h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm trying to remember where I've heard of Christabel Bielenberg, other than through Dennis Potter's play.

German Anti-Nazi resistance has become something of a specialist topic for me...and you may have seen these:
A3059255
A3054359

Plus I have an Entry pending with Researcher JEllen42 on The White Rose organisation.

What I'd really like to find out more about is 'die Rote Kapelle'. There were, apparently, two Red Orchestra's operating. Firstly there was an extensive, Soviet-backed network of sabotage and espionage. But the Gestapo used the same name to refer to a larger but looser affiliation of resistance activists. Stalin made overtures to this group but was rejected. I shall have to brush up my German by reading a few .de sites. (Actually - it can't be as bad as I fear: I've just had to make a phone call to an elderly friend of an aunt-in-law wgo died a while back - and we seemed to understand one another).

Another fascinating topic would be the left wing origins of the Home Guard. It was far from Dad's Army. The basic idea was that the communists would get some sabotage training and keep their guns under their beds in preparation for the coming revolution.

I hadn't seen those, but I have now. Thanks!

Christabel Bielenberg was English, or maybe Anglo-Irish(!); she came to live in Ireland after the war and her sons went to school with my brother-in-law.

She married a German in the twenties or thirties and her book tells of her outsider's view, first deploring the lack of real coffee, gradually growing in horror. Her husband was a friend of Adam von Trott who also made an attempt on Hitler's life; the most hair-raising passage in the book describes Christabel visiting her husband in prison (he was picked up, suspected of being one of von Trott's circle) and managing to get over to him the vital message that Adam had been killed, without mentioning his name before the guard. "Bad news: our neighbour's son has been killed at the Front . . . A, Ad, . . . Adolph?" meanwhile giving Bielenberg's hand furious meaningful squeezes under the cover of her coat. He was involved, but he got away.

One tiny thing about the first entry: surely the ess-zett always stands for a double s? You say "sometimes" in your footnote.

Ah...an ambiguity indeed. Yes, whenever an ess-zett is used, it can always be substituted for a double-s. However, double-s's aren't always substituted for ess-zetts - hence my 'sometimes'. I think.

There's a lot of politics mixed up with the remembrance of the resistance. Sophie Scholl of the White Rose was a nice, convenient, middle-class martyr (not to denegrate her undoubted bravery) and thus has schools named after her and at least one street in every town. Georg Elser was invconvenient for the Bundesrepublik because he was a dangerous commie...wheras for the DDR he was a suspicious loner who eschewed the collective. Pastor Niemoeller spread a viscious rumour that he was working for the SS. Then there's the Edelweiss Piraten who found themselves margianalised after the war in favour of the apolitical timeservers and closet ex-Nazis.

That much about Bielenberg I knew, though...but I think there's some sort of unexpected modern connection too - like a family marraige to someone famous.

What was the mention in a Dennis Potter play?

'Christabel' starring Liz Hurley: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094435/

Ah--a 1988 TV adaptation of her book. I'd love to see that.