ABSTRACT
While most Germans accepted Hitler's regime as a fact of life and some enthused about it, there were many varieties of dissent, disaffection and opposition, among women as well as men. At its simplest, there were ‘women who only reluctantly hung out the Nazi flag, [and] women who carried two shopping bags so as not to have to raise their hand in the so-called German greeting’ (Wiggershaus, 1984: 106). At its most dangerous, there were those who demonstrated, by word or deed, their contempt for Nazism and Nazis. Describing the entire spectrum of dissenting or oppositional activity as ‘resistance’ is controversial. Yet if people could be executed for distributing anti-regime leaflets – as members of the ‘White Rose’ group were in 1943 – or for listening to enemy radio during the war, then these activities were perhaps ‘resistance’, even if they posed no physical threat to the regime. The ferocity of the Nazi leadership's reaction to mere disobedience or dissent, especially in later wartime Germany, was compounded by its arbitrariness: as Hans Mommsen says, ‘the highly fragmented nature of the Nazi political system resulted in a wide-ranging variety of opposition and … ultimately it was primarily the Gestapo that decided what resistance was’ (1991: 161).
