The German Resistance (Widerstand) was the opposition by individuals and groups in Germany to Adolf Hitler or the National Socialist regime between 1933 and 1945. Some of these engaged in active plans to remove Adolf Hitler from power and overthrow his regime.

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,[1] analogous to the more coordinated Polish Underground State, French Resistance, and Italian Resistance. The German resistance consisted of small and usually isolated groups. They were unable to mobilize political opposition, and their only real strategy was to persuade leaders of the Wehrmacht to stage a coup against the regime: the 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler was intended to trigger such a coup.[1]

Approximately 77,000 German citizens 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; in addition the Canadian historian Peter Hoffman counts unspecified tens of thousands in concentration camps who were either suspected or actually engaged in opposition.[2] By contrast, the German historian Hans Mommsen wrote that resistance in Germany was resistance without the people and that the number of those Germans engaged in resistance to the Nazi regime were very small.[3]

The resistance in Germany included German citizens of non-German ethnicity, such as members of the Polish minority who formed resistance groups like Olimp.[4]
Contents

1 Introduction

2 Pre-war resistance 1933?39

3 Resistance in the Army 1938?42

4 The first assassination attempt

5 Catholic resistance

6 The nadir of resistance: 1940?42

7 Communist resistance

8 The aeroplane assassination attempt

9 The suicide bombing attempts

10 Stalingrad and White Rose

11 Unorganised resistance

12 Relations with Allies

13 Towards July 20

14 July 20 Plot

15 Historiography

16 See also

17 Notes

18 Further reading

19 External links


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 Democrats (SPD) and Communists (KPD), such as 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) that distributed anti-Nazi propaganda and assisted people in fleeing the country.[5] Another group, the Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle), consisted of anti-fascists, communists, and an American woman. The individuals in this group began to assist their Jewish friends as early as 1933.

Another strand was resistance based on minorities within the Christian churches, Catholic and Protestant. Their role was mostly symbolic ? a few Christian clergy spoke out against the regime, such as the Protestant pastors Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemoller (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 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 many Protestant ministers did so (see Confessing Church).

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.[6] 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 Army, the Foreign Office and the Abwehr, the military intelligence organisation. These groups hatched conspiracies against Hitler in 1938 and again in 1939, but for a variety of reasons could not implement their plans. After the German defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942, they contacted many army officers who were convinced that Hitler was leading Germany to disaster, although fewer who were willing to engage in overt resistance.