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Norwalk Campus Library

Norwalk ESOL 1402: Lest Innocent Blood be Shed

Secret Messages for the French Resistance

Excerpts from Radio Londres. These messages were inserted with the radio program in the form of personal greetings, they were often peculiar and obviously had hidden meanings intended to a specific audience. The last two messages (taken from the poem, Chanson d'automne) was to inform the underground movement that Operation Overlord (D-Day landings) was to commence in 24 hours.

Non-Jewish Resistance

Between 1933 and 1945, a variety of groups offered resistance to the Nazi regime, both in Germany and in German-occupied territory.

Among the earliest domestic opponents of Nazism were Communists, Socialists, and trade union leaders. Although mainstream church hierarchies either supported the Nazi regime or acquiesced in its policies of discrimination and persecution, individual German theologians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer opposed the regime. Bonhoeffer, who was connected to anti-Hitler military officers in the German Armed Forces intelligence service (Abwehr), was arrested in 1943 and executed in 1945.

Within the German conservative elite and the German General Staff, small pockets of opponents to the Nazi regime existed. In July 1944, under the leadership of Colonel Klaus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, a coalition of these groups and a handful of moderate Social Democratic politicians conspired unsuccessfully to assassinate Adolf Hitler and overthrow the Nazi regime.

Another small resistance group in Germany developed around the Munich students Hans and Sophie Scholl. Through a leaflet campaign, they sought to directly expose the atrocities committed by German forces in the east and to urge Germans to actively oppose the Nazi regime. Arrested by the Gestapo (German secret state police) in February 1943, the Scholls and several other members of their group were executed. Read More.....