As soon as they had power, the Nazis took steps to silence any opposition. They murdered most vocal and influential political opponents of Hitler. Lesser opponents were silenced in other ways.
Over the next several months, the Nazis implemented their Gleichschaltung, their plan to ensure that every aspect of public and private life was controlled by the government. The ordinary citizen would have no more private life.
The Nazis believed that the government should know everything and supervise everything - that’s the meaning of the word ‘Nazi’ - it’s short for “national socialism.”
When the government “nationalizes,” it takes over businesses, schools, hospitals, and anything else it can get its hands on. It owns them and controls them. It uses them to influence what people do and how people think.
When the government “socializes,” it taxes and regulates, taking away a person’s freedom to do what she or he wants with his or her own property.
The name ‘Nazi’ refers to a government which nationalized industries and businesses, and a government which socialized the basic functions of life: education, healthcare, transportation, etc.
In the midst of this horrifying takeover of society, there were brave people who resisted. The children of the Scholl family founded a resistance group among the university students in München (Munich). People like Oskar Schindler and Dietrich Bonhoeffer smuggled Jews out of Germany to freedom, and organized assassination attempts on Hitler.
The number of those who resisted was large; some of them may never be identified as anti-Hitler subversives, because they worked in secret, and perhaps died in secret.
One such man was Konrad Adenauer.
Adenauer had been the mayor of Köln (the German city Cologne) for a number of years prior to Hitler’s seizure of power. As soon as the Nazis had a hold on the national government, they began to pressure Adenauer to leave office.
Adenauer was known as someone who’d clearly opposed the plans of the Nazis. When Adenauer refused to leave, he was forced out of office, as historian Horst Osterheld recounts:
Efforts were made to force him to resign, to entice him with pension offers, but Adenauer stayed. He held out until the local government elections which took place a week later, on 12 March. On the very eve of the elections the Chief of Police had given him his word and that of his officers “to defend him to the last man.” When Adenauer asked barely twenty-four hours later for protection, because he had reason to believe that there was a plan to imprison him in his office next morning or even to push him out of the window, he was told - the request was made in Berlin - that “unfortunately nothing could be done.” On Monday, 13 March, Adenauer stole out of his house in the early morning, past the sleeping SA guard, and went to Berlin. He first tried to take the bull by the horns by going to see Hermann Göring a few days after his arrival to protest against his dismissal and expulsion, which had already been pronounced. He asked in vain.
No longer mayor, Adenauer would spend the Nazi years as a private citizen, working behind the scenes to undermine Hitler’s government. The Nazis arrested him several times, and at one point arranged for him to be deported to the East - which would have meant either his death in a concentration camp or his death on the eastern front.
When order was given to ship Adenauer eastward, an old acquaintance, Eugen Zander, who’d work for the Cologne city government years earlier, rescued Adenauer by having him sent to the hospital.
At war’s end, Adenauer quickly emerged as an individual who’d not only resisted Hitler’s Nazis, but who also had political skills and experience in government.
Although it might seem inevitable that Adenauer would be the leader of Germany’s first free government in fifteen years, it was only by a thin margin that he became chancellor in 1949.
