My purpose in this essay is to develop a historical and social typology derived from an exploration of the broad variety of attitudes toward resistance prevalent in German society under the Nazi regime: attitudes that changed in response to the historical development of the regime and that differed among various sectors of German society.

Formulating this typology requires a definition of resistance that is broader than the one used heretofore. The long-standing, exclusive definition of resistance focusing only upon exceptional cases of fundamental and active opposition has produced an idealized and undifferentiated picture of German resistance. This vision of the resistance was encouraged by the Federal Republic in its early years out of a need to compensate for the past and to legitimize the new republic. As a consequence, scholars have largely ignored the primacy of change within the resistance and the interdependence between it and the Nazi regime, and the relationship between the two has been falsely presented as both static and clearly antagonistic. A revised definition of resistance that includes the less heroic cases of partial, passive, ambivalent, and broken opposition - one that accounts for the fragility of resistance and the inconsistency of human bravery - may in the end inspire a greater intellectual and moral sensitivity toward the subject than a definition that includes only the exceptional greatness of heroic martyrdom.