrested by the Gestapo, some merely being arrested because of the Nazi policy of Sinnenhaft kin detention. The military resistance had close ties with members of the Foreign office, including Ulrich von Hassell, former ambassador in Rome, and Adam von Trott zu Solz,. Both men attempted to negotiate with the allies for backing for a coup, but were unsuccessful. (Klemperer 1992, cited in McDonough, 1999). The Kreisau Circle is a well known resistenz group of the Third Reich. A conservative elite debating society, whose members widely differed on their views of how a post-Nazi Germany should be run. They were, however, united by their hate for Hitler. Most of the members were

of religious conviction, ruling out assassination as means of bringing down the regime (Stackelberg, 2008, p.247). Despite this, the group was discovered by the Gestapo following the exposure of the 20 July plot, and members were hanged, as the groups leader von Moltke claimed, merely for talking. The strength of the resistance by the Catholic and Protestant Churches to the Nazi regime is shown by the fact that some 400 catholic priests and 35 evangelical pastors were incarcerated in the priests block of Dachau alone (van Norden, cited in Kershaw, 1985, p.211). On March 14 1937, Pope Piux XI issued an encyclical titled Mit Brennender Sorge, charging the Nazi government of violating the Concordat which had been signed by Hitler in July 1933. The Pope accused the regime of inciting open fundamental hostility to Christ (Shirer, 1991, p.208). In response to this, the Nazis arrested thousands of political priests. By and large the Catholic Church avoided open confrontation with the Nazis, unless policies offended their religious values. For example, Catholic leaders did not tend to offer support to Jews, but did oppose the Nazi Race Policy. (Dietrich, 1988, p176) The Nazis wanted a centralised and unified Protestant Church. In July 1933, 28 provincial protestant churches were amalgamated into the Reich Church, the aim of which was to bring all protestants together in order to promote Nazi ideology within Christianity. Opposed to this Nazification of religion was a minority group called the Confessional Church. It rejected the Nazi racial theories and criticised the anti-Christian doctrines of Rosenberg and other Nazi leaders (Shirer, 1991, p209). The opposition was formed because of the introduction of the Aryan paragraph, which excluded non-Aryans from congregations - and the attempt by the German Christians to banish the Jewish Old Testament. In May 1934, over 700 of those opposing the Aryan Paragraph joined to form the Confessing Church, which was eventually led by Martin Niemller. The Confessing Church was not a political movement of opposition to the Nazi state, but a religious movement to preserve the integrity of the Lutheran Faith (Stackelberg, 2009, p.171) Many members of the Confessing church actually supported the regime (Ericksen, 1985, p.48). Despite this, Niemller was arrested and confined to Moabit prison in Berlin, from where he was transported to Dachau. Over 800 other members of the Confessing Church leadership were arrested in 1937, followed by hundreds more in subsequent years. As a result of this, majority of Protestant pastors did not actively resist the regime, and in 1938 the highly respected Bishop Marahrens submitted to ordering all pastors in his diocese to swear a personal oath of allegiance to the Hitler. The most consistent of the resistance groups were those from the political left. Hoffmeister (2005) tells us that half a million dissenters of the German political opposition most of them on the left were imprisoned in 1933 alone. Unlike many of the conservative resistors, the left opposed the National Socialists before Hitler came to power. Hitler viewed the communists as a bitter enemy of his regime, and the KPD was brutally crushed in 1933, after members controversially voted against Hitlers Enabling Act. Of the 300,000 KPD party members in 1933, 150,000 were sent to concentration camps and 30,000 executed (McDonough, 1999, p.61). However, this did not wipe out the resistance altogether, and the communists continued to function in underground cells that distributed anti-Nazi literature to factory workers. The KPD struggled to organise public demonstrations at the start of the regime, and the Gestapo managed to infiltrate the party very quickly (Mommsen, 1999, p.261). The communists were famously involved in acts of sabotage, for example striking against the Olympic Games in Berlin. In 1942, the main communist espionage group, known to the Gestapo as the Rote Kapelle, was broken up, and 50 of its members were executed. The majority of socialist resistance groups (such as Neubeginnen, Rote Stosstrupp and Deutsche Volksfront) came to similar ends, and were wiped out by the mid 1930s (Grassman 1976, cited by Mommsen). Despite this terror, small scale resistance remained wide spread, particularly among industrial workers. This is illustrated by the fact that in Dortmund prison, the vast majority of the 21,823 prisons serving time for political opposition were industrial

workers (McDonough, 1999, p.63). However, it became clear that illegal groups attempting to expand beyond a close circle of friends was doomed to failure (Mommsen, 1999, p.268) The most famous youth resistance to the Nazi regime is undoubtedly the White Rose movement, led by the Scholl siblings. The group distributed anti-Nazi material calling for the youth to rise up against the regime. The group was exposed, and the leadership were guillotined. Equally, in February 1943, the Gauleiter gave a speech at the University of Munich, during which he made comments which offended the students. In response, they ejected him from the hall and marched through Munich in the first anti-Nazi demonstration since December 1933 (McDonough 1999, p. 64). Examples of resistenz by the youth are abundant; from the insistence of the Swing Youth to listen to banned music, to the gangculture of the Edelweiss Pirates who refused to join the Hitler Youth. The regime was so concerned with the growing influence of these groups that they decided to suppress them; in December 1942, 700 gang members were arrested, many of whom were executed. At the smallest end of the scale, many ordinary Germans expressed their dissatisfaction with the regime by means of humour; and Nazi leaders were the butt of many jokes within private spheres. Though seemingly insignificant, this resistenz played a role in preventing the total indoctrination of the German people to the Nazi regime. It is evident that though widespread, resistance to the Nazi regime was without the people as suggested by Mommsen, and the only serious threat to the regime was posed by the disgruntled conservatives as all other resistance had been repressed since 1933 (Stackelberg, 2008, p. 248). Within the army, the allied policy of unconditional surrender gave the ordinary soldier no choice but to stay and fight against the odds of defeat. Many of the German people hoped that an anti-fascist mass would emerge and overthrow the regime, but did not wish to act themselves. Bibliography Ian Kershaw, 2000. The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation. Fourth Edition Edition. Bloomsbury USA. Roderick Stackelberg, 2008. Hitler's Germany: Origins, Interpretations, Legacies. 2 Edition. Routledge WILLIAM L. SHIRER, 1991. THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH. Edition. ARROW. Roger Moorhouse, 2006. Killing Hitler. First Edition Edition. Bantam. Mommsen, 1999. German Society and the Resistance against Hitler, in Christian Leitz (ed), The Third Reich, Blackwell. Frank McDonough, 1999. Opposition and Resistance inside Nazi Germany in idem, Hitler and Nazi Germany. Cambridge University Press, pp 57-70 Martin Broszat, Resistenz and Resistance, in Neil Gregor (ed.), Nazism (Oxford: OUP, 2000), pp 241-44. Ericksen, 1985. Theologians Under Hitler. Edition. Yale University Press. Dietrich, DJ, 1988. Catholic Resistance in the Third Reich. Holocaust and Genocide Studi, [Online]. 3, Available at: http://hgs.oxfordjournals.org/content/3/2/171.full.pdf+html [Accessed 03 January 2012].

Hoffmeister, Gerhart. "German Resistance to National Socialism [Nazism]". The Literary Encyclopaedia. First published 06 May 2005 [http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1543, accessed 04 January 2012.]