The fallacy of inner emigration

The concept of an “inner emigration” was, upon closer inspection, hollow. With very few exceptions the “inner emigration” had produced ... no literature of dissent.-Ernestine Schlant.

Jul 30, 2025

Boathouse in Starnberg. Photo © 2019 Denise Elaine Heap.

We were wrapping up our April 1995 conversation with Fritz and Elisabeth Hartnagel. It had been an inspiring afternoon. Despite Inge Scholl’s Schreibverbot, they had agreed to talk to me. (Thank you, Inge Jens!) The afternoon had been more than I could have wished for. Fritz and Elisabeth, especially Elisabeth, decided to break their decades-long silence and talk openly about the fiction in Inge’s White Rose book.

“I was there, she wasn’t,” said Elisabeth at one point. Indeed, “Liesel” had spent weeks with her siblings in Munich, while those same siblings had kept Inge at arm’s length. They trusted Liesel. Inge, not so much.

As my mother put her video camera back into its case, as I put the finishing touch on my notes, my mom told the Hartnagels that this trip was healing something inside her. “I grew up in the USA believing all Germans were evil. Germans were the enemy. From the people we’ve talked to, I can now see that there were good Germans as well.”

Almost as one, Fritz and Elisabeth drew themselves straight as a ramrod. The conversation with them had grown relaxed the longer we talked. But their peaceful demeanor vanished in a moment.

No. No. There were very few good Germans. Almost all Germans believed in Hitler, wanted his policies. Good Germans were few and far between. What you believed growing up was right. There were not very many good Germans.

Seven years later, we sat with Herta Probst and her Christl mini-me, Michael. We sat on their veranda. We sat with children running, playing all around us, tricycles and bicycles creating a joyful cacophony as we talked about Herta’s husband and Micha’s dad.

I broke the ice by telling them about the cool Gasthaus in Tutzing where we were staying, that our usual place in Bad Heilbrunn was fully booked. We nattered a bit about Bad Heilbrunn. Turned out Herta had lived there with her three tiny children after the war, a rabbit hole that still intrigues me and which I’m pursuing. She loved “my” little town and was not surprised to learn that Erich Schmorell had connections there as well.

Told her as well about the Tutzinger Gasthaus. That morning over breakfast, the owner’s wife had related family history connected with the charming inn and its even more charming restaurant. It had been in her husband’s family since the 1600s, always a fishery with attached restaurant. They prided themselves on fresh-caught fish. Mostly trout.

Apparently her husband’s uncle or great-uncle had been the fisherman who found the drowned body of Mad King Ludwig — accidental drowning, murder, or suicide? The debate rages on. However King Ludwig II — Count Palatine of Rhein, of the House of Wittelsbach — may have died in the waters of Starnberger See, that Tutzinger uncle was the man who discovered the king’s body.

The narrator continued with her tale of the inn’s history. After the war, the American military billeted soldiers there. One night, the GI Joes got drunk and shot up the pier and parts of the outdoor restaurant. She was incensed as she recalled the story she had heard from older family members.

I was recounting this anecdote to Herta. As Fritz and Elisabeth had done seven years prior, Herta reacted almost angrily. This sweet older woman drew herself up and squared her shoulders. “As well they should have, as well they should have!”

She proceeded to tell us how she and her tiny children, including Micha who was sitting next to her, had nearly been murdered by the SS a few days before war’s end. The full story is in the draft of White Rose History, Volume III (October 13, 1943-May 8, 1945). Short version: Despite having found what she thought was a safe hiding place, the SS tracked her down and planned to execute her and her children in cold blood, to protect “blood and soil.” A few days before the war ended.

Her father Harald Dohrn had been killed three days before the war ended. He participated in Freiheitsaktion Bayern, less of a resistance movement, more an attempt to convince everyday Germans to surrender to the American troops who were fast approaching Munich. SS and Gestapo hunted down as many FAB participants as they could. They found Dohrn and shot him in the back. No trial. No due process.

Herta’s anger was righteous and fierce. Like Fritz and Elisabeth Hartnagel, she asserted that there had been no good Germans. Her near-death experience in May 1945 proved to her that although the war was lost and Hitler was dead, most Germans were such fanatical Nazis that they had betrayed her location high in the mountains. “My neighbors in that mountain village would have killed me given half a chance.”

When we told Herta about the assertion made by Christel Bejenke, wife of Jürgen Wittenstein, that Americans were shooting people on the ground just for fun, Herta rolled her eyes. Christel had said that she and her brother were in a meadow when an American plane flew overhead. Christel insisted that the pilot could see they were children (actually young adults, not children) and shot at them anyway. Herta Probst just shook her head. No.

We heard this over and over again. Hellmut Kohlermann of the children’s sanatorium in Bad Dürrheim where Sophie Scholl served part of her Fröbel Praktikum allowed us to tour every nook and cranny of that great house. The house itself had survived the war with minimal damage. But the French (Bad Dürrheim was in the French sector) had taken every stick of furniture back to France. Beds, tables, chairs, silverware, glasses, plates, curtains, the Kohlermanns had had to replace everything.

My mom expressed sympathy for their plight. Hellmut shook his head. No. We deserved it. After what we had done to them? After what we had done to… It became too much to talk about.

While writing the White Rose histories, I received an alert for a Goethe Institut speech related to World War II. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there were no Webinars. This was announcement of a published transcription of a speech given a few weeks earlier.

I ordered the free transcript and fumed as I read it. The speaker at this conference sponsored by Goethe Institut voiced her strong opinion that it was not merely Jews, Roma, Sinti, Jehovah’s Witnesses, LGBTQ+, “useless eaters,” Socialists, Communists, and political dissidents who were victims of Nazi terror. No!, she said, all Germans were victims too! Her thesis: Ordinary Germans had been deceived, which equated to victimization.

Flabbergasted, dismayed, angry, perplexed, mind boggled — these are only a few of the emotions that surged through me as I read that text. How dare she!

A few years later, that speech disappeared from the Goethe Institut’s Web site. No retraction. No apologies. It just disappeared.

In academic circles, sometimes also adopted by educated Germans after the war, there’s the common notion of “inner emigration.” While technically inner emigration is supposed to mean citizens who feel alienated from their own country or government, it’s become a handy excuse for postwar Germans. If you’ve ever spoken at a Holocaust event where very old Germans are present, the Q&A afterwards always includes at least one elderly person who whines, But we didn’t knoooooow. More on that in a minute.

Instead of meaning a sense of alienation in one’s own country, it is now wielded as a weapon. “Well you see, we did not leave Germany, but we did not approve of Hitler’s policies either. So we emigrated inside ourselves.” In other words, the claim is that they mentally exited Germany and did not participate in Nazi stuff.

It actually gets worse. In the 1970s, an academic named Martin Broszat introduced another term to the lexicon of Holocaust scholarship: Resistenz. That word means resistance, but not like you think. It’s biological resistance, as in immunity. Plants, mammals, fowl that have Resistenz are immune to parasites and disease.

Broszat took that biological concept and applied it to Nazi Germany. To him, various German institutions such as state churches and the country’s vast bureaucracy (Broszat included the military as well) simply went on their merry way, regardless of what the NSDAP decreed. He deemed this “going on their merry way” to be immunity or Resistenz to National Socialism. Notably, he never proved that churches, bureaucrats, and the military went their own merry way and disregarded NSDAP regulations and laws. Minutiae, I guess.

At the time, Broszat was director of Munich’s Institut für Zeitgeschichte. As part of his Bavaria Project in which he sought to depict and shed light on daily life in Bavaria from 1933-1945, he tried to paint a portrait of apolitical Bavarians.

Curiously, I agree with part of his premise. Germans from the Third Reich cannot be cleanly separated into two groups, “members of the NSDAP” and “resistance.” There were non-Party members who were more hardcore National Socialists than official members would be. There were people in the resistance who loved the NSDAP platform but didn’t like the fact that Hitler was losing the war (Kurt Huber belongs to this group). There were Party members who came to regret their decision to join, although those were few in number. Our group of White Rose friends held diverse political, philosophical, and religious viewpoints on almost every topic they debated.

Broszat’s concept of Resistenz did little to improve our understanding of life under Hitler. If anything, he subverted transparent scholarship by inserting the term into an already difficult discourse. As real scholars battled the notion of “inner emigration” — although it is still invoked by those who wish to absolve themselves of all responsibility — Resistenz took its place. Aha!, I may not have resisted, but I was immune to corruption!

Once it was learned that Broszat had been a member of the NSDAP, much of his work — even his good publications — were discredited. Scholars looked anew at the “historians dispute” between Broszat and Saul Friedländer, between Broszat and Ernst Nolte. Broszat’s defense of Wilhelm Hagen, who had assisted in the extermination of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, did little to improve his reputation.

The notion of Resistenz fell out of favor for a while, but has been resurrected by scholars seeking excuses for the general German population. I see this especially among “religious” academics who wish to claim that their religion (Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists) had held themselves apart. They tend to be apologists, not scholars.

Allow me to address inner emigration. Objections to use of that phrase apply equally if not more to the term Resistenz, now used to describe passive-passive resistance in addition to immunity to corruption.

Instead of reinventing the wheel, I will simply quote two authors whose work I respect immensely: Ernestine Schlant and Armin Ziegler.

Ernestine Schlant, from Language of Silence

Note: I broke her very-long paragraphs down into manageable sections.

Still shackled to the Nazi indoctrination of striving for “higher ideals,” the literature of the immediate postwar years was dominated by “vague feelings of guilt, the appeal to the ideals of the ‘essential’ and the ‘higher,’ one’s own sufferings, and the relief over having managed to escape.” In the early postwar months, Thomas Mann provoked extensive controversy when he declared from his exile in the United States that “it was not a small number of criminals” who were responsible for what had happened but “hundreds of thousands of the German elite.” He admonished the German people to “return to the spiritual tradition” and, instead of admiring power, to foster “the development of the free spirit.”

Writers who had not gone into exile, such as Frank Thiess, found Mann’s admonitions objectionable. Thiess claimed that “Germans involved in an inner emigration had gathered far more important experiences within Nazi Germany than those who had looked on ‘from the dress circle and first row seats abroad.’” (The fact that Thiess could call what had happened in Nazi Germany “a gathering of experiences” and found them “far more important” than what had happened to the exiles, is in itself a shocking example of the recalcitrance and obtuseness of those who described their passive attitude toward the Nazi regime as “inner emigration.”)

The concept of an “inner emigration” was, upon closer inspection, hollow. With very few exceptions (such as Ernst Wiechert), the “inner emigration” had produced no documents of the “experiences” it had “gathered” and no literature of dissent that it would have had to hide in desk drawers during the Nazi regime. Writers who did publish under the Nazis, such as Ernst Jünger, Werner Bergengruen, Gertrud von le Fort, and Frank Thiess, continued to write and publish in the postwar period. …

Few exiled writers came back to live in the Western zones. They were not invited to return, in itself a sign of continued recalcitrance. (page 22) — Schlant destroyed some of writers read by White Rose students in her book. Bergengruen in particular does not come off well.

Writing of Hermann Lenz’s nine-part autobiographical novel entitled Vergangene Gegenwart, Schlant said: No other postwar author has scrutinized this passivity as unremittingly as Lenz. His alter ego, Eugen Rapp, is aware that, as the historian Fritz Stern has remarked, “to pretend to be unpolitical at a time of violent social change and unrest is in itself a support of the existing order.” Yet he does not find it in himself to act.

How did an introvert who preferred the vita contemplativa to the vita activa, an “unpolitical German,” respond to times in which the majority of the population (including his own father) was caught up in a euphoric optimism and had no patience for those who foresaw catastrophe? Passivity, even passive resistance, and a sense of fatalism were not uncommon among Germans during the Third Reich, and Lenz depicts Eugen Rapp this way—as an intelligent (though not intellectual) observant individual who cannot abandon his protective shell in order to take a stand.

Eugen Rapp does not represent the “good German” of the so-called “inner emigration” who did not dare speak out. He is not the retroactive voice for those who were too intimidated or paralyzed and who now might think they had found an apologist. He is too much of an individualist and a loner—someone whose thoughts and observations are uniquely his own and who is recognized by his peers as someone apart. (page 127)

Armin Ziegler, my pingelig fact-checker (his word)

[Pingelig means picky.]

In the penultimate draft of my White Rose histories, I sent Ziegler my book, chapter by chapter. He checked my work for accuracy, asked questions when he encountered new material, provided commentary, some of which I incorporated into my work (with attribution!). I especially enjoyed it when I had found something he didn’t know, or when my database clarified dates or places. He would in turn correct his manuscripts.

When he read White Rose History, Volume I, chapters thirteen and fourteen — covering August 1938 through April 1939 — he reprimanded me. “You can prioritize the ‘aversion of eyes’ of the Scholl children properly only when you know that they were still the only Aryan family in that house located at Adolf-Hitler-Ring 131 — with three Jewish families. There’s always talk about a Jewish classmate of Sophie whose fate she [Sophie] bemoaned. At least that’s what they say. But there is not one word recorded about the fate of these three families!!! They saw them up close and in person (hautnah) every day!! At least Sophie, Werner, Elisabeth, and Inge. Why did you leave this out?” (Ziegler email July 11, 2002)

The subtext was, This isn’t like you to do so.

As the “conversation” continued by email the next day, he wrote:

“There are two things of which I accuse the people in Crailsheim (and all of us): 1. They (We) ‘looked the other way’ when their (our) fellow citizens became JEWS and were treated as such. (And this is something of which I accuse even all the Germans who only learned about the Holocaust after the war. And that was nearly everyone. There were not all that many co-conspirators.) 2. And that there are still too many people who talk about the things that were done to Jews. These things were done — in this case — to citizens of Crailsheim.”

Understand what Ziegler is saying. He is not in the camp of the Goethe Institut speaker who claimed that ordinary Germans were victims as well. No, a thousand times no.

What Ziegler is arguing is a fact that too few people face, namely that the first crime against the German Jewish community was not their deportation, it was not forbidding Jews to attend public schools, it was not even Kristallnacht. The first crime against the German Jewish community came when the NSDAP declared that German Jews were not German.

Think about that a minute: The first crime against the German Jewish community came when the NSDAP declared that German Jews were not German.

Plank #4 of the NSDAP platform stated: “Only a fellow German can have right of citizenship. A fellow German can only be so if he is of German parentage, irrespective of religion. Therefore no Jew can be considered to be a fellow German.” [Bold in original.]

This plank is reinforced throughout the rest of the Party platform. Everything that Hitler did is contained in those twenty-five planks. Written and approved in Munich on February 24, 1920. Anyone who voted for the NSDAP in January 1933, and again in March 1933, went in with eyes wide open. The marginalization, indeed the extermination, of Germany’s Jews was not an afterthought. It was part of the plan.

I don’t think I need to tell you that like Ernestine Schlant, Armin Ziegler fully rejected the concept of inner emigration. He did not try to cloak himself in the excuse that “I was only sixteen in 1945.” No, he accepted his responsibility, his accountability for not having spoken up when he saw Jewish neighbors forbidden from sitting on a park bench. When Jewish classmates suddenly disappeared from his school. When the homes and stores of Jewish neighbors were suddenly vacated and occupied by “Aryans.”

Ziegler maintained that the excuse “we didn’t know” does not hold water, because everyone knew that Jews could not sit on park benches, had been dispossessed of homes and businesses, had been subjected to ‘enforced disappearance’ — and said nothing.

More than that, everyone knew that Germans were subjected to these discriminatory acts. Because German Jews in 1933 were German. And no one should ever forget the humiliation that that loss of citizenship imposed upon them.

Should you hear someone prattling on and on about inner emigration, about Resistenz during the Third Reich, tell them to… well, what you should tell them would be bleeped.

Should you hear someone prattling on and on about being apolitical, about keeping their head down during our current constitutional crisis, tell them to…

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