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Between 1933 and 1945 the Nazi regime presented itself as a united Volksgemeinschaft (people's community) in which every German served a single Führer. Newsreels showed only cheering crowds; plebiscites reported votes of 98% in favour of the regime; the Gestapo reported regularly to Berlin that "the political mood" was "calm". Behind this manufactured unanimity, however, Germans who objected to the regime continued to act. Their numbers were small and their options few. Most faced a choice between emigration, private withdrawal, low-level non-conformity or active resistance that risked arrest, torture and execution. This lesson examines the groups that opposed the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945 — the Communist and Social Democratic left, the Christian churches, sections of the youth, and finally the army — and the reasons why organised resistance never seriously threatened the regime. It closes with Ian Kershaw's influential concept of "working towards the Führer" and what that implies for a judgement on Nazi control.
The most immediate political opponents of the Nazis in 1933 were the parties of the left. The Communist Party of Germany (KPD) had won 81 seats in the November 1932 Reichstag elections and had strong networks in the industrial Ruhr, Berlin and Hamburg. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) remained the largest democratic party. Both were among the first targets of the new regime.
The Reichstag Fire Decree of 28 February 1933 was used to arrest approximately 4,000 KPD officials within days. The party was effectively outlawed; formally dissolved alongside all other parties under the Law Against the Formation of New Parties on 14 July 1933, the KPD had already been driven underground. The SPD was banned on 22 June 1933 after its leadership went into exile and its remaining Reichstag deputies had voted against the Enabling Act in March.
Underground networks tried to continue. The exiled SPD executive in Prague (and later Paris and London) published reports on conditions inside Germany — the SOPADE reports — which remain one of the most important sources historians have for tracking German attitudes under the regime. Inside Germany, small groups distributed leaflets and reported on the economy and popular mood. The costs were severe: between 1933 and 1939 around 225,000 Germans were convicted of political offences; many thousands more were taken into "protective custody" without trial.
| Organisation | Fate under Nazi rule |
|---|---|
| KPD (Communists) | Suppressed from 28 February 1933; driven underground; ~4,000 officials arrested in first wave |
| SPD (Social Democrats) | Leadership in exile from 1933; party formally banned 22 June 1933 |
| SOPADE | SPD exile network; produced reports on popular opinion |
| Trade unions | Dissolved 2 May 1933; replaced by DAF |
The most famous left-wing resistance network of the war years was the Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle) — the Gestapo's collective name for several overlapping groups of Communists, socialists and independent liberals who passed military intelligence to the Soviet Union. The Berlin cell, led by Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid Harnack, was broken up in 1942; more than 50 members were executed, most at Plötzensee prison in late 1942 and early 1943. The network had been small — perhaps 150 people — but its existence shows that organised left-wing resistance, although decimated in 1933, never entirely disappeared.
Relations between the Nazi regime and the Christian churches were uneasy from the beginning. Roughly two-thirds of Germans were Protestant and a third Catholic; both churches retained institutional independence and pastoral authority that the regime could not easily dissolve.
The Nazis initially encouraged a pro-regime movement called the German Christians (Deutsche Christen) that sought to create a single "Reich Church" purged of Jewish influence — including, absurdly, the Old Testament. In response, a group of pastors led by Martin Niemöller and the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer broke away in 1934 to form the Confessional Church (Bekennende Kirche). The Confessional Church's Barmen Declaration of May 1934 rejected the subordination of the Gospel to Nazi ideology.
Niemöller, a former U-boat captain turned pastor, preached openly against the regime's interference in church affairs and was arrested in July 1937. He spent the next eight years in concentration camps (Sachsenhausen and Dachau) as Hitler's "personal prisoner". Bonhoeffer went further. Having joined the wider resistance against the regime, he was arrested in April 1943 and executed at Flossenbürg concentration camp on 9 April 1945 — weeks before the end of the war.
Pope Pius XI signed a Concordat with the German state on 20 July 1933 that guaranteed Catholic institutions in return for their withdrawal from political activity. The regime broke its terms repeatedly, harassing Catholic youth organisations and the Catholic press. In response, Pius XI issued the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge ("With burning concern") on 14 March 1937, written in German rather than the usual Latin. It was smuggled into Germany and read from Catholic pulpits on Palm Sunday. It denounced Nazi racial doctrine and the breaking of the Concordat. The Gestapo arrested priests who distributed it and closed church printing presses.
A notable single Catholic voice was Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen of Münster, whose three sermons in the summer of 1941 condemning the T4 "euthanasia" programme — the systematic murder of disabled Germans — contributed to Hitler's decision to formally halt the programme in August 1941 (though the killing in fact continued, decentralised).
| Church opposition | Date | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Confessional Church formed | 1934 | Barmen Declaration |
| Niemöller arrested | July 1937 | Held 1937–45 |
| Mit brennender Sorge | 14 March 1937 | Papal encyclical read in Catholic churches |
| Galen's sermons on T4 | Summer 1941 | Led to public (partial) halt of programme |
| Bonhoeffer executed | 9 April 1945 | Flossenbürg |
Church opposition was nevertheless limited. Both Catholic and Protestant churches opposed Nazi interference with religious life, but most church leaders did not oppose the regime's antisemitic laws, its war, or its treatment of other groups. Resistance was selective — it defended church institutions rather than a wider concept of human rights.
The regime made Hitler Youth membership compulsory in 1936 and enrolled around eight million young Germans by 1939 (see the next lesson). Yet pockets of young people refused to conform or quietly mocked the official youth culture. Three groups stand out.
The Edelweiss Pirates (Edelweißpiraten) were loose, mainly working-class youth groups in western German cities — Cologne, Essen, Düsseldorf — who rejected the regimentation of the Hitler Youth. They wore their own distinctive clothing, sang forbidden hiking songs, ambushed Hitler Youth patrols and scrawled anti-Nazi slogans. From 1942 some Pirates sheltered army deserters and escaped concentration camp prisoners. In November 1944 a group in Cologne led by Bartholomäus Schink was publicly hanged for sabotage and contact with resistance networks. Thirteen teenagers were executed without trial.
The Swing Youth (Swing-Jugend) were by contrast mostly middle-class teenagers in Hamburg, Berlin and other large cities who listened to banned American and British jazz, cultivated long hair, English phrases and loose-cut clothing, and organised illegal dance parties. Their defiance was cultural rather than political — yet cultural non-conformity was itself subversive in a regime that demanded total cultural coordination. In 1941 Himmler ordered harsh measures against them; several hundred were sent to camps.
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