Resistance to Hitler in Germany

This paper will review six books concerning the resistance movement in Germany during the Third Reich. The first part of the paper will briefly discuss the background of the German resistance to the Nazi regime. The second part of the paper will compare three of the narrative works on the subject. The third part of the paper will compare three works which emphasize the moral dimensions of the resistance.

What has traditionally been lacking in the histories of the Nazi period in Germany is any study of the opposition to Hitler after he became Chancellor in 1933. A student of this period virtually comes to the conclusion that there was no serious opposition and that almost all elements of German society were "four-square" behind Hitler and the war he started. The only mention usually given of any such opposition is of the famous attempt of July 20, 1944, when a few army officers unsuccessfully tried to kill Hitler with a bomb. What is rarely discussed is the fact that there had been previous assassination attempts made by other groups of officers; what is almost never discussed is that from the middle part of the 1930s until the end of the war there existed small cells of opposition within the government and the military, united by a deep sense of moral shame regarding the Nazi policies and moral obligation to do something about it.

The largest roles in this opposition were played by Army officers who held high-r

. . .
y detested the activities of the Waffen SS in the occupied territories and the debilitating war which was being waged in spite of the inevitability of defeat. Yet, Hitler held a "spell" over the military officers in the form of the personal oath sworn by all officers to be loyal to Hitler; they were not loyal to the National Socialist party. Thus, the death of Hitler was necessary to "free" the majority of officers from this oath; with Hitler dead and a clear justification for a state of emergency given, the majority of military officers would have supported the plotters in arresting the rest of the loyal party members. In various parts of the book, Zeller emphasizes that the plotters were motivated not by the pursuit of power (as they have been accused of by some historians) but moral concerns. They believed that the Nazi party was intrinsically evil and that its reign of power in Germany had to be ended. Hitler was an instrument of evil; ending his life would not destroy the Nazi government by itself, but his death had to be part of a larger plot to overthrow the party. Deutsch ignores the plots subsequent to 1940, concentrating instead upon the Abwehr plot of 1939. In this plot, Admiral Canaris was the central figure
. . .

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Approximate Word count = 2579
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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