Why would people face death, when they could survive and go on living by simply accepting the National Socialist Party?
There is more than one reason which motivated people to actively resist the National Socialist. People from different parts of society had different inspirations. Yet these diverse groups all worked at the same time to achieve the same goals: to make sure that the Nazis would fail, to see to it that the Germans would be liberated from Nazi oppression, and to save the lives of as many Jews as possible.
The National Socialists oppressed Germany for twelve years, from 1933 to 1945. People of sincere faith could meet only secretly. Hitler had ordered that all churches be turned into Nazi propaganda centers.
Writing about one of the many groups of anti-Nazi resistance groups, historian Uwe Siemon-Netto explains:
More than six decades ago, scores of Germans were rounded up and tortured to death, hanged, guillotined, or executed by firing squads for their attempt to overthrow the National Socialist tyranny. Almost all of them were Christians; some were Roman Catholic, and some were Lutheran. The most famous among the latter group were Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the theologian, and Carl Friederich Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig. Goerdeler would have become Germany’s chancellor had the July 20, 1944 coup succeeded.
The idea of opposing Hitler produced an impressive cooperation between different groups of people.
The German women and men who resisted the Nazis came from many different demographic groups: aristocrats, scholars, military officers, theologians, and blue-collar men from the factories. Each social group had its own style of opposing Hitler. The Lutherans, as mentioned above, “acted in accordance with Martin Luther’s teachings on how and when to resist secular authority,” according to Uwe Siemon-Netto.
Four hundred years after his time, Martin Luther, who lived from 1483 to 1546, provided encouragement for the women and men who defied Hitler and undermined the Nazi government.
These freedom fighters willingly and knowingly embraced a great risk: many were arrested, beaten, imprisoned, and murdered for their actions. They followed Martin Luther’s advocacy of “an almost foolhardy opposition against all governmental injustice,” in the words of historian Franz Lau.
Here is a great historical paradox: on the one hand, many scholars accuse Luther of fueling the anti-semitism which ultimately led to the rise of Hitler; on the other hand, other scholars see Luther as providing the inspiration for the anti-Nazi resistance movement. Which one is true? Can it be both ways?
Part of the solution to this seeming contradiction is this: Nazi propaganda was so effective that its results have outlived the actual Nazis by almost a century.
The National Socialists attempted to legitimize themselves — or more precisely, to make themselves seem legitimate — by distorting the historical record. They hoped thereby to make it seem as if almost every great thinker in history endorsed Nazi views.
Martin Luther was only one victim of this propaganda effort. Philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Herbert Spencer, both of whom stood clearly opposed to National Socialist ideas, were presented by the Nazis as if they agreed with, and predicted, the rise of Hitler and his policies. Poets like J.W. von Goethe and Ludwig Uhland were interpreted as if they were proto-Nazis. The list of brilliant authors who were portrayed as forerunners of Naziism is long — and each of them was in reality opposed to Naziism.
The Nazis were so good at lying that their propaganda has shaped the views of anti-Nazis, and their lies are molding media and authors a century later.
The notion that Martin Luther would have in any way encouraged the ideas of Naziism is a notion produced by Nazi propaganda.
Yet some people during the 1930s and 1940s were duped by the propaganda. Even now, many people have been tricked into believing it. Ironically, many sincere anti-Nazi thinkers in the twenty-first century have been deceived by Nazi propaganda, because that propaganda was so thoroughly disseminated that it has infused modern scholarship and culture.
So historian Uwe Siemon-Netto can write that, “well, yes, there were” a few “Germans who misunderstood Luther” under the influence of Nazi propaganda “and therefore did not resist the Nazis and who became Nazis themselves; and there were” many “other Germans whose internalized Lutheranism guided them in the opposite direction and made them choose the path of resistance and martyrdom.”
History is messy. History is complicated. Figuring out who the real Martin Luther is, and separating him from the fake ideas about Martin Luther which the Nazis presented, is not easy. Some people in the 1930s and 1940s were fooled. Some people today are fooled.
But some people, then and now, were and are aware of how the Nazis attempted — and often succeeded — in warping and twisting the words and actions of the real Martin Luther. Those who have explored the ideas of Luther see that he inspired resistance against Hitler and against National Socialism.
The resistance movement was multifaceted: while Luther inspired the Lutheran freedom fighters, a different group of writers inspired the Roman Catholic underground, and philosophers and poets inspired the academics who resisted Hitler. Just as the resistance movement was composed of diverse groups of people, so the inspiration behind that movement was a diverse group of authors and thinkers.
