Resistance, Germany

Resistance, Germany Following Hitler's accession to power, by 1939 over 150,000 members of the Communist Party and the SPD had been sent to concentration camps, while around 40,000 had emigrated abroad, so that the scope for opposition to the Nazi regime was very limited, especially given the growing extent of the SS security apparatus. One exception to this was what the Gestapo later termed the Red Chapel (Rote Kapelle), diverse groups of socialists with members in several ministries which enabled them to pass military and other national secrets to the Soviet Union. However, they were discovered between summer 1941 and summer 1942, and over forty of their members were executed. Although Hitler managed to placate much of the Church establishment, individual bishops and priests like Bishop von Galen and Dietrich Bonhoeffer of the Confessing Church also offered resistance. More often than not, however, resistance by individual, lesser-known priests was brutally persecuted. A different approach was taken by the White Rose (Weisse Rose), a group mainly of students from Munich which began to distribute pamphlets in the summer of 1942 urging Germans to rise against the regime. They were arrested in February 1943 and executed. Apart from individual acts of resistance, for example the hiding of about 4,000 Jews by other Germans, the one act of resistance which came close to having any lasting effect was the July Plot of 1944, carried out with the support of more conservative groups.