Was communist resistance bad resistance?
What’s the price you’re willing to pay for your values? I would suggest that the majority of people draw the line at risking their job, their home, their livelihood or their reputation for a voiced opinion.
When people feel that there is a risk to saying or doing something, most stay quiet, erect borders around their inner lives and withdraw into the private sphere. We all have certain things we’d say to friends in confidence but wouldn’t want broadcast to the public. But in totalitarian states, the stakes are, of course, much higher.
So what kind of person did it take to resist Nazism, a regime under which the mere act of listening to foreign radio stations was potentially punishable by death?
This question is especially interesting when it comes to non-Jewish Germans who had a choice to keep their heads down and live quiet, compliant lives. Why did some of them decide to risk everything?
We like to think of the few Germans who resisted Hitler at their peril as the ‘good Germans’, morally pure individuals who had such strong convictions that they would readily risk their own lives for them.
Sophie Scholl, who was only 21 when she was executed by guillotine in 1943, is the ultimate example of this: a member of a non-violent resistance group with eloquently argued ethical and philosophical objections to Nazism. Facing the infamous Nazi judge Roland Freisler, she said in court on the day she died: ‘Somebody, after all, had to make a start.’ A shining example of moral rectitude, Sophie Scholl has become an almost legendary figure.
It gets more uncomfortable with Germans who resisted Nazism for political reasons. Social Democrats are usually deemed safe, though people like to forget how much socialism there still was in Social Democracy in the interwar period. But Germany’s SPD is rightly proud of the record of its forebears in fighting Nazism, particularly in voting down Hitler’s Enabling Act with often horrific consequences for SPD politicians.
Where it gets really complicated is with communists. How should we remember people who lost their lives fighting and resisting a genocidal dictatorship when their aim was to replace it with a communist one?
Take Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the German Communist Party (KPD) from 1925 to 1933. He had worked toward a violent revolution during the years of Weimar democracy. He ruthlessly aligned the KPD with Stalinism.
Does this negate his single-minded resistance against Nazism or the cruel treatment he was subjected to? He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933, subjected to brutal beatings and held in solitary confinement for over 11 years before Hitler had him shot in 1944. Naturally, East Germany honoured him widely after the war, naming schools, factories and the pioneer organisation after him. Where I grew up, east of Berlin, many streets are still named after him to this day.
This veneration by socialists during the Cold War, along with his own fervent communism, has made him a complex figure in memory culture. Despite the fact that both fought Nazism and died for it, Thälmann and Scholl are very different historical figures.
A new film is now trying to find a different approach to portaying communist opponents and victims of the Nazi regime. From Hilde, With Love has just been released in British and Irish cinemas. It follows the true story of Hilde Coppi, a resistance fighter who belonged to a loosely connected movement dubbed the Red Orchestra by the regime.
Through her boyfriend and later husband, Hans Coppi, Hilde got involved in a communist resistance group that aided victims of the regime, conducted a sticker campaign and shared information gleaned from Radio Moscow. The latter was particularly significant because Radio Moscow broadcast messages from German Prisoners of War while the Nazis claimed that the Red Army didn’t take prisoners so as deter people from deserting. Hilde relayed greetings to the POWs’ next-of-kin, letting them know their loved ones were still alive.
To the Nazis this and other rather small-scale actions amounted to the ‘preparation of high treason alongside aiding the enemy, especionage and radio communication crimes.’ Hilde and Hans were arrested in September 1942, which is where the film starts. It’s a harrowing and relentless watch. Hilde was heavily pregnant at the time of her arrest and gave birth to the couple’s son in prison.
Remarkably, the film deals with all of this almost exclusively on a human level. Hans, Hilde and their fellow resistance fighters are neither presented as daring spies (as Western media sometimes has in the past), nor as political martyrs (as Eastern depictions often did). They are portrayed as young people who spend a beautiful, sensual, and happy summer in 1942 before everything goes terribly wrong.
In the film, there is a naivety about the group that is endearing and likeable. They were all young, felt invincible and attracted by the danger of what they were doing as much as the principle of the matter.
There is much truth in that for Hilde Coppi. She seemed to be a fairly apolitical person before she met Hans, working as a typist and administrative assistant. She fell for Hans rather than Lenin.
Hans is a different matter. He came from a working-class family in the impoverished Berlin district of Wedding, where the later Stasi boss, Erich Mielke, also grew up. His parents were both KPD members, and Hans grew up deeply politicised, joining demonstrations and communist groups from a young age. He was expelled from his school for taking part in a communist street rally in 1929 when he was barely 13 years old.
Hans pointblank refused to go back to school once the Nazis were in power since that now involved a nazified curriculum and rituals like the Hitler salute. He went underground, spent time in a concentration camp and in prison. There is no question that he was a human being too —a young man in love, a father-to-be. But his resistance to Nazism wasn’t coincidental. It was political, communist to be precise.
The film chooses to downplay this political dimension of resistance. Hans Coppi becomes a secondary character to Hilde’s story, and the entire group is portrayed as a somewhat naive cluster of young people who dabble in a bit of clandestine activity. In one scene, the group discusses a book they are all supposed to have read, and it turns out that they are all just pretending to have read it. Only Hilde takes the assignment seriously and has actually studied the text.
With this approach, the film certainly moves on from older depictions of communist resistance to Nazism. In From Hilde, with Love, the protagonists are all complex humans with lives, flaws, and changing characteristics. This is also what makes the film emotionally so intense. How could it not be heart-wrenching to see a young woman give birth in a Nazi prison while her husband is sentenced to death?
But wouldn’t this human dimension also mean we should have empathy for Ernst Thälmann, who was beaten senseless with a leather whip and who endured solitary confinement for 11 years before being murdered in a concentration camp? Does his veneration in the GDR and that of other communist victims of the Nazi regime take away from the human dimension of his suffering and the evident strength of his conviction? If so, what does this mean for the way we should remember communists who fought Nazism despite the risk to themselves and their families?
Those are not suggestive questions. I genuinely don’t have an answer to them.
Many of those who survived later took high-ranking and influential positions in the GDR. Take Erich Honecker, leader from 1971 until shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. He was three years younger than Hilde Coppi and a KPD member from 1930 when he was 18 years old. He was arrested by the Gestapo for resistance activity and eventually received a ten-year prison sentence. Unlike Hans Coppi, he survived, and we now remember him not for his resistance activity but for his political activity in the GDR.
I don’t have a definitive answer for how communist resistance to Nazism should be remembered but it seems historically wrong to me that either their humanity or their politics should be left out of the picture. Neither will help us understand why they did what they did when others chose to comply.
If the topic is even of vague interest to you, I’d highly recommend From Hilde, with Love. It’s a thoroughly engaging film in its own right, but also a testament to how values and our perspective on history evolve over time. It’s interesting also because of the complexity of the Nazi ‘enforcers’ in it as well from the Gestapo to prison staff and clergy. It’s in cinemas now.
As ever Katja you make us think. It’s yet another aspect of the history of the SWW that is hugely complex. As a Brit I hesitate to criticise the motives of anyone who resisted the Nazis. Whether or not we like the politics of Thälmann et al it took great courage to confront the Nazis. I saw the film yesterday (28/6/25) and was incredibly moved by the story. I knew vaguely of the Red Orchestra story but not the detail. The lead performance of Liv Lisa Fries (Hilde) was remarkable, she carries the entire film. Also worthy of recognition is Lisa Wagner’s portrayal of the transformation of the female guard Frau Kühn from stern functionary to human being in my opinion. And as you have said the Nazis are portrayed as full human beings rather than cartoon evil figures. We see them as mere functionaries carrying out their roles and duties without obvious violent emotions. I found watching the film quite unsettling, for me there was a pervading sense of foreboding. That could be because I knew the story does not end well. An extraordinary film.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend - until he or she is not. Very fascinating read. Thanks.