Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg in the German Resistance to Hitler: Between East and West

Abstract

Within a few months of Hitler's appointment as Reich chancellor (30 January 1933), opposition was driven underground. Illegally organized opposition was on the whole destroyed by the Gestapo (secret state police); opposition within the establishment (vice-chancellor von Papen, SA chief of staff Röhm) was suppressed in a round of murders; the rest was gradually intimidated, as in the case of the churches. The opposition surviving underground could not act effectively to change the regime. It became clear that in the Nazi police state opposition could not be effective without support from the principal non-Nazi force in the nation, the army.