The resistance took different forms in different times and places. Many of the leaders were Aristocrats, academics, military officers, and Christians. But some leaders were blue-collar factory workers. They had several things in common: they were opposed to Hitler’s “National Socialist” movement, and they were determined to oppose it in concrete and effective ways.
Such an explicit refusal to accept National Socialism was dangerous, and more than dangerous, as historians Gordon Thomas and Greg Lewis write:
These are the ones who through a love of Germany committed treason against it, rejecting the shackles of a warped, corrupt, and evil state.They stood up in the knowledge that almost all dissent would be punished by death.
They gave their lives with one thing foremost in their minds: that through their actions they might redeem the honor of their nation.
The list of individual Germans who worked to defend their country from the Nazi oppressors is long. Specific names, dates, places, and actions reveal the ways in which this underground movement reduced the effectiveness of the National Socialist plans, weakened the Nazis, and assisted the Allies in the effort to liberate Germany.
One example is Robert Scholl. He and his wife Magdalena lived in the city of Ulm with their children. He’d been active in politics: he’d been the mayor Ulm at one point in time. When Hitler took power, Scholl could see the hidden intentions behind the Nazi propaganda, and realized that the National Socialists were preparing for war:
Fiercely independent-minded, he “translated” the Nazi propaganda on the radio for his family and told them war was coming. He had maintained his friendships with Jewish friends and associates in Ulm when others shunned them.
When some of Scholl’s neighbors draped Nazi banners from their windows, the Scholl family did not: “There were no flags flying from their windows.” Robert Scholl “was a man of deep conviction and strongly held” Christian and civic “beliefs.” Scholl’s children agreed with the ideas they found in the sermons of Bishop Galen: Real Christians must oppose the Nazi practice of treating human life as worthless.
Among Scholl’s children, two of them — Hans and Sophie — would become the most influential in the resistance movement. They saw the National Socialists as insulting to Christ. True Christians could not support a party which offended God by murdering innocent people.
Opposition to the National Socialists had a unifying effect: academics and factory workers found themselves supporting the cause; military officers and pacifists joined forces; Lutherans, Catholics, and Calvinists found common ground. There was a terrible tension: on the one hand, basic humanity demanded opposition to the Nazis; on the other hand, such opposition not only risked one’s life, but more likely guaranteed the end of one’s life.
So it was that the entire Scholl family persevered solidly in their efforts against the National Socialists:
Scholl had brought up his five surviving children in his image. Hans, the elder boy, was the dominant character among them, but Sophie matched him in spirit. As they learned about the treatment of Jews across Germany, the words of one friend struck them deeply: “They are crucifying Christ a second time, as people!”For the Scholls, opposition to Hiter was a moral imperative, a simple question of right versus wrong. No matter what the consequences. In the horrors that Hitler would create in the coming years, the family would pay a terrible price for its desire for a better Germany.
The price paid was this: Hans and Sophie would be executed by the Nazis in 1943 for their conscientious resistance.
In the blue-collar neighborhood of Neukölln in Berlin, Jews and non-Jews worked closely together. Led by Herbert Baum, they engaged in a number of actions to undermine National Socialist propaganda. They printed and distributed their own writings against the Nazis, and when the Nazis set up an exhibition about the Soviet Union, Baum and his colleagues set it on fire. Gordon Thomas and Greg Lewis report:
In areas like working-class Neukölln, Jews and Gentiles found common ground in their hatred of the Nazis. Many congregated around electrician Herbert Baum and his wife, Marianne, who were developing a flair for the dramatic, creating their own antifascist propaganda to counter that of Goebbels. They had already humiliated the “poison dwarf” once and intended to do so again.The Baums and their Jewish friends intended to fight back.
Like Hans and Sophie Scholl, Herbert and Marianne Baum were murdered by the Nazis.
The underground resistance efforts against the National Socialists ultimately came from all income levels, from all regions of Germany, from Christians and Jews, from the highly educated and the blue-collar. Those who were part of the efforts understood that they were essentially signing away their lives, but they also understood that they were doing so in order to hasten the end of the evil which the Nazis were perpetrating.
