The place of the resistance movement in German national remembrance
In June 2019, the German parliament passed a motion to pay tribute to the women of the German resistance movement. It acknowledged the invisibility of women resistance fighters both in the public arena and in research, when actually women played a crucial role. But they became largely mediators of men’s memory, which contributed to concealing or diminishing their own role.
The theme of German women’s resistance emerged in the field of women’s studies in the 1980s, through the work of Annette Kuhn, Valentine Rothe, Rita Thalmann and Claudia Koonz. Up until then, only a small number of female figures had attracted attention. The case of Sophie Scholl is emblematic. No sooner had the war ended than West German society witnessed the quasi-sanctification of this student from a middle-class Protestant background, whose actions were, depending on the period and the requirements, excessively Christianised or depoliticised. Her recognition came equally early in East Germany, where streets began to be named after her in 1950. But this overexposure was made at the expense of other, surviving women resistance fighters, like Traute Lafrenz or Lilo Rahmdohr, members of The White Rose.
The distorted reception of women’s resistance
It was not until 1993 that the first colloquium devoted to the resistance of German women was organised in Berlin by Christl Wickert. The minutes were published in 1995 with the title Frauen gegen die Diktatur (“Women against the dictatorship”). A handful of female working-class members of the resistance had their stories published in the 1970s, but it was the 1990s that saw the publication of a steady stream of accounts by women belonging to well-known groups, like those of the Confessing Church or the plot that led to the attempted assassination of Hitler on 20 July 1944. In the 1990s, resistance by women became more visible in West Germany, but the interest in it remained marginal, and it was often reduced, in the eyes of the general public and at times by researchers too, to a “resistance of the heart” (Nathan Stoltzfus). This condescending term was supposed to sum up their presumed motivations (sentimental and emotional) and actions (to support and assist).
There are a number of reasons for this distorted reception. First of all, post-1945 there was a strong focus on political actions, to the detriment of others. We should remember that the German resistance was almost entirely unarmed: only about 40 attempts were made to assassinate Hitler, there were no rural guerrilla groups and few acts of sabotage. Yet the gendered division of tasks within the groups meant that women performed the secretarial work, dealt with supply and communications issues, and provided medical care, whereas all strictly political activities (writing texts, programmatic discussions, planning, plots) were the preserve of men. That division spanned the entire political spectrum, from communists to conservatives. The resistance that consisted of helping the Jews by lodging them or helping them to escape was slow to be acknowledged in West Germany, with a dedicated museum only opening in Berlin as recently as 2008. Yet these acts of resistance were carried out, in two-thirds of cases, by women. Even the term used to describe these men and women – “silent heroes” (stille Helden) – suggests a modest withdrawal from the limelight, which belonging to the “nation of the persecutors” does not altogether explain and has often been observed among members of the resistance after the war. An overemphasis on political forms of resistance has therefore contributed to obscuring the actions of women.
Sophie Scholl (1921-43), a member of anti-Nazi German resistance group “The White Rose”, 1940. © Ullstein Bild / Roger-Viollet
Another reason has to do with their under-representation in the regime’s police and judicial archives. Gender prejudices caused the police and the courts to underestimate women’s role in the resistance or to depoliticise their actions, except for those regarded as Marxists, who were punished as severely as the men. Judge Roland Freisler, for instance, offered the student Eva-Maria Buch the chance to dissociate herself from the Red Orchestra group, during her trial in February 1943, on the pretext that she had not truly grasped the nature of their activities and had been manipulated, which the young woman vehemently denied. Conversely, Nina von Stauffenberg, Claus von Stauffenberg’s widow, tells how she played “the idiotic little housewife, awash with children, nappies and dirty laundry”, in order to lessen the punishment she received following the failed assassination attempt of 20 July 1944. This concealment or minimising of the actions of women by the police and justice system resulted in a bias in the archives, which may have impacted the attitudes of researchers. Attempts to ascertain the proportion of women in the resistance, which vary between 10 and 20% depending on the milieu, are similarly distorted by the sources.
In the GDR, women’s role in the resistance was not an issue in itself, since in the Marxist-Leninist conception of the East German State, issues of gender were subordinated to issues of class. Nevertheless, in keeping with the image which the GDR wanted to present of itself as guarantor of equal rights for women and men, women resistance fighters were depicted as playing an active part in KPD (German Communist Party) cells. Thus the GDR, too, had some iconic female figures, whose heroisation went hand in hand with a distortion of the facts. For instance, Liselotte Herrmann, a single mother executed at the age of 28, is known to all East German schoolchildren born since the 1970s because of Paul Dessau’s musical setting of Friedrich Wolf’s poem dedicated to her. Remembrance policy also led, in 1959, to the erection of a monument in the former Ravensbrück concentration camp for women. But according to historian Anne Kwaschik, the former detainees lamented the fact that Will Lammert’s sculpture, entitled Die Tragende (The Bearer), represented them in the form of a “socialist Pietà” bearing a dead child, thereby confining them to mourning, motherhood, at best to solidarity, whereas the monument at the Buchenwald men’s camp celebrates combatants on their feet. The women saw the statue as diminishing their resistance actions.
Women, mediators of resistance memory
The gender prejudices of the Nazi regime meant that women members of the non-Marxist resistance had a better survival rate than men, leading them to play a decisive role post-1945. Whether they were sisters, wives or resistance comrades, after the war women became custodians of the memory of those who had been killed, most of them men. In West Germany, where for a long time resistance was seen as a betrayal of the fatherland, the first task of the survivors was to defend the honour of those killed by emphasising the legitimacy of their actions, their sense of sacrifice and, if necessary, their patriotism. Shortly before his execution, the conservative diplomat Ulrich von Hassel gave his private journal to his wife, in the hope that she would publish it after the war and that this would help clear his name.
Nina von Stauffenberg (third from the right), Claus von Stauffenberg’s widow,
at the commemorations of the assassination attempt of 20 July 1944 against Adolf Hitler, 20 July 1953. © Harry Croner/Ullstein Bild/Roger-Viollet
Some women devoted part of their lives to keeping alive this “legacy” (Marion Yorck von Wartenburg). Within the conservative ranks, a number of women, for example, collected the documents that led to the creation of the first archive managed by the Stiftung 20. Juli 1944 foundation, whose first chair was a woman, Renate von Hardenberg. The acknowledgement of the social-democratic and workers’ resistance in West Germany, in the context of the ideological and territorial division of the two Germanies, came even later than for the conservative resistance. Within its ranks, a memory was developed by the activists, parallel to the official narrative, partly led by women.
In many groups, women published the autobiographical writings of those who died – memoirs, correspondence, private journals – thereby contributing to a better understanding of the resistance. For instance, in 1988 Freya von Moltke published a collection of letters written by her husband, Helmuth James von Moltke. Other women collected or wrote their own accounts, such as the iconic The White Rose, published in 1953 by Inge Aicher-Scholl, the elder sister of Hans and Sophie Scholl, which tells their story from a family perspective.
In the 1980s, another form of engagement emerged, which consisted of participation in educational activities with schools. Anneliese Knopp-Graf, sister of Willi Graf, he too a member of The White Rose, was particularly involved in this kind of initiative. Freya von Moltke and Rosemarie Reichwein, both members of the Kreisau Circle, a discussion group whose membership spanned the political spectrum, from socialists to conservatives, were committed to German-Polish friendship and worked on restoring the Kreisau (present-day Krzyżowa) estate in Lower Silesia, Poland, then on turning it into an international youth exchange centre. Thus, women played an active role in preserving the memory of the resistance, but they did it discreetly, rarely speaking on the political or media stage. If we look, for example, at the national commemorations of 20 July, which have taken place every year since 1952 in Berlin, it was a long time before women were invited to speak, and even then, only a minority did so.
Liselotte Herrmann and her son. A communist activist and member of the anti-Nazi resistance, she was executed in 1938 at the age of 28. © German Resistance Memorial Center
Women resistance fighters themselves undervalue their own role
In their accounts of their lives, many women resistance fighters have tended to diminish the part they played. There appear to be a number of reasons for this. First, there is survivor syndrome, which undoubtedly caused them to remain in the shadow of those who died. The iconic figures, whether women or men, are practically all personalities who were executed by the regime. Then there is the continuity between Julien Blanc’s “syndrome de la petite main” (women in the resistance being confined to menial duties) and their subsequent inclusion in the remembrance narrative. In 1983, for instance, Emmi Bonhoeffer explained how her activities were limited to standing guard outside the house while the men met and plotted inside, or making coded phone calls, as if such tasks, which she classed as non-political, were not equally risky and essential to the plotting.
There are methods of narration of resistance activities that are specific to women. At over 80, Margarethe von Oven described her part in the plot of 20 July 1944 in these terms: “Well, I must emphasise that I was no more than a pen-pusher; a high-quality pen-pusher, to be sure, but that is why I do not want to be counted among the women of 20 July. (...) Yes, I gave my little contribution, but I don’t want it to be emphasised. (...) I have nothing to hide, but I don’t want to be given a laurel crown. I’m allergic.” If women lacked visibility in representations of the resistance, it is also because their accounts, when they gave any, were neither formulated nor understood as stories of resistance.
In East Germany, we find women in this position as bearers of memory, evidenced by the role they played in constituting the memory of the German communist resistance in France. Having been excluded from the official memory of East German anti-fascism after the war, in the 1970s the German communists in France had their name cleared, as Alix Heiniger points out, through the establishment of a specific archive, and it was three women – Luise Kraushaar and Edith Zorn, then Dora Schaul – themselves anti-fascists, who collected the 2 500 testimonies comprising it.
Will Lammert’s Die Tragende, Ravensbrück concentration camp, 2013. © Jessica Spengler
Meanwhile, beyond borders and ideologies, there are situations that reflect the Matilda effect, whereby the work of women scientists is attributed to their male colleagues. Edith Zorn, for instance, wrote a manuscript on the anti-fascist resistance in France which was not published, but the ideas it contained were incorporated in works by the communists Florimonte Bonte in France and Karlheinz Pech in East Germany, neither of whom cited Zorn. Meanwhile, between 1956 and 1958, Clarita von Trott zu Solz sifted through the papers of her husband, the diplomat Adam von Trott zu Solz, to write a biography, a copy of which she gave to her British friend Henry O. Malone, who in 1980 wrote the first biography of the diplomat. Her original 215-page manuscript was not published until 1994.
The research projects and exhibitions launched since 2019, in the wake of the parliamentary motion, will undoubtedly contribute to expanding our knowledge of the resistance of German women. For now, the figure of Sophie Scholl continues to be a strong focus of attention. Several cartoons aimed at young people have been made about her, and in May 2021 the Instagram account @ichbinsophiescholl (“I am Sophie Scholl”) was created so that a fictitious blogger named Sophie Scholl could chart the last ten months of her life. The account has nearly one million followers around the world, which is considerable. While this focus has the advantage of making the German resistance better known in Germany and elsewhere, it is likely also an obstacle to a plural and varied reception for male and female resistance fighters.