After Kristallnacht (9 November 1938), Popitz protested the mass persecution of Jews by offering his resignation, which was refused. As a conservative and monarchist who would have preferred to see Crown Prince Wilhelm, Kaiser Wilhelm II's eldest son, succeed Adolf Hitler, Popitz became active in the resistance circles beginning in 1938, including the group around Carl Friedrich Goerdeler. As a member of another such right-wing circle, the Mittwochsgesellschaft ("Wednesday Society"), a small group of high officials and industrialists who had evolved from a debating club into a centre for conservative opposition to the régime, he was drawn ever further into the centre of the conspiracy against Hitler and drew up a provisional post-Hitler constitution, the Vorläufiges Staatsgrundgesetz, whose general tendencies were quite authoritarian.
