Word: hitlers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Recognition, at last, for the heroic Germans who persistently op posed Hitler. See BOOKS, The Forgotten...
GERMANS AGAINST HITLER by Terence Prittie. 292 pages. Little Brown...
...July 20, 1944, when a group of army officers made their unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the Fiihrer, Hitler had been in power for eleven blood-soaked years. Why, ask historians, had no other Germans ever conspired before to overthrow the dictator? True, as Terence Prittie notes, history's most ruthless tyranny had reduced the German people to "docility, dumb ignorance and wrong-mindedness." What few non-Germans realize, and few Germans fully appreciate, is that individual men and women never ceased to risk and lose their lives in opposition to Hitler's totalitarianism-ineffectually perhaps, but heroically nonetheless...
...Accuse! Prittie, the Manchester Guardian's able, longtime (1946-63) Bonn correspondent, broadly interprets the opposition as encompassing not only Germans who plotted against Hitler but also those who tried "to help his victims, or just to defend their beliefs." While the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches were both ingloriously compliant, many individual churchmen in particular were outspoken foes of the regime. Clemens Cardinal von Galen of Miinster denounced the Nazis' euthanasia program from the pulpit, halting, at least for a time, the mass murder of feeble-minded and spastic children. After calling upon his congregation to pray...
...unsung of all were the children and youths who resisted the Nazis. Helmut Huebener, 17, was guillotined for writing some 20 pamphlets denouncing the Nazi destruction of Warsaw and Rotterdam. Hans and Sophie Scholl, a handsome brother and sister who seemed outwardly to be the outdoor-loving prototypes of Hitler youth, organized an underground at the University of Munich. Under the romantic name of the White Rose, they authored pamphlets eloquently attacking the regime. After one particular Nazi outrage, they openly distributed the leaflets around the university, even scattered them from rooftops in the vain hope of inspiring an uprising...