Sign up to access the complete lesson and track your progress!
Unlock This CourseBefore 1939 there was little open opposition to Hitler, and while Germany was winning the war most people stayed loyal. After the defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943, more Germans began to believe the war was lost and that Hitler was leading the country to ruin.
Even so, opponents were always a small minority. They are best seen as three different kinds: rebellious youths, students with ideas, and army officers with a plan to kill Hitler.
Key terms:
The Edelweiss Pirates were loose gangs of working-class teenagers, mostly aged 14 to 17, in industrial cities of western Germany such as Cologne, DĂĽsseldorf and Essen. Each town's group had its own name: in Cologne they were the Navajos. Many members wore a badge of the edelweiss, a white mountain flower.
The Nazis answered with arrests, head-shaving and labour camps. In November 1944, 13 people were hanged in public in Cologne without a trial. Several were teenagers linked to the Pirates, including 16-year-old Bartholomäus Schink. The Pirates annoyed the Nazis, but they were scattered, had no leaders or shared aims, and never threatened Hitler's rule.
The White Rose was a small group at the University of Munich. Its best-known members were Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie. Others included the students Alexander Schmorell, Christoph Probst and Willi Graf, and a professor, Kurt Huber. Some of the men had served as army medics on the Eastern Front and had learned of Nazi crimes there.
Between June 1942 and February 1943 the group wrote six leaflets and secretly posted or left them in cities across southern Germany. The leaflets told Germans about the murder of Jews in Poland, said the war could not be won and called on people to resist the Nazis without violence. In February 1943 members also painted 'Down with Hitler' and 'Freedom' on walls in Munich.
On 18 February 1943 Hans and Sophie scattered leaflets inside the main university building. A caretaker saw them and reported them, and the Gestapo arrested them. Four days later the People's Court, under the judge Roland Freisler, found them and Christoph Probst guilty of treason. All three were executed by guillotine that same day. Sophie was 21. Schmorell, Graf and Huber were executed later in 1943.
The White Rose did not start a rising. Most people who found a leaflet were too frightened to pass it on. But the last leaflet was smuggled abroad, and in 1943 British planes dropped copies of it over Germany.
The most serious threat came from inside the army. A group of senior officers and officials, including General Ludwig Beck and the politician Carl Goerdeler, believed Hitler was destroying Germany. By the summer of 1944 the Allies had landed in France and Soviet armies were advancing fast. The plotters wanted to kill Hitler, take over the government and make peace before Germany was invaded.
Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg carried a bomb in a briefcase into a meeting at the Wolf's Lair, Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia. He left it under the map table and slipped out. The bomb exploded and four men died, but Hitler lived, with burst eardrums and minor wounds. Another officer had pushed the briefcase behind a thick table leg, and the meeting was in a wooden hut, so much of the blast escaped.
Stauffenberg flew to Berlin, sure that Hitler was dead. The plotters now launched Operation Valkyrie, but hours had been lost while they waited for news. They did not take control of the radio stations. When it became clear that Hitler was alive, officers in Berlin stayed loyal to him. Stauffenberg and three others were shot that night.
Hitler's revenge was savage. About 7,000 people were arrested and nearly 5,000 were executed, many after show trials in the People's Court. Field Marshal Rommel, who was linked to the plotters, was forced to kill himself. The army lost what was left of its independence, and Himmler and the SS gained even more power. No further attempt was made to remove Hitler.
The Gestapo and its informers found opponents quickly, as the caretaker in Munich shows. Punishments were swift and terrifying. Opponents had no newspapers or radio, so most Germans never heard their message. Nazi propaganda called them traitors who were stabbing their country in the back in wartime.
The groups were small, cut off from each other and wanted different things. Teenagers and students had no weapons. Only the army had the power to remove Hitler, yet most officers kept their oath of loyalty to him. The July plotters also had bad luck, hesitated at the key moment and got no help from the Allies, who demanded Germany's unconditional surrender.
Many Germans also still supported Hitler, or felt it was their duty to defend their country in wartime. Opposition grew during the war, but it never became a mass movement.
Do not treat the three groups as one movement. They never worked together. Do not say the Edelweiss Pirates or the White Rose tried to kill Hitler: only the army plotters did. And do not write that the July Bomb Plot failed just because of bad luck. The slow, unsure action in Berlin and the loyalty of other officers mattered as well.
Extract A (a practice extract written for this lesson, in the style of a modern history textbook)
The plotters of July 1944 bungled their one real chance. Stauffenberg, rushed and flustered, primed only one of his two bombs. He then fled without checking that Hitler was dead. In Berlin his fellow officers dithered for hours, waiting for news instead of seizing the radio stations. By the evening, troops loyal to Hitler had taken back control, and the whole clumsy plot had collapsed in less than a day.
(a) What impression does the author give about the July Bomb Plot? You must use Extract A to explain your answer. [6 marks]
The author gives the impression that the July Bomb Plot was badly carried out and failed through the plotters' own mistakes. This is shown by the language. The verb 'bungled' and the adjective 'clumsy' suggest the plotters were careless, while 'rushed and flustered' makes Stauffenberg sound panicky and 'dithered for hours' makes the officers in Berlin sound weak and unsure. The author has also chosen to stress only errors: one bomb primed out of two, no check that Hitler was dead, and the radio stations left alone. The author leaves out the plotters' courage, the danger they faced and the bad luck that saved Hitler, which makes them seem simply incompetent.
What lifts this to the top level: it names one clear impression and proves it from the author's choice of words, what the author stresses and what the author leaves out.
Do not use this question to tell the story of 20 July 1944. Every mark is for what the author is doing. Begin with 'The author gives the impression that...', quote short loaded words such as 'bungled' and 'dithered', say what each one suggests, then finish with what the author chose to stress and what was left out.