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Aristocrats such as [[Maria Gräfin von Maltzan]] and [[Marie Therese von Hammerstein]] obtained papers for Jews and helped many to escape from Germany. After the Nazis seized power in 1933, tension between the authorities and von Thadden's school began to grow. In [[Wieblingen]] in Baden, [[Elisabeth von Thadden]] a private girls' school principal, disregarded official edicts and continued to enrol Jewish girls at her school until May 1941 when the school was nationalized and she was dismissed (she was executed in 1944). A Berlin Protestant Minister, [[Heinrich Grüber]], organised the smuggling of Jews to the [[Netherlands]]. At the Foreign Office, Canaris conspired to send a number of Jews to Switzerland under various pretexts. It is estimated that 2,000 Jews were hidden in Berlin until the end of the war. [[Martin Gilbert]] has documented numerous cases of Germans and Austrians, including officials and Army officers, who saved the lives of Jews. <ref>Martin Gilbert, ''The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust'', chapters 8 and 9</ref>
There was only one public manifestation of opposition to the Nazi persecution of the German Jews, the [[Rosenstrasse protest]] of February 1943, sparked by the arrest and threatened deportation to death camps of 1,800 Jewish men married to non-Jewish women. Before these men could be deported, their wives and other relatives rallied outside the building in Rosenstrasse where the men were held. An estimated 6,000 people, mostly women, rallied in shifts in the winter cold for over a week. Eventually Himmler, worried about the effect on civilian morale, gave in and allowed the arrested men to be released. Some who had already been deported and were on their way to [[Auschwitz]] were actually brought back. There was no retaliation against the protesters, and most of the Jewish men survived the war. This incident was remarkable both for its success and its uniqueness, and again raises the question of what might have happened if more Germans had been wilkling to protest against the deportations.
Nazism had a powerful apperal to German youth, particularly middle-class youth, and German universities were strongholds of Nazism even before Hitler came to power. The [[Hitler Youth]] sought to mobilise all young Germans behind the regime, and apart from stubborn resistance in some rural Catholic areas, was generally successful in the first period of Nazi rule. After about 1938, however, persistent alienation among some sections of German youth began to appear. This rarely took the form of overt political opposition - the [[White Rose]] group was a striking exception, but was striking mainly for its uniqueness. Much more common was what would now be called "dropping out" - a passive refusal to take part in official youth culture and a search for alternatives. Although none of the unofficial youth groups amounted to a serious threat to the Nazi regime, and although they provided no aid or comfort to those groups within the German elite who were actively plotting against Hitler, they do serve to show that there were currents of opposition at other levels of German society.
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