2. Sources

This chapter provides a comprehensive description of the data and sources that lie at the heart of the research undertaken and reported in this book. It notes that the collection of court records, from which the Quantifying Resistance database was constructed, the Resistance as High Treason project (Widerstand als Hochverrat), was the first of its kind to combine material stored in the archives of the Federal Republic of Germany and Austria with previously inaccessible files from the former German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia and Soviet Union. In this chapter, one finds details of how the Quantifying Resistance database was constructed, the judgement calls made by the authors in its construction, and how key variables should – and should not – be interpreted.