Political leaders, church people, business people, workers, just plain citizens - the resistance movement in Germany drew people from diverse social ranks and from differing political and religious orientations together to the very dangerous and, for most, costly task of opposing Hitlers totalitarian rule and inhuman control. The law empowering the Nazis to take fearsome control was challenged by many who understood the lurking danger of totalitarian control.

In this post we continue with my adaptation of the Ploetzensee Memorial Centre's information booklet with its description of Hitler's rise to absolute power in the 1930s and the brutality with which its opponents were persecuted.

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Convinced Social Democrats' traditional stance in support of democracy led them into the resistance. In spite of mass arrests and finally total prohibition of public assemblies and suppression of publications, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) came out of the March 1933 elections with 18.3% of the votes - the second largest party.

Without experience in dealing with the methods of totalitarian dictatorship, the SPD hoped that the Nazi Party would quickly have been sidelined and therefore the SPD clung to the illusion for several weeks that they could continue to function as the legal opposition.

With the "NO" to the Empowerment Law the SPD professed itself totally committed to parliamentary democracy. With the growing pressure of persecution, the SPD leadership decided to meet outside of Germany in Prague and in its manifesto of 18 June 1933 "Break the Chains", called people to work for Hitlers downfall.

No less than 3000 social democrats had to suffer the hard lot of exile. All over Germany social democratic resistance groups - largely broken up by the Gestapo, but constantly re-started. Until the war began, they were able to maintain difficult and dangerous contacts with the leading exiles and through them report about the true character of the Nazis. Regrettably the governments and partially the citizens of other states came to understand these warnings and exhortations too late. [Including the government of Canada led by Prime Minister Mackenzie King blinded by Hitlers dramatic aggressive leadership style. The refusal to allow exiled Jews to disembark from the St. Louis ship was a sign of this blindness. ed.}

The Chair of the SPD, Otto Weis, on the 23rd of March 1933 stated:
"We profess solemnly in this historic hour the fundamental principles of humanity and justice and freedom. No empowerment law gives you the power to destroy ideas that are eternal and indestructible."

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The post-war period saw the nations express some of these eternal ideas more formally. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed in Paris by the United Nations on 10 December 1948 stands as a challenge to any who would seek to destroy the principles that remain as a permanent challenge to all who would follow the totalitarian ways of the Nazis or any other ideology. To be sure, the Declaration has been given lip-service but not enough substantial implementation by far too many nations. But it enshrines a standard against which all governments can be assessed.