9 - The Solitary Witness: No Mere Footnote to Resistance Studies

Summary

There is general agreement that, by contrast to the resistance movements in the occupied countries and outside Germany, there was no one German resistance movement. As Richard Löwenthal has rightly pointed out, the Nazi dictatorship in Germany, being native (bodenständig), came closer than elsewhere to approximating the exercise of total control. All the more was resistance in Germany bound to be “resistance without 'the people'” (Hans Mommsen); the resisters were “'strangers' among their own people.”

I am of course aware of the fact that in turn the viability of totalitarianism as a concept has been increasingly questioned, even among non-Marxist scholars. But if total control was not in fact fully realized in Nazi Germany, if we can talk of a “polycracy,” and if there were pockets of privacy - more than Robert Ley's “person asleep” - the dynamics of Nazism, the party's and the state's claim to rule, were totalitarian. Moreover, of course, the identification of the Nazi regime with the national cause before - and even more strongly after - the outbreak of the war discouraged the formation of a resistance movement and deprived resisters of what Barrington Moore called that “social support” which was available, at least latently, to resistance movements elsewhere.