The German Resistance against Hitler and the Restoration of Politics

Abstract

In the first years after the war, contemporary historical research often turned its attention to the German resistance to Hitler. By emphasizing the Other Germany researchers sought to combat the belief that Germans as a whole had been responsible for the National Socialist dictatorship and its crimes, and that the dictatorship was a logical consequence of German history.' In addition to this apologetic tendency, an attempt emerged early on to see in the history of the German resistance a secondary legitimation for the existence of the two German states. What resulted were two portrayals of the resistanceone in the Federal Republic, the other in the German Democratic Republic (GDR)-that were essentially mirror images of one another. Only in the 1970s did this antithesis begin to subside. In West Germany, working-class resistance and the activities of the illegal German Communist party (KPD) above all drew increased attention. At the same time, historians in the GDR gradually indicated their readiness to exempt the bourgeois resistance from the verdict of imperialism and to accept the resisters, at least in part, due to their advocacy for peace. They were in no way willing to give up the claim that the KPD had played the leading role in the resistance.2 In the light of the current situation, these arguments have lost their rationale. Instead, the collapse of the German Socialist Unity party (SED) regime raises the question of why the Protestant and Catholic churches became, at least in part, places of refuge for the opposition under the communist system, while the church hierarchies, with few exceptions, engaged in no political resistance during the period of the Third Reich. At that time they confined their efforts to defending their own position, although there were specific differences between the comparatively unified stance of