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Annedore Leber, trans. By Rosemary
O’Neill, Conscience in Revolt: Sixty-Four Stories of Resistance in Germany,
1933-45 (San Francisco: Westview Press, 1994).
I found this paperback clearance priced at $5. This
is a book that is part history, and partly inspirational. It tells in a
series of vignettes the stories of 64 Germans who resisted the Nazis and
paid the ultimate price for it. Some are famous, some are not. Many of
these sketches quote from their letters and diaries as they faced death:
Eastern Front soldier Michael Kitzelmann was horrified by what he saw done
in Poland after the German invasion, and quickly became an opponent of
the regime. He was eventually executed for undermining morale. From his
diary, as he awaited execution:
I pray to Jesus the Crucified, who has led the way through
the most bitter pain. And He answers me: "If you will be My disciple, take
up your cross and follow me.!"
But I appeal to Him: "Lord, I am still so young, too young
for such a heavy cross; I have not lived my life, all my hopes, plans and
aims are unfulfilled." And he says: "Behold, I too was young, I had yet
to live my life, and as a young man I carried to cross and sacrificed my
young life."….
Now I live the life of a hermit. My day’s work consists
of praying, reading the Bible, occasionally scribbling something in my
diary or writing letters. It is very painful, this separation from life,
from the past, from all fond hopes and plans and particularly from my nearest
and dearest. It is terribly hard to submit wholly to God’s will in such
agonising circumstances; but the only attainable comfort is to hold out
to the end despite all suffering….[pp. 30-31]
Motivations were varied: some were young socialists; some
were conservatives, appalled by the horrors of what the Nazis were doing
in the name of the German government; most were Christians who recognized
the Nazi movement for what it was. From the Nationalist Party’s Ewald von
Kleist-Schmenzin’s 1932 pamphlet against the Nazis:
Religion alone stand between us and National Socialism,
and always will. We believe that faith in God and obedience to His Word
must permeate our public life; National Socialism holds a fundamentally
different view, and let me say that questions of dogma have nothing to
do with it.
What it comes to is that Hitler regards as the basis of
policy— the fact that he may occasionally say something else does not alter
the case—the race and its demands. This is a crude form of materialism,
and quite incompatible with Christianity. According to his theories, it
is the duty of the state to encourage not ability, but racial characteristics.
He reduces the state to the level of a cattle-breeder, and shows that he
is quite incapable of understanding its character and obligations….
What have we in common, spiritually, with National Socialism?[p.
168]
Many of these were men and women whose only crime was to
speak against evil, but many were men and women of action as well. Some
were participants in the von Stauffenberg plot against Hitler. One of the
socialists, Anton Schmaus, expected problems from the SA (brownshirts)
early in the Nazi regime:
[T]he SA forced their way into the house late that evening.
They kicked his mother, who barred their way, and knocked her down. Anton
was woken by her cries for help and found himself at the top of the stairs
confronted by the SA. He told them to get out of the house, otherwise he
would shoot. They took no notice, and closed in on him; and so as a last
resort he pulled out a pistol. According to the police report of 5 July
1933, File No. IAdVI, three storm troopers were badly wounded and later
died in hospital and a fourth was fatally wounded by a shot from one of
his companions.[pp. 4-5]
Schmaus turned himself into the police, hoping for a proper
trial. The SA demanded Schmaus from the police, who still had the courage
to refuse the SA demand. The police escorted Schmaus to Berlin police headquarters,
but along the way, 30-40 SA surrounded Schmaus and his police escort, and
shot and killed him.
The individual steps forward from the ranks to sacrifice
himself for others: this is the theme which emerges from the photographs
taken at the trial, which underlies this whole story of resistance to tyranny,
which is the embodiment of the Christian spirit and which finds expression
in the great part played by the Christian Churches in the struggle with
National Socialism.
After describing the formation of a movement that called
itself "Protestant National Socialists" or sometimes "German Christians,"
Leber describes how the Nazis took advantage of a widespread desire within
Protestant Germany to unify the existing denominations:
But it soon became clear that [the Nazis] regarded the
Churches as useless bourgeois institutions and merely hoped to exploit
them for their own purposes and to present the picture of the progressive
assumption of power in a pseudo-Christian frame.... In May 1934, at a synod
in Barmen, the Confessional Church was founded. This was not a territorial
Church, but a movement within the Protestant Church to counter the false
doctrines which threatened it. At this point the regime dropped even the
"German Christians" and from then on state measures were directed not at
the reconciliation of the Church with the National Socialist Weltanschaung,
but at the subordination of all things Christian.
The attempt to oppress the Catholic Church was at first
a little more circumspect and the negotiations which followed the Reich
Concordat of 1933 gave some protection for the time being. But attacks
on the Church, and the persecution of those who professed allegiance to
it, steadly increased; and the Papal Encyclical With Grave Concern,
which was read to the faithful from the pulpits in 1937, was tantamount
to a declaration of war. Both Churches suffered confiscation, restriction
and persecution, and both challenged the policies and ideologies of the
state. They opposed the biological creeds and the idolising of the German
people. They protested against the Oath of Allegiance and its claim to
impose unconditional obedience not to God, but to man, and against the
anti-Christian teaching given to the young, the arbitrary methods of the
Gestapo, the horrors of the concentration camps and the ill-treatment of
the population of occupied territories. They also protested most violently
against the murder of incurables.[pp. 187-188]
Annedore Leber was there. She was the widow of the prominent
Social Democrat leader Julius Leber, executed by the Nazis.
Clayton's rating: This is a fascinating and powerful work,
well-written (or at least well-translated). It is history, and it
is inspiring -- evidence that even in the darkness of Nazi Germany, where
the full weight of the propaganda machinery of modern media was turned
to the task of enforcing ideological conformity, there were those willing
to do to fight against an evil that did not personally threaten them.
We owe it to those who died in the defense of human dignity to not let
these courageous men and women be forgotten. BUY THIS BOOK!
You can order it from amazon.com