24) Opposition and resistance in wartime

• wild cliques


  independent youth groups which Nazis were never able to completely eradicate
• White Rose group

  Student movement based in Munich, lee by Hans and Sophie Scholl, active in 1942 - 3

  Attacked Nazi policies and issued pamphlets and painted anti-Nazi slogans

  6 were executed in 1943
• Swing Youth


  MC youth who wore unconventional clothes, and listened to American Jazz music (banned) based in major cities
• Edelweiss Pirates


  working class youths who beat up Hitler youths, did anti-nazi graffiti and sang anti-Hitler songs, based in Rhineland and Ruhr
• Cologne group


  1944 - linked to an underground group that helped army deserters and escaped prisoners of war

  13 leaders hung in Nov 1944
• Bishop Galen (Catholic)


  Spoke out against euthanasia of disabled children in 1940

  led to it being halted in August 1941
• T4 campaign


  killed 270,000 through euthenasia
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Protestant)


  protested against treatment of Jews

  Executed in 1945
• KPD opposition


  In 1941, they had 89 secret cells in Berlin alone and other in other cities.

  22 communist cells destroyed in Berlin but 67 still remained
• How many oppositions arrested by SS

  7000
• How many oppositions executed by SS

  over 5000
• The Kreisau circle


  A group of army officers, university professors and aristocrats who talked discussed the possibility of assassinating Hitler.

  Only 3 meetings before being broken up by Gestapo
• Operation Valkyrie


  July 1944 - attempted to assassinate Hitler, involving Colonel and Stauffenberg, with a bomb in his headquarters but failed and executed.

  Led to the army being put under SS control to resist further opposition
• Nazis failed tactics at Stalingrad


  Soldiers blamed Nazis for the failure as there was not enough supplies so people starved and it became known as the 'rat war
• How many German died in the war?

  Around 6.5 million
• When did Germany surrender?

  May 1945