Honourable Defeat, An - A History of German Resistance to Hitler, 1933-1945

The numbers were small, and their cause hopeless.

Scattered across the landscape that was Nazi Germany, the Resistance looked puny: too little, too late. And yet it was made of many heroic men and women who were not afraid to risk their lives to stand up to a regime they knew was wrong.

For those who have never known life under such a regime, it is hard to grasp the daily terror that makes an act of political graffiti a capital offense, that labels resistance “treason.”

Now, drawing on archival materials and on interviews with those few resisters who survived, Anton Gill brings their story to light.

Here are union leaders and businessmen, priests and communists, students and factory workers; above all, here are the only people who had any real chance at more than symbolic resistance: those in the Army, the Foreign Office, the Abwehr.

For these, obeying the dictates of conscience meant betraying the demands of government, and every day brought the risk of denunciation and death.