The German Resistance Memorial Center occupies the southeast corner of the Bendlerblock, which during the Third Reich housed the headquarters of the Army High Command, among other offices, near the Tiergarten in Berlin. One brisk fall afternoon I locked my bicycle in front of it and walked through an archway into a cobblestone courtyard, which was bare except for a few linden trees and a life-size bronze statue, cast in 1953, of a bound and naked prisoner. A wreath mounted on a bullet-pocked wall marked the spot where a firing squad executed Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and three other officers after their failed attempt to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944.

Up two flights of stairs, in galleries with creaking wooden floors that once served as the offices of Wehrmacht commanders, an exhibition displays photos and stories of Germans who refused to bow to Nazi rule. They include Hans and Sophie Scholl, leaders of the White Rose student movement, who were guillotined in February 1943 for handing out anti-Nazi leaflets in Munich, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the pacifist Lutheran pastor who was hanged during the regime’s last days. But there were also hundreds of lesser-known figures—devout Protestants and Catholics, Communists, traditional conservatives—who chose not to sit by when confronted with National Socialism.

The individuals who challenged the Third Reich knew that they were almost certainly doomed to failure. The Gestapo, with its network of informants, ubiquitous surveillance, and merciless use of torture, proved ruthlessly effective at rooting out opposition. And yet many risked everything to defy the regime. What does it take to rouse oneself from complacency to engagement? Why hazard imprisonment, unimaginable pain, and death when passivity and silence offer a far safer course? In an era characterized by growing authoritarianism and the dehumanization of some of society’s most vulnerable, such questions have taken on new urgency.

A number of recent books underscore the eternal fascination of the resistance to Nazi evil. It took place not just in the offices and salons of Berlin and Munich but also in the ghettos and concentration camps of occupied Europe, where the oppressed engaged in acts of quiet rebellion and sometimes rose violently against their oppressors.

In The Traitors Circle, Jonathan Freedland, a Guardian columnist and the author of The Escape Artist (2022), about one of the handful of Jews who escaped from Auschwitz, excavates the little-known story of a loosely connected group of dissidents in wartime Berlin. (William L. Shirer mentions several of them in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, but I could find almost no information about them at the German Resistance Memorial Center.) “There were 65 million German citizens in 1933, which means the vast, overwhelming majority, more than 95 per cent, did as they were told,” Freedland writes in the author’s note to this enthralling tale. “They raised their right arm in salute and said ‘Heil Hitler!’ But quite a few did not.”

The oppositionists on whom Freedland focuses came mostly from the German elite. Countess Maria von Maltzan, the free-spirited daughter of Silesian aristocrats, was twenty-four and living in Munich when Hitler came to power. Unlike her brother, Carlos, who liked to strut around in his Nazi uniform, she found the goose-stepping Brownshirts at once ludicrous and menacing, and she fell in with a Catholic resistance group. An encounter with violent fascists in Czechoslovakia and a brief internment in a concentration camp intensified her commitment to the anti-Nazi cause. Elisabeth von Thadden, another aristocrat and a conservative nationalist, applauded Hitler’s ascent, regarding it as the birth of “the new Germany.” But as the headmistress of an evangelical girls’ school outside Heidelberg, she moved from allegiance to defiance as a result of the Nazis’ attacks on the church.

Arthur Zarden, a high-ranking official in the German Ministry of Finance, lost his job because of his marriage to a Jew (the heiress to one of the country’s largest fortunes) and quickly became disillusioned with the regime. Hanna and Lagi Solf, the wife and daughter of an elderly German diplomat in the Far East who helped funnel Jews to safety in Japan, committed themselves to carrying on his mission after his death from natural causes in 1936. They formed an informal anti-Nazi group known as the Solf Circle that gathered at their apartment at Alsenstraße 9 in the Steglitz neighborhood, blocks from where Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring had once lived.

Then there was Otto Kiep, the German consul general in New York, whose admiration for American democracy turned him against the Nazis from their first days in power. Kiep, who was fluent in English, used his position to help German Jews obtain refuge in the US, welcomed Albert Einstein to New York in 1933, and condemned Nazi thuggery. His superiors soon summoned him back to Berlin, where he continued to draw attention to Nazi persecutions. Kiep’s family “feared this solid, middle-aged diplomat, previously so practised in the arts of tact and restraint, was becoming reckless. Yet Otto did not see it that way at all,” writes Freedland, in a paragraph that resonates in the current political climate:

On the contrary, it was his patriotic duty to tell what he knew…. When the air was filled with propaganda, it mattered that the actual facts should still exist, that they should live in the minds of others, not his alone. “We are surrounded by lies,” he would say. “People must know there are still Germans who love the truth.” To be informed, to know the truth and to share it: in a republic of lies like Hitler’s Germany, these were acts of resistance.

Freedland’s narrative meanders for its first hundred pages, shifting back and forth in time and place, sometimes confusingly, among his many characters. In the first few years after Hitler’s ascent, as the Nazis intensified anti-Jewish persecutions and marched the country toward war, members of the group engaged mostly in symbolic protests. The Solf Circle told anti-Hitler jokes and performed satirical skits at its social gatherings; Thadden read a psalm to her students after the Germans occupied Paris.

Over time their actions became more substantive. Hanna and Lagi Solf helped Jews find hiding places—the concealed became known as “submarines”—and spirited some to safety in Switzerland. Kiep joined a cell inside the Abwehr—the German military intelligence service—committed to Hitler’s overthrow. The head of the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, once a devoted Nazi, was so horrified by Einsatzgruppen massacres that he came to regard National Socialism as a disaster for Germany and tipped off dissident officers who were under surveillance. Maltzan hid her Jewish lover, Hans Hirschel, in her apartment. When the Gestapo ransacked it and zeroed in on a suspicious-looking folding couch, she claimed she couldn’t open it:

And now Maria took a gamble, one that required iron self-confidence. Hans heard the words she used but could let out no gasp as she made her suggestion to the Gestapo.

“Take out your gun and shoot through the couch.”

She seemed deadly serious. As if she were not setting a dare so much as offering a reasonable solution to the stand-off. “If you don’t believe me, all you have to do is take out your gun and shoot through the couch.”

How long did Hans lie there, waiting for the Nazis’ response? How long did Maria’s words hang in the air as he braced himself? It would have taken only a second for one of the men to pull out a pistol and call this imperious woman’s bluff. If they did, how long would it take for Hans to die? A few seconds? A minute?

Maltzan’s successful gambit demonstrated the daring and poise of a woman who would soon evacuate Jews across Lake Constance to Switzerland by swimming alongside them in the darkness and helping them elude Nazi patrol boats.

But her circle’s undoing came soon enough. Freedland’s narrative picks up momentum with the introduction of Paul Reckzeh, a young Swiss doctor and purported anti-Nazi activist who won Thadden’s trust and secured an invitation to a tea party she hosted in Berlin in September 1943. In fact Reckzeh was a Gestapo mole, code-named Agent Robby, in the employ of Herbert Lange, an ardent SS officer who had led a Sonderkommando unit that murdered Jews and people with mental disabilities in mobile gas vans in Poland. Reckzeh elicited self-incriminating statements from Zarden, Zarden’s daughter, Kiep, Hanna Solf, Thadden, and others as they engaged heedlessly in anti-Hitler talk and discussed their liaisons with political exiles in neutral Switzerland. (Maltzen, fearful of surveillance, had canceled at the last minute; the decision probably saved her life.) “The first order of business, the group was saying, was to remove the SS and Gestapo,” Freedland writes.

A shadow government would have to be standing by, ready to take over. As for Hitler, well, Frau Solf was clear on that point. “When we get him, we’ll put him against a wall.”

If Reckzeh felt the urge to punch the air, he hid it well. He had had to do so little, yet here he was, scooping the jackpot.

Freedland creates a chilling portrait of the Forschungsamt (Research Office), the most ideological of nine Nazi intelligence agencies that specialized in eavesdropping on the regime’s enemies. Six thousand employees amassed information from across the Third Reich, sifting through 34,000 telegrams and telexes a day, tapping thousands of phone lines, and producing reams of reports on anti-Nazi activity. Agents typed material deemed top priority on braune Blätter—brown sheets—and sent them by courier to Hitler, Göring, and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Yet even the Forschungsamt had its vulnerabilities. An anti-Nazi activist inside the unit leaked Reckzeh’s true identity to the resistance, and the tea party group ignored the undercover agent’s subsequent overtures. But by then it was too late. One by one, those who had attended were rounded up, imprisoned in Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, and other concentration camps, and subjected to harrowing show trials before Roland Freisler, the “hanging judge,” at the People’s Court in Berlin.

Why has so little attention been paid to the Solf Circle? One reason may be that their resistance, unlike Stauffenberg’s plan to kill Hitler with a bomb planted in a briefcase at his Wolf’s Lair retreat, was diffuse and disorganized and consisted primarily of talk, not action. (Maltzan’s aquatic journeys were a notable exception.) Nevertheless, after the failure of Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt in July 1944, they became swept up in Hitler’s push for vengeance against all who opposed him. The Gestapo subjected several members of the circle to months of torture. Arthur Zarden killed himself by leaping from a window. Kiep was hanged from a butcher’s hook. Thadden met her end on the guillotine at Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison. Hanna and Lagi Solf escaped execution in the chaos that followed Freisler’s death in an Allied bombing of the People’s Court in February 1945. Their survival, and the brutal demise of the judge who had gleefully sent thousands to their executions, provide a measure of solace in Freedland’s grim, gripping tale.

In The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück, Lynne Olson returns to familiar territory for her: France during the German occupation. The author of several books about French women who plotted against the Nazis, including Madame Fourcade’s Secret War (2019) and Empress of the Nile (2023), Olson now follows half a dozen resistance agents whose activities landed them at Ravensbrück, among Germany’s most notorious concentration camps.

One was Germaine Tillion, an anthropologist respected in academic circles for her exhaustive study of a Berber tribe in the Algerian Sahara, who joined a band of anti-Nazi French scholars in Paris, the Museum of Man group, in 1940. They helped British troops escape from POW camps and published an underground newspaper, Résistance, until a priest, Robert Alesch, betrayed them to the Gestapo in 1942. Anise Girard, the blonde, blue-eyed, spirited daughter of Paris intellectuals, attached herself to a cell known as Gloria SMH (a variation of HMS, for His Majesty’s Service), whose members included Samuel Beckett. Girard fed information to British intelligence about the locations of German tanks and defensive positions until she was caught up in the Gestapo sweep that Alesch had set in motion. After detentions in prisons around Paris, Tillion and Girard were sent on cattle trains to Ravensbrück, situated on swampy wasteland north of Berlin. Established as a slave labor camp for German political prisoners, by 1943 it had become a disease-ridden hellhole jammed with women from across the Third Reich. Arriving there after a long journey from France, Tillion and Girard recoiled from

the sight of emaciated, wraithlike figures, dressed in shapeless rags, who were creeping around the square, some staggering under the weight of vats of soup, others pushing immense wagons overflowing with garbage. According to one of the new arrivals, it was like something from a horror movie: “I barely noticed their skeletal forms or their shaven heads. What shocked me to the core was the sight of their dead, vacant stares. They were living zombies.”

Eighteen thousand women were imprisoned at Ravensbrück at the time. “In each barracks, more than seven hundred were jammed into a space meant to hold three hundred,” Olson writes; they subsisted on “a bowl of watery rutabaga soup and a piece of bread a day.” The camp doctor, Karl Gebhardt, conducted horrific experiments, reminiscent of Josef Mengele’s at Auschwitz, to test the efficacies of sulfa drugs after the death from sepsis of Reich security chief Reinhard Heydrich, who had been ambushed by partisans in Prague in 1942. Gebhardt sliced open the legs of dozens of Polish women, injected the wounds with tetanus and gangrene bacteria, and left most of them untreated. “Many of the incisions were never properly sewn up, and they oozed blood and pus for weeks,” Olson writes. “Most could not walk without crutches. Some would never walk again.”

Other members of the French Resistance soon joined them in the barracks. Geneviève de Gaulle, the niece of the general who commanded the Free French Forces in exile, wrote for and distributed an underground newspaper, Défense de la France, until she was betrayed by a double agent and arrested by the Gestapo in July 1943. After the death of her officer husband in a German POW camp early in the war, Jacqueline d’Alincourt, the daughter of devoutly Catholic aristocrats, “vowed to avenge him by committing herself to the Nazis’ destruction,” Olson writes. She became an important member of the sabotage and intelligence network run by the doomed resistance hero Jean Moulin. The Gestapo captured her two months after de Gaulle’s arrest and subjected her to five days of interrogation and torture, but she refused to give up the names of any of her comrades.

Olson’s subtitle, How an Intrepid Band of Frenchwomen Resisted the Nazis in Hitler’s All-Female Concentration Camp, is a bit of a misnomer, conjuring up images of a violent uprising. In fact, the resistance by the women of Ravensbrück consisted mostly of providing one another with moral and material support, refusing to labor in factories that manufactured weapons for the Nazis, and sometimes shirking work details by evading their sadistic guards. De Gaulle moved clandestinely from barracks to barracks, rallying her compatriots with stirring stories about the advances made by her uncle’s Free French Forces. Tillion kept records of abuses and even wrote and passed around an operetta that mocked their lives of deprivation. (Though never performed at Ravensbrück, it was staged decades later.)

In 1944, under SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s orders, the Nazis converted Ravensbrück into a death camp, installing gas chambers, crematoriums, and chimneys that belched smoke day and night. The implementation of mass murder forced the women to adopt different tactics. Olson writes stirringly of a staged riot involving hundreds of prisoners, a ruse that allowed Gebhardt’s crippled Polish victims, affectionately nicknamed “the rabbits,” to hide in crawl spaces and avoid the gas chambers. Some of their actions, including an elaborate effort to save the elderly mother of one resistance leader, were unsuccessful. But as the Allied forces advanced and the camp commanders accelerated the pace of the killings, their efforts to derail the system, Olson argues, bought time and probably saved many lives.

Olson strays from her theme in the last half of the book, devoting many chapters to the final days of Ravensbrück and the war’s aftermath. She documents the Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte’s negotiations with Himmler to free Scandinavian, French, and Jewish prisoners; the trials in Germany of Fritz Suhren, the camp commandant, and his deputies; the difficulties faced by de Gaulle and her comrades in readjusting to the outside world; and an initiative to bring the Polish victims of Gebhardt’s experiments to the US for treatment. But what resonates most are the quiet rebellions of de Gaulle, Tillion, and the others, their efforts to resist dehumanization even as their bodies wasted away from starvation and disease.

Elizabeth R. Hyman’s The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto documents a far more dramatic—and bloodier—resistance. The granddaughter of Polish Jews who fled their homeland in 1939, Hyman tells the story of the legendary Warsaw Ghetto Uprising mostly from the perspective of a handful of female operatives. (Hyman uses the term “bandits” for the young women, an ironic nod to Banditen, the Nazis’ description of Jews in general.) All had belonged to a web of Jewish organizations that fostered self-reliance and a sense of community in one of the most antisemitic countries in Europe, where opportunities for Jews were so restricted that the younger generation in the 1930s became known as the “youth without a future.”

Hitler’s army occupied Warsaw on September 28, 1939, and began anti-Jewish persecutions. One year later the Nazis created the Warsaw Ghetto, sealing it off behind ten-foot-high walls. Inside, in appalling conditions, many slept on the streets; thousands died every month of disease and starvation. The SS and Gestapo began roundups and deportations to Treblinka in July 1942. By autumn the ghetto was a ghost town, with between 55,000 and 70,000 survivors from its original population of 375,000. Many of those who remained were young activists who had eluded the Nazi sweeps and now committed themselves to armed resistance. Hyman captures the psychology of defiance:

These survivors were simultaneously exhausted, despairing, apathetic, and tormented by guilt. Their carefully constructed illusions regarding German intentions toward the Jews were gone; they knew now that they were marked for death. Yet it was precisely this newfound awareness of their collective fate that allowed these survivors to emerge from the psychological shock of what had befallen them. And as they emerged, a new mood began to take hold; for if they had nothing left to lose, nothing left in their short lives but grief and a yearning for revenge, resistance was the only rational option.

In fact, the chalutzim—Jewish fighters—who launched the uprising had been laying the groundwork for a rebellion for more than a year. As early as December 1941, at a meeting at the Pioneers’ Public Kitchen in Vilna, an umbrella group of Jewish organizations had committed itself for the first time to guerrilla war. Months later a cell of resisters founded the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), with five commanders, two hundred fighters, and a single gun to carry it out. Several women featured in Hyman’s book, including Tosia Altman and Tema Schneiderman, began to prepare for battle around this time, acting as couriers between rebel cells across Poland and spreading news about Einsatzgruppen mass killings. On January 18, 1943, forty male and female fighters from the Dror unit of the ZOB ambushed a German police unit with pistols and hand grenades inside the stairwell of an apartment building on Zamenhof Street. This incident, known as the “little uprising,” offered a preview of the full-scale rebellion that began on April 19.

Hyman recounts in lurid and engrossing detail the twenty-seven days of fighting that raged in the warrens of the ghetto. Zivia Lubetkin, code-named Celina, a shtetl-born member of a Polish Zionist group, rose to become the highest-ranking female member of the ZOB. She and her fellow fighters smashed through interior walls, creating corridors that gave them mobility without exposing them to enemy fire in the streets. “There will be a struggle for every building,” Lubetkin wrote in her diary, from which Hyman liberally quotes. “We will fight for every house. The enemy’s blood will be spilt on every threshold.”

While Lubetkin and her comrades ambushed Nazi troops, other women were active outside the ghetto. The ZOB chose several female agents with “Aryan” looks to operate in the city under the noses of the Gestapo and the Polish police. Feigele Peltel, who had been an activist in the socialist Jewish Zukunft organization in pre-war Poland, adopted the code name Vladka. She and her fellow operatives obtained dynamite, machine guns, pistols, grenades, and other weaponry and smuggled it back into the ghetto, and she also secured safe houses for underground Jews and equipped them with false documents.

The uprising was, of course, destined to fail. In late April, with hundreds of its fighters killed, the ZOB command began evacuating survivors through the sewers. “Masses of refugees were huddling in the filth and the stink,” Tuvia Borzykowski, one of the rebel leaders, wrote of the escape, “in pipes so low and narrow that only one person could pass at a time, walking in a low crouch.” Lubetkin wrote, “We trudge on for hours with no rest…crouched over, crawling on our knees in the stinking water.” She and a handful of others survived to fight in the Warsaw Uprising the following year, but the cost of their resistance was enormous: the Nazis destroyed 631 bunkers that contained hidden Jews, murdered 7,000 of them, and sent another 6,929 to Treblinka. More than 6,000 rebels died in house-to-house fighting and fires set by the German army; the ghetto burned to the ground.

I thought about the price of resistance as I made my way through the courtyard of the Bendlerblock on that brisk October morning. Pausing before the statue of the bound prisoner, a representation of all those who dared to rise against the Nazis, I studied a plaque attached to the pedestal. “You did not bear the shame,” it read. “You fought back.” The sculptor, Richard Scheibe, had chosen not to fight back. He created works that celebrated the Nazis’ annexation of territory, and Hitler and Goebbels declared him “indispensable.” His name appeared on the Third Reich’s list of 378 “divinely gifted” artists, an honor that exempted him from military service. Even though the Allies declared him a “follower” of Nazism, he continued to obtain commissions long after the war, and his career thrived. The rewards of collaboration make it all too easy to choose the path of silence.