Quite a few people showed their opposition through private grumbling,
amongst their friends, family or trusted colleagues, but they were
careful not to do so in the presence of people who would report them
to the Nazis. However, this grumbling didn’t become a collective open
opposition for several reasons. Firstly, people were afraid of the
Nazis, especially its aggressive divisions like the SS and Gestapo.
Most of the time, people didn’t know what was going on as censorship
and propaganda prevented them from getting the clear picture. Those
who knew about the harsh extremes of the Nazi policy were silent for
fear of their own lives. Plus, though people didn’t agree with certain
Nazi policies, they would still bear with the ideas that the Nazis
were at least helping Germany regain its stability and prosperity. The
fact that Nazis did drop unpopular policies also pleased them. Since
the Nazis were voted for, and achieved success in the elections,
people from other countries and majority of Germany saw that they had
legal authority to do as they pleased, so little was done to actually
stop them.
There wasn’t much of passive resistance, as people were intimidated
by the Nazis. Since the Nazis could not be voted out, there were few
attempted coup d’etats, i.e., attempts to kill Hitler and then replace
him. However, Hitler was sheer lucky in these cases, once the bomb
failed to explode and in another instance, the opposition accidentally
moved the bomb away from him, leaving him unscathed.
Nazis faced opposition from conservative, socialist and communist
groups as the roles of these groups and Hitler’s supposed negligence
towards them was exaggerated by people like Gerard Ritter [in ‘THE
GERMAN RESISTANCE [1958]]. However, Hitler tactfully handled each of
them effectively.
It’s said that there was opposition not only for Hitler’s power and
position but for the desire to maintain authoritarian government. The
army on the other hand believed that German could only dominated
Europe after Hitler was kicked out from his position. Historians
believe that opposition was not due to political reasons but was a
‘moral, ethical’ opposition against dictatorship.
From all Hitler’s opposition, only the army actually posed a serious
threat to Hitler and aimed to confront the SS. So there were
undercurrents of opposition against Hitler, but most of them didn’t
manifest into a full fledged rebellion, or even an open opposition.