Greg Lewis

I was impressed by the difference in background among the resistance documented by the authors We hear the stories of the White Rose students Hans and Sophie Scholl and Christopher Probst, followed by the near success of aristocratic military men like Stauffenberg and the less well-known, Tresckow. I had to disengage for a time after reading how close the military came to killing Hitler. Hitler cut short a tour of captured Russian weapons just before a bomb could go off carried by a German military office, Christoph von Gersdorff. The well-known Valkyrie attempt is retraced for those unfamiliar with its history. The book is well indexed, allowing us to check on the many characters. Almost every actor in the resistance was found out and executed --Bonhoeffer, less than a month before the war's end. The authors do not waver from entering the life of the most controversial resister of all -- Kurt Gerstein -- the man who became an SS officer in order to "bear witness." They document his life until, at the end of the war, he commits suicide in a French prison before Swedish diplomats and others can corroborate the sincerity of his efforts to produce evidence of war crimes. To their credit, the authors resist the temptation of forcing a comparison to the present. Instead, the authors cite how all of the German resistance seemed able to see beyond their short-term failure. A closing quote from the book honors this vision: "... while they could not save their nation, they did ensure that, as Germany sought to find itself again, it could cling to a spirit of goodness and purity: a resistance, an opposition, a White Rose."… (mehr)