~ Hitler Policy Notes ~
General Opposition:
o
Recently,
much more attention focused on opposition by historians
o
Grumbling to
general political activism to threatening resistance
o
Dissent about
lack of wage increases, increased working hours, compulsory activities, and the
subordination of consumer interests to rearmament
o
Discontent
was low compared to resistance of peasantry in Soviet Union
o
Grumbling
sparked by economic conditions, not fundamental reservations
o
Preferred
Hitler to the Weimar Republic
Youth Opposition:
o
Growth of
social deviance that threatened to undermine re-education of youth
o
Edelweiss
Pirates – antagonist to authority and Hitler Youth, whose patrols they would
ambush and beat up
o
Slogan was
‘Eternal War on the Hitler Youth’
o
Supported the
Allies during war and offered help to German army deserters
o
Swing
movement was provocative and as jazz was ‘negro music’ it was degenerate
o
Lacked the
organizational edge to be anything more than an embarrassment to the regime
o
Social
deviance was never a serious opposition
Church Opposition:
o
Catholics
protested to replacing crucifixes with portraits of Hitler in Catholic schools
o
Opposition to
regime’s euthanasia program from 1939
o
Nazify
schools and euthanasia were temporarily suspended
o
Protestant
opposition less likely to succeed than Catholic, due to fragmentation and
division
o
Catholic
church was centralized with considerable capacity for exerting pressure
Party Opposition:
o
Communists
and Social Democrats
o
Failed badly
o
SPD voted
against Enabling Act, so funds seized and exiled
o
Underground
members produced rebellious propaganda
o
Gestapo had
success in identifying and eradicating opposers
o
KPD
activities were banned after Reich fire
o
Produced over
1 million anti-Nazi leaflets between 1933 and 35
o
10% of whole
Communist membership were killed
o
Thälmann, the
leader of the KPD was arrested in 1933
o
Communists
impeded by external constraints such as the foreign policy of Stalin and the
Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact
o
Not until
1941, when Hitler invaded the USSR that Communists retorted
o
Strongest
form of resistance was the attempt to remove the regime all together
o
Only done by
a coup as all the constitutional channels had been blocked by Hitler’s ‘legal
revolution’
o
Reason for
the failure of an armed resistance – there was simply no depth in numbers to
offset the failure of individual attempts like the Stauffenburg bomb plot
o
General Beck
tried to persuade the General Staff to remove Hitler in 1938, and also urged
the British government to resist Hitler’s demands for the Sudetenland
o
Rommel
participated in a plot against Hitler’s life
o
Conservatives
wanted to replace Hitler’s regime with a more democratic one to negociate an
armistice with Allies
o
Would be no
November 1918, since Hitler was head of state and not open to any attempt to
deal
o
Allies
insisted on an unconditional surrender thereby removing an important component
from the campaign of the resistance movement
Prevention Opposition:
o
Enabling Act
o
Law against
the formation of political parties (single party state)
o
Totalitarian
state that eradicated institutions with formal expressions of dissent and
opposition
o
Propaganda
o
Nazism could
be removed only by conquering armies, not by internal revolution
o
Banned Jazz,
left-wing art and literature, and modern art
o
Public
hanging of Edelweiss Pirates
o
SS and SA to
pick off individual manifestos and anti-Nazi behavior
o
Concentration
camps
o
Gestapo
o
Opposition
did develop in such a variety of forms indicating the totalitarianism was only
partly successful
o
Volksgemeinschaft
was not achieved
o
SPD fell from
14,000 in 1935 to 3800 in 1938 due to Gestapo arrests
o
1942 and 1944
Gestapo goes through with a relentless crackdown of Communist rebels and
cripples the organization
o
The basic
Gestapo law passed by the government in 1936 gave the Gestapo carte blanche to
operate without judicial oversight. The Gestapo was specifically exempted from
responsibility to administrative courts, where citizens normally could sue the
state to conform to laws.
o
A further law
passed later in the year gave the Gestapo responsibility for setting up and
administering concentration camps.
o
Gestapo woke
up people in the middle of the night and put them in court . Made citizens sign
a paper pleading guilty often by torture
o
Gestapo was
limited in numbers and depended on denunciations rather than spying directly on
people.
Establishment:
o
Opposition of
KPD
o
Youth
o
Church
o
Methods to
deal – Gestapo
o
Not many
people
