Introduction

“Wiederstand,” Resistance, the struggle of a part of the German people against the regime that led to a war that lasted six years and cost the votes of more than 50 million people, with unprecedented destruction and unprecedented barbarism, carried out for ideological, racial, revenge or sheer cruelty motives unleashed by a struggle that exposed the worst but also the best sides of the human being. Even in that horror that brought the world to a darkness worse than the Middle Ages there were lights due to people who were able to rediscover and make it clear that all was not lost regardless of nationality or religious belief, and this occurred even on the battlefields by men who until then had thought of nothing but killing each other. Historiography has been dealing with the subject of resistance to Nazism, and in recent times, with the end of the Cold War and the reunification after 40 years, of Germany itself, documents have come to light, especially from eastern countries, that shed new light and give new information on those who opposed a bloody and criminal regime and paid with their lives for this act of theirs, in the early postwar years there had been, especially in the Federal Republic of Germany , a kind of removal of the recent past with a teaching of history that placed a caesura on that period, and yet many professors had directly participated in it and many students had had relatives who had done the same, many, although they had seen or known or even committed crimes, hid behind a soldier’s sense of duty, others denied that it had happened. The German Democratic Republic, which also occupied a territory that had been the heart of the Prussian state and maintained its traditions in its armed forces, accused the other Germany of militarism and books were printed by former members of the Free Germany Committee fornded in 1943 by Field Marshal Paulus, by the Stasi ( secret police) belonging to the disciplinary unit 999 , all aimed at glorifying resistance to Nazism by comparing it to the liberation struggle waged by Prussia against Napoleon forgetting that this was an absolute state but not at all comparable to the Nazi criminal state. Deserters, soldiers executed on the orders of military tribunals or SS and police flying courts, have in recent times been regarded as resisters to the Nazis, and the infamous Torgau military prison in Saxony on the banks of the Elbe has become the memorial to remember all those who opposed the regime.
After World War II with the division of Germany in two, Federal Chancellor Adenauer wanted to make his country the bulwark against communism in Europe by anchoring it to the rest of the Western countries economically and militarily by bringing it into NATO and admitting into the new armed forces, Bundeswehr, men who had served in the Wehrmacht both of proven anti-Nazi faith, such as Generals Speidel, Heusinger and others, and those who, although they learned of the conspiracy, did not want to do anything to actively participate in it even though they partly covered for those who did, appealing to a sense of duty. On the other hand, there were some such as Field Marshals von Manstein and von Rundstedt who even though they knew of the crimes committed by the regime used their sense of honor as a means of justification for their taxation and yet among the military were people such as Stauffemberg, Tresckow, von Witzleben, Beck, von Stulpnagel, von Kluge, and Rommel, who were active participants in the conspiracy, going so far as to accept the necessity of the death of Hitler and other hierarchs in order to give Germany a new chance at redemption, they paid with their lives for this action but were aware of it and did not set themselves moral justifications: they were men who also came from deeply religious families, morally unimpeachable, who accepted tyrannicide as the ultimate means of restoring their country’s lost dignity, they did not pose any scruples as did some of the civil opposition groups who discussed the issue at length giving the Gestapo, which had eyes and ears everywhere, time to act and eliminate them, those who opposed the regime were often accused of treason but, when the so-called ordinary people were confronted with the reality of the death camps, they shook their heads saying that they did not know or that it was propaganda of the victor, how could they close their eyes to this, the fear of the Gestapo could not silence their consciences and forget what they saw even though they did not have the opportunity to act directly against the regime that had led them to a destructive war, indeed many had initially seen it as the one that had given them hope again after the tragic Weimar years. In West Germany historians like Fest and Ritter and politicians like Brandt, Niemoller who had been part of the resistance , published books and memoirs to show that there had existed another part of the population that had detached itself from the regime were people of all classes, workers, bourgeois, intellectuals, religious, workers who tried even in their own small way to do some things if not also for their moral redemption, but they often limited themselves to discussion and not to action, and this was the real drama of the civil resistance to Nazism, namely the division among the various groups, the lack of a clear political program on the future of Germany after the fall of the regime to be presented also to the Allies who, another fundamental issue, did not believe in the possibility that there was any possibility of resistance in a police state like Hitler’s.
The latter accepted the possibility of a German revival only after the unconditional surrender, established in Tehran in 1943, and in order to obtain it they accepted the alliance the Stalin regime, which in terms of violence was no different from the Nazi regime, however, many such as Churchill, Dulles and Truman believed that this was only temporary and they were right, but this does not mean that they gave in to the proposals made by the German resistance members. There were also the young people who did not want to be part of Hitler’s youth or similar organizations and who, in their own small way, carried out acts of nonviolent disobedience such as the White Rose movement in Munich of siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, who were executed by order of the people’s courts ( Volksgerichthof) such as the infamous one in Berlin of Roland Freisler, who died by nemesis under an air raid. The German church was also divided, especially the Protestant church, on how to act against the regime, but men like Dietrich Bonhoeffer confessional faction of Lutheranism, the aforementioned Niemoller and Catholic Bishops von Galen and Faulhaber, and others like them openly expressed their dissent to some like Bonhoeffer, were executed. Some of the leaders of the major parties such as the SPD and the Communist Party , chose exile was the case with Brandt and the future leaders of the GDR Ulbricht, Grotewohl and Stoph , others such as Leber, Reichwein and Thaelmann himself died in prisons or camps, still others such as Helmuth James von Moltke Carl Goerdeler, took advantage of their connections to seek contacts abroad, but list would still be long. Another topic was that of the relations between the Vatican of Pius XII ° and the regime, a hot and sensitive subject, because there were exponents of the German Catholic world such as former Ambassador von Hassell, whose diaries are an exemplary testimony of those tragic years, who had contact with the Holy See and sought its help and to whom the Gestapo gave them the name of the Black Orchestra (Schwarze Kapelle) as opposed to the Red Orchestra ( Rote Kapelle ) which instead was a spy structure in the service of the USSR and of which they were part among others, Schulze Boysen, they were motivated primarily by religious and moral motives but wanted to restore to their nation an image tarnished by the crimes of the regime The author of the present paper, a modest lover of history will limit himself to recounting, as far as possible the facts of which he has knowledge, leaving it to readers and those who know more than he does, to draw their own conclusions without judging those of that sad affair, were the protagonists

German political parties at the time of the rise of Nazism

In order to be able to understand why there was no serious opposition to the Hitler regime on the part of the major German political parties, it is necessary to briefly describe their situation during the troubled period before, the Weimar Republic had been founded with a democratic-parliamentary type of constitution, which, however, had to come to terms with the difficult economic and political situation after World War I, in everyone’s minds it retained the character of temporariness as if there was hope of a future regime that would restore Germany’s lost role as a power, so many of the major parties abandoned their original function to condemn the state and rely on the president of the republic who had legislative power in his hands by governing through emergency decrees. The largest of these was the Social Democratic Party ( Socialistiche Partei Deutschland SPD) which brought together agrarian, blue-collar, and civil servants from the lower levels, but it was the workers who ensured its connection with the trade unions but the Catholic workers remained largely loyal to the Party of the Center ( Zentrum) especially in Upper Silesia and the Ruhr i.e. the industrial poles of Germany, nor did the SPD succeed in totally winning over the peasants tied to the conservative patronage. In order to stabilize the republic, the SPD was supposed to control the key ministries, Defense, Interior and Justice, but it often switched from government to opposition roles, forming disparate coalitions depending on the situation.
The Center party was confessional in nature and gathered together members of the Catholic world, mainly in the western areas such as Rhineland, Westphalia and Bavaria, this party had little interest in the institutional form and collaborated with all those formations that were concerned with personnel and cultural politics, but even within it there were members who were opposed to the republic, republicans, liberals, monarchical conservatives and Christian socialists, as well as workers, artisans and industrialists, compared to the social democratic party however it showed greater internal stability.
The Republican Party ( Deutsche Demokratische Partei DDP) was one of the drafters of the Weimar Constitution especially in terms of state theory and public law and was willing to govern with the Social Democrats, on the other hand, the German People’s Party ( Deutsche VolksPartei DVP) was internally divided but in the majority was an expression of the national liberalia unlike the German National Party ( Deutsche NazionalVolksPartei DNVP) which encompassed non-liberal right-wing forces i.e. the conservatives, Christian-social trade unionists, nationalist evangelicals. On the far left there was the Independent German Social Democratic Party USPD) which was an expression of the radical left and some circles of journalism, finally there was the Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschland KPD) which played an important role in the early years of the republic oscillating between cadre and mass organization eventually becoming an instrument of Soviet policy especially under the leadership of Ernest Thaelmann, however it was more committed to the opposition of the SPD than to the life of the republic and for this reason the Nazis then had an easy time eliminating it. In addition to these major parties there were a number of far-right paramilitary organizations expressed by former World War I combatants , the Stahlhelm (Helm of Steel) or the Frankish Corps ( Reichsbanner) which later largely merged into the Nazi party.
Faced with Hitler’s rapid seizure of power all these political and trade union forces quickly capitulated because the situation of powerlessness in which they found themselves had been created by themselves and most civil servants accepted the new regime without posing any problems, many members of the major parties were arrested or fled abroad, and soon the regime disillusioned those who thought it would be easy to control it this was because Hitler’s persuasive power had been underestimated and he had managed to get both the business community and above all the military i.e. the Reichswehr on his side. There was no cooperation among the underground resistance organizations that had gone underground, which then allowed the Gestapo to quickly infiltrate and destroy them.

Resistance from leftist intellectuals.

None of the members of the German political parties were unaware of the need to oppose Nazism some implemented a form of passive resistance such as refusing to join one of Hitler’s organizations like the Hitler Goiventu , or refusing to salute with the outstretched arm or not displaying the flag with the hooked cross during official occasions, others fled abroad such as the SPD leadership that went to Prague, Paris and finally London or the communist leadership that ended up in Moscow. Clandestine activity was initially limited to the printing and dissemination of propaganda material, and one of the first organizations to do this was the Neubeginnen (New Beginning ) founded in Walther Lowenhardt formerly a member of the Communist youth who had gone over to Social Democracy, he succeeded in informing the SPD leadership who had emigrated abroad of Hitler’s plans for aggression, however he never drew up a political program of government for the future of Germany at the fall of Nazism, in 1938 many members of the group were arrested, tried and sent for long years to prison or concentration camps, one group, the Marwitz Circle , even carried out sabotage actions but without much result. As we have said the Communist Party was quickly eliminated but there was one organization that gave the Gestapo a hard time: it was the Red Orchestra ( Rote Kapelle) led by Harro Schultze – Boysen nephew of Admiral von Tirpitz he had enlisted in the German Air Force since 1935 and devoted himself to the distribution of anti-Nazi leaflets, then managed to get transferred to the communications department and passed a lot of information to Russian intelligence during the Spanish Civil War.
He met Arvid Harnak who worked in the Ministry of Economics and established contacts with all social groups, published a newspaper, Der Inner Front ( Inner Front) in which he also had the speeches of Bishops Galen and Preysing transcribed , his end came about by accident when a Russian agent parachuted into Germany was captured by Canaris’ secret service, the Abwehr, and handed over to the Gestapo who managed to obtain information that enabled the arrest of Boysen who was sentenced to death by execution at the end of 1942.

The resistance of the bourgeoisie

The bourgeois class was more incapable than the left to actively oppose Nazism, its opposition was by individuals and groups and was mainly moral, many were religious and were members of all classes from trade unionists to high state officials, the military and diplomats, when Hitler subjugated the judiciary by creating people’s courts and establishing a police state, many of the jurists who had contributed to the drafting of the Weimar constitution left or were forced to resign from service, however, a part of the judiciary, the most conservative accepted the new regime willingly. One group of nationalist and conservative conspirators was the Wednesday Circle in Berlin of which intellectuals such as the philosopher Spregler, former ambassador Ulrich von Hassell, and the Prussian finance minister Johannes Popitz were later joined by General Ludwig Beck, who soon became its leading figure, but this group did not plot to overthrow the regime, it was a kind of political congress that criticized the existing system and discussed possible alternatives to bring down Hitler; it had contacts with Carl Goerdler and von Moltke’s Kreisau Circle.
Another center-right group was the so-called Freiburg School which brought together business and academic figures under the chairmanship of the famous historian Gerhardt Ritter who was later arrested by the Gestapo, it had contacts with the Protestant confessional church through Pastor Bonhoeffer , there was, however, a third circle in Freiburg founded in 1943 by members of the German Academy of Law suspended by the Nazi regime at the beginning of the war, it was concerned with drafting papers concerning the Nazi central planning system and its replacement, Ludwig Erhardt who was to become chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany after the war was part of this group.
Then there was The Solf Circle which was not composed of conspirators but of people exchanging views on various topics but the group was hit by the Gestapo in 1944 and some of its members were executed after July 20. The most famous of the bourgeois resistance groups was the Kreisau Circle formed after 1940 and of which Count Helmuth James von Moltke was the real soul, but there were Catholics, conservatives, socialists, landowners, trade unionists and Protestants; it had contacts with other groups within the Canaris Secret Service and the Jesuits in Munich. Because of his Christian faith von Moltke refused to participate in the plot to assassinate Hitler convinced that military defeat would end Nazism as he was aware that he did not have the means to overthrow him. He worked in the counterintelligence service of the German Supreme Command (OKW) as an expert in international law giving assistance to Jews, prisoners of war and the civilian population of occupied Europe, he had contacts with Count Peter York von Wartemburg descendant of the Prussian general who fought against Napoleon, who was close to many military circles, there was then Adam Trott und zu Solz who sought support from the Allies but there were other famous names in the group such as Count von der Schulemburg former German ambassador to Moscow until June 1941, Jesuit Father Alfred Delp, socialists Adolf Reichwein, Julius Leber and trade unionist Kakob Kaiser.
Moltke tried to draw the churches to his side and had contacts with Bishop Faulhaber of Munich, Bishop Preysing of Berlin, Lutheran Gerstenmeier and others, the Kreisau Circle met several times in 1942 and 1943 believing that Germany had to overcome its divisions of political faith, religion and class , they were convinced that Germany would be defeated but failed to gain the support of the Allies. Von Moltke was arrested on Jan. 19, 1944, and sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp but the authorities did not know the real activity in which he was involved, but after July 20, although he had not participated in the plot as he was already detained, he was convicted by the infamous Judge Freisler and executed on Jan. 23, 1945, in Plotzensee Prison in Berlin while York, Reichwein, Trott, Father Delp and others suffered the same fate for their direct participation in the bombing.

The resistance of the churches

The Nazi regime’s behavior toward the German churches was confusing, and initially both Catholics and Protestants did not consider it an adversary; forms of dissent were directed not against the state but at certain behaviors of the regime. The Protestant church was mainly Lutheran but had a tradition of respecting the state since its formation in 1517 and was divided into 28 separate entities and weakened by internal struggles, then the German Christian movement developed, which, opposing Lutherans and Calvinists, conformed to the regime further weakening the other two and they had the support of Hitler so in October 1933 Pastor Ludwig Muller, was elected German national bishop totally subject to the regime. There were, however, Lutheran church members who did not accept the regime , they risked their lives to help people fleeing the Gestapo, but the main opponents of this group were Pastor Martin Niemoller who had been a submarine commander in World War I and Confessing church member Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Niemoller opposed the persecution of Jews and aroused the ire of the regime and Bishop Muller so in January 1944 he was suspended from his duties, arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp from which he was released in 1945, emblematic figure of this opposition to the regime was Bonhoeffer who had had contacts abroad with exponents of the Anglican church he popi thanks to his brother-in-law Hans von Donhanyi was recruited in the secret service of Canaris and had contacts with General Oster one of the main exponents of the military opposition, Bonhoeffer exploited this position to have contacts with the allies and submit to them the situation of the German resistance for help. In April 1943 he was arrested and imprisoned in Tegel Prison where he remained for 18 months wrote a number of letters that after the war were published under the title Resistance and Surrender.
Letters and writings from prison,he was never tried by the people’s court but transferred first to Buchenwald then to Flossenburg where he was executed along with Canaris and Oster on April 9, 1945.
The Catholic church initially had a similar attitude to the Protestant church but was more united and cosmopolitan and retained its autonomy thanks to the concordat signed by the German government and the Vatican in 1933. The first exponent who raised a public outcry against Nazism was Konrad von Preysing bishop of Eichstadt in Bavaria who warned the Vatican of the real nature of the new regime, but remained unheeded, became bishop of Berlin continued in his work against the regime and in 1937 together with von Galen and the bishops of Wroclaw, Munich and Cologne went to the Vatican to explain to Pius XI ° the real situation of the German church in Germany. The result was the famous encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge ( With Burning Anxiety) which was sent clandestinely to Germany and read in Catholic churches, Preysing wanted to implement a more effective defense of the episcopate but was blocked by Cardinal Bertram who feared ina violent reaction from the regime.
The encyclical was seized and forbidden to be read in churches taking arrest and condemnation for those who violated this provision, but this did not help other even louder voices rose up against the regime and among them was that of Bishop Klemens August von Galen, the lion of Munster, whom Hitler though he wanted dead feared and dared not touch for fear of an outcry from Catholics even in the armed forces with unpredictable consequences. Galen publicly lashed out against euthanasia i.e., the killing of mentally ill people deemed useless by the regime, and eventually his protest was so vigorous that it led to the suspension of the operation.
German youth resistance and the case of the White Rose. Not all German youths agreed to join Nazi youth organizations such as the Deutsche Jungvolk or the Hitler Jugend ( HJ Hitler Youth), some resisted by adopting nonconformist attitudes such as listening to forbidden music, others, known as the Edelweiss Pirates, had contact with defectors from the armed forces, foreign workers and Communist Party members who remained in hiding to whom they provided help and often killed party officials , when they were caught they were stung severely, then there was a group known as the Leipzig Dog Pack in Saxony, who listened to Radio Moscow but the one that undoubtedly represented the resistance of German youth the Nazism was the White Rose Movement ( Weisse Rose).
It was made up of Munich students whose actions consisted of the dissemination of anti-Nazi leaflets until the spectacular gesture of Feb. 8, 1943, was formed by medical students Hans Scholl and Alexander Schmorell, there were then Sophie Scholl, Christopher Probst, Willy Graf and Professor Kurt Huber. They came from wealthy, conservative, bourgeois families and of the Christian faith; the Scholl brothers were the sons of a burgomaster and Schmorell was the son of a doctor like Probst; Graf had refused to join the Hitler youth and was arrested for it. The name White Rose derives from a German novel of the same name , the group accepted trusted people , in 1942 they began printing anti-Nazi leaflets and distributing them clandestinely, then at the end of that year Hans Scholl was sent as a nurse to the southern part of the Russian front from which he returned with a greater will to oppose the regime. The leafleting activity expanded to other cities such as Stuttgart, Ulm, Frankfurt am Main, Bonn . when the defeat of the 6th Army at Stalingrad became known in February 1943, the Scholl brothers decided to take a striking action, on February 18 they went to the University of Munich and dropped protest leaflets from all floors, these were handed over to the Gestapo, and the notorious Freisler was summoned from Berlin to proceed to trial after the entire White Rose group had been arrested. The trial had no history given the foregone death sentence for high treason but confronted a vulgar servant of the regime with young people who were idealistic but convinced that they could redeem those who like them were forced to die on the various fronts.The Scholl brothers and Probst were executed on February 22, 1943, the others between July and October of that year but their memory endures to this day through the founding of the White Rose. There were other forms of civilian opposition to the regime, in addition to the well-known one of the military that resulted in the July 20 plot, that cannot be mentioned in the space of a short paper, just think of individual acts of altruism performed in the horror of concentration or extermination camps where everyone thought of their own survival or of those military personnel who refused to carry out reprisals on civilian populations and for this they were executed or sent to punishment units, but the discussion would be long.

Final

The author of this paper leaves it to the readers to draw their own considerations what he can say is that there was another Germany behind the one that National Socialism posited as its foundation, a Germany founded on different and traditional values far removed from the vulgarity and ignorance of many of the exponents of that regime, the motives that led these people to resistance were of different kinds and related to the circumstance of the moment, but these people were the ones who after the war created a state that today firmly maintains the democratic traditions whose foundations were laid in Nazi prisons and concentration camps

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