Extent of resistance to the Nazis

List resistance to the Nazis

• Political resistance

• Conservative opposition

• Religious opposition

• Youth resistance

• Everyday resistance

Describe political resistance

• Communists maintained underground presses and networks

• the Gestapo infiltrated and dismantled most cells.

• The SPD attempted exile leadership

• yet by 1935 political opposition was effectively crushed through imprisonment and exile.

Describe conservative opposition

• Some civil servants and army officers remained sceptical of Nazism, but active resistance was rare before the war.

• Most elites chose accommodation or passive dissent over open defiance.

Describe religious opposition

• The Confessing Church resisted Nazi interference in Protestantism

  • leaders such as Martin Niemöller were imprisoned (Sachsenhausen, 1937).

• The Catholic Church also protested:

  • Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (1937) denounced Nazi racism, smuggled into Germany and read from pulpits.

Describe youth resistance

• Groups like the Edelweiss Pirates rejected the regimentation of the Hitler Youth

• the Swing Youth embraced jazz and other “degenerate” forms of culture. By 1939

• these acts were small-scale but symbolic challenges to conformity.

Describe everyday resistance

• Defiance included

  • anti-Nazi jokes

  • absenteeism

  • refusal to salute.

• Such actions were widespread but individual, fragmented, and rarely coordinated.

Evaluate the extent of resistance to the Nazis

Resistance to Nazism before 1939 was limited, fragmented, and largely ineffective.

The Gestapo’s reach prevented broad-based opposition, while fear and repression discouraged organised movements.

Although moral and cultural defiance existed, especially among youth and churches, it never coalesced into a serious challenge to the regime.