Opposition, resistance and Germany at war
By 1939 the Nazi state had reshaped almost every German institution. Yet there were always Germans who refused to be reshaped. This final lesson covers two linked topics on the AQA spec: the opposition and resistance to Nazi rule, and the impact of war on the homefront. It also asks the question behind most 12-mark essays on this topic: did opposition matter, given that it failed to remove Hitler? Significance is not the same as effectiveness.
Forms of Opposition
Opposition under the Third Reich ran through five rough categories. Private grumbling: jokes, foreign-radio listening, refusing to give the Nazi salute. Subcultural resistance: youth movements like Edelweiss Pirates and Swing Youth that rejected Hitler Youth norms. Religious resistance: the Confessional Church, Catholic clergy, Bishop Galen's 1941 sermon against T4. Political resistance: KPD and SPD networks operating underground. Conservative-military resistance: senior officers and civil servants who came to plot Hitler's removal. None of these toppled the regime; together they show consent was never universal.
Opposition took five forms: private grumbling, youth subcultures (Edelweiss Pirates, Swing Youth), religious resistance (Niemoller, Bonhoeffer, Galen), political networks (underground KPD and SPD) and conservative-military plotting (Beck, Stauffenberg). The regime treated all five as treason — tens of thousands were imprisoned or executed by 1945.
Swing Youth
In Hamburg, Berlin and other cities, mostly middle-class teenagers from 1939 onwards rejected Nazi cultural norms by listening to American and British Swing jazz, dancing in mixed-sex couples, growing their hair long and dressing in Anglophile fashions. Around 6,000 people attended a Swing festival in Hamburg in 1940. The Swing Youth were not political in any organised sense, but they refused the Hitler Youth's choreographed culture. From 1940 the Gestapo arrested Swing Youth leaders; some were sent to camps and forced to wear shaved heads as humiliation.
Edelweiss Pirates
In the Ruhr and Cologne working-class districts, the Edelweiss Pirates formed informal gangs from the late 1930s. They wore the Edelweiss flower badge, sang anti-Nazi versions of folk songs, and physically attacked Hitler Youth patrols. During the war they distributed Allied propaganda leaflets. In Cologne the local Edelweiss Pirates sheltered deserters, escaped slave labourers and Allied airmen; in November 1944 they helped to assassinate the local Gestapo chief, and twelve pirates were publicly hanged in retaliation. The Edelweiss Pirates were a class-based protest movement as well as a generational one.
The White Rose
In Munich, a small group of university students and one professor formed the White Rose in 1942. Hans and Sophie Scholl, with their philosophy professor Kurt Huber and friends Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell and Willi Graf, produced six leaflets denouncing Nazi murder of Jews and disabled people. The leaflets were duplicated by hand and posted to addresses across Germany. On 18 February 1943 Sophie was caught throwing leaflets from a balcony at the University of Munich. Four days later she, Hans and Probst were sentenced to death by the People's Court and executed by guillotine. Huber and the others followed. The sixth and final leaflet was smuggled out of Germany and dropped over the country by Allied aircraft — making it the only Nazi-era resistance text to reach a mass German audience during the war.
Niemoller's Confessional Church kept independent Protestant theology alive; Niemoller himself was held in Sachsenhausen and Dachau from 1937 to 1945. Bishop Clemens August von Galen of Munster delivered a sermon in August 1941 publicly denouncing the T4 euthanasia killings; the regime suspended the official programme weeks later, although informal killings of disabled people continued. Dietrich Bonhoeffer joined the conservative resistance from his Confessional Church base, smuggling intelligence to Britain through the Abwehr. He was arrested in April 1943 and hanged at Flossenburg on 9 April 1945, weeks before the regime's collapse.
The July 1944 Bomb Plot
By 1943 a circle of conservative officers and civil servants had concluded that only Hitler's death could end the war. Their leader was Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a Wehrmacht staff officer wounded in North Africa. Their plan, Operation Valkyrie, used a contingency plan for the Reserve Army to take over Berlin in case of an SS uprising — subverting it for a coup against Hitler.
On 20 July 1944 Stauffenberg attended a briefing at Hitler's eastern headquarters, the Wolf's Lair in Rastenburg. He left a briefcase containing a primed bomb under the table and excused himself. The bomb exploded at 12:42 p.m. but the briefcase had been moved behind a heavy oak table support; four officers were killed but Hitler suffered only minor injuries. In Berlin, conspirators believed Hitler dead and began arrests under Operation Valkyrie. By evening the news was clear that Hitler had survived. Stauffenberg, General Ludwig Beck and three others were arrested and shot in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock that night. Around 200 conspirators were executed in the following months. Some were hanged with piano wire from meat hooks at Plotzensee Prison; films of the executions were shown to Hitler. Around 5,000 people connected to the plot or its sympathisers were eventually arrested.
The Wartime Economy and Speer
War transformed the German economy. Albert Speer, appointed Reich Minister for Armaments in February 1942, rationalised arms production: tank output rose from 4,200 in 1941 to 19,000 in 1944, despite Allied bombing. The price was paid by foreign labour. By 1944 around 7.5 million foreign workers (Polish, Russian, French) were forced to work in German factories — a quarter of the total workforce. They were housed in barracks, paid little or nothing, and often worked under starvation rations.
On 18 February 1943, after Stalingrad, Goebbels gave his ‘total war’ speech in the Berlin Sportpalast, calling for the full mobilisation of German society for war production. Cinemas, restaurants and luxury shops were closed; non-essential consumer goods stopped being made. Women aged 17 to 45 were required to register for war work. Rationing tightened: bread rations fell from 2,400g per week in 1939 to 1,700g by 1945; meat from 700g to 250g; fat from 270g to 80g.
From 1942 the RAF's Bomber Command and from 1943 the US Eighth Air Force conducted area bombing of German cities. Hamburg in July 1943 (Operation Gomorrah) suffered a firestorm that killed around 37,000 people in one week. Berlin endured a sustained Bomber Command campaign from November 1943. Dresden was destroyed on 13–15 February 1945 with around 25,000 deaths in two nights. By 1945 around 600,000 German civilians had died in Allied bombing, and 7.5 million were homeless. Whether area bombing was militarily decisive or morally justified remains historically contested; what is not disputed is that it transformed daily civilian life from 1943 onwards.
Refugee Crisis 1944–45
From summer 1944 the Eastern Front collapsed. As the Red Army advanced, around 12 million ethnic Germans fled westward from East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. Many died in the bitter winter of 1944–45. The Wilhelm Gustloff, a former cruise ship evacuating refugees from Gdynia, was sunk by a Soviet submarine in January 1945 with the loss of around 9,000 lives — the worst single maritime disaster in history. By May 1945 most of eastern Germany had been emptied of its civilian population, and the Soviet zone of occupation absorbed the surviving refugees alongside its own military operations.
Did Opposition Matter?
No internal opposition removed Hitler — the regime collapsed because Allied armies entered Berlin. But significance is not the same as effectiveness. The Edelweiss Pirates and White Rose preserved the idea that Germans could resist; Galen's sermon halted the official T4 programme; Niemoller and Bonhoeffer kept Christian dissent alive; Stauffenberg's bomb showed even at the heart of the Wehrmacht the regime was opposed. After 1945 these stories shaped how post-war Germany understood its responsibility — the Federal Republic adopted Stauffenberg's Bendlerblock as a memorial. Opposition mattered because it preserved an alternative Germany inside the Third Reich, even though it could not bring the Reich down.
Stauffenberg's bomb at the Wolf's Lair on 20 July 1944 killed four officers but only wounded Hitler. Stauffenberg, Beck and three others were shot at the Bendlerblock the same night; around 5,000 conspirators or sympathisers were eventually arrested. The plot failed in its immediate aim but proved that resistance reached the highest levels of the German military.