3 - Choice and Courage

Summary

The title of this essay reflects two components of resistance to any oppressive state: first, the cognitive choice to discover truth despite public control of the media; and second, the courage to act on that knowledge. As Willy Brandt has commented in his introductory remarks, a resister, by definition, takes serious risks to act illegally in a world where right has become wrong. What is a “risk,” and how can historians evaluate what counts as moral action in an immoral world? The answers to these questions have changed in the decades since World War II. Looking at women who opposed Hitler adds a new dimension to an inquiry that has become increasingly complex.

In the decades immediately following the war, many books, published in both Germanies, paid homage to the heroic Resistance, comprised of men who had organized underground cells, planned uprisings against the National Socialists, volunteered in the war against Franco's dictatorship, or opposed Nazism from exile. The Resistance seemed monolithic and masculine. This clean-cut concept of the Resistance mirrored the prevailing vision of Hitler's rule itself as powerful, organized, and centralized. But over the years another view of the Nazi state has emerged in the works of historians as diverse as Uwe Dietrich Adam, Reinhard Bollmuss, Martin Broszat, Hans Mommsen, and Edward Peterson. Similarly the term “resistance” lost its capital letter as research revealed many levels of resistance - perhaps one might even say resistances. As our new paradigms shift, a far more complex vision of both Nazi power and opposition to it emerges.