There was in Germany no sustained, concerted, or widespread opposition to the regime's anti-Jewish policies. There was, however, the consistent, pertinacious, and courageous opposition of Carl Goerdeler.

Ulrich von Hassell characterised Carl Goerdeler as naive and sanguine. In fact, Goerdeler was at least as well ‘connected’ as Hassell. On 30 June, the day of the massacre of SA leaders, the commander of No. 11 Infantry Regiment in Leipzig, Colonel Erich Friderici, had received an order to keep all troops in their barracks; he appealed to Goerdeler to determine whether the garrison was being used for political ends (something military men generally abhorred), Goerdeler rushed to Berlin to see the war minister, Field Marshal von Blomberg, who received him on that day at 3 p.m. Goerdeler had seen Hitler on several occasions and succeeded in convincing the Führer to support his, Goerdeler's, view on certain economic issues, and once after such a conference in March 1935, Hitler invited him to lunch with him. This ‘naive’ man drafted a plan, an approximation to which became reality three years after his death with the foundation of the state of Israel.

It has been shown in the preceding chapters how Goerdeler progressed from what he himself called ‘a narrow kind of nationalism’ (Nationalismus enger Art) at home, to frequent contact with the world, as mayor of Leipzig, the city famous for close to a thousand years for the Leipzig Trade Fair; to prominence as a conservative politician and candidate for Reich chancellor, and as Reich prices commissioner; to a national reputation as an administrator and politician, inspired by religion and humanism, concerned above all with bettering the human condition.