But most of the military weren’t Nazis.
Most historians estimate that 29% of the officers in the Wehrmacht were members of the National Socialist Party. Among those officers, 33% of the junior officers were members, while significantly less than 29% of the senior officers were members. Among the enlisted men, even fewer were members.
The majority of both officers and enlisted men in the German military were not members of the Nazi Party.
A significant number of them were active in the resistance. Not only were they not National Socialists, but they were taking specific concrete steps both to undermine the war effort and to impair the extermination of the Jews. These soldiers and officers helped the Allies to defeat the Nazis and liberate Germany, and saved thousands of Jewish lives in the process.
The general public in the first quarter of the twenty-first century is accustomed to seeing black-and-white photos of German soldiers and officers in uniform, and simply equating them with Nazis. Yet the majority of them were not Nazis, and many of them fought vigorously against the Nazis.
One such example is Harro Schulze-Boysen. He was a well-respected officer in the Luftwaffe who’d worked his way up to a responsible position. In the word of historians Gordon Thomas and Greg Lewis, Harro Schulze-Boysen worked “in the air force intelligence division, scanning foreign press reports and writing briefings for one of the most powerful figures in the Third Reich, Hermann Göring.”
By outward appearances, Schulze-Boysen was loyally supporting the Nazi war effort. But the reality was different:
Schulze-Boysen was in fact a daring, sometimes reckless anti-Nazi. Aided by his wife, Libertas, he planned not only to reveal some of the regime’s most heinous crimes, but also to turn over its military secrets to the enemy. As war consumed the world, he would become one of the most significant spies at the heart of the Third Reich.
Schulze-Boysen made contacts in the military and outside the military in order to form a resistance network. One of his contacts was Arvid Harnack.
Arvid Harnack was “one of the nation’s greatest academic minds,” having obtained both a doctorate in legal studies and a doctorate in philosophy. He had a job working in the Economics Ministry, where people supposed that he was making sure that Hitler’s plans were well-financed.
But in reality, Harnack was at the center of a growing opposition movement to Hitler, and was already sharing some of the Reich’s most confidential secrets with both Washington and Moscow.
In April 1939, before the war started, he and his wife Mildred were “busy passing Harnack’s secrets to America’s only spy in Germany.” Mildred was an American who’d moved to Germany. She was eager to protect the Germans from the Nazis.
Both Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid Harnack lived and worked in Berlin. Together they formed a group which sent Nazi military secrets to the Allies. Their efforts were effective and made a real difference in helping the Allies to defeat the Nazis.
They were discovered by the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo, and murdered in 1942.
