Defying Hitler
The Germans Who Resisted Nazi Rule
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5.0 • 6 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"A terrifying and timely account of resistance in the face of the greatest of evils.”—Alex Kershaw, New York Times bestselling author of The First Wave
An enthralling story that vividly resurrects the web of everyday Germans who resisted Nazi rule
Nazi Germany is remembered as a nation of willing fanatics. But beneath the surface, countless ordinary, everyday Germans actively resisted Hitler. Some passed industrial secrets to Allied spies. Some forged passports to help Jews escape the Reich. For others, resistance was as simple as writing a letter denouncing the rigidity of Nazi law. No matter how small the act, the danger was the same--any display of defiance was met with arrest, interrogation, torture, and even death.
Defying Hitler follows the underground network of Germans who believed standing against the Fuhrer to be more important than their own survival. Their bravery is astonishing--a schoolgirl beheaded by the Gestapo for distributing anti-Nazi fliers; a German American teacher who smuggled military intel to Soviet agents, becoming the only American woman executed by the Nazis; a pacifist philosopher murdered for his role in a plot against Hitler; a young idealist who joined the SS to document their crimes, only to end up, to his horror, an accomplice to the Holocaust. This remarkable account illuminates their struggles, yielding an accessible narrative history with the pace and excitement of a thriller.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalists Thomas and Lewis (Shadow Warriors of World War II: The Daring Women of the OSS and SOE) provide an engrossing and accessible history of Germans who risked, and mostly lost, their lives opposing the Nazi regime, effectively countering the idea that "the German people followed Hitler as if one mass." The authors interweave stories of heroic acts of defiance by academics, blue-collar workers, and military service members, beginning their protagonists' stories before WWII, as with Mildred Fish, a Wisconsin teacher who married visiting German student Arvid Harnack; she helped organize an anti-fascist underground in Berlin, while he became a senior official at the German Ministry of Economics who leaked information about the Nazis to the Americans. Readers familiar with movements such as the White Rose and the various conspiracies to assassinate Hitler will appreciate having them placed in a broader context. The authors rely on both primary and secondary sources, although their sourcing, as when they reconstruct the thoughts of White Rose leader Sophie Scholl, is not consistently robust. Despite a paucity of insight into what led a few Germans to oppose the Nazis when the vast majority of their countrymen did not, this volume is an informative counterpoint to accounts of widespread German complicity with the Holocaust.
