Tuesday, April 23, 2013

What is Resistance?


     One of the more fascinating issues in the multifaceted composition of the Holocaust narrative is the resistance movement in Nazi Germany.  Popular tropes of resistance against the Nazis are commonly depicted in Hollywood movies such as Defiance and Inglorious Bastards, the latter in which beautiful movie theater owners conspire with brave Americans to eliminate the entire Nazi leadership.  While these imaginations of the resistance sometimes exaggerate, they still help bring our attention to the true models of resistance such as the White Rose and Sophie Scholl.  What makes it so fascinating is the challenge to answer the question of, “what is resistance????”


    Digging deeper into the meaning of this word in the context of the Holocaust, the true meaning of resistance is much murkier.  For example, what is the difference between resistance, and opposition?  It is really resistance if one harbored resentment against the Nazis and nothing more?  Is that on the same level as an organized movement such as the ghetto uprising in Warsaw or in the death camps at Treblinka and Sobibor, where conditions were so bad that the “immediacy and current threats (the costs of inaction) [were] perceived as greater than repressive threats (the costs of action) and thus armed resistance occurred” (Maher 255)? These are the questions we must ask ourselves in an evaluation of resistance and opposition, and historians have agreed that there is a sliding scale between the two.  For our purposes, we will use the definition laid out for us by Matthew Stibbe, to create a “distinction between ‘resistance’—defined as politically organized action aimed that the overthrow of the National Socialist system and  ‘opposition’—defined as any type of behavior that was intentional non-conformist or that showed contempt for the Nazi regime and its policies” (Stibbe 132). One can quickly begin to understand the complexity of this lexical dilemma but if we understand the difference between the two, a more complete picture of the anti-Nazi movement will emerge.

            To add an even deeper level of understanding and controversy to this topic is the consideration of the resistance from a gendered perspective.  This may seem inconsequential to some but women actually have a rich history within the resistance movement that stretched from the very beginning of the Nazi Regime in 1933 to the end in 1945.  In this narrative, the same questions regarding resistance and opposition emerge from the larger narrative of the resistance movement.  Are the actions of opposition such as a man giving Ruth Kluger an orange in her book Still Alive, or Frau Haferkamp from Alison Owing’s interview’s giving food to Jewish POW the same as Sophie Scholl's proliferation of anti-Nazi propaganda? What is the difference between true resistance or requisite actions to feel better about not doing more to help?   In this presentation, we will show many different facets of the women’s resistance movement as a  part of the larger resistance against the Nazi regime. It is impossible to come up with a grand, unifying narrative for the resistance.  Thus we will provide a categorical understanding of opposition and resistance in their many forms.  We will provide information in several sections: organized movements such as the White Rose and Red Orchestra, opposition in everyday life and in the household, and resistance in concentration and death camps.

Sophie Scholl and the White Rose


            Sophie Scholl and her brother, Hans, have become heroic figures in the story of resistance in Nazi Germany.  Despite the tragic and sudden end to their young lives, the siblings managed to leave behind a lasting legacy of courageous resistance in the face of evil.  Their life story tells the tale of a young German girl and boy growing up during a turbulent and confusing period of history, struggling to balance life in Nazi Germany with their personal ideologies of morality.
Sophie Scholl during her formative years
Image courtesy of www.madameguillotine.co.uk
            Born during the interwar period, Sophie and Hans spent their formative years under the guidance of their freethinking Lutheran parents, Robert Scholl, a mayor and successful businessman, and Magdalene Müller, a nurse and lay minister.  As Hitler and the Nazis began to accumulate power and influence, the childhoods of Sophie and Hans began to follow a path in line with other Aryan children of the time, one headed toward Nazi youth organizations.  Hans rose in the ranks of the Hitler Youth, while Sophie participated in the Jungmädel, or Young Girls League, and eventually the Bund Deutscher Mädel, or League of German Girls (Vargo).  In the face of rising National Socialism, however, Robert insisted that his children not listen to Nazi ideology, but instead maintain their individual spirits and critical minds.  Initially, they disregarded their father’s warnings, but Sophie and Hans quickly became disillusioned by the bombardment of Nazi ideology that transcended all corners of society (Scholl).   They saw through the Party’s façade, recognizing its underlying darker fanaticism and hatred. 
By the mid-1930s, Sophie and Hans began to take actions opposing the regime.  Sophie was never enchanted by Nazi ideology, participating in Party youth organizations for recreational and social reasons rather than for ideological ones.  In fact, she rejected anti-Semitism entirely and continued friendships with Jewish children at school, despite Nazi pressures to do otherwise.  Hans’s discontent heightened, and he soon resigned from the Hitler Youth, joining a forbidden organization called the Deutsche Jungenschaft, or German Boys Federation, which provided relief from the oppressive regime of Nazism.  In 1937, Hans’s opposition activities and an alleged homosexual relationship attracted the attention of the Gestapo; the entire Scholl family was questioned and placed under suspicion indefinitely.  This scare solidified Sophie and Hans’s convictions of the Nazi Party’s villainy.  While fulfilling her required year of work for the National Labor Service by working on a farm, she solidified her religious and moral beliefs (Vargo).  Before attending university, Sophie and Hans embodied opposition, performing acts of dissent against the Third Reich (Henderson).  However, once the pair became students at Munich University, their acts of opposition evolved into full-fledged resistance, as they organized actions intended to confront the regime head-on. 
(Left to right):   Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl,
and Christoph Probst in Munich, 1943
Image courtesy of www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org
            By 1942, Sophie and Hans had met likeminded individuals at the University, students and professors eager to speak out against Nazism.  Among their acquaintances were Traute LaFranz, Katharina Schüddekopf, Marie-Luise Jahn, Alex Schmorell, Christl Probst, Willi Graf, and Kurt Huber, their philosophy professor at the University.  Members of the group – eventually named the White Rose – shared similar socioeconomic statuses and religious beliefs.  Many came from affluent families and had comfortable lives within German society, sheltered from the chaotic social transformations that overwhelmed the public during Hitler’s reign.  Their resistance was an act of choice, not one of survival.   Similarly, members held compatible religious beliefs; most followed the Catholic faith intently, and while Sophie and Hans were Lutheran, they held Catholic teachings in high regard (Vargo).  The members’ shared religious beliefs permeated the White Rose’s central moral messages. 
            The White Rose printed and distributed its first leaflet in June 1942.  Its first sentence read, “Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as to allow itself to be ‘governed’ without any opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to basic instincts.  It is certainly the case today that every honest German is ashamed of his government” (Dumbach).  The messages were intended for the German intelligentsia, who the White Rose believed held the political potential to oppose the Nazi Party.  Each leaflet called for people to make copies and further disseminate their messages.  Quoting renowned philosophers like Schiller, Goethe, and Aristotle, and citing biblical themes, the White Rose’s leaflets initially underscored the wrongs of fascism in Germany.  As the group’s efforts strengthened and its members grew more frustrated with Nazism, the final leaflets began to make direct calls to resistance (Michalczyk).  Within weeks of the first leaflet, three more were distributed under the name “Leaflets of the White Rose.”  By February 1943, the White Rose had written two more leaflets titled, “Leaflets of the Resistance Movement in Germany,” which encouraged Germans to liberate themselves from oppression by asserting their inalienable democratic rights of free speech.  By the time the movement neared its fatal end, it had distributed leaflets of resistance to thousands of influential community members – including writers, professors, doctors, and businessmen – in cities across Germany and Austria (Henderson).  Yet, due to their risky resistance campaigns – including a scheme to graffiti public walls with the phrase “Down with Hitler!” – Sophie and Hans soon jeopardized their own safety, growing more reckless as the War progressed. 
The White Rose's first leaflet
Image courtesy of www.holocaustresearchproject.org
As the two Scholls distributed copies of the sixth leaflet around Munich University campus on February 18, 1943, they were caught in the act by a school custodian and soon after arrested by the Gestapo.  Four days later they were put on trial at Munich’s Palace of Justice.  The trial – a formality given the fact the siblings faced certain execution – was no small matter; Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS and the Gestapo, oversaw the procedure, intent on warning students against any forms of resistance.  Sophie, Hans, and their friend Christoph Probst were indicted for treason and sentenced to death.  During the proceedings, Sophie interrupted Roland Feisler, the notoriously cruel Nazi judge overseeing the trial, shouting, “Somebody had to make a start…What we said and wrote are what many people are thinking.  They just don’t dare say it out loud!”  Later that afternoon, the three friends were killed by guillotine.  Hans’s last words: “Long live freedom!” (Dumbach).

Gender Roles: Oppression or a Cover-Up?

Typical Nazi Propaganda: The Ideal Nazi Woman 






     “(A woman's) first and foremost place is in the family, and the most wonderful duty which she can take on is to give her country and her people children, children which carry on the success of the race and assure the immortality of the nation." Joseph Goebbels’, the State Minister for People's Enlightenment and Propaganda, words couldn’t have made the Nazi position on women more clear; that they belonged at home, having and raising children. The Nazis forced strict gender roles on women through propaganda, laws that kept them out of the workplace, and through rewards for marriage and childbirth. The Nazis made sure to keep women out of the political sphere and promoted the “ideal woman”, one whose place was at home, cooking, cleaning, raising good Nazi children, and taking care of her husband. A woman’s place was out of the public eye and tucked away in the private sphere of her own home. Many women accepted their roles and became party of the machinery that allowed the Nazi Party to flourish. However, some women took these oppressive gender roles and stereotypes and turned them right back on the Nazis by using them to cover up their participation in resistance.

The stereotypical view of women as passive housewives that obeyed their husbands’ orders prevented the Nazis from suspecting women of activities of resistance.. Women resistors were fully aware of these highly propagated stereotypes and therefore were able to take advantage of them carrying out their work without attracting attention. Women resistors had varying motivations for participating in resistance, but it would be incorrect to define their motivations as feminist or a response to the oppressive stereotypes placed upon them. “Most women resistors were members of clandestine networks and subcultures led by men and guided by a particular ideology or set of beliefs that the defeat and overthrow of the Nazi regime was more important than any other contemporary political goal, including progress towards the emancipation of women…” (Matthew Stibbe, p. 129) Although women’s resistance was not a direct response to the Nazis oppressive policies towards women, women used the Nazi’s dismissal of women’s abilities and courage to successfully participate in resistance.



Examples of Women Taking Advantage of Gender Stereotypes

The gender roles of wife, mother, and housekeeper imposed by the Nazis acted as a disguise under which women resistors were able to work. Women were able to successfully use their homes for secret meetings, or as hideaways for political fugitives or Allied airmen because of the stereotype of women being nothing more than homemakers.  Lucie Aubrac, a member of the French resistance, and Diet Eman, who worked with the Nazi resistance in Holland, are examples of women who used such tactics. Lucie used her appearance as a mother, emphasizing her duty as a wife and raising her children to cover up for secret meetings between her husband and other resistance members. Meanwhile, Diet hid Jews, downed English pilots, and others considered German enemies (Amber McDonald).

 Nazi men also saw women as weak, simple-minded, and beneficial only as bearers of the next generation. Women played into the stereotype of simplemindedness when caught in order to be found innocent or to have their husbands released from prison. Lucie, for example, pretended to be pregnant and used the social taboo of an unmarried, pregnant woman to claim that hr husband needed to be released so that she could marry him. Because of her gender they did not investigate her interest in the release of her husband. Diet also used this tactic. When caught by the Gestapo with a fake identification she portrayed herself as extremely unintelligent in order to be found innocent. (Amber McDonald) 

The Nazis didn’t believe that women were courageous enough to take on some of the most dangerous jobs as couriers and saboteurs and thus would not stop and search them. Women, like Diet and Lucie, were able to type up and distribute illegal pamphlets and forged identification documents and act as couriers for underground resistance groups because of the Nazi’s dismissal of women’s courage. Women took advantage of gender expectations and stereotypes to actively participate in resistance right under the Nazis’ noses. (Amber McDonald)



For more information on Lucie Aubrac: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucie_Aubrac


For further reading on Diet Eman:

Eman, D., & Schaap, J. C. (1999). Things we couldn’t say. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans.




concentration camps josh

http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/33d/projects/resistance/WomenResistRosie.htm

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Annotated Bibliography



Amber McDonald: Women’s Resistance Through Gender Roles. (n.d.). Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Holocaust. UC Santa Barbara, Fall 2005. Retrieved March 23, 2013.

Dumbach, Annette, and Jud Newborn. Sophie Scholl and the White Rose. Oxford: Oneworld, 2006.

Henderson, Simon. “The White Rose and the Definition of ‘Resistance’.” History Review 53 (2005): 42-27.

Maher, T. V. “Threat, Resistance, and Collective Action: The Cases of Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz.” American Sociological Review 75, no. 2 (April 1, 2010): 252–272.

Michalczyk, John J, and Franz Josef Müller. “The White Rose Student Movement in German: Its History and Relevance Today.” In Resisters, Rescuers, and Refugees: Historical and Ethical Issues, 49-57. Kansas City, MO: Sheed & Ward, 1997.

Scholl, Inge. “Introduction: The Legacy of the White Rose.” In The White Rose: Munich, 1942-1943, ix-xiv. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1970.

Vargo, Marc E. Women of the Resistance. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012.