“To everyone, he seemed like the model officer; few knew that his conversion to Nazism was a sham.”

THE RULERS OF Nazi Germany tolerated neither dissent nor opposition. Yet despite the regime’s powerful state security apparatus and its insistence on total obedience, many of the Third Reich’s own citizens secretly (sometimes openly) defied Berlin. Hundreds of thousands of them would be arrested in the process; many would be executed.

Here, Greg Lewis, author of Defying Hitler, profiles just a handful of the many who put their lives on the line to stand up to the Nazis.

Hans Oster

What if Adolf Hitler had been assassinated in 1938? There would likely have been no invasion of Poland and no Second World War. This alternate history came close to becoming reality thanks to a plot hatched in the higher echelons of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence unit. The agency’s head, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, would go on to be one of the foremost resistors. From his headquarters, he secretly cultivated a corps of equally committed officers. They were led by Lieutenant-Colonel Hans Oster.

A devout Christian who opposed the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies, Oster believed that Hitler presided over a “revolution of the gutter.” With the Führer threatening to invade Czechoslovakia in 1938 – a move many feared would provoke war with Britain and France – Oster hoped to not just overthrow Hitler, but to kill him. After secretly compiling a list of political figures, military officers and economists who could form a new government, Oster quietly dispatched envoys to London appealing for support if a coup could somehow be carried out. Meanwhile, he organized a plan to have Hitler taken into custody the moment German tanks were ordered into Czechoslovakia. Secretly, he instructed the arresting officers to shoot the Führer and claim their prisoner had died in a gunfight.

Unfortunately for anti-Nazis like Oster, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain believed he could tame Hitler and, when he agreed at Munich to effectively allow German forces into the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia. In Berlin, the development was viewed as a diplomatic victory.

With domestic support for Hitler riding high, Oster was forced to abandon his coup. But he continued to work against the Nazis, even sharing Hitler’s plans for the invasion of France and the Low Countries with Dutch intelligence. His warnings were largely ignored.

As Hitler’s persecution of Jews increased during the war years, Oster smuggled many of those targeted into Switzerland disguised as Abwehr spies. An investigation into his office by the Gestapo revealed Oster’s activities. Arrested in the summer of 1944, he was hanged on April 9, 1945 just as the American army was approaching Flossenburg concentration camp where he was being held as a prisoner.

Kurt Gerstein

Both a conformist and a rebel, Kurt Gerstein was a devout Christian, but something of a joker too. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933, but was soon repulsed by its hostility towards the church and began to speak out. In fact, he once leapt to his feet during a Hitler Youth theatre production to openly criticize the play’s anti-Christian message.

His vocal protests quickly landed him in trouble with authorities. Gerstein was arrested in 1936, banished him from the party and even spent time in a concentration camp. Upon his release three years later, he found work in a potassium mine where he became a model employee. A good-citizen certificate from a local Nazi official led to his reinstatement in the NSDAP. In 1941, Gerstein volunteered for the SS. Although the decision bewildered his religious friends, some speculated that he enlisted to gather evidence of Nazi atrocities. Gerstein soon made two discoveries: The Nazis were committing mass murder in Poland, while closer to home the party had launched a secret euthanasia program. Codenamed Aktion T4, the scheme targeted the mentally-ill and intellectually disabled. Gerstein’s own sister-in-law was among the 300,000 victims of this murderous policy.

“I am on the trail of so many crimes,” he confided to a close friend.

When Gerstein’s knowledge of both medicine and engineering attracted the attention of the Nazi Institute of Hygiene, they put him to work in chemical disinfectants. That’s how in 1942 he found himself tasked with delivering a consignment of the the poison gas, Zyklon B, to a death camp in Poland. Unwilling to be party to genocide, Gerstein managed to destroy one of the canisters en route. Unfortunately, the rest got through. At the camp at Belzec, Gerstein personally observed the murder of a large number of Jews. Now both a witness and participant in the Holocaust, he tried to leak information about the Final Solution to the Allies and the Vatican, albeit unsuccessfully. In April, 1945, he surrendered to the French army and told them all he knew about the murder of European Jews. Branded a war criminal, he committed suicide in his holding cell while awaiting trial. A letter from a Swedish diplomat testifying to Gerstein’s efforts to expose the Holocaust arrived too late.

Harro Schulze-Boysen

Like Kurt Gerstein, Harro Schulze-Boysen went from outcast to apparent Nazi insider.

Tall, fair and from a distinguished family, Schulze-Boysen rebelled against his aristocratic upbringing during the years of the Weimar Republic. As a student revolutionary, he became the editor of a magazine that warned Germans about the dangers of Nazism before Hitler had even come to power.

After the party’s victory in 1933, Schulze-Boysen’s publication was among the first that were shuttered. One of his Jewish colleagues, Henry Erlanger, was murdered. Harro himself was beaten and jailed.

Upon his release, Schulze-Boysen appeared to have a change of heart and joined the newly established Luftwaffe. His skill for languages landed him work as an interpreter. While in the air force, he also met Libertas Hass-Heye, a beautiful young aristocrat who worked in the publicity department of MGM Studios in Berlin.

Libertas’ mother was a personal friend of Hermann Göring, one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich. In fact, when Harro and Libertas got married, the future Reichsmarschall gave the young man a special wedding present: a job at the heart of Luftwaffe headquarters in the Ministry of Aviation.

To everyone, Schulze-Boysen seemed like the model officer; few knew that his conversion to Nazism was a sham. He told a confidant that after his friend Erlanger’s death, Harro had simply put his “revenge on ice.”

He later converted Libertas to the anti-Nazi cause and fostered contact with others in the capital who shared his views. In time, he linked up with Arvid Harnack, a senior economist, and his American-born wife, Mildred. Together, they began to collate economic, industrial and military secrets.

Harnack, an expert on the Soviet Union, was already passing secrets to the Americans and Russians. The connection to Moscow allowed Schulze-Boysen to hand over details about Germany’s proposed attack on the Soviet Union.

Soon, the Gestapo tapped the Berlin spy group’s radio links with Moscow and the arrests began. The Schulze-Boysens, the Harnacks and many of their friends in the anti-Nazi resistance were rounded up and executed. Harro accepted his fate stoically.

In a final letter to his family he wrote that with people dying “all over the world” in the war, “one extinguished life does not matter very much.” He concluded by saying he’d acted “in accordance with my head, my heart, and my convictions.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Greg Lewis is author with Gordon Thomas of DEFYING HITLER: The Germans Who Resisted Nazi Rule (Dutton Caliber)