The history of the 1930s and 1940s tells of the networks of individuals and small groups inside Germany which worked to effectively undermine, hamper, and hinder the Nazi war effort and Nazi systematic destruction of human life. This resistance movement had measurable effects: thousands of Jewish lives were saved as Jews were hidden or smuggled out of the Nazi-controlled territory; Germans deliberately produced munitions to substandard specifications, disrupted railways, and cut telegraph and telephone lines, all to make the military less successful.
What motivated these Germans? Some answers to that question are obvious: they desired to free Germany from Nazi oppression and end the war that was taking German lives; they had the rather obvious moral intuition that murdering millions of people — not only Jews, but Russians, Poles, religious groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, communists, libertarians, etc. — was wrong and should be stopped.
The official name for Naziism is ‘National Socialism’ and opposing it was risky. Many members of the resistance died for their beliefs. Given the risk involved, those who opposed National Socialism spent time and energy exploring and articulating their motives. One example is the writings of the White Rose group at the University of Munich.
The leaflets produced and distributed by the White Rose are written in a reflective and educated tone. They include references to Chinese philosophers, Greek and Roman thinkers like Aristotle and Cicero, the Old Testament, classic German poets like Goethe and Novalis, and most most frequently, allusions to the New Testament and to Jesus. The members of the anti-fascist resistance had a carefully reasoned and documented worldview which caused them to take an uncompromising stance against Adolf Hitler and his National Socialism.
Other members of the resistance also wrote about their motivations. Perhaps most famously, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote extensively during the prewar and wartime years.
Examining the statements of those who took steps against the Nazis, both similarities and differences appear. Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran theologian; Claus von Stauffenberg was devout Roman Catholic; still other resistance members were Calvinist, Protestant, or Evangelical. The members of the White Rose group included all the above and followers of eastern Orthodoxy.
As journalist Uwe Siemon-Netto writes
It was by and large a movement of Christians, Protestant as well as Roman Catholic.
He gives details:
As far back as 1933 some 6,000 pastors, one-third of Germany’s entire Protestant clergy, had joined the anti-Nazi Pfarrernotbund (Pastors Emergency League). Interestingly, this number corresponds roughly to the proportion of ministers actively opposed to the totalitarian authorities in East Germany after the war, according to Harald Krille, editor-in-chief of Glaube und Heimat, a weekly Protestant newspaper for central Germany.
It was in 1933 that Hitler seized power, so Siemon-Netto’s data shows that the resistance began immediately. The members of what would become the resistance had been watching and analyzing carefully. They didn’t wait to see what would happen, or give National Socialism a chance to prove itself. They knew and understood the actions that Hitler would take. They were ahead of the curve in perceiving and responding to evil on a large scale.
“Thousands of clergymen critical of Hitler,” Siemon-Netto continues, “were jailed, forbidden to preach, or drafted and often sent to the Russian front, from whence most did not return.”
Yet these are the easy and obvious examples: theologians and clergy. The biggest part of the resistance was composed of people who didn’t get a paycheck from a church, and didn’t officially represent organized religion.
Claus von Stauffenberg was one of many officers who were part of resistance: they were a large part of organizing assassination attempts on Hitler, and sabotaging the war effort. Military officers saw Hitler as carelessly wasting the lives of young German soldiers. Claus von Stauffenberg played a central role in a plot to assassinate Hitler, and was executed when the plot failed. Claus von Stauffenberg understood the risk he was taking, and considered it worthwhile. There were at least 42 attempts to assassinate Hitler from 1932 to 1944, indicating the level of energy in the resistance movement.
Carl Friedrich Goerdeler studied economics at the University of Tübingen. His career included a role as a bureaucrat in the city government of Solingen, the mayor of Königsberg, and the mayor of Leipzig. When Hitler seized power in 1933, Goerdeler first attempted to influence Hitler; he wrote him memoranda on various policy topics, hoping to change Hitler’s plans. Goerdeler resisted pressure to join the Nazi Party, and by 1936 took an openly hostile view of Hitler and the National Socialist government. Starting in 1938, Goerdeler was involved in a series of plots to overthrow the National Socialist government and assassinate Hitler. Like Claus von Stauffenberg, Goerdeler paid with his life.
Both Goerdeler and von Stauffenberg represent a large segment of the resistance, perhaps the majority: They hadn’t studied theology at the university, weren’t employed by a church, didn’t represent a church, and didn’t receive a paycheck from a church. They came from ordinary, worldly, walks of life.
Yet both of them were motivated by deeply spiritual conceptions of life. Goerdeler was a Lutheran and von Stauffenberg was a Roman Catholic. Both had absorbed the faiths of their families in childhood, and both of them retained this faith as adults. These two men probably could not have expressed their faiths in the precise academic language of professors, but they had absorbed and internalized their faiths to the point at which they instinctively recognized evil when they saw it, and to the point at which they knew that they were morally obliged to take action against such evil, even if it would cost them their lives.
About Goerdeler’s conceptual framework, Uwe Siemon-Netto writes:
His sense of order made him an early opponent of National Socialism. In very Lutheran terms, Goerdeler called the anti-Semitic outrages of the Hitler regime an “unbearable offense to civilization and a manifestation of mob rule.” Driven by his own motto, omnia restaurare in Christo, Goerdeler strove to topple Hitler.
In this framework, resistance was not optional; it was a duty to defy the National Socialist government:
A Lutheran ethos motivated men like Goerdeler. Goerdeler’s internalized Lutheranism told him that Germans must rid themselves of this evil.
He didn’t write or talk about spirituality; he lived it:
Goerdeler, who knew nothing of Luther’s theology of the cross, lived a theology of the cross.
From these examples, it is clear that those who resisted the Nazis weren’t reacting out of simple emotion. They were drawing from a deep well of intellectual resources. They received the support they needed to take the ultimate risks and endure the ultimate sacrifices.
