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 th...