The Good Germans

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The Good Germans by Catrine Clay: Episode 4

The Good Germans by Catrine Clay

Episode 4

BBC Radio 4 - The Good Germans by Catrine Clay, Episode 4

The story of German families who resisted the Nazis from 1933 to the end of the war.

Catrine Clay’s portrayal of five families in Germany who actively attempted to bring down Adolf Hitler’s regime. Read by David Annen.

Within six months of becoming Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Adolf Hitler had disbanded all political parties, put a boycott on Jewish businesses and placed the Protestant churches under Nazi rule.    

Yet two-thirds of the Germans had not voted for the Nazis and, as Jews began to disappear and the first concentration camp was opened at Dachau in Bavaria, many Germans found the courage to resist.   They knew that, if caught, they would be subject to incarceration, torture or outright execution.   

Catrine Clay argues that this was a much more widespread movement than has been previously thought.  Teachers, lawyers, factory and dock workers, housewives, shopkeepers, church members, trade unionists, Army officers, Social Democrats, Prussian aristocrats, Socialists and Communists, resisters, who worked throughout the war to sabotage German armaments, to spread propaganda against the Nazis, and to try to assassinate Hitler. 

This book offers a rare glimpse into the growth of this movement - a movement which brought disparate bodies together with one common aim, to save Germany by dismantling Nazism. 

The episodes investigate the impact of the terror regime on ordinary ‘good’ Germans, on German Social Democrats and Communists, as well Jews - both in microcosm, in the domestic detail of resistance, and in macrocosm,  as Germany’s relationship with Britain is brought into sharp focus prior to the outbreak of war.


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Book of the week. Catrine Clay's portrayal of five families in Germany who actively attempted to bring down Adolf Hitler's regime. Read by David Annen.

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