The Canadian National Newspaper: There were good Germans during World War II, just like there are good Americans today

There were good Germans during World War II, just like there are good Americans today

by Roger Leisner, American Radio Commentator

I grew up in a German-American family. My father, a Leisner, was drafted in early 1941 along with four of his brothers. My mother, a Rinehart, served as a WAVE nurse while her two brothers were drafted.

I was always amazed that hardly anyone would talk about World War II (WWII) and their experiences. Perhaps it was Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

As a result, I started reading about WWII when I was in my early teens.

In 1961, at the tender age of 15, I read the paperback copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer. I was blown away. When asked what I thought of the book by both the Principal and Superintendent of my High School, I told them, "I never knew there was another nation like America".

Since then, I have been fascinated by the relationship between Nazi Germany and Imperial America; between the European Holocaust and the two American Holocausts; between party/state control and corporate control; as well as between anti-Semitism and racism; and also between Lebensraum and Manifest Destiny.

Since I have always view myself as a good American, subscribing to liberty and justice for all, I have always thought that there were good Germans who resisted the Nazis and Hitler.

By the way, always keep in mind the fact that Hitler didn't do it alone. There were individual Nazis all the way down to the local level and plenty of corporate supporters. Sounds just like Bush and the Republicans, huh?

The Nazis permanently suspended all civil liberties following the Reichstag fire in early 1933. It created the Gestapo (secret state police) as one of its major instruments of political terror, with all actions of this body, immune to judicial review. It abolished the principle of "no punishment outside the law," as well as the judiciary's autonomy. The Fuehrer's edict could also overrule the law, as well as impose the degree of punishment.

The Nazis also created concentration camps, where, until the late 1930s, prior to the establishment of work and death camps outside Germany, no fewer than 200,000 non-Jewish Germans were incarcerated for alleged political, racial or anti-social offences. The Nazis eventually dissolved all political parties other than its own, rendering parliament an empty shell, notwithstanding the fact that more than half of the German electorate had voted for parties other than the Nazis in the March 1933 elections. As a result of the suppression of civil freedoms and of all opposition, the Nazis attained a monopoly of information, so as to manufacture consent.

Between 1933 and 1945, many thousands of people resisted the Nazis using both violent and non-violent means. Among the earliest opponents of the Nazis in Germany were Communists, Socialists and trade union leaders. Although mainstream church hierarchies supported the Nazis, individual German theologians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer opposed the regime. Bonhoeffer was executed in 1945.

The German conservative elite within the Intelligence Services, Foreign Service and the military's General Staff composed small pockets of opposition to the Nazi regime. These groups consisted of those who had been opposed to the Nazis in 1933 and those who became disillusioned by Hitler during the course of the war.

One of those who had lost his faith in Hitler was Colonel von Stauffenberg, the aristocratic Nazi army officer who tried to kill Hitler with a briefcase bomb placed under a conference table on July 20, 1944. The plot failed and Stauffenberg was also executed along with many others.

In addition to resistance by Jews, members of other victimized groups had sought to resist the Nazis.

In May 1944, SS men ordered Roma (Gypsy) prisoners to leave their barracks at the Auschwitz Gypsy family camp. Sensing that they were being sent to death in the gas chambers, the Gypsies armed themselves with knives and axes and refused to leave. The SS guards retreated.

In a show of spiritual resistance, many Jehovah's Witnesses in Germany and elsewhere resisted Nazism through defiance. Some of them refused to serve in the German army and, as concentration camp prisoners, organized illegal religious study groups.

Other forms of non-violent resistance included sheltering Jews (sometimes at risk of death); listening to forbidden Allied radio broadcasts and producing clandestine anti-Nazi newspapers. In the face of Nazi repression and violence, acts of resistance at times significantly impeded German actions, saved lives or simply boosted morale of the persecuted.

In Nazi Germany, all known political dissenters were imprisoned, and many German priests were sent to the concentration camps for their opposition, including the parson of the Berlin Cathedral Bernhard Lichtenberg, and seminarian Karl Leisner. Notably, Hitler was never directly excommunicated by the Catholic Church, and several Catholic bishops in Germany or Austria are recorded as encouraging prayers of support for "The Führer"; this despite the fact the original Reichskonkordat of Germany with the Holy See proscribed any active political participation by the priesthood.

The Nazis did not persecute Jews alone. Five million Christians lost their lives as well. Gypsies; homosexuals; Jehovah’s Witnesses; the physically and mentally handicapped; blacks, Slavic peoples such as Czechs, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Russians and Ukrainians; and anybody who resisted or spoke against Hitler’s administration were all persecuted.

In 2004, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder honoured Germany’s Nazi resistance on the 60th anniversary of the most famous plot to kill Hitler. But the emembrance also underscored the fact that, unlike in countries like France and the Netherlands, the German resistance never gained popular support for an uprising against Nazi rule.

Schroeder said Germans need to keep on asking themselves: ”How could the dictatorship rely for so long on a broad mass base?"

But there were some protests against the Nazis that succeeded.

On July 14, 1933, the Nazis instituted the "Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases."

This law, one of the first steps taken by the Nazis toward their goal of creating an Aryan "master race," called for the sterilization of all persons who suffered from diseases considered hereditary, such as mental illness, learning disabilities, physical deformity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness and severe alcoholism. With the law's passage the Nazis also stepped up its propaganda against people with disabilities, regularly labeling them "life unworthy of life" or "useless eaters" and highlighting their burden upon society.

Just a few years later, the persecution of people with disabilities escalated even further. In late 1939, Adolf Hitler secretly authorized a medicallyadministered program of "mercy death" code-named "Operation T4." Between 1940 and 1941 approximately 70,000 Austrian and German disabled people were killed under the T4 program, most via large-scale killing operations using poison gas.

In July 1941, the Bishop of Münster in Westphalia, Clemens August Graf von Galen (who was an old aristocratic conservative, like many of the anti-Hitler Army officers), publicly denounced the “euthanasia” program in a sermon, and telegraphed his text to Hitler, calling on “the Führer to defend the people against the Gestapo.” On 3 August Galen was even more outspoken, broadening his attack to include the Nazi persecution of religious orders and the closing of Catholic institutions. Local Nazis asked for Galen to be arrested, but Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels told Hitler that if this happened there would be an open revolt in Westphalia.

By August the protests against "Operation T4" had spread to Bavaria. Hitler himself was jeered by an angry crowd at Hof, near Nuremberg – the only time he was opposed to his face in public during his 12 years of rule. Despite his private fury at the Catholic Church, Hitler knew that he could not afford a confrontation with the Church at a time when Germany was engaged in a life and death two front war since, following the annexations of Austria and the Sudetenland, nearly half of all Germans were Catholic.

On 24 August he ordered the cancellation of the T4 program, and also issued strict instructions to local Nazi officials that there were to be no further provocations of the churches for the duration of the war.

Although Hitler formally ordered a halt to the program, the killings secretly continued until the war's end, resulting in the murder of an estimated 275,000 people with disabilities.

Most extraordinary and telling is the Rosenstrasse incident. Some 30,000 Jews lived openly in Germany as the spouses of Christians. Nine in ten such marriages remained intact despite ceaseless harassment. Oriented toward family values as they were, the Nazis could not decide how to handle these Jews without violating the sanctity of marriage. Early in 1943, Goebbels, then in charge of Berlin, decided it was time to cleanse the capital by rounding up these last Jews. Hitler agreed. Some 2,000 Jewish men from mixed marriages were seized and taken to a large downtown building on the Rosenstrasse, from which they would be deported to the camps.

For a week their Gentile wives stood in the winter cold, chanting “We want our husbands back!” Ordinary Germans sometimes joined them. All told, the protests involved about 6,000 people. They continued in the face of S.S. and Gestapo threats, even threats to use machine guns. They continued though British bombers pounded the city by night. But the Nazis dared not fire upon these defenseless, unorganized Aryan women. Berliners saw the protests directly. Foreign diplomats spread word of it to the world press. The BBC broadcast the story back into Germany.

What was the outcome of Nazi Germany’s only mass demonstration to save Jews? The 2,000 Jewish husbands were released with Hitler’s approval. Two dozen who had already been sent to Auschwitz were returned. Jewish-Christian couples continued to live openly and survived the war. They would comprise the great majority of German Jewish survivors. Goebbels later commented to an associate that the regime relented “in order to eliminate the protest from the world, so that others didn’t begin to do the same.” Sadly, this strategy was successful: during the rest of the war, no similar action would ever be taken in defence of Jews in general.

Nor does this exhaust the catalogue of successful opposition. When Goebbels called for mass employment of housewives in war industries, also early in 1943, refusal was widespread. Again, reprisals were rare, partly because of the regime’s established emphasis on traditional roles for women. On a broader scale, Germans who refused to participate in atrocities — even if they were soldiers, party members, or S.S. men —almost never suffered retaliation. This was so well known that, after the war, Nazis accused of war crimes were forbidden to claim fear of retaliation as a defence.

And it was not only the adults who resisted. By the late 30s, thousands of young working class people were finding ways to avoid the clutches of Hitler Youth. They were gathering together in their own gangs and starting to enjoy themselves again. This terrified the Nazis, particularly when the teenagers started todefend their own social spaces physically. What particularly frightened the Nazis was that these young people were the products of their own education system. They had no contact with the old Democrats and Socialists, knew nothing of Marxism or the old labour movement. They had been educated by the Nazis in Nazi schools, their free time had been regimented by Hitler Youth listening to Nazi propaganda and taking part in officially approved activities and sports.

These gangs went under different names. Their gang uniform varied from town to town, as did their badges. In Essen they were called the Travelling Dudes, in Oberhausen and Dusseldorf the Kittelbach Pirates and in Cologne they were the Navajos. But all saw themselves as Edelweiss Pirates, named after an edelweiss flower badge many wore.

Gestapo files in Cologne contain the names of over 3,000 teenagers identified as Edelweiss Pirates. Clearly, there must have been many more and their numbers must have been even greater when taken over Germany as a whole. Initially, their activities were in themselves pretty harmless. They hung around in parks and on street corners, creating their own social space in the way teenagers do everywhere. On weekends, they would take themselves off into the countryside on hikes and camping trips in a perverse way mirroring the activities initially provided by Hitler Youth.

The activities of the Edelweiss Pirates grew bolder as the war progressed. They engaged in pranks against the authorities, fights against their enemies and moved on to small acts of sabotage. They were accused of being slackers at work and social parasites.

They began to help Jews, army deserters and prisoners of war. They painted anti-Nazi slogans on walls and some started to collect Allied propaganda leaflets and shove them through people’s letterboxes.

A 1943 Dusseldorf-Grafenberg Nazi Party report to the Gestapo stated “There is a suspicion that it is these youths who have been inscribing the walls of the pedestrian subway on the Altebbergstrasse with the slogans "Down with Hitler", "The OKW (Military High Command) is lying", "Medals for Murder", "Down with Nazi Brutality" etc. However often these inscriptions are removed within a few days new ones appear on the walls again."

As time went on, a few Edelweiss Pirates grew bolder and even more heroic. They raided army camps to obtain arms and explosives, made attacks on Nazi figures other than Hitler Youth and took part in partisan activities. The Head of the Cologne Gestapo was one victim of the Edelweiss Pirates.

The authorities reacted with repressive measures. These ranged from individual warnings, round-ups and temporary detention (followed by a head shaving), to weekend imprisonment, reform school, labor camp, youth concentration camp or criminal trial. Thousands were caught up in this hunt. For many, the end was death. The so-called leaders of the Cologne Edelweiss Pirates were publicly hanged in November 1944.

White Rose was a non-violent resistance group in Nazi Germany, consisting of a number of students from the University of Munich and their philosophy professor. The group became known for an anonymous leaflet campaign, lasting from June 1942 until February 1943, that called for active opposition to Hitler's regime. Six members of the group were arrested by the Gestapo, convicted and executed by beheading in 1943. Their sixth leaflet was smuggled out of Germany through Scandinavia to England, and in July 1943 copies of it were dropped over Germany by Allied planes, retitled "The Manifesto of the Students of Munich."

So, what are the lessons of history?

What can we Americans learn from German resistance?

About the writer:

Roger Leisner is a historian, the founder/owner of Radio Free Maine and a long-time Maine peace and justice advocate. LINK

Recommended book and film:

John J. Michalczyk, Confront! Resistance in Nazi Germany, Published in 2004

The Restless Conscience: Resistance to Hitler within Germany 1933-45, Released in 1992 and nominated for an Oscar

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