Paths of Resistance | Joshua Hammer
The German Resistance Memorial Center occupies the southeast corner of the Bendlerblock, which during the Third Reich housed the headquarters of the Army High Command, among other offices, near the Tiergarten in Berlin. One brisk fall afternoon I locked my bicycle in front of it and walked through an archway into a cobblestone courtyard, which was bare except for a few linden trees and a life-size bronze statue, cast in 1953, of a bound and naked prisoner. A wreath mounted on a bullet-pocked wall marked the spot where a firing squad executed Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and three other officers after their failed attempt to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944. Up two flights of stairs, in galleries with creaking wooden floors that once served as the offices of Wehrmacht commanders, an exhibition displays photos and stories of Germans who refused to bow to Nazi rule. They include Hans and Sophie Scholl, leaders of the White Rose student movement, who were guillotined in February 1943 for handing out anti-Nazi leaflets in Munich, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, …
