It is not the purpose of this essay to offer a narrative description of the historical events under discussion. Presuming a knowledge of the central facts connected with the resistance, my concern is to draw attention to key problems in the history of the working-class opposition to Nazism and to provide a critical analysis of the historical achievements of that phenomenon.

Any discussion of the historical role of the working-class resistance provokes disputes over concepts and methodology. Too often, indeed, debate on this issue does not get beyond the stage of terminological dispute, since the conceptual presuppositions on which judgments and definitions are based are not made clear. The term “working-class resistance” is especially complex and carries a particularly heavy freight of ideologically charged connotations. It ascribes to a collective entity - the “working class” - a mode of action - namely “resistance” - which is the subject of highly favorable value judgments in the historiography of the Third Reich. The very terms of discussion, in other words, are an invitation to an ideological blurring of individual events and collective conditions, of actual behavior and moral evaluation. In what follows, I will confine myself to using definitions and arguments relating to historical contexts that can be established neutrally and dispassionately; I will look at causes, at people's margin for maneuver, at actions that really took place, at effects that can be specified. Only when the central theses of the argument have been set forth will I proceed to ask how these actions are to be evaluated and whether they belong to a tradition that is desirable from a democratic point of view.