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
8 - The Second World War, German Society, and Internal Resistance to Hitler
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
The Second World War was, like the First World War, long regarded as in a class of its own in terms of death, destruction, and cruelty. It was accompanied by genocidal measures on a vast scale against the political infrastructure and population of the Soviet Union, against the 5.7 million Soviet prisoners of war (of whom 3.3 million lost their lives in captivity), and against the Jews in Europe, of whom over 5 million were murdered. The commanders of Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommandos (mobile killing squads) encountered little difficulty with German military authorities; frequently they may have been surprised at the amount of cooperation they received.
Since the Second World War, the world has become more accustomed to mass killing on a comparable scale in countries in Africa and Southeast Asia and in the Persian Gulf region. From time to time one hears mentioned the mass murder of the Armenians in 1915, and the Stalinist mass murder of (some 14 million) Ukrainian farmers is beginning to be acknowledged even by the Soviet government. It becomes increasingly difficult to brush off these events as irrelevant to Western civilization; we can no longer try to isolate them by chronological encapsulation or by assigning responsibility to “national character” or to impersonal “forces.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Contending with HitlerVarieties of German Resistance in the Third Reich, pp. 119 - 128Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992