The resisters in On the Road to the Wolf's Lair are not the singular souls doomed to failure by the massive Nazi machinery, but those who emerged from the Third Reich itself - those people whose cultural, administrative, and military positions allowed them, ultimately, to form a systematic, organized opposition to the Nazi regime. These were people with a vested interest in the Third Reich, and their slow and painful awakening to its evils makes a dramatic story, marked as much by temporizing and compromise, vacillation and reluctance - a resistance to conscience - as by the intrigue and heroics of political resistance that finally emerged. Hamerow follows these men as, one by one, they find themselves overwhelmed by guilt and contrition over their support of a murderous regime. He shows how their awakened moral reckonings and higher interests overrode lifetime habits and disciplines on the road to "the wolf's lair."

Introduction: From Collaboration to Resistance -- 1. Opposition to Democracy -- 2. Breaking the Shackles of Versailles -- 3. The Struggle against Materialism -- 4. That Perennial "Jewish Question" -- 5. The Collapse of the Republican Regime -- 6. The Military and the Third Reich -- 7. The Bureaucracy and the Third Reich -- 8. The Catholics: Church, Clergy, and National Socialism -- 9. The Protestants: Church, Clergy, and National Socialism -- 10. The Armed Forces under the Hitler Dictatorship -- 11. Nazi Dominance and Bureaucratic Accommodation -- 12. The Conflict over Ecclesiastical Autonomy -- 13. Tightening the Totalitarian Grip -- 14. The Diplomacy of Brinkmanship -- 15. The March toward Armageddon -- 16. German Successes or Nazi Triumphs? -- 17. The Moral Dilemmas of Hegemony -- 18. The Ebbing Tide of Conquest -- 19. Searching for a Negotiated Peace -- 20. On the Brink of Redemption -- 21. A Mortal Failure -- 22. The Passion of the German Resistance.