The Bendlerblock is a complex of imperial-era army office buildings in the Tiergarten district of Berlin, on what is now Stauffenbergstrasse. From 1933 to 1945, it housed the headquarters of the Reserve Army, where Stauffenberg held a senior staff position. From this office he and a group of fellow officers planned Operation Valkyrie, originally a contingency plan for using the Reserve Army to maintain order in case of internal unrest. They modified it into a coup plan: kill Hitler, then activate Valkyrie to seize Berlin from the SS and SD before the Nazi leadership could regroup. On July 20, 1944, Stauffenberg flew to East Prussia, placed a briefcase bomb under Hitler's conference table, and flew back to Berlin convinced the Fuhrer was dead. By the time he landed, it was clear Hitler had survived. The Reserve Army commander General Friedrich Fromm, fearing for his own neck, ordered the conspirators arrested and shot in the courtyard the same night.

The historian Joachim Fest called German resistance to Nazism 'the resistance that never was.' He meant that there was no unified national movement, no underground army, nothing comparable to what existed in occupied France or Norway. Most Germans, polls and elections suggest, supported Hitler through the war's mid-years. The museum does not pretend otherwise. What it does is show the Germans who, despite that majority, chose to resist anyway. They came from incompatible political traditions. Communists and Social Democrats ran underground networks against the regime from 1933. The Confessing Church, led by figures like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, opposed Nazi interference in Protestant theology; Bonhoeffer was hanged in April 1945. Catholic resistance included Bishop Clemens August von Galen, who denounced the T4 euthanasia program from his pulpit in Munster in 1941. Conservative officers like Stauffenberg planned the July 20 plot. Students Hans and Sophie Scholl founded the White Rose at Munich University and were beheaded in February 1943 for distributing leaflets. Few of these groups knew about the others.

The exhibition occupies three floors of one of the Bendlerblock buildings, with more than five thousand individual items. Documents, photographs, samizdat handbills, last letters from condemned prisoners, propaganda materials the resistance had to operate against. The museum gives equal weight to all strands: military officers and communist organizers, religious dissenters and exile intellectuals like Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Hannah Arendt. Marlene Dietrich, who became an American citizen and entertained Allied troops, is treated as a resister. The museum also displays Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda, with explicit critical framing, to show what the resisters were actually fighting against. Its central argument is that the moral duty of soldiers and citizens does not stop at obedience to orders. This argument was written into the founding ethos of the postwar Bundeswehr in the 1950s, which holds that the July 20 conspirators were not traitors but heroes. Every July 20, the German government and armed forces hold a memorial ceremony in this courtyard.

Particular attention goes to the military conspirators. Ludwig Beck, the Wehrmacht Chief of Staff who had resigned in 1938 over Hitler's war plans, was the moral leader of the plot; he tried to shoot himself when it failed and was finished off by a sergeant. Friedrich Olbricht, head of the General Army Office, had drafted the operational details of Valkyrie. Erich Hoepner, a panzer general dismissed by Hitler in 1942, was hanged at Plotzensee Prison after the show trial. Erwin von Witzleben, a former Field Marshal, was hanged with piano wire on Hitler's order so the death would be slow. Helmuth James von Moltke, the great-great-nephew of the Iron Chancellor, ran the Kreisau Circle of conservative resisters and was beheaded in January 1945. Their ranks, their decorations, their backgrounds did not save them. They had not assumed they would. The reading of their last letters in the museum's exhibition makes clear they understood what they were risking and did it anyway.

On June 25, 1963, two years before the museum was founded, U.S. President John F. Kennedy spoke at the Frankfurt Paulskirche and praised West Germany for the difficult work of confronting its recent history. The German Resistance Memorial Center, established in 1980, is part of that work. It does not flatter the German people. It does not claim there was a movement that could have stopped the Nazis. What it does is ensure that the names of those who tried are not forgotten, and that the rest of the country has to walk past their courtyard and account for the choice they made. Every July 20, German military recruits take their oath in this courtyard. The traditional soldier's lament Ich hatt' einen Kameraden, dating from the Napoleonic Wars, is played on the trumpet over the spot where Stauffenberg fell.