Volume 3, Number 9 · December 17, 1964
Plotting Against Hitler
By Walter Laqueur
Germans Against Hitler
by Terrence Prittie
Little Brown, 319 pp., $5.75
The Men Who Tried to Kill Hitler
by Roger Manvell, by Heinrich Fraenkel
Coward McCann, 272 pp., $4.95
In the library in which I work there is almost an entire roomful of books and pamphlets on German resistance against Hitler. When visitors are shown round our building they often express surprise that so many people have devoted so much time to writing so many books upon a nonexistent subject. Similar opinions have been expressed by widely read authors (such as Hannah Arendt and A.J.P. Taylor); they are commonly held in England and in the United States. But what of the thousands of German enemies of Hitler who perished in prisons and concentration camps? True, these dissidents were singularly ineffective, but is it just to ignore them altogether? The question of the German resistance against Nazism, its inspiration, aims, and effects, is one of the most complicated and vexing of modern history. Hence the flood of books about it in many countries. That the issue happens to be also of wider significance need hardly be stressed: the problem of resistance in a totalitarian regime has not, unfortunately, become a purely academic one since 1945.
Review, 1704 words
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