Hitlers Europe 1085Germany fled into the hills and mountains of France. These resistance
bands came to be called the maquis, a name for rugged brush in the south
of France that could conceal them.
Better armed by airplane drops of guns, the maquis grew bolder. By 1944,
they controlled some areas in southern France, at least at night, vulnerable
only to the arrival of German military columns, diversions that the Ger
man army could by then ill afford. General Dwight Eisenhower (1890—
1969), commander of Allied forces in the European theater of operations,
later claimed that the resistance in France was the equivalent of fifteen
military divisions.Against Hitler in Germany
The vast majority of Germans remained loyal to their Fuhrer, even as defeats
mounted and Allied bombers frequently droned overhead and news of hor
rendous losses on the Russian front became known. Disgruntlement and bit
ter jokes were common, but they did not threaten the regime. Those who
had never approved of Hitler retreated into family life and the daily struggle
to get by. When wartime deprivation left people grumbling, Germans tended
to blame Hitler s subordinates, not the Fuhrer.
German resistance against Hitler was fragmented and ineffective. Courts
sentenced 15,000 Germans to death for crimes against the state, under an
expanded definition of capital crimes, which included listening to BBC
radio broadcasts from London. Trade union and Communist groups, earlier
smashed by the S.S., emerged again as economic conditions worsened in
1942 and 1943. Some students in Munich and Communists in Berlin
bravely distributed anti-Nazi propaganda, but such courageous acts were not
widespread. About 250,000 people in Germany were imprisoned or forced to
emigrate because of their political opposition and at least 150,000 German
Communists were executed. The active connivance of ordinary Germans
aided the S.S. and Gestapo in rooting out potential sources of opposition.
Even humane gestures toward Jews or foreign workers were dangerous. Here
and there, young people responded to Nazism by adopting a counterculture
of nonconformity, refusing to join the Hitler Youth, listening to American
music deemed decadent by Hitler, and scrawling anti-Nazi graffiti on walls.
The Nazis publicly hanged several sixteen-year-old boys for such actions.
The only serious plot against Hitler came among traditional conservatives
within the army. On July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (1907
1944) carried a bomb in his briefcase to a staff meeting with Hitler near the
Russian front. Stauffenberg, who had been badly maimed in battle, was a
conservative aristocrat appalled by the Nazi murder of Jews and Soviets and
by what he considered Hitler’s amateur management of the war. He hoped
that Hitler s assassination would allow the army to impose its rule. He placed
the bomb under the table beneath Hitler, who instinctively shoved the brief
case out of his way, moving it to the other side of a heavy table support.