Samuel Miner
The war years were also important for political opposition members imprisoned in Nazi Germany during the Third Reich. Chapter 3 focuses on two networks of resisters: Hermann Brill and the socialist resistance in Buchenwald, and Georg August Zinn’s “Red Shock-Troop” resistance group in the early Third Reich. This chapter stresses the popular front aspects of the anti-Nazi resistance. Anti-Nazis within Germany tried to create alliances with communists; however, the search for a popular front failed in the postwar. Disgust with the lack of a German resistance led key anti-Nazis to embrace an “authoritarian democracy” in the postwar as a denazification measure until Germany was ready for a democracy. In the case of Hermann Brill, the idea of a popular front only disappeared at the hands of persecution by the Soviet occupation government. Finally, the chapter looks at several Christian converts in Nazi Germany who were persecuted as “racial Jews” by the Nazi regime. These jurists were persecuted for an identity that they never held as their own.