The Good Germans: Resisting the Nazis, 1933–1945 by Catrine Clay (review)

Catrine Clay's book on the German resistance to the Nazi regime sets out to tell the story of the less well-known resisters, "people like you and me," in order to show that, in addition to the now famous resistance groups, "there were hundreds of thousands of other, unknown people acting at the same time" (3). She chooses six individuals on whose life stories she constructs her narrative history of the anti-Nazi resistance.

The six are: Bernt Engelmann, a well-known journalist and author in post-war West Germany; Fabian von Schlabrendorff, an army officer who was one of the few survivors of the military conspiracy behind the 20 July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler (and whose 1959 memoir, Officers against Hitler, is a well-known source for the topic); Rudolf Ditzen, better known as Hans Fallada, one of the most popular novelists of the Weimar republic; Irma Thälmann, daughter of the German Communist Party leader Ernst Thälmann, whose memoir of her father was published in the German Democratic Republic; the Prussian official Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, like Schlabrendorff a member of the conservative resistance; and the Social Democratic politician Julius Leber. This is not really "history from below" as most of these names are well known, at least in Germany, and the description of the 20 July bomb plot near the end of the book covers very familiar ground. Ditzen/Fallada is an odd choice in this company: his oscillations between not very successful attempts at accommodation with the dictatorship and intermittent acts of self-assertion are perhaps characteristic of many Germans' behaviour under the Nazi regime, but it is doubtful whether he belongs in a history of the resistance.

For readers unfamiliar with the relevant German-language literature (and the book is clearly aimed at a general readership), it provides a highly readable narrative of Irma Thälmann's experiences of the Nazi period, and her efforts to maintain her relationship with her imprisoned father (who was murdered in Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944), and a vivid portrait of Julius Leber, who survived years in concentration camps before being arrested again and executed in connection with the 20 July 1944 plot. Engelmann's life, growing up in an anti-Nazi working-class milieu in Düsseldorf, will also be of interest to readers of this journal, although his autobiography has already been published in English translation (and Clay garbles some of its details). There is also some useful information on resistance by the German labour movement interspersed in these narratives.

There are minor errors scattered through the book, most of which are only slightly distracting, but they start to become egregious two-thirds of the way through. Clay quotes a slightly bizarre letter from Hitler to Stalin, dated 14 May 1941, seeking to explain away any major troop movements near the Soviet border in June (237–38). Clay does not acknowledge that there are serious doubts about the letter's authenticity (no-one has ever seen the original) and she even cites the wrong (secondary) source for it: diplomat Robert Murphy's memoir Diplomat among Warriors is cited rather than the book What Stalin Knew by the former CIA agent David E. Murphy, where the letter actually appears. A page later, she states that German generals defied Hitler's order to shoot Soviet prisoners of war on the spot. Hitler's order applied to so-called "political commissars" and CPSU functionaries, not to prisoners of war in general. There is no evidence that the "Commissar Order" was resisted by the Wehrmacht; rather, it was generally carried out, and Soviet soldiers captured by the Wehrmacht had a mortality rate of 55–60 per cent within less than four years. Many were shot immediately, others were starved, worked to death, or died of disease in appalling conditions at the hands of the German army. The mass murder of Jews by Einsatzgruppen and police units on...