But that’s not the way it was.
Most Germans weren’t Nazis. Quite a few Nazis weren’t Germans.
The population of Germany, just before WW2 started, was a bit over 79,000,000. The peak membership of the Nazi Party was between 8,000,000 and 8,500,000. Approximately 90% of the German population were not Nazis.
Even in the German armed forces — the Wehrmacht — Nazis were in the minority.
Not only were the majority of Germans not Nazis; many of them were active anti-Nazis. They were engaged, not only in an intellectual rejection of National Socialism, but in concrete actions which slowed the war effort and saved the lives of thousands of Jews.
From the moment Hitler took power in 1933, groups of resistance formed among the Germans. A diverse group of Germans worked simultaneously to defeat the National Socialist: aristocrats, academics, military officers, theologians, and working-class men from the factories. Some of these groups were networked with other groups, forming a larger resistance web. Other groups worked in isolation. Together, they weakened the military resources of the Nazis and saved the lives of thousands of Jews, as historians Gordon Thomas and Greg Lewis write:
There were people in the uniforms of the Third Reich who not only had plotted to overthrow Hiter but also hoped to assassinate him.Lieutenant-Colonel Hans Oster, a talkative, open, and honest man who had served bravely in the Great War, despised Hitler and his “politicization” of all aspects of German society; among friends, he would insist on only referring to the Führer dismissively as “Emil.” His senior role in German military counterintelligence, the Abwehr, allowed him to discover the real truth behind the torture of political dissidents, Jews, and religious figures, and of the concentration camps. Oster, a pastor’s son, believed Hitler intended to drive Germany’s Jews to destruction and felt a growing responsibility before God for their rescue.
His friend Hans von Dohnanyi — a studious-looking man with dark hair swept to one side and this metal-rimmed glasses — was collecting a Chronicle of Shame, a legal file of Hitler’s crimes to be used in a prosecution of the Führer following a coup.
Oster was intent not only on resisting the Nazi regime, but also on removing Hitler.
Hans Oster was part of one particular resistance nexus which was organizing assassination attempts. Some of the civilian members of these networks were morally opposed to killing a human being, but soon they understood that by assassinating Hitler, they would save the lives of thousands of others. Parallel to the projected death of Hitler, these groups planned a coup which would overthrow the entire National Socialist government and put an authentically German government in place to end the war and stop the oppression of the civilian population.
He had already planned one coup and was now planning another. For Oster there would be no trial of Adolf Hitler. He planned to kill him.
Altogether, there would be more than twenty-five separate assassination attempts on Hitler between 1932 and 1944.
While none of these attempts was successful in killing Hitler, they did hinder the political leadership of the Reich and thereby reduced the effectiveness of the war effort.
The members of the German resistance understood earlier than the Allies what Hitler intended to do, and how repulsively evil it would be. The resistance members developed a passionate and urgent need to work against Hitler, long before the French, British, or Americans understood how horrifying the Nazi regime would be.
That’s why these German freedom fighters took such great risks in undermining the National Socialist regime.
