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German Resistance to the Nazi State Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler ANNE NELSON New York: Random House, 2009, 588 pp. $27
THE BOOK'S TITLE TRANSLATES A TERM, "Rote Kapelle," that the Gestapo applied to a relatively small circle of men and women in Berlin, active in seeking to weaken the political authority of the Hitler regime during the 1930s and early 1940s. The term, however, was meant to convey the notion that the group was involved in a Soviet conspiracy - a notion that survived the war and was perpetuated in the ensuing climate of a public opinion shaped by the cold war and hostility to the Soviet Union. The group's "historical legacy" was diminished and "distorted," not least by its former adversaries in Germany (as was that of the German resistance to Hitler generally whose acts, such as their attempt to assassinate the "Fuehrer" in July 1944, were held to be treasonable for many postwar years).
This reviewer has no knowledge of any of the vast number of German sources the author cites; nevertheless the book reads like a powerful argument in telling the story of untiring resistance to Nazi tyranny by the Red Orchestra - a resistance in which the group's retaliation to Soviet agents was but one of the means.
Some of the Orchestra's members had been active in the German Communist Party and were in sympathy with its views. Information thought useful to the Soviet Union, such as warnings about its planned invasion (in June 1941), was transmitted by those of the group's members in a position to do so. But at the core of the Orchestra's actions was the uncompromising moral impulse to fight the evil of the Hitler regime. It was an impulse motivated also by a passion to exonerate the German people from the atrocities committed in Eastern Europe in its name, and from an aggressive, unjustifiable war. It was that impulse and passion which also moved the participants of the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944, even at the risk of failure (which, fatefully, ensued). What mattered indeed was not so much failure or success of that conspiracy but the testimonial to the will...