Quick questions on Opposition and resistance to the Nazi regime: HSC Modern History National Study (Germany 1918-1939)

Detlev Peukert (Inside Nazi Germany, 1987) transformed this topic by insisting that not all dissent was "resistance". He ranged behaviour along a spectrum of rising opposition:

The only mass-based opposition - the working-class parties - was destroyed first. The Reichstag Fire Decree (28 February 1933) was used to arrest around 10,000 Communists; the KPD was effectively banned and the SPD was outlawed on 22 June 1933. What survived went two ways. Some leaders fled abroad: the SPD's exile executive, the Sopade (Prague, then Paris and London), produced detailed reports on German opinion that historians still rely on.

Church opposition was real but mostly defensive - protecting Christian doctrine and institutions rather than challenging the dictatorship or its racial policies.

The regime claimed German youth through the Hitler Youth, but pockets resisted its discipline.

When the regime tried to merge Protestants into a Nazified "Reich Church" run by the pro-Nazi "German Christians", dissenting pastors broke away. The Barmen Declaration (1934) rejected state control of doctrine. Martin Niemoller, a former U-boat commander turned pastor, led the Pastors' Emergency League; he was arrested in 1937 and held in Sachsenhausen and Dachau until 1945.

The Reich Concordat (20 July 1933) traded Catholic political neutrality for guarantees of worship, deliberately limiting institutional Catholic opposition. The regime broke its terms, and Pope Pius XI responded with the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (March 1937), smuggled into Germany and read from pulpits, condemning Nazi breaches and racial doctrine. The outstanding case of effective protest was Bishop Clemens von Galen of Munster, whose 1941 sermons publicly denounced the T4 "euthanasia" programme as murder.