Martha Schad Frauen gegen Hitler (Women Against Hitler) Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, April 2001. 367pp ISBN 3-453-19420-9 At a point when it might seem that historians of the Nazi period had almost exhausted the description of its horrors, here comes a work by a Munich-born historian saluting in moving detail a group of little known heroines - the women, nearly all of them German, who opposed Hitler both before and, more dramatically, during the war. Their stories are as memorable, and as moving in their different way, as those of the women who took part in the Resistance in France. Elfriede Scholz, sister of Erich Maria Remarque, author of the famous novel All Quiet on the Western Front (banned by the Nazis), worked as a tailor. Denounced by a customer in 1943 for making anti-Nazi remarks, she was executed after trial by the notorious People's Court. Elisabeth von Thadden, a Protestant headmistress and aristocrat, suffered a year later in the same manner and for similar reasons. Hanna Solf, widow of a former German ambassador, and her daughter Lagi, Countess von Ballestrem, hid German Jews in their homes and helped others to leave Germany. They were also concerned in the plot to kill Hitler and were saved from execution only by the ending of the war. Just occasionally, great pluck led to success. A Communist, Lina Haag, appealed personally to Heinrich Himmler for her husband to be released from a concentration camp, and for some reason he agreed. The Aryan wives of a group of German Jews demonstrated outside a camp in Berlin's Rosenstrasse in March 1943 for their husbands' release - which most, amazingly, obtained. But these cases were the exceptions. Particularly pitiful was the fate of another Communist, Hilde Coppi, whose execution on political grounds was delayed for eighteen months, but only so that she could breast-feed her baby boy. This wide-ranging book includes interviews with survivors. It is a worthy memorial to an idealistic group of women who were prepared to face execution rather than acquiesce in the iniquities of the Nazi state.