Protest in Hitler's "National Community": Popular Unrest and the Nazi Response (Protest, Culture and Society)

That Hitler’s Gestapo harshly suppressed any signs of opposition inside the Third Reich is a common misconception. This book presents studies of public dissent that prove this was not always the case. It examines circumstances under which “racial” Germans were motivated to protest, as well as the conditions determining the regime’s response. Workers, women, and religious groups all convinced the Nazis to appease rather than repress “racial” Germans. Expressions of discontent actually increased during the war, and Hitler remained willing to compromise in governing the German Volk as long as he thought the Reich could salvage victory.

Nathan Stoltzfus is Rintels Professor of Holocaust Studies at Florida State University. His most recent publication is Hitler’s Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany (New Haven: Yale, 2016).

Birgit Maier-Katkin is Associate Professor of German at Florida State University. She is author of Silence and Acts of Memory: A Postwar Discourse on Literature, History, Anna Seghers, and Women in the Third Reich (Bucknell University Press, 2007).