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Adam von Trott zu Solz and Resistance Foreign Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Klemens Von Klemperer
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Extract

Resistance under conditions of close to total control is fraught with enormous, almost insurmountable, difficulties. And in the Germany of 1933–45 they were compounded by the fact that the “totalitarianism” of the state was effective not merely by virtue of controls it exercised, but also of the consensus it had managed to whip up. But the most agonizing difficulties were of an ethical order: unlike the Resistance movements in the Nazi-occupied countries, the German Resistance was bound to come into conflict with the “national interestü and it thus got involved in the dilemma of risking the charge of treason in order to assert the prerogatives of higher laws, natural or divine. The “foreign policy” of the German Resistance, involving contacts abroad before the war and during the war, takes us to the most exposed aspects of our problem.

Type
Symposium: New Perspectives on the German Resistance Against National Socialism
Information
Central European History , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , December 1981 , pp. 351 - 361
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1981

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