Who tried to stop Hitler?

[realFedUp]

Did anyone inside Germany try and stop
Hitler? Intellectuals? Scientists?
Religious leaders? Writers?

Love to have some facts.

[Oreo]

1. Failed assassination attempt in 1944

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3908431.stm

Hitler plot 'heroes' commemorated
Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager, one of the last survivors of the Stauffenberg plot against Hitler, commemorates the attack 60 years later
Plot survivor Philipp von Boeselager was at the commemoration
Germany's leaders have paid tribute to the plotters who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler 60 years ago.

At the spot where they were executed, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder commended their bravery, while President Horst Koehler laid a wreath.

On 20 July 1944, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg planted a bomb during a meeting at Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia, which is now Poland.

The bomb, in a briefcase, exploded but Hitler survived virtually unscathed.

[theboss]

5. A little late by then

And those who tried to kill him had ridden the gravy train with him for a decade. They simply thought he had lost his mind and was leading them to ruin by then.

I think the question was meant to be who tried to stop him during his rise to power.

[kick-ass-bob]

6. Someone even made a game (Avalon Hill?)

about the plot to assassinate Hitler.

I think that was the name of it.

[dolstein]

2. I believe there was an assassination plot

I think there were some German military officers who tried to assassinate Hitler.

[HereSince1628]

3. He was jailed in the 20's

does that count?

[Freddie Stubbs]

20. He was given a very light sentence (5 years) but only served 8 months

The judiciary was very right-wing at the time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch

[diamond14]

4. Here's a good link on the RESISTANCE....many many tried....(PHOTOS)

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/resisttoc.html


As we watch Professor Ward Churchill being dismissed from the University of Colorado, for speaking out against bush*....here is a story of RESISTANCE that is lacking in America today:


-----------------------------------------------

Professor Protests Dismissal of Jewish Law Professor
(November 26, 1940)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Prof. Mr. R.P. Cleveringa made the following protest after Prof. E.M. Meijers, a Jewish Professor of Law, was dismissed:


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The “Aryanism statement” and its aftermath—the dismissal of Jews from the governmental and public bureaucracies—sent a shock wave through Dutch public affairs and elicited various responses. Some of the responses quickly ebbed but others created a point of departure, from which many people began to consider various actions in resistance to the occupier. One of the most prominent protests was that of R.P. Cleveringa, a professor of law at the University of Leyden, who delivered a lecture to a class, that his Jewish colleague, Meijers, had taught until he was fired. At the end of the protest lecture, he laid a printed copy of his remarks on the lectern, so that the students could take and disseminate it. Cleveringa's lecture, in which he condemned the authorities explicitly, made a tremendous impression on the students. They declared a strike that very day and ferment erupted in other universities. The Germans responded by shutting down several universities and arresting several professors and students. Cleveringa himself spent eight months in detention and was released afterwards.

more here....
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/professor.html




Jewish partisans, including a song and dance group, in the Naroch forest in Belorussia. In addition to armed resistance, Jewish resistance also focused on spiritual resistance -- the attempt to preserve traditions and culture. Soviet Union



A group of Jewish partisans in the Rudninkai Forest, Near Vilna

[realFedUp]

7. The White Rose: A Lesson in Dissent

...thanks for posting that link.

[Freedom_from_Chains]

8. There was some resitance to the rise of Hitler

Though one of the problems was that by the time people began to see that there might be a problem developing the regime had so effectively censored communications among the people that it was difficult for such opinions to be expressed.

One organization that I think was active during this time, clandestinely of course, was called the white rose. I am however going from very distant memory but you might do a search on it and see if you come up with anything.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

9. In 1937-8 some German generals made contact with Britain

asking for help to overthrow Hitler in a coup. The U.K. wasn't interested at the time because they still attributed an unrealistic rationality to Hitler and hoped they could still preserve peace by dealing with him.

[realFedUp]

14. "unrealistic rationality"....gee that sounds familiar

oy.

[deutsey]

10. Pastor Bonhoeffer; the White Rose immediately come to mind

http://www.dbonhoeffer.org/who-was-db2.htm
http://www.jlrweb.com/whiterose/

Here's an overview of German resistance to Hitler:
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005208

[realFedUp]

12. That's right....Bonhoeffer

thanks.

[TexasSissy]

25. Interesting. n/t

[Wind Dancer]

28. Required reading.

This paragraph is taken from the 6th leaflet by The White Rose Society.

They address the words "Freedom and Honor", sound familiar?




"Freedom and honor! For ten long years Hitler and his coadjutor have manhandled, squeezed, twisted, and debased these two splendid German words to the point of nausea, as only dilettantes can, casting the highest values of a nation before swine. They have sufficiently demonstrated in the ten years of destruction of all material and intellectual freedom, of all moral substance among the German people, what they understand by freedom and honor. The frightful bloodbath has opened the eyes of even the stupidest German - it is a slaughter which they arranged in the name of "freedom and honor of the German nation" throughout Europe, and which they daily start anew. The name of Germany is dishonored for all time if German youth does not finally rise, take revenge, and atone, smash its tormentors, and set up a new Europe of the spirit. Students! The German people look to us. As in 1813 the people expected us to shake off the Napoleonic yoke, so in 1943 they look to us to break the National Socialist terror through the power of the spirit. Beresina and Stalingrad are burning in the East. The dead of Stalingrad implore us to take action. "Up, up, my people, let smoke and flame be our sign!"


Those leaflets should be required reading for those who are afraid to compare our current situation to the rise of the Nazi Party.

The PR campaign in the US has been so successful that people are willing to accept preemptive wars based on lies, torture, overturning existing legislation, detaining "enemy combatants" indefinitely without legal representation, and the list goes on and on.

People need to WTF up!

http://www.jlrweb.com/whiterose/leafsixeng.html

[Deep13]

11. soldiers

A decorated and disabled WWI officer named Klaus von Stoffenberg tried to kill Hitler with a bomb in a briefcase. He was hanged for the attempt. Also, I have heard that some officers tried to blow up Hitler's airplane, but the low pressure caused the timer to fail.

The regular army officers, made up mostly of Prussian aristocracy, considered Hitler a usurper believed his military policies were reckless. They hated him.

The film Cross of Iron briefly delves into the relationship between the officers and Hitler. Max Schell plays a Prussian officer determined to earn an Iron Cross in battle. James Coburn is a battle-hardened sargent from the working clas who already has an Iron Cross and thinks it is worthless. Both agree that they would be better off without the Fuehrer.

[realFedUp]

13. Was all the media controlled by the state?

[bloom]

16. "Germans knew of Holocaust horror about death camps"

Details of deaths of Jews and other groups in concentration camps were well publicised

John Ezard
Saturday February 17, 2001
The Guardian

The mass of ordinary Germans did know about the evolving terror of Hitler's Holocaust, according to a new research study. They knew concentration camps were full of Jewish people who were stigmatised as sub-human and race-defilers. They knew that these, like other groups and minorities, were being killed out of hand.

They knew that Adolf Hitler had repeatedly forecast the extermination of every Jew on German soil. They knew these details because they had read about them. They knew because the camps and the measures which led up to them had been prominently and proudly reported step by step in thousands of officially-inspired German media articles and posters according to the study, which is due to be published simultaneously in Britain and the US early next month and which was described as ground-breaking by Oxford University Press yesterday and already hailed by other historians....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,439168,00.html


What Americans knew in the 40's:

Morality aside, it is simply false to say the ICRC was "ill-informed" about the "horrifying reality of the camps." The American Red Cross files contain a collection of newspaper clippings that indicate it was well aware of events in Europe. Here are a few of the headlines of those stories:

"25,000 Jews Seized In Southern France," (New York Times, August 28, 1942);


"Jewish Children Interned by Vichy" (Chicago Sun, August 31, 1942);


"35,000 Jews Executed in Five Polish Towns," (New York Herald Tribune, March 21, 1943);


"50,000 Jews Put In Nazi Prison 'Die Like Flies,'" (Washington Times Herald, September 3, 1943);


"50,000 Jews Dying In Nazi Fortress," (New York Times, September 3, 1943);


"Nazi Slayings Near 250,000," (Baltimore Sun, September 22, 1943);


"Poles Report Nazis Slay 10,000 Daily," (Washington Post, March 22, 1944);


"1,000,000 Hungarian Jews Face Massacre, Hull Says," (Chicago Sun, July 15, 1944).

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/redcross.html

[realFedUp]

18. thanks for that info on media coverage....

oy.

[txaslftist]

26. I heard on NPR that Max Schnelling acknowledged this...

that most ordinary Germans knew what was going on in the camps and discussed it around the tables in the cafes.

[rman]

30. Pretty much yes, though at least Germans knew it was propaganda

the independent media consisted of foreign broadcasts that were heavily jammed by the German government and it was prohibited to listen to those anyway. also there were some small scale underground newspapers.

[diamond14]

15. Lessons for US today about RESISTANCE: Resisters, Rescuers, Bystanders

armed resistance, alleviation, evasion, paralysis, and compliance....how many here at DU are "Bystanders" today? It's a matter of conscience...



http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/resist.html

Resisters, Rescuers, and Bystanders:
An Introduction


The "Jewish reaction patterns" to a threat have taken five forms: armed resistance, alleviation, evasion, paralysis, and compliance. During the Holocaust, all five were a response to various incidents at various times. Jews, under duress, assisted the Nazi terror by becoming Kapos or by serving on Judenrat. Many Jews did not resist the "Final Solution," but many others did, and that resistance took many forms. There were many examples of armed and spiritual resistance in the death camps and ghettos which refute the myth that all the Jews walked to the gas chambers "like sheep to the slaughter." Though the majority of European peoples and nations can be faulted with inactivity, and even at times collaboration with the Nazis, there are many documented reports of the efforts made by individual non-Jews and whole nations who took great risks to save Jewish lives.


good link for all information about the Holocaust...
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/index.html

[deutsey]

17. "In societies under the post-totalitarian system,

all political life in the traditional sense has been eliminated. People have no opportunity to express themselves politically in public, let alone to organize politically. The gap that results is filled by ideological ritual. In such a situation, people's interest in political matters naturally dwindles and independent political thought, in so far as it exists at all, is seen by the majority as unrealistic, far-fetched, a kind of self-indulgent game, hopelessly distant from their everyday concerns...

"Yet even in such societies, individuals and groups of people exist who do not abandon politics as a vocation and who, in one way or another, strive to think independently, to express themselves and in some cases even to organize politically, because that is a part of their attempt to live in truth."

Vaclav Havel, 1978

[Ian David]

21. Early on, Hitler arrested Jewish men married to Christian women

Their wives staged huge protests outside the prison until Hitler finally relented and let them go. The understanding within The Reich was they would be rounded up again eventually anyway.

This was one of the points in the book "Hitler's Willing Executioners," by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. He makes the argument that the people had a voice that COULD have been effective if they had chosen to use it, as it was when the wives protested to get their husbands back.

I do not necessarily support that point of view.

In Germany they came first for the Communists and I didn't speak up
because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me--and by that time no one was left to speak up.

Martin Niemöller 1892-1984.

By the autumn of 1934, Niemöller's faith in Hitler has collapsed, and he formed the "Confessing Church", a Protestant group that opposed the Nazification of the German Protestant churches, the anti-Christian ideas of certain Nazi leaders, and Nazi racial doctrines.

The Confessing Church explicitly opposed the German Christians, proponents of the single all-embracing State-established "Protestant Reich Church," headed by Hitler-appointed Reichsbischoff Ludwig Müller.

On 8 November 1934, the Confessing Church held a rally of 20,000 at Dahlem, at which one of its leaders, a Reverend Dr. Koch, proclaimed:

We are fighting against the defamation of Christ and true Christianity. There are false prophets abroad in this land preaching the doctrine of blood and soil and racial mysticism, which we reject

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Niem%F6ller

See also:

Confessing Church
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessing_Church

German Christians
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Christians

"Protestant Reich Church,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_Reich_Church

Ludwig Müller
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ludwig_M%FCller&action=edit

1934
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1934

[realFedUp]

23. good info too. Thank you. n/t

[slor]

19. I believe there was...

an earlier attempt at blowing him up, prior to 1944. I think it was in Austria in the late 1930s by a lone man.

[Kellanved]

31. there were several attempts to assassinate him

About 40 in total AFAIR.

There was a German resistance, but it lacked real effectiveness.

However, names like "Kreisauer Kreis", "Weiße Rose" and the communistic red chapels should not be forgotten.

Also Germans in Exile, fighting to bring down the Regime - be it in the Uniform of the US army or in the ranks of the French Resistance.

The Court of Honour of the German Resistance Memorial Center:


http://www.gdw-berlin.de/index-e.php

[Igel]

22. The Russian writer Granin wrote a quasi-biography on a

scientist named Timofeyevsky. The other quasi-biographies Granin wrote are based on real people, and although I've never heard of this guy (I think he was a biologist) I suspect he was real enough.

Granin recounts the efforts made to make sure there was never officially enough heavy water: increasing quantities of heavy water were always in transit from one lab to another, and therefore not in anybody's inventory. (Timofeyevsky was researcher sent to Germany for training and research before WWII and forgotten about when hostilities broke out. German scientists kept him safe, and he only really hit trouble after the war and he returned to Russia.

[TexasSissy]

24. Famous quote that shows the danger ahead:

I've seen the quote worded differently over the years, and attributed to different people. Here are a few versions:

They came for the Communists, and I didn't object - For I wasn't a Communist;
They came for the Socialists, and I didn't object - For I wasn't a Socialist;
They came for the labor leaders, and I didn't object - For I wasn't a labor leader;
They came for the Jews, and I didn't object - For I wasn't a Jew;
Then they came for me - And there was no one left to object.

- Martin Niemoller, German Protestant Pastor, 1892-1984

The quote is from Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984), a Pastor in the Confessing Church, not by Bohoeffer who was
executed by the Nazis shortly before the end of World War II.
*******************************************
ALSO:
This quote appears in the Congressional Record 14 October 1968, page 31636:


When Hitler attacked the Jews I was not a Jew, therefore I was not concerned.
And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned.
And when Hitler attacked the unions and industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned.
Then, Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church -- and there was nobody left to be concerned.
***********************

The quote seems to indicate that there was at least not a massive effort to stop Hitler until it was too late.

[GOPBasher]

27. I've loved that quote.

Or the thirty different versions of it, anyway.

[radar]

29. Georg Elser in 1939...

...On November 8 1939, he attempted an assassination of Adolf Hitler on the occasion of the annual commemoration speech dedicated to the failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 9 1923, for which Hitler became famous.
Elser, a carpenter and worker in factories and quarries, had connections to several socialist or communist organisations, but did not act for them nor with their knowledge or support....
Nationmaster.com Encyclopedia: Georg Elser
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Georg-Elser

How was Hitler able to become Chancellor in January 1933?
http://www.johndclare.net/Weimar7.htm

Parallels To the Third Reich In The USA Today
By Christos Rudy, www.Heartcom.org
http://www.gvnr.com/65/editorial.htm

[FreedomAngel82]

32. Look up the

White Rose Society.

[Kellanved]

33. Have a look at this:

http://www.gdw-berlin.de/dauer/index-e.html?inhalt-e.php
http://www.gedenkstaette-ploetzensee.de/index_e.html

[rman]

34. yes, several attempts

There was a documentary on Discovery channel (Europe) about it. I don't remember the details but the most famous attempt involved a suitcase bomb that almost killed Hitler, the conspirators were high ranking military (and some politicians i think), they all got caught.

a google on "hitler suitcase bomb" brings up this:
http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_holocaust/chronology/1942-1945/1944/chronology_1944_18.html#top
"...The anti-Hitler conspirators were not well organized, but they managed to recruit Lt.-Col. Count Klaus von Stauffenberg, a courageous soldier who had lost an eye, a hand, and two fingers in war for his homeland. Stauffenberg plotted a coup and undertook to eliminate Hitler personally. When he was invited to a meeting with Hitler at an eastern Prussian outpost, he brought a suitcase containing a time bomb. His intention was to place the suitcase in the bunker where meetings with Hitler were usually held, and then to leave. The meeting was relocated to a retreat house made of wood, but Stauffenberg continued to seek an opportunity to implement his plan. He placed the suitcase under the conference-hall table, a short distance from Hitler’s legs, and left the room. At 12:37, a loud explosion was heard. Four people were killed and 20 wounded. The reason for the small number of casualties was that somebody moved the briefcase. Hitler was not seriously injured. Several conspirators, including Stauffenberg, were caught and shot at once; the others were given an opportunity to commit suicide and spare their families. Field Marshal Rommel, wrongly suspected of direct involvement in the conspiracy, was among the suicides; the Germans’ official communique reported his death as the result of a traffic accident. In the aftermath, 15,000 people were arrested and 5,000 executed. Several of the most famous conspirators were subjected to abuse and then strangled in an espeslow and brutal manner. By order of Hitler, their executions were filmed and shown to selected audiences as a warning."