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Since the end of the Second World War, historical research on German and Austrian resistance has steadily expanded, deepened and enrichened our understanding of the phenomenon. Like all healthy fields of research, though, mysteries and gaps not only persist but are constantly being opened up. This book has sought to add to that accumulated knowledge by attempting to tease further insights from the archives with quantitative analysis. Its results have both cast light on a number of important existing debates and identified new areas of study that call for greater research. The various threads discovered in earlier chapters are brought together in this concluding chapter, and some of the key implications of our findings for the understanding of serious resistance activities in Nazi Germany are discussed. One new thing that emerges from this analysis is a framework that for the first time allows the objective evaluation of the impact of serious resistance to be made, an approach which with simple modifications could be easily extended to the study of dissent, opposition and nonconformity.

This chapter provides an overview of some of the key personal and environmental characteristics of those who participated in serious resistance to the Nazi regime. It reminds us that as a group they were more than just the politics to which they subscribed. Moreover, the chapter describes a range of interesting phenomena: inter alia, the steady aging of resisters over the course of the regime, especially during the war; the dominance of blue-collar labour in resistance movements; and the small, though disproportionate, contribution of foreigners, the stateless and people of partial Jewish ancestry in the struggle to undermine Hitler’s state from within. The chapter also demonstrates the meaningfulness of analysing resistance by stage of life and gender. In particular, its analysis highlights the distinctiveness of two often overlooked types of resistance: juvenile and female.

In this chapter, we turn our attention to another feature of the resister’s story, one that has typically been less scrutinised and certainly is not as well understood: their experience once they had been arrested and entered custody. It was there in the interrogation chambers, cells and court rooms of the Nazi regime that the personal consequences of their actions were to be first painfully brought to bear. The chapter begins with an outline of the nature and structure of the Nazi legal system and how it evolved to deal with the most serious of political crimes it confronted: treason and high treason. It then moves on to explore aspects of the reality of the resister’s actual engagement with that system. In particular, the chapter considers the length of time it took to get from arrest to sentence, the type of charges resisters were likely to face, the verdicts they could expect, the determinants of the sentence they were ultimately to receive and what role, if any, the discretion of the judge presiding over the case would play in that process. The chapter also investigates a critical choice that all resisters in custody, irrespective of their background or motivations, had to make, a choice that would directly impact their and their co-defendants’ fate: should they cooperate with the authorities or not?

Despite the personal dangers involved, a remarkable number of Germans and Austrians chose to resist the Nazi regime. The aim of this chapter is to provide a succinct, yet comprehensive, overview of the myriad groups and organisations of differing political, religious and ethnic persuasions that took the fateful decision to resist the regime. The chapter identifies precisely when, where and with what frequency each of these groups carried out their serious resistance. While the chapter captures and highlights the amazing diversity of political and spiritual beliefs which provided the organisational context for, and motivation to, those who chose to engage in serious resistance, it also identifies the enduring importance of certain parties and groups – in particular, the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands or KPD) and Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands or SPD) in Germany and the Communist Party of Austria (Kommunistische Partei Osterreichs or KPO) and Catholic-Conservative-Legitimist organisations in Austria – in that struggle to bring down Hitler’s regime from within.

In this chapter, our analysis of serious internal resistance to Hitler’s regime begins with an examination of the overall structure and composition of that resistance from the inception of Nazi rule in January 1933 through to the collapse of the German legal system in early 1945. The chapter seeks to answer two fundamental questions in particular, one temporal and one geographic: namely, how did the levels of serious resistance change across time and what regions were most active in this resistance? Along the way, a number of secondary issues are also considered: inter alia, can a distinct periodisation of resistance be identified, how did the different phases of the war impact resistance activities, did the intensity of such activities in any location merely reflect its population size, and is it more appropriate to talk of the commonality or distinctiveness of regional resistance experiences? The answers to such questions gleaned from quantitative analyses of the available data on treason, and high treason shed new light on, and challenge aspects of, our understanding of the path of serious resistance within Nazi Germany. The chapter offers a new periodisation of serious resistance in Nazi Germany.