We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
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.”
1. This paper is the revised text of comments delivered on the papers published here by Peter Hoffmann, Harold Deutsch, and Klemens von Klemperer. The Leonidas Hill paper came to me only later, and I have not commented directly on it.
2. Ritter, Gerhard, Carl Goerdeler und die deutsche Widerstandsbewegung (Stuttgart, 1954), 46–47Google Scholar. See also the summary of the postwar debate about the Rote Kapelle in Duhnke, Horst, Die KPD von 1933 bis 1945 (Cologne, 1971), pp. 467–68.Google Scholar
3. Peukert, Detlev, Die KPD im Widerstand: Verfolgung und Untergrundarbeit am Rhein und Ruhr 1933 bis 1945 (Wuppertal, 1980), p. 232Google Scholar; Duhnke, pp. 101–05, 224.
4. Duhnke, pp. 343–51.
5. Mason, T. W., Arbeiterklasse und Volksgemeinschaft: Dokumente und Materialen zur deutschen Arbeiterpolitik 1936–39 (Opladen, 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Broszat, Martin, ed., Bayern in der NS-Zeit (Munich, 1977), pp. 193–207.Google Scholar
6. Duhnke, p. 506.
7. Hassell, Ulrich von, Vom anderen Deutschland, 2d ed. (Zurich, 1946), pp. 128–33Google Scholar; Sykes, Christopher, Tormented Loyalty (New York, 1969)Google Scholar. Hassell insisted on the 1914 German-Polish frontiers, among other things, as a basis for settlement.
8. Michel, Henri, The Shadow War: European Resistance, 1939–45 (New York, 1972), pp. 101, 116.Google Scholar
