The Forgotten Few

GERMANS AGAINST HITLER by Terence Prittie. 292 pages. Little Brown. $5.75.

By 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.

I 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 for the Jews, Father Bernhard Lichtenberg, dean of Berlin's St. Hedwig Cathedral, was sent to his death at Dachau. The gifted Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer joined the conservative anti-Nazi movement as early as 1935, was executed moments before liberation in 1945.

Many died for their religious beliefs. Paul Schneider, a Rhineland Protestant pastor who was several times imprisoned for ridiculing the Nazis and collecting money for the Jews, was finally tortured to death in a cell from which he was made to watch the execution of prisoners outside. Each time a man was shot, Schneider's voice thundered over the parade ground: "I have seen this! And I will accuse you of murder before God's judgment seat!"

The White Rose. Most touching and 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. Agents of the dread Gestapo carted them off to prison, later rounded up close to 100 of their friends. Condemned to death, Hans and Sophie never once lost their composure; just before he was beheaded, Hans cried out: "Long live liberty!"

As Prittie notes regretfully in this well-balanced, unemotional book, many Germans seem curiously ignorant about the opposition to Hitler; yet in the end it was that "other Germany," small as it was, that "put the German nation, so brilliantly efficient, so talented, and so lacking in the power of self-examination, on the road to finding its own soul."

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