Terror and dissent : towards the social structure of popular protest in the Third Reich 1941-1945.

This thesis explores the shape and form of acts of dissent committed by ordinary Germans between 1941 and 1945. Its purpose is to establish the motivations of individuals who contravened a draconian legal code which mandated the death penalty for even minor misdemeanour. In the period considered, German civilian courts sent over 15,000 people to their deaths. Specifically, it looks at the influence of the three milieux (the Socialdemocratic, Communist and Catholic) most antagonistic towards Nazism on those persons who confronted the Nazi regime. The thesis concentrates on the final four years of Hitlerian rule when Nazi terror was most arbitrary and violent. It makes use of an open-ended understanding of dissent and opposition first established by Martin Broszat in the Bavaria Project in the 1970s. Based on the empirical analysis of over three thousand Gestapo and police records taken from archive holdings in Düsseldorf and Munich, the thesis asks and provides answers to the following questions 1) Was political motivation a key factor in persuading individuals to become involved in oppositional actions? 2) Were opposition forms of action ‘circumstantial’ - that is a product of often spontaneous random reactions - rather than premeditated? 3) Did they follow from any specific known experiences and/ or a process of gestation? 4) Were those involved in such actions socially isolated ‘outsiders’, or were they a part of a distinctive social milieu or sub-culture? 5) Are sociological and geographical patterns of ‘everyday’ resistance perceptible? The thesis places renewed emphasis on the importance of terror, rather than consent, to the maintenance of Nazi rule. It locates both police and legal terror within a wider terror nexus which brought considerable pain and suffering to many hundreds of thousands of Germans.