From Crooked Timber, an absolutely fascinating article in Deutsche Welle about a group of German teenagers in Cologne who resisted the Nazis in various ways, getting six of themselves hanged without a trial 60 years ago today.
I'm surprised that there isn't loads of scholarship and media devoted to this group. It seems that the nature of German citizen resistance, the lack thereof, and its successes and (more obvious) failures would be the most important thing to understand about the Third Reich. The constant admonition that we learn from our past doesn't work well for the average citizen if the average citizen has no idea what they could have done differently.
There's a feature film that premiered in Montreal in September. I thought this quote from the article was key:
The director Nico von Glasow said he made the film after being surprised to discover the existence of this group. He says like many Germans he knew nothing about the Edelweiss Pirates despite having grown up in Cologne.
"And I wanted to know why I had not heard about them and I asked my friend Jean Jülich and he said something very interesting. He said that if there is one hero in the country then the rest of the country could say they knew nothing about what was going on. But if there is one hero on every street, then it looks bad for the rest of the street."
I hope someone picks the film up for distribution in the USA.
