Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 A Social and Historical Typology of the German Opposition to Hitler
- 2 Working-Class Resistance: Problems and Options
- 3 Choice and Courage
- 4 Resistance and Opposition: The Example of the German Jews
- 5 From Reform to Resistance: Carl Goerdeler's 1938 Memorandum
- 6 The Conservative Resistance
- 7 The Kreisau Circle and the Twentieth of July
- 8 The Second World War, German Society, and Internal Resistance to Hitler
- 9 The Solitary Witness: No Mere Footnote to Resistance Studies
- 10 The German Resistance in Comparative Perspective
- 11 The Political Legacy of the German Resistance: A Historiographical Critique
- 12 Uses of the Past: The Anti-Nazi Resistance Legacy in the Federal Republic of Germany
- Bibliography
- Index
9 - The Solitary Witness: No Mere Footnote to Resistance Studies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 A Social and Historical Typology of the German Opposition to Hitler
- 2 Working-Class Resistance: Problems and Options
- 3 Choice and Courage
- 4 Resistance and Opposition: The Example of the German Jews
- 5 From Reform to Resistance: Carl Goerdeler's 1938 Memorandum
- 6 The Conservative Resistance
- 7 The Kreisau Circle and the Twentieth of July
- 8 The Second World War, German Society, and Internal Resistance to Hitler
- 9 The Solitary Witness: No Mere Footnote to Resistance Studies
- 10 The German Resistance in Comparative Perspective
- 11 The Political Legacy of the German Resistance: A Historiographical Critique
- 12 Uses of the Past: The Anti-Nazi Resistance Legacy in the Federal Republic of Germany
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
There is general agreement that, by contrast to the resistance movements in the occupied countries and outside Germany, there was no one German resistance movement. As Richard Löwenthal has rightly pointed out, the Nazi dictatorship in Germany, being native (bodenständig), came closer than elsewhere to approximating the exercise of total control. All the more was resistance in Germany bound to be “resistance without 'the people'” (Hans Mommsen); the resisters were “'strangers' among their own people.”
I am of course aware of the fact that in turn the viability of totalitarianism as a concept has been increasingly questioned, even among non-Marxist scholars. But if total control was not in fact fully realized in Nazi Germany, if we can talk of a “polycracy,” and if there were pockets of privacy - more than Robert Ley's “person asleep” - the dynamics of Nazism, the party's and the state's claim to rule, were totalitarian. Moreover, of course, the identification of the Nazi regime with the national cause before - and even more strongly after - the outbreak of the war discouraged the formation of a resistance movement and deprived resisters of what Barrington Moore called that “social support” which was available, at least latently, to resistance movements elsewhere.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Contending with HitlerVarieties of German Resistance in the Third Reich, pp. 129 - 140Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992