The English version of the book has been extensively revised and expanded since its original publication in German. This edition includes a new preface and an updated bibliography.
A McGill University history professor provides a comprehensive account of the German opposition's struggle against Hitler, covering all the serious attempts to overthrow or assassinate him leading up the failed attempt of 20 July 1944. First published in West Germany in 1969 by R. Piper and Co. as Widerstand, Staatsstreich, Attentat, this volume first appeared in English, published by Macdonald and Jane's and MIT Press, in 1977. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The numbers are small. Scattered across the landscape that was Nazi Germany, the Resistance looks puny: too little, too late. And yet, in the context of a police state, it assumes larger proportions. For those who have never known life under such a regime, it is hard to grasp the daily terror that makes an act of political graffiti a capital offense, that labels resistance "treason." Now, drawing on archival materials and on interviews with those few resisters and their families who survived, Anton Gill brings their story to light. Here are union leaders and businessmen, priests and Communists, students and factory workers; above all, here are the only people who had any plausible chance at more than symbolic resistance: those in the Army, the Foreign Office, the Abwehr. For these, obeying the dictates of conscience meant betraying the demands of government, and every day brought the risk of denunciation and death. Not many survived. Seen in terms of numbers, this is a story of defeat. But in the larger moral universe, it must be acknowledged as an honourable defeat: against awful odds and in appalling circumstances, these men and women kept the faith - a tribute to the power of human conscience.
Hoffmann examines the growing recognition by some Germans in the 1930s of the malign nature of the Nazi regime, the ways in which these people became involved in the resistance, and the views of those who staked their lives in the struggle against tyranny and murder.
There was much popular support for Hitler's regime in Nazi Germany, and little widespread domestic opposition or resistance. However, a number of individuals amd small groups, from all sections of society, did engage in acts of public defiance or resistance against the regime. This opposition came from the Christian churches; communists, socialists and industrial workers; conservative groups; elements within the army; students and the German youth; and Jews. This book looks at the nature of this opposition and the historical debate surrounding it.
Between 1933 and 1945, more than 500,000 German citizens resisted the Nazi government. Many were imprisoned for political crimes which included both active attempts to remove Hitler from office and passive attempts to oppose the Nazi regime. Resistance was found among university students, churches and even in the German military. This fascinating and compelling history of the German resistance covers groups and methods from underground newspapers such as "Rote Kapella" and "Internal Front" to conspiracy movements within the army, that culminated with Operation Valkyrie, a coup d'état and assassination attempt which went terribly wrong.
National Book Award Finalist: Never before has the mentality of the average German under the Nazi regime been made as intelligible to the outsider.” —The New York TImes They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Milton Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” These ten men were not men of distinction, according to Mayer, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune. A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.
This volume puts to rest the myth that the Jews went passively to the slaughter like sheep. Indeed Jews resisted in every Nazi-occupied country - in the forests, the ghettos, and the concentration camps.The essays presented here consider Jewish resistance to be resistance by Jewish persons in specifically Jewish groups, or by Jewish persons working within non-Jewish organizations. Resistance could be armed revolt; flight; the rescue of targeted individuals by concealment in non-Jewish homes, farms, and institutions; or by the smuggling of Jews into countries where Jews were not objects of Nazi persecution. Other forms of resistance include every act that Jewish people carried out to fight against the dehumanizing agenda of the Nazis - acts such as smuggling food, clothing, and medicine into the ghettos, putting on plays, reading poetry, organizing orchestras and art exhibits, forming schools, leaving diaries, and praying. These attempts to remain physically, intellectually, culturally, morally, and theologically alive constituted resistance to Nazi oppression, which was designed to demolish individuals, destroy their soul, and obliterate their desire to live.
While the "Valkyrie" plot by Nazi officers to kill Adolf Hitler is the best known instance of German opposition to his dictatorship, there were many other significant acts of resistance. Behind Valkyrie collects documents, letters, and testimonies of Germans who fought Hitler from within, making many of them available in their entirety and in English for the first time.