Test of conscience: A lesson in defiance from Nazi Germany

As authoritarian rulers gain ground across the democratic world, making inroads not only in Hungary and Turkey but even in the United States, an old question has returned: who bends the knee to tyranny, and who stands up to it?

A clue lies in an episode from inside the Third Reich that has lain, almost forgotten, for nearly 80 years. At its heart was a loose circle of 10 or so friends drawn from German high society — aristocrats, diplomats, professionals — bound by a shared willingness to defy Hitler. Their circle included countesses, an ambassador’s widow, a doctor, a headmistress, and others who believed they had found common purpose.

In September 1943, they gathered for a tea party, unaware that one of them was about to betray the rest to the Gestapo. The betrayal led to arrest, prison, and, for several, execution by guillotine or hanging. Its reverberations would reach the apex of the Nazi state.

The mystery is not only who betrayed them, but why people of privilege risked everything. They could have kept their heads down, their estates and fortunes intact. Yet they chose otherwise.

Consider Otto Kiep, 57, a diplomat who had served as consul general in New York during the Weimar years. In 1933, he was invited to a dinner honoring Albert Einstein, then the world’s most famous Jew. Accepting meant defying the new Nazi rulers; refusing meant endorsing antisemitism. Kiep accepted and toasted Einstein — an act that brought him before Hitler himself.

Or take Maria von Maltzan, the young countess who turned her Berlin apartment into a refuge for “submarines” — Jews forced to live in hiding, including her Jewish lover. Her fellow countess, Lagi Solf, broke the ban on contact with Jews to fetch groceries for those in hiding. She carried a bag in each hand so that, if stopped in the street, she could not give the required Heil Hitler salute.

In archives, letters, and court testimonies, and through interviews with surviving relatives, a pattern emerges: what enabled some to resist while most bowed?

Several were devout Christians who believed they would answer not to Hitler but to God. The tea party’s hostess, Elisabeth von Thadden, was a pioneering educator whose school discreetly took in Jewish pupils while their families sought escape abroad. When the Gestapo accused her of “deficiencies of conviction” after she recited a psalm tainted, in their view, by Hebrew scripture, she faced them down calmly, certain she was accountable only to God.

Others were aristocrats who believed their loyalty lay not with the Nazi state but with centuries of noble tradition. Hitler’s dream of a 1,000-year Reich was, to them, a passing fad. They saw themselves as guardians of a deeper Germany — one defined by compassion and duty.

That conviction could steel them in moments of danger. When Gestapo officers raided Maria von Maltzan’s apartment, they demanded she open a wooden compartment beneath her sofa — where her lover was hiding. She told them it couldn’t be opened, and if they were so sure someone was inside, they should shoot — but only after compensating her in writing for the damage. Her aristocratic composure worked. They left; her lover lived.

Many of the women shared another formative bond: a close relationship with strong, loving fathers who treated them as equals. That trust, rare for women of the era, became inner steel. By the time the Nazis ruled Germany, it had ripened into courage.

Their strength reflected a deeper belief that may define who resists tyranny and who submits: faith in an authority higher than any regime. For these rebels, belief demanded action as well as thought. For some, it meant small gestures — like Solf’s laden shopping bags. For others, like Kiep, it meant daring involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Through such acts, they proved to themselves and one another that obedience was not the only option.

Most of Germany’s nobility did not rebel. Many embraced Hitler, drawn by his promise to restore abolished titles and privileges. But the few who resisted — men and women at that ill-fated tea — embodied a principle larger than class or country.

Their fate was grim: betrayal, torture, death. Yet their legacy endures as a quiet answer to the question that still haunts us. The best safeguard against tyranny, they showed, is not ideology or party, but conscience — a belief in something higher than any political program, prince or president.

The New York Times