WHITE KNIGHTS IN THE BLACK ORCHESTRA

The story of a group of valiant German voices of opposition to Hitler’s murderous regime.

Troubled by Hitler’s racist, unhinged, warlike rhetoric, these Germans, largely from the Christian upper class of Berlin, expressed alarm and attempted to sabotage a variety of Nazi plans. Journalist Dunkel, author of Color Blind: The Forgotten Team That Broke Baseball's Color Line, frames the suspenseful narrative around the work and family of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, leader of the Confessing Church, established in spring 1934 as “an offshoot of the Protestant National Church,” which operated “without ties to the Nazi Party, staking out a position firmly opposed to the deification of Hitler.” By 1937, the Gestapo had shut down the church, jailed many of the pastors, and suppressed the teachings of Bonhoeffer and his associates. At the time, his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, a staff attorney at the Ministry of Justice, began secretly compiling a list of Nazi transgressions, which he referred to as the “Chronicle of Shame.” Both had connections to high-ranking Nazi officials, which they used to their advantage during their dangerous, clandestine plotting, creating a confederation known as the Black Orchestra. In addition to chronicling the actions of the Black Orchestra, the author weaves in the lives and fortunes of other early Hitler critics, including American journalist Dorothy Thompson, who believed that “Nazi Germany out-eviled almost everybody’s frame of reference”; Paul Schneider, the first Confessing Church pastor murdered by the Nazis; and Carl von Ossietzky, a pacifist journalist who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935 and then spent the next three years being tortured in a series of concentration camps before he died in 1938 in Berlin. “After some of the beatings,” writes Dunkel, “guards would ask Ossietzky to sign a statement retracting his criticisms of the German government. He never took back a word.”

A thoroughgoing history of indispensable purveyors of active and passive resistance in Nazi Germany.