The July bomb plot

In July 1944, some army officers came close to removing Hitler. By this stage of the war, many
army officers were sure that the war was lost and that Hitler was leading Germany into ruin.
One of these was a colonel in the army Count von Stauffenberg. On 20 July, he left a bomb in
Hitler's conference room. The plan was to kill Hitler, close down the radio stations, round up
the other leading Nazis and take over Germany. It failed on all counts, for the revolt was poorly
planned and organised. Hitler survived and the Nazis took a terrible revenge, killing 5,000 in
reprisal.

The bombing of Dresden

It was the bombing of Germany-which had the most dramatic effect on the lives of German
civilians.
In 1942, the Allies decided on a new policy towards the bombing of Germany. Under Arthur
'Bomber' Harris the British began an all-out assault on both industrial and residential areas of all
the major German cities. One of the objectives was to cripple German industry the other was to
lower the morale of civilians and to terrorise them into submission.
The bombing escalated through the next three years, culminating in the bombing of Dresden in
February 1945, which killed between 35,000 and 150,000 people in two days.
By 1945, the German people were in a desperate state. Food supplies were dwindling. Already
3.5 million German civilians had died. Refugees were fleeing the advancing Russian armies in
the east
Three months after the massive destruction of Dresden, Germany's war was over. Hitler,
Goebbels and other Nazi war leaders committed suicide or were captured. Germany
surrendered.

It was now a shattered country. The Nazi promises lay in tatters and the country was divided up
into zones of occupation run by the British, French, US and Soviet forces.

How did war affect young people?

In 1939, membership of a Nazi youth movement was made compulsory. But by this time, the
youth movements were going through a crisis. Many of the experienced leaders had been
drafted into the German army. Others particularly those that had been leaders in the pre Nazi
days had been replaced by keener Nazis. Many of the movements were now run by older
teenagers who rigidly enforced Nazi rules. They even forbade other teenagers to meet
informally with friends.
AS the war progressed, the activities of the youth movements focused increasingly on the war
effort and military drill. The popularity of the movements decreased and indeed an anti-Hitler
movement appeared. The Nazis identified two distinct groups of young people who they were
worried about: the Swing movement and the Edelweiss Pirates.

The ‘Swing' movement

This was made up mainly of middle-class teenagers. They went to parties where they Iistened
to English and American music and sang English songs. They danced American dances such as
the ‘jitterbug’ to banned jazz music. They accepted Jews at their clubs. They talked about and
enjoyed sex. They were deliberately ‘slovenly’. The Nazis issued a handbook helping the
authorities to identify these degenerate types. Some were shown with unkempt, long hair,
others with exaggeratedly English clothes.

The Edelweiss Pirates

The Edelweiss Pirates were working-class teenagers. They were not an organised movement,
and groups in various cities took different names: ‘The Roving Dudes' (Essen); the ‘Kittelbach
Pirates'
(Düsseldorf);’ the Navajos' (Cologne). The Nazis, however, classified all the groups under the
single name ‘Edelweiss Pirates’ and the groups did have a lot in common.
The Pirates were mainly aged between fourteen and seventeen (Germans could leave school at
fourteen, but they did not have to sign on for military service until they were seventeen). At the
weekends, the Pirates went camping. They sang songs, just like the Hitler youth, but they
changed the lyrics of songs to mock Germany and when they spotted bands of Hitler Youth they
taunted and sometimes attacked them. In contrast with the Hitler Youth, the pirates included
boys and girls. The Pirates were also much freer in their attitudes towards sex, which was
officially frowned upon by the Hitler Youth.
The Pirates activities caused serious worries to the Nazi authorities in some cities. In December
1942, the Gestapo broke up 28 groups containing 739 adolescents. The Nazi approach to the
Pirates was different from their approach to other minorities. As long as they needed future
workers for industry and future soldiers, they could not simply exterminate all these teenagers
or put them in concentration camps (although Himmler did suggest that). They therefore
responded uncertainly sometimes arresting the Pirates, sometimes ignoring them.
In 1944 in Cologne, Pirate activities escalated. They helped to shelter army deserters and
escaped prisoners. They stole armaments and took part in an attack on the Gestapo during
which its chief was killed. The Nazi response was to round up the so-called ‘ringleaders'. Twelve
were publicly hanged in November 1944. Neither of the groups described above had strong
political views. They were not political opponents of the Nazis. But they resented and resisted
Nazi control of their lives.

How did war affect the Jews?

The ghettos
Persecution of the Jews developed in intensity after the outbreak of war in 1939. After
defeating Poland in 1939, the Nazis set about ‘Germanising' western Poland. This meant
transporting Poles from their homes and replacing them with German settlers. Almost one in
five Poles died in the fighting and as a result of racial policies of 1939-45. Polish Jews were
rounded up and transported to the major cities. Here they were herded into sealed areas,
called ghettos. The able-bodied Jews were used for slave labour but the young, the old and the
sick were simply left to die from hunger and disease.

Mass murder
In 1941, Germany invaded the USSR. The invasion was a great success at first. However, within
weeks the Nazis found themselves in control of 3 million Russian Jews in addition to the Jews in
all of the other countries they had invaded. German forces had orders to round up and shoot
Communist Party activists and their Jewish supporters. The shooting was carried out by special
SS units called Einsazgruppen. By the autumn of 1941, mass shootings were taking place all
over occupied Eastern Europe. In Germany, all Jews were ordered to wear the star of David on
their clothing to mark them out.

The 'Final solution'

In January 1942, senior Nazis met at Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, for a conference to discuss
what they called the Final Solution' to the Jewish Question'. At the Wannsee Conference,
Himmler, head of the SS and Gestapo, was put in charge of the systematic killing of all Jews
within Germany and German-occupied territory. Slave labour and death camps were built at
Auschwitz, Treblinka, Chelmo and other places. The old, the sick and young children were killed
immediately. The able-bodied were first used as slave labour. Some were used for appalling
medical experiments. Six million Jews, 500,000 European gypsies and countless political
prisoners, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals and Russian and Polish prisoners of war were sent
to these camps to be worked to death, gassed or shot.

Resistance
Many Jews escaped from Germany before the killing started. Other Jews managed to live under
cover in Germany and the occupied territories. Gad Beck, for instance, led the Jewish resistance
to the Nazis in Berlin. He was finally captured in April 1945. On the day he was due to be
executed, he was rescued by a detachment of troops from the Jewish regiment of the Red
Army who had heard of his capture and had been sent to rescue him. There were 28 known
groups of Jewish fighters, and there may have been more. Many Jews fought in the resistance
movements in the Nazi-occupied lands. In 1945, the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto rose up against
the Nazis and held out against them for four weeks. Five concentration camps saw armed
uprisings and Greek Jews managed to blow up the gas ovens at Auschwitz.
We know that many Germans and other non-Jews helped Jews by hiding them and smuggling
them out of German-held territory. The industrialist Oskar Schindler protected and saved many
getting them on to his “list” of workers. The Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg worked with
other resisters to provide Jews with Swedish and US passports to get them out of the reach of
the Nazis in Hungary. He disappeared in mysterious circumstances in 1945. Of course, high-
profile individuals such as these were rare. Most of the successful resisters were successful
because they kept an extremely low profile and were discovered neither by the Nazis then, nor
by historians today.