German resistance to Nazism

Many individuals and groups in Germany that were opposed to the Nazi regime engaged in active resistance, including attempts to remove Adolf Hitler from power by assassination or by overthrowing his established regime.

German resistance was not recognized as a collective united resistance movement during the height of Nazi Germany, unlike the more coordinated efforts in other countries, such as Italy, Denmark, the Soviet Union, Poland, Greece, Yugoslavia, France, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia and Norway. The German resistance consisted of small, isolated groups that were unable to mobilize widespread political opposition. Individual attacks on Nazi authority, sabotage, and the successful disclosure of information regarding Nazi armaments factories to the Allies, as by the Austrian resistance group led by Heinrich Maier prevailed alongside this as well. One strategy was to persuade leaders of the Wehrmacht to stage a coup against the regime; the 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler was intended to trigger such a coup.

It has been estimated that during the course of World War II 800,000 Germans were arrested by the Gestapo for resistance activities. It has also been estimated that 15,000 of those Germans were executed by the Nazis, although new evidence suggests the death count may have been up to 77,000. These resistance members were usually tried, mostly in show trials, by Special Courts, courts-martial, People's Courts and the civil justice system. Many of these Germans had served in government, the military, or in civil positions, which enabled them to engage in subversion and conspiracy; in addition, the Canadian historian Peter Hoffmann counts unspecified "tens of thousands" in Nazi concentration camps who were either suspected of or actually engaged in opposition. By contrast, the German historian Hans Mommsen wrote that resistance in Germany was "resistance without the people" and that the number of those Germans engaged in resistance to the Nazi regime was very small. The resistance in Germany included German citizens of non-German ethnicity, such as members of the Polish minority who formed resistance groups like Olimp.

Overview

Historiographical debates on the subject on ''Widerstand'' have often featured intense arguments about the nature, extent and effectiveness of resistance in the Third Reich. In particular, debate has focused around what to define as ''Widerstand'' (resistance). The German opposition and resistance movements consisted of disparate political and ideological strands, which represented different classes of German society and seldom able to work together—indeed for much of the period there was little or no contact between the different strands of resistance. A few civilian resistance groups developed, but the Army was the only organisation with the capacity to overthrow the government, and from within it a few officers came to present the most serious threat posed to the Nazi regime. The Foreign Office and the Abwehr (Military Intelligence) also provided vital support to the movement. But many of those in the military who ultimately chose to seek to overthrow Adolf Hitler had initially supported the regime, if not all of its methods. Hitler's 1938 purge of the military was accompanied by increased militancy in the Nazification of Germany, a sharp intensification of the persecution of Jews, homosexuals, and trade union leaders and aggressive foreign policy, bringing Germany to the brink of war; it was at this time that the German Resistance emerged.

Those opposing the Nazi regime were motivated by such factors as the mistreatment of Jews, harassment of the churches, and the harsh actions of Himmler and the Gestapo. In his history of the German Resistance, Peter Hoffmann wrote that "National Socialism was not simply a party like any other; with its total acceptance of criminality it was an incarnation of evil, so that all those whose minds were attuned to democracy, Christianity, freedom, humanity or even mere legality found themselves forced into alliance...".

Banned, underground political parties contributed one source of opposition. These included the Social Democrats (SPD)—with its paramilitary group the Iron Front and activists such as Julius Leber— Communists (KPD), and the anarcho-syndicalist group the Freie Arbeiter Union (FAUD), that distributed anti-Nazi propaganda and assisted people in fleeing the country. Another group, the Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle), consisted of anti-fascists, communists, and an American woman. The individuals in this group began to assist their Jewish friends as early as 1933.

Whereas the German Christian movement sought to create a new, positive Christianity aligned with Nazi ideology, some Christian churches, Catholic and Protestant, contributed another source of opposition. Their stance was symbolically significant. The churches, as institutions, did not openly advocate for the overthrow of the Nazi state, but they remained one of the very few German institutions to retain some independence from the state, and were thus able to continue to co-ordinate a level of opposition to Government policies. They resisted the regime's efforts to intrude on ecclesiastical autonomy, but from the beginning, a minority of clergymen expressed broader reservations about the new order, and gradually their criticisms came to form a "coherent, systematic critique of many of the teachings of National Socialism".Theodore S. Hamerow; On the Road to the Wolf's Lair – German Resistance to Hitler; Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; 1997; ; p. 133 Some priests—such as the Jesuits Alfred Delp and Augustin Rösch and the Lutheran preacher Dietrich Bonhoeffer—were active and influential within the clandestine German Resistance, while figures such as Protestant Pastor Martin Niemöller (who founded the Confessing Church), and the Catholic Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen (who denounced Nazi euthanasia and lawlessness), offered some of the most trenchant public criticism of the Third Reich—not only against intrusions by the regime into church governance and to arrests of clergy and expropriation of church property, but also to the fundamentals of human rights and justice as the foundation of a political system.Theodore S. Hamerow; On the Road to the Wolf's Lair – German Resistance to Hitler; Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; 1997; ; pp. 288–89 Their example inspired some acts of overt resistance, such as that of the White Rose student group in Munich, and provided moral stimulus and guidance for various leading figures in the political Resistance.
In Austria there were Habsburg-motivated groups. These were the special focus of the Gestapo, because their common goal—the overthrow of the Nazi regime and the re-establishment of an independent Austria under Habsburg leadership—was a special provocation for the Nazi regime, and especially because Hitler bristled with hatred of the Habsburg family. Hitler diametrically rejected the centuries-old Habsburg principles of "live and let live" with regard to ethnic groups, peoples, minorities, religions, cultures and languages.

Because of Hitler's orders, many of these resistance fighters (according to current estimates approx. 4000–4500 Habsburg resistance fighters) were sent directly to the concentration camp without trial. 800 to 1,000 Habsburg resistance fighters were executed. As a unique attempt in the German Reich to act aggressively against the Nazi state or the Gestapo, their plans regarding the later executed Karl Burian to blow up the Gestapo headquarters in Vienna apply. The Catholic resistance group, led by Heinrich Maier, wanted to revive a Habsburg monarchy after the war on the one hand, and very successfully passed on plans and production sites for V-2 rockets, Tiger tanks, Messerschmitt Bf 109, Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet and other aircraft to the Allies. From the fall of 1943 at least, these transmissions informed the Allies about the exact site plans of German production plants. The information was important to Operation Crossbow. With the location sketches of the manufacturing facilities, the Allied bombers were given precise air strikes. In contrast to many other German resistance groups, the Maier Group informed very early about the mass murder of Jews through their contacts with the Semperit factory near Auschwitz—a message the Americans in Zurich initially did not believe in the scope of.

But even the Habsburg resistance on a small scale was followed extremely strictly. For example, in a People's Court ("Volksgerichtshof") trial in Vienna, an old, seriously ill and frail woman was sentenced to 4 years in prison for possessing a self-written note found in her wallet with the rhymed text "Wir wollen einen Kaiser von Gottesgnaden und keinen Blutmörder aus Berchtesgaden. (German: We want an emperor of divine grace and not a blood murderer from Berchtesgaden.)". Another Habsburg supporter was even sentenced to death by a Nazi court in Vienna for donating 9 Reichsmarks to "Rote Hilfe". The pro-Habsburg siblings Schönfeld were also sentenced to death for producing anti-Nazi leaflets.

Ernst Karl Winter founded in 1939 in New York the "Austrian American Center", a non-partisan national committee with a Habsburg background. This organized regular demonstrations and marches and published weekly publications. In the US there were also the "Austrian American League" as pro-Habsburg organizations. Otto von Habsburg, who was on the Sonderfahndungsliste G.B. ("Special Search List Great Britain"), strongly opposed the Nazi regime. If he had been arrested by Nazi organs, he should be shot immediately without further proceedings. On the one hand, Habsburg provided thousands of refugees with the rescue visas and, on the other, made politics for the peoples of Central Europe with the Allies. The decisive factor was the attempt to keep the peoples of Central Europe out of the communist sphere of influence and to counterbalance a dominant post-war Germany. He obtained the support of Winston Churchill for a conservative "Danube Federation", in effect a restoration of Austria-Hungary, but Joseph Stalin put an end to these plans.

Individual Germans or small groups of people acting as the "unorganized resistance" defied the Nazi regime in various ways, most notably, those who helped Jews survive the Nazi Holocaust by hiding them, obtaining papers for them or in other ways aiding them. More than 300 Germans have been recognised for this. It also included, particularly in the later years of the regime, informal networks of young Germans who evaded serving in the Hitler Youth and defied the cultural policies of the Nazis in various ways.

The German Army, the Foreign Office and the '' Abwehr'', the military intelligence organization became sources for plots against Hitler in 1938 and again in 1939, but for a variety of reasons could not implement their plans. After the German defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943, they contacted many army officers who were convinced that Hitler was leading Germany to disaster, although fewer who were willing to engage in overt resistance. Active resisters in this group were frequently drawn from members of the Prussian aristocracy.

Almost every community in Germany had members taken away to concentration camps. As early as 1935 there were jingles warning:
"Dear Lord God, keep me quiet, so that I don't end up in Dachau." (It almost rhymes in German: ''Lieber Herr Gott mach mich stumm / Daß ich nicht nach Dachau komm.'') "Dachau" refers to the Dachau concentration camp. This is a parody of a common German children's prayer, "Lieber Gott mach mich fromm, daß ich in den Himmel komm." ("Dear God, make me pious, so I go to Heaven")

Forms of resistance

Disorganized resistance

While it cannot be disputed that many Germans supported the regime until the end of the war, beneath the surface of German society there were also currents of resistance, if not always consciously political. The German historian Detlev Peukert, who pioneered the study of German society during the Nazi era, called this phenomenon " everyday resistance." His research was based partly on the regular reports by the Gestapo and the SD on morale and public opinion, and on the "Reports on Germany" which were produced by the exiled SPD based on information from its underground network in Germany and which were acknowledged to be very well informed.

Peukert and other writers have shown that the most persistent sources of dissatisfaction in Nazi Germany were the state of the economy and anger at the corruption of Nazi Party officials—although these rarely affected the personal popularity of Hitler himself. The Nazi regime is frequently credited with "curing unemployment," but this was done mainly by conscription and rearmament—the civilian economy remained weak throughout the Nazi period. Although prices were fixed by law, wages remained low and there were acute shortages, particularly once the war started. To this after 1942 was added the acute misery caused by Allied air attacks on German cities. The high living and venality of Nazi officials such as Hermann Göring aroused increasing anger. The result was "deep dissatisfaction among the population of all parts of the country, caused by failings in the economy, government intrusions into private life, disruption of accepted tradition and custom, and police-state controls."

Otto and Elise Hampel protested the regime by leaving postcards urging resistance (both passive and forceful) against the regime around Berlin. It took two years before they were caught, convicted and then put to death.

Opposition based on this widespread dissatisfaction usually took "passive" forms—absenteeism, malingering, spreading rumours, trading on the black market, hoarding, avoiding various forms of state service such as donations to Nazi causes. But sometimes it took more active forms, such as warning people about to be arrested, hiding them or helping them to escape, or turning a blind eye to oppositionist activities. Among the industrial working class, where the underground SPD and KPD networks were always active, there were frequent if short-lived strikes. These were generally tolerated, at least before the outbreak of war, provided the demands of the strikers were purely economic and not political.

Another form of resistance was assisting the persecuted German Jews. By mid-1942 the deportation of German and Austrian Jews to the extermination camps in occupied Poland was well under way. It is argued by some writers that the great majority of Germans were indifferent to the fate of the Jews, and a substantial proportion actively supported the Nazi programme of extermination. But a minority persisted in trying to help Jews, even in the face of serious risk to themselves and their families. This was most pronounced in Berlin, where the Gestapo and SS were headquartered, but also where thousands of non-Jewish Berliners, some with powerful connections, risked hiding their Jewish neighbors.

Aristocrats such as Maria von Maltzan and Maria Therese von Hammerstein obtained papers for Jews and helped many to escape from Germany. In Wieblingen in Baden, Elisabeth von Thadden, a private girls' school principal, disregarded official edicts and continued to enroll Jewish girls at her school until May 1941 when the school was nationalised and she was dismissed (she was executed in 1944, following the Frau Solf Tea Party). A Berlin Protestant Minister, Heinrich Grüber, organised the smuggling of Jews to the Netherlands. At the Foreign Office, Canaris conspired to send a number of Jews to Switzerland under various pretexts. It is estimated that 2,000 Jews were hidden in Berlin until the end of the war. Martin Gilbert has documented numerous cases of Germans and Austrians, including officials and Army officers, who saved the lives of Jews.

Youth resistance

Nazism had a powerful appeal to German youth, particularly middle-class youth, and German universities were strongholds of Nazism even before Hitler came to power. The Hitler Youth sought to mobilise all young Germans behind the regime, and apart from stubborn resistance in some rural Catholic areas, was generally successful in the first period of Nazi rule. After about 1938, however, persistent alienation among some sections of German youth began to appear. This rarely took the form of overt political opposition—the White Rose group was a striking exception, but was striking mainly for its uniqueness. Much more common was what would now be called "dropping out"—a passive refusal to take part in official youth culture and a search for alternatives. Although none of the unofficial youth groups amounted to a serious threat to the Nazi regime, and although they provided no aid or comfort to those groups within the German elite who were actively plotting against Hitler, they do serve to show that there were currents of opposition at other levels of German society.

Examples were the so-called '' Edelweisspiraten'' ("Edelweiss Pirates"), a loose network of working-class youth groups in a number of cities, who held unauthorised meetings and engaged in street fights with the Hitler Youth; the Meuten group in Leipzig, a more politicised group with links to the KPD underground, which had more than a thousand members in the late 1930s; and, most notably, the ''Swingjugend'', middle-class youth who met in secret clubs in Berlin and most other large cities to listen to swing, jazz and other music deemed "degenerate" by the Nazi authorities. This movement, which involved distinctive forms of dress and gradually become more consciously political, became so popular that it provoked a crackdown: in 1941 Himmler ordered the arrest of Swing activists and had some sent to concentration camps.

In October 1944, as the American and British armies approached the western borders of Germany, there was a serious outbreak of disorder in the bomb-ravaged city of Cologne, which had been largely evacuated. The ''Edelweisspiraten'' linked up with gangs of deserters, escaped prisoners and foreign workers, and the underground KPD network, to engage in looting and sabotage, and the assassination of Gestapo and Nazi Party officials. Explosives were stolen with the objective of blowing up the Gestapo headquarters. Himmler, fearing the resistance would spread to other cities as the Allied armies advanced into Germany, ordered a savage crackdown, and for days gunbattles raged in the ruined streets of Cologne. More than 200 people were arrested and dozens were hanged in public, among them six teenaged ''Edelweisspiraten'', including Bartholomäus Schink.

Open protests

Across the twentieth century public protest comprised a primary form of civilian opposition within totalitarian regimes. Potentially influential popular protests required not only public expression but the collection of a crowd of persons speaking with one voice. In addition, only protests which caused the regime to take notice and respond to are included here.

Improvised protests also occurred if rarely in Nazi Germany, and represent a form of resistance not wholly researched, Sybil Milton wrote already in 1984. Hitler and National Socialism's perceived dependence on the mass mobilization of his people, the "racial" Germans, along with the belief that Germany had lost the First World War due to an unstable home front, caused the regime to be peculiarly sensitive to public, collective protests. Hitler recognized the power of collective action, advocated non-compliance toward unworthy authority (e.g. the 1923 French occupation of the Ruhr), and brought his party to power in part by mobilizing public unrest and disorder to further discredit the Weimar Republic. In power, Nazi leaders quickly banned extra-party demonstrations, fearing displays of dissent on open urban spaces might develop and grow, even without organization.

To direct attention away from dissent, the Nazi state appeased some public, collective protests by "racial" Germans and ignored but did not repress others, both before and during the war. The regime rationalized appeasement of public protests as temporary measures to maintain the appearance of German unity and reduce the risk of alienating the public through blatant Gestapo repression. Examples of compromises for tactical reasons include social and material concessions to workers, deferment of punishing oppositional church leaders, "temporary" exemptions of intermarried Jews from the Holocaust, failure to punish hundreds of thousands of women for disregarding Hitler's 'total war' decree conscripting women into the work force, and rejection of coercion to enforce civilian evacuations from urban areas bombed by the Allies.

An early defeat of state institutions and Nazi officials by mass, popular protest culminated with Hitler's release and reinstatement to church office of Protestant bishops Hans Meiser and Theophil Wurm in October 1934. Meiser's arrest two weeks earlier had stirred mass public protests of thousands in Bavaria and Württemberg and initiated protests to the German Foreign Ministry from countries around the world. Unrest had festered between regional Protestants and the state since early 1934 and came to a boil in mid-September when the regional party daily accused Meiser of treason, and shameful betrayal of Hitler and the state. By the time Hitler intervened, pastors were increasingly involving parishioners in the church struggle. Their agitation was amplifying distrust of the state as protest was worsening and spreading rapidly. Alarm among local officials was escalating. Some six thousand gathered in support of Meiser while only a few dutifully showed up at a meeting of the region's party leader, Julius Streicher. Mass open protests, the form of agitation and bandwagon building the Nazis employed so successfully, were now working against them. When Streicher's deputy, Karl Holz, held a mass rally in Nuremberg's main square, Adolf-Hitler-Platz, the director of the city's Protestant Seminary led his students into the square, encouraging others along the way to join, where they effectively sabotaged the Nazi rally and broke out singing "A Mighty Fortress is our God." To rehabilitate Meiser and bring the standoff to a close, Hitler, who in January had publicly condemned the bishops in their presence as "traitors to the people, enemies of the Fatherland, and the destroyers of Germany," arranged a mass audience including the bishops and spoke in conciliatory tones.Kuller, Christiane (2015). Stoltzfus, Nathan; Maier-Katkin, Birgit, eds. ''Protest in Hitler's "National Community": Popular Unrest and the Nazi Response''. New York: Berghahn Books.

This early contest points to enduring characteristics of regime responses to open, collective protests. It would prefer dealing with mass dissent immediately and decisively—not uncommonly retracting the cause of protest with local and policy-specific concessions. Open dissent, left unchecked, tended to spread and worsen. Church leaders had improvised a counter-demonstration strong enough to neutralize the party's rally just as the Nazi Party had faced down socialist and communist demonstrators while coming to power. Instructive in this case is the view of a high state official that, regardless of the protesters motives, they were political in effect; although church protests were in defense of traditions rather than an attack on the regime, they nonetheless had political consequences, the official said, with many perceiving the clergy as anti-Nazi, and a "great danger of the issue spilling over from a church affair into the political arena".

Hitler recognized that workers, through repeated strikes, might force approval of their demands and he made concessions to workers in order to preempt unrest; yet the rare but forceful public protests the regime faced were by women and Catholics, primarily. Some of the earliest work on resistance examined the Catholic record, including most spectacularly local and regional protests against decrees removing crucifixes from schools, part of the regime's effort to secularize public life. Although historians dispute the degree of political antagonism toward National Socialism behind these protests, their impact is uncontested. Popular, public, improvised protests against decrees replacing crucifixes with the Führer's picture, in incidents from 1935 to 1941, from north to south and east to west in Germany, forced state and party leaders to back away and leave crucifixes in traditional places. Prominent incidents of crucifix removal decrees, followed by protests and official retreat, occurred in Oldenburg (Lower Saxony) in 1936, Frankenholz (Saarland) and Frauenberg (East Prussia) in 1937, and in Bavaria in 1941. Women, with traditional sway over children and their spiritual welfare, played a leading part.

German history of the early twentieth century held examples of the power of public mobilization, including the Kapp military Putsch in 1920, some civilian Germans realized the specific potential of public protest from within the dictatorship. After the Oldenburg crucifix struggle, police reported that Catholic activists told each other they could defeat future anti-Catholic actions of the state as long as they posed a united front''.'' Catholic Bishop Clemens von Galen may well have been among them. He had raised his voice in the struggle, circulating a pastoral letter. A few months later in early 1937, while other bishops voiced fear of using such "direct confrontation," Galen favored selective "public protests" as a means of defending church traditions against an overreaching state''.''

Some argue that the regime, once at war, no longer heeded popular opinion and, some agencies and authorities did radicalize use of terror for domestic control in the final phase of war. Hitler and the regime's response to collective street protest, however, did not harden. Although a number of historians have argued that popular opinion, brought to a head by Galen's denunciations from the pulpit in the late summer of 1941, caused Hitler to suspend Nazi " Euthanasia," others disagree. It is certain, however, that Galen intended to have an impact from the pulpit and that the highest Nazi officials decided against punishing him out of concern for public morale. A Catholic protest in May the same year against the closing of the Münsterschwarzach monastery in Lower Franconia illustrates the regime's occasional response of not meeting protester demands while nevertheless responding with "flexibility" and "leniency" rather than repressing or punishing protesters. That protest, however, represented only local opinion rather than the nationwide anxiety Galen represented, stirred up by the Euthanasia program the regime refused to acknowledge.

Another indication that civilians realized the potential of public protest within a regime so concerned about morale and unity, is from Margarete Sommers of the Catholic Welfare Office in the Berlin Diocese. Following the Rosenstrasse Protest of late winter 1943. Sommers, who shared with colleagues an assumption that "the people could mobilize against the regime on behalf of specific values," wrote that the women had succeeded through "loudly voiced protests". The protest began as a smattering of "racial" German women seeking information about their Jewish husbands who had just been incarcerated in the course of the massive roundup of Berlin Jews in advance of the Nazi Party's declaration that Berlin was "free of Jews." As they continued their protest over the course of a week, a powerful feeling of solidarity developed. Police guards repeatedly scattered the women, gathered in groups of up to hundreds, with shouts of "clear the street or we'll shoot." As the police repeatedly failed to shoot, some protesters began to think their action might prevail. One said that if she had first calculated whether a protest could have succeeded, she would have stayed home. Instead, "we acted from the heart," she said, adding that the women were capable of such courageous action because their husbands were in grave danger. Some 7,000 of the last Jews in Berlin arrested at this time were sent to Auschwitz. At Rosenstrasse, however, the regime relented and released Jews with "racial" family members. Even intermarried Jews who had been sent to Auschwitz work camps were returned.

Another potential indication that German civilians realized the power of public protest was in Dortmund-Hörde in April 1943. According to an SD Report from July 8 of 1943, in the early afternoon of April 12, 1943, an army captain arrested a Flak soldier in Dortmund-Hörde because of an insolent salute. The townsfolk looking on took his side. A crowd formed of three to four hundred comprised essentially of women. The crowd shouted lines such as "Gebt uns unsere Männer wieder" or "give us our men back" which suggest some in the crowd were aware of the protest on Rosenstrasse. The recentness of the weeklong protest on Rosenstrasse strengthens this possibility. On Rosenstrasse the chant had been coined as the rallying cry of wives for their incarcerated husbands. Here on behalf of one man it made little sense.

The Rosenstrasse protest

The Rosenstrasse protest of February 1943 was the only open, collective protest for Jews during the Third Reich. It was sparked by the arrest and threatened deportation to death camps of 1,800 Jewish men married to non-Jewish women. They were "full" Jews in the sense of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws and the Gestapo aimed to deport as many as it could without drawing attention to the Holocaust or alienating the "racial" public. Before these men could be deported, their wives and other relatives rallied outside the building in Rosenstrasse where the men were held. About 6,000 people, mostly women, rallied in shifts in the winter cold for over a week. Eventually Himmler, worried about the effect on civilian morale, gave in and allowed the arrested men to be released. Some who had already been deported and were on their way to Auschwitz were brought back. There was no retaliation against the protesters, and most of the Jewish men survived.

Intermarried German Jews and their children were the only Jews to escape the fate Reich authorities had selected for them, and by the end of the war 98 percent of German Jews who survived without being deported or going into hiding were intermarried. Hitler told Goebbels in November 1941, Jews were to be deported aggressively only as long as this did not cause "unnecessary difficulties." Thus "intermarried Jews, above all those in artist circles," should be pursued somewhat reservedly. A protest during wartime showing public dissent and offering an opportunity to dissent represented an unnecessary difficulty for a Führer determined to prevent another weak home front like the one he blamed for Germany's defeat in the First World War.

Witten protesters

Even up until the end of 1944, Hitler remained concerned about his image and refused to use coercion against disobedient "racial" Germans. On October 11, 1943, some three hundred women protested on Adolf Hitler Square in the western German Ruhr Valley city of Witten against the official decision to withhold their food ration cards unless they evacuated their homes. Under increasing Allied bombardments, officials had struggled to establish an orderly program for evacuation. Yet by late 1943 many thousands of persons, including hundreds from Witten, had returned from evacuation sites.Torrie, Julie (2015). Stoltzfus, Nathan; Maier-Katkin, Birgit, eds. ''Protest in Hitler's "National Community": Popular Unrest and the Nazi Response''. New York: Berghahn Books, 76–105. ''The Westfälische Landeszeitung,'' the daily Nazi Party regional newspaper, branded evacuees who returned as pests ("Schädlinge"), a classification for persons subverting the Reich and its war. Officials called them "wild" evacuees, exercising their own against the party and state, according to Julie Torrie.

The Witten protesters had the power of millions of likeminded Germans behind it, and venerable traditions of family life. Within four months Hitler ordered all Nazi Party Regional Leaders ( Gauleiter) not to withhold the ration cards of evacuees who returned home without permission. In July 1944, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler and Hitler's Private Secretary Martin Bormann jointly ruled that "coercive measures" continued to be unsuitable, and in October, 1944 Bormann reiterated that coercion was not to be used against evacuees who had returned.

"One dare not bend to the will of the people in this point," Goebbels wrote in his diary several weeks later. The shuffling back and forth of Germans between evacuation sites and their homes strained the Reichsbahn, and the regime must "dam up" the stream of returning evacuees. If "friendly cajoling" failed "then one must use force." At the moment, however, "the people know just exactly where the soft spot of the leadership is, and will always exploit this. Should we make this spot hard where we have been soft up until now, then the will of the people will bend to the will of the state. Currently we're on the best path to bending the will of the state to the will of the people." Giving in to the street is increasingly dangerous, Goebbels wrote, since each time this happens the state loses authority and in the end loses all authority.

In Berlin, leaders continued to assuage rather than draw further attention to public collective protests, as the best way to protect their authority and the propaganda claims that all Germans stood united behind the Führer. In this context, ordinary Germans were sometimes able to exact limited concessions, as Goebbels worried that a growing number of Germans were becoming aware of the regime's soft spot represented by its response to protests.

Assassination attempts on Hitler

First assassination attempt

In November 1939, Georg Elser, a carpenter from Württemberg, developed a plan to assassinate Hitler completely on his own. Elser had been peripherally involved with the KPD before 1933, but his exact motives for acting as he did remain a mystery. He read in the newspapers that Hitler would be addressing a Nazi Party meeting on 8 November, in the Bürgerbräukeller, a beer hall in Munich where Hitler had launched the Beer Hall Putsch on the same date in 1923. Stealing explosives from his workplace, he built a powerful time bomb, and for over a month managed to stay inside the Bürgerbräukeller after hours each night, during which time he hollowed out the pillar behind the speaker's rostrum to place the bomb inside.

On the night of 7 November 1939, Elser set the timer and left for the Swiss border. Unexpectedly, because of the pressure of wartime business, Hitler made a much shorter speech than usual and left the hall 13 minutes before the bomb went off, killing seven people. Sixty-three people were injured, sixteen more were seriously injured with one dying later. Had Hitler still been speaking, the bomb almost certainly would have killed him.

This event set off a hunt for potential conspirators which intimidated the opposition and made further action more difficult. Elser was arrested at the border, sent to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, and then in 1945 moved to the Dachau concentration camp; he was executed two weeks before the liberation of Dachau KZ.

= Aeroplane assassination attempt

=
In late 1942, von Tresckow and Olbricht formulated a plan to assassinate Hitler and stage a coup. On 13 March 1943, returning from his easternmost headquarters FHQ Werwolf near Vinnitsa to Wolfsschanze in East Prussia, Hitler was scheduled to make a stop-over at the headquarters of Army Group Centre at Smolensk. For such an occasion, von Tresckow had prepared three options:

# Major Georg von Boeselager, in command of a cavalry honor guard, could intercept Hitler in a forest and overwhelm the SS bodyguard and the Führer in a fair fight; this course was rejected because of the prospect of a large number of German soldiers fighting each other, and a possible failure regarding the unexpected strength of the escort.
# A joint assassination could be carried out during dinner; this idea was abandoned as supporting officers abhorred the idea of shooting the unarmed Führer.
# A bomb could be smuggled on Hitler's plane.

Von Tresckow asked Lieutenant Colonel Heinz Brandt, on Hitler's staff and usually on the same plane that carried Hitler, to take a parcel with him, supposedly the prize of a bet won by Tresckow's friend General Stieff. It concealed a bomb, disguised in a box for two bottles of Cointreau. Von Tresckow's aide, Lieutenant Fabian von Schlabrendorff, set the fuse and handed over the parcel to Brandt who boarded the same plane as Hitler.

Hitler's Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor was expected to explode about 30 minutes later near Minsk, close enough to the front to be attributed to Soviet fighters. Olbricht was to use the resulting crisis to mobilise his Reserve Army network to seize power in Berlin, Vienna, Munich and in the German Wehrkreis centres. It was an ambitious but credible plan, and might have worked if Hitler had indeed been killed, although persuading Army units to fight and overcome what could certainly have been fierce resistance from the SS could have been a major obstacle.

However, as with Elser's bomb in 1939 and all other attempts, luck favoured Hitler again, which was attributed to "Vorsehung" (providence). The British-made chemical pencil detonator on the bomb had been tested many times and was considered reliable. It went off, but the bomb did not. The percussion cap apparently became too cold as the parcel was carried in the unheated cargo hold.

Displaying great sangfroid