The Restless Conscience: Resistance to Hitler Within Germany 1933-1945

This is quite a fascinating retrospective on some of the citizens of Germany who, throughout the 1930s and the Second World War, worked to help the Jews to escape and latterly to remove Adolf Hitler from the leadership of the Nazi movement. Using contemporaneous interviews from many of those related to these people, as well as an impressive selection of archive this doesn't just offer us a chronology of who did what, when and where as the German state fell almost effortlessly under the control of the fascists, but it focusses more on the activities of many people who were determined to do what they could to thwart or at least mitigate this regime. Some of the scheming and plotting will doubtless be more familiar, like the Von Stauffenberg plan made more famous later by Tom Cruise in 'Valkyrie' (2008), but it also shines quite a powerful light on the initial reservations of the German military that Hitler inherited as well as of many amidst the provincial governments around the country who sensed the ominousness of his rule. It raises questions about the approach taken by other European powers to the militarisation and industrialisation of Germany, and of just how by the commencement of hostilities against Poland it was clear that this was a man not to be trusted at home or abroad. To that end, even some of his most senior advisers - such as Admiral Canaris who ran the Abwehr, Adam von Trott and Axel von dem Busssche all conspired at considerable peril to the lives of themselves and their families to decapitate this increasingly heinous administration. It also dips it's toe into a world where officers of significance were in constant denial of the abuses being carried out in the name of the 'Herrenfolk' and indeed as many ended up facing summary justice, it's interesting that so many of the hangings and even the odd beheading, were carried out in the name of the people and their beloved Führer. One other suggestion it makes, which may well be as true now as it was then and for aeons before, is the human being's need for hierarchical leadership. Was this nascent nation really ready for democracy after decades of Imperial leadership and centuries before of feudal ones? Paraphrasing one contributor, how do you get shot of a government you don't like when every day it seems to be delivering success, improvement and prosperity to great swathes of a politically apathetic population who are all too eager to wave a flag and jeer a foe. The film researching here is comprehensive and I had never seen much of the trial footage as the authorities cracked down on those who dissented even theoretically, let alone physically. This is a very Euro-centric appreciation of some of the causes of the rise of these governments, and by staying focussed on the aspirations of the recently defeated German state balanced by the obvious reluctance of the French and the British to repeat their own tragically traumatic experiences from barely one generation earlier, this commentary goes some way to explaining, without hyperbole nor propaganda, that not every German was a Nazi and that many courageous people died trying to do the right thing in the face of overwhelming odds.