Close contemporaries, heroes of the Great War for which they volunteered in their teens, both becoming officers when they were barely twenty, then gravely wounded and decorated for outstanding valor, Ernst Jünger (1895– ) and Curzio Malaparte (1898–1957) spent the period of “l'entre deux guerres” in roughly the same circumstances. Malaparte began as a combat observer with the Italian legation in Poland where he saw Trotsky's army lay siege to Warsaw in 1920, Jünger as a Reichswehr officer moving between Hanover and Berlin during the deep unrest of the immediate postwar years; both men at this time wrote books based on their war experiences which excited attention, Jünger's memoir, In Stahlgewittern (1920), and Malaparte's polemic account of the retreat from Caporetto, La Rivolta dei santi maledetti (1921); the Italian became an early and militant Fascist, no stranger to the hooliganism of Mussolini's squadristi; the German a national bolshevist, militarist, and a friend of such street fighters as Ernst von Salomon and Otto Strasser. Jünger like Malaparte was, for a time, a journalist, and his editing of the weekly Standarte, with its strong nationalist ideology, found its parallel in Malaparte's editorship of the radical Fascist Conquisto dello stato.

In Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, resistance, save perhaps in the ranks of the SS, sooner or later manifested itself in every quarter and over a range of forms from mere footdragging to outright conspiracy. Of the many types that could be enumerated, however, there was only one that (1) had enough access to instruments of power to give promise of attaining a turnover; (2) represented, except for the Communists, a full range of social, political, and religious forces in German society; and (3) repeatedly produced concrete plans and preparations for seizing the reins of government.

Ludwig beck was born in Biebrich on the Rhine in 1880. He joined No. 15 Prussian Field Artillery Regiment in Strassburg in 1898, attended the War Academy in Berlin from 1908 to 1911, was called into the Great General Staff in 1912, served in general-staff positions through the First World War, and held troop-command and staff positions after the war. From October 1929 to September 1931, as a colonel, he commanded No. 5 Artillery Regiment in Fulda, Ludwigsburg, and Ulm; from October 1932 to September 1933 he commanded the First Cavalry Division in Frankfurt an der Oder.

Resistance under conditions of close to total control is fraught with enormous, almost insurmountable, difficulties. And in the Germany of 1933–45 they were compounded by the fact that the “totalitarianism” of the state was effective not merely by virtue of controls it exercised, but also of the consensus it had managed to whip up. But the most agonizing difficulties were of an ethical order: unlike the Resistance movements in the Nazi-occupied countries, the German Resistance was bound to come into conflict with the “national interestü and it thus got involved in the dilemma of risking the charge of treason in order to assert the prerogatives of higher laws, natural or divine. The “foreign policy” of the German Resistance, involving contacts abroad before the war and during the war, takes us to the most exposed aspects of our problem.

This paper originated as part of a panel in which the author's intended role was to bring comparative perspectives formed in the study of other parts of Hitler-dominated Europe to bear upon the German opposition to Hitler. After giving hard thought to my comparative assignment, I came to the conclusion that internal opposition, as in Germany between 1933 and 1945, is fundamentally incomparable to resistance to a foreign occupation. The constraints of patriotism and the problems of legitimacy that face a domestic opposition, especially in wartime, are of an altogether different order than the more narrowly corporeal dangers facing resistance to a foreign occupation. Very few even of the most determined opponents of Hitler were willing to accept the defeat of the German Army or the overthrow of the German state as necessary for Hitler's removal, while very few resisters outside Germany believed that his removal could be accomplished in any other way. Such unbridgeable differences of perception make comparative discussion of resistance to Hitler inside and outside Germany so general as to be of little use. I have even used different terms here, referring to struggles against foreign occupation as “resistance” and to the anti-Hitler movements within Germany as “opposition.”

We still do not have a satisfactory synthesis of the history of resistance to National Socialism. A new history with different chronology, continuities and perspectives, different geography and range of activity or behavior, is increasingly necessary because of recent scholarship on numerous aspects of the subject. A new history should commence before 1933 as well as extend beyond 1945; give greater emphasis to resistance inside Germany between 1933 and 1938, and also to the efforts of Germans in exile during the entire Nazi period; minimize the role of the churches; provide another view of the conservative political-military resistance from 1938 to 1944; include youths who were active in gangs and individual Germans whose irreverent and nonconformist behavior was correctly viewed by the regime as subversive; examine resistance from July 20, 1944, until the end of the war; survey the contribution to the two postwar Germanies of the surviving internal groups and the returned exiles; sketch the changing treatment of the history of the resistance in public life, the military, journalism, and academic historiography since 1945.