Luke Berryman’s Resist­ing Nazism pro­files peo­ple and groups who fought against Ger­man fas­cism before, dur­ing, and after World War II. His sub­jects include a Black Amer­i­can sol­dier, a for­mer US con­gress­woman, pre­war Ger­man car­i­ca­tur­ists, teenaged Ger­man out­casts, and repen­tant Amer­i­can neo-Nazis. In com­pos­ing a book with so many diver­gent indi­vid­u­als, he works dili­gent­ly to con­vince the read­er that the tales he tells exem­pli­fy and sat­is­fy his broad def­i­n­i­tion of ​“resis­tance.” 

Each chap­ter tells a sto­ry suc­cinct­ly and with a sense of imme­di­a­cy and dra­ma. One will suf­fice as an exam­ple. Leon Bass was a Black Amer­i­can ser­vice­man who arrived at Buchen­wald death camp at the end of World War Two. Years lat­er, as a high school prin­ci­pal who suc­ceed­ed despite per­sis­tent racism, he began relat­ing his hor­ri­fy­ing sto­ry after hear­ing a Holo­caust sur­vivor tell her sto­ry to reluc­tant stu­dents. ​“I want­ed to let my stu­dents know where I stood. That I didn’t believe that com­ing out and attack­ing your prob­lems with a base­ball bat was the right way. I want­ed to be an agent of non­vi­o­lent change.”

Berry­man accom­pa­nies each tale of hero­ism, deter­mi­na­tion, and — arguably, in cer­tain cas­es — fail­ure, with a behind-the-scenes descrip­tion of his detec­tive work. Switch­ing to first-per­son, he tells us where he con­duct­ed research and pro­vides snip­pets of inter­views with the peo­ple he pro­files or their sur­vivors. These sec­tions lack the pathos of the sto­ries them­selves. Berry­man and his sub­jects strug­gle to explain the ​“why” of their tales: Why did teenaged Ger­mans who could not fit in the rigid frame­works of Nazi youth groups turn to every­thing from hik­ing and danc­ing to small-scale efforts at dis­rupt­ing Nazi war efforts? Why did post­war Ger­man pros­e­cu­tors con­tin­ue to hunt down Nazi crim­i­nals who had evad­ed their reck­on­ing with the law for decades? Why did film­mak­er Claude Lanz­mann and a young part­ner devote more than ten years — and use eth­i­cal­ly ques­tion­able tac­tics — to make what became the land­mark film Shoah? Per­haps inevitably, their expla­na­tions fall short of satisfying. 

Sev­er­al of Berryman’s sketch­es will leave the read­er gasp­ing with emo­tion. Oth­ers illu­mi­nate lit­tle-known tales that deserve more atten­tion than the author gives them. Indeed, many of these nar­ra­tives could be expand­ed to book-length his­to­ries or nov­els. None will leave you unmoved.