Germans against Nazism was a timely Festschrift in 1990, published in honor of Peter Hoffmann in his sixtieth year. This still important twenty-fifth anniversary edition opens with a new introduction to the same collection of essays, along with a list of six books and two dozen articles and chapters that Hoffmann has published since the 1990 tribute. The original volume first appeared in a dawning era of post–Cold War liberalism and German unification, at a time when many were asking how long interest in National Socialism and the Holocaust would continue. Now, as some predict the end of that liberal era in light of recent political developments, the matter of resistance to tyranny, and thus the subject of these essays, has only become more topical. In recent decades, scholars have not moved any closer to a commonly accepted definition of the term resistance, and most historians now identify it as a range of behaviors—shades of gray—between resistance and perpetration. Germans against Nazism showcases the work of twenty internationally recognized experts in the field to reveal a wide spectrum of acts of opposition by Germans who, in various social settings, resisted Nazism to different degrees and in differing forms.

Whereas several chapters examine grass-roots resistance, others deal with resistance by political parties or military elites. Ian Kershaw's “Social Unrest and the Response of the Nazi Regime, 1934–1936” establishes the context for understanding resistance from the perspective of the regime, whereas Robert Gellately's “Surveillance and Disobedience” shows that the Gestapo's efforts to prevent disaffection and noncompliance from becoming large-scale resistance often relied on a stream of reports from Germans who denounced other Germans. Although it met organized and open resistance with brute force, the dictatorship remained sensitive to popular morale. This was why, as Kershaw writes, Adolf Hitler redirected more than seventy million Reichsmarks away from rearmament and toward the import of foodstuffs during the winter of 1935–1936. He followed this with a morale-boosting remilitarization of the Rhineland, which undermined military independence and swelled popular acclaim for his leadership.

This type of leadership, which included compromises aimed at maintaining popular morale and consolidating support for the Führer, persisted until the final phase of the war. The regime continued to make some concessions to preempt threats or ameliorate acts of mass nonconformity and protest by social groups other than workers, e.g., popular and intentionally public uprisings by Catholics to defend their school traditions. In a chapter on Protestants in southern Germany, Robert Ericksen examines one such episode: the protests against the formation of a Reich Church led by a Reich bishop loyal to the Führer. Rather than throwing church leaders into concentration camps, as he had done with leaders of political parties, Hitler appointed a Reich bishop to centralize his leadership over the churches. He quickly won the support of twenty-six Protestant bishops, but two of them, Hans Meiser and Theophil Wurm, refused to fall into line, choosing instead to mobilize their congregations in public opposition to joining their provincial churches to a Reich Church. Unable to turn the faithful against their bishops, party officials put Meiser and Wurm under house arrest and stripped them of their offices. This stirred up Protestant unrest to such an extent that, in October 1934, a few months after the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler himself intervened to release and rehabilitate the bishops. According to Donald Dietrich's chapter on Catholic resistance to Nazi eugenics, it was also popular opposition and unrest, braced by the public statements of Church leaders, that halted Nazi euthanasia.

In his chapter on “The Social Democratic Underground Resistance,” William Sheridan Allen shows why Hitler was sometimes unwilling to use brute force to get his way: historically, he argues, brute repression “risks recruiting even more adherents to oppositional movements, rather than achieving its intended goal of discouraging them” (192). Terror cut off organized, conspiratorial resistance, but Allen argues that the resistance of the SPD failed chiefly because it had acted according to the ground rules of traditional European underground movements, which the Nazi system had rendered ineffective. The range of actions discussed in this volume, particularly the two chapters on Jewish resistance by Arnold Paucker and Karol Jonca, illustrates the necessity of interpreting resistance in a variety of ways that depend on how the regime itself characterized different groups of people, as well as on the degree to which resources and opportunities were available to such groups. Martin Broszat's category of Resistenz is not discussed in the book, but there is some attention to the way in which cultural norms or sociocultural milieus did produce stubborn nonconformity—such as Ernst Hanisch's chapter on peasants and workers in the Austrian Alps, which illustrates Resistenz. Arguing that Nazism was based, for the most part, on mass mobilization, Hanisch writes that it sought to weaken or dissolve traditional loyalties within largely self-contained, agrarian Catholic communities, which acted as a bulwark against Nazi principles. Carrying on such traditions led to certain acts of “indirect resistance,” such as listening to foreign radio broadcasts. One Catholic later testified that the Gestapo would have “simply eliminated” them had it known about their activities—thus illustrating the pervasive lack of awareness during and after the war about the concessions the dictatorship had made to intentionally public acts of protest.

Jill Stephenson's fine essay in the book's section on the history of resistance studies provides the best consideration of the various ways in which one can construe resistance, pointing out that one reasonable definition would be that resistance comprises the acts that the regime perceived as resistance. National Socialism's efforts to achieve total control led to the politicization of much of the private sphere; yet, even small acts could and did prevent total politicization. Stephenson also concludes that “the weakness of the anti-Nazis lay not so much in their lack of skill or bad luck as in lack of numbers” (390). In his concluding reflections on resistance, Michael Balfour is skeptical that resistance in Germany could have changed the course of history, given that sympathy for acts of resistance within the Reich was generally limited.