The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  Map 3. The Plebiscite of 12 November 1933

  VI

  How far, then, did terror and intimidation penetrate into German society under the Nazis? Blatant intimidation and manipulation at election time may have rendered the results completely unreliable as an indicator of popular attitudes, but they undoubtedly concealed a good deal of support for the regime as well as stifling criticism and opposition, and on some issues at least - the remilitarization of the Rhineland and the annexation of Austria, for instance - it is more than likely that a majority would have voted ‘yes’ even had the election been completely free. Moreover, for most Germans, Nazi terror, as we have seen, rapidly evolved from a reality, as it was in the near-universal violence of the first half of 1933, into a threat that was seldom translated into action. In 1933 a huge apparatus of surveillance and control was rapidly brought into being to track down, arrest and punish anyone who opposed the Nazi regime, including a good third of the electorate who had voted for the parties of the left in the last free German elections. By the end of 1935 organized opposition had been completely crushed. The ‘Night of the Long Knives’ was also a lesson to dissenters within the Nazi movement, above all of course to the millions of men who belonged to the turbulent brownshirt paramilitary movement. Politicians in many other parties, from the Democrats to the Nationalists, had been arrested, threatened, even murdered as a warning to others to fall into line. But from 1936 onwards, overt terror was directed increasingly against relatively small minorities such as persistent or committed Communists and Social Democrats, the asocial and work-shy, petty criminals and, as we shall see later in this book, Jews and homosexuals. For the vast majority of Germans, including millions of former Communists and Social Democrats, provided they kept their noses clean, the threat of arrest, imprisonment and concentration camp receded into the background.232

  Recently, indeed, some historians have built upon these facts to argue that the Nazis did not rule by terror at all. Violence and intimidation rarely touched the lives of most ordinary Germans. After 1933 at least, terror was highly selective, concentrating on small and marginal groups whose persecution not only met with the approval of the vast majority of Germans, but was actually carried out with the co-operation and often voluntary participation at the local level of the broad mass of ordinary German citizens. German society under the Nazis was, in this view, a society engaged in ‘self-surveillance’.233 This went beyond denunciations for personal motives to include a good degree of ideological input, as was clear, for example, in the case of Augsburg. Statistics of denunciations that include, for example, reports to the Gestapo by customers in inns and bars or ‘colleagues at work’ make no mention of how many of these were in fact loyal Nazi Party members or officials of organizations like the Labour Front; a good many of them are likely to have been, given the huge numbers of people who had joined the Nazi Party by the mid-1930s or belonged to ancillary organizations like the stormtroopers, the Hitler Youth and so on. If we look at the composition of the inmate population of concentration camps at any time in the Third Reich, we do indeed find overwhelmingly members of minorities who were generally regarded with suspicion by a large part of the German population.

  Yet to speak of a self-policing society understates the element of top-down terror and intimidation in the functioning of the Third Reich.234 Those cases that landed up on the Gestapo’s desks constituted only a tiny proportion of criminally liable statements in any given year. The vast majority were never denounced by anybody. Denunciation was the exception, not the rule, as far as the behaviour of the vast majority of Germans was concerned. In Lippe, for instance, a district with 176,000 inhabitants, the total number of denunciations sent in to Party agencies from 1933 to 1945 was a mere 292; the maximum submitted in any single year was only 51, the minimum was three denunciations.235 In 1937, moreover, only 17,168 cases of contravention of the Law on Malicious Gossip were reported by the Gestapo in the whole of the German Reich. The actual number of contraventions is likely to have been many hundred times greater. Thus, from whatever motive, the overwhelming majority of witnesses to such contraventions declined to become denouncers. Particularly in working-class districts, the fear of ostracism or counter-denunciation, even of revenge attacks, must have been considerable. Moreover, it was not ordinary German people who engaged in surveillance, it was the Gestapo; nothing happened until the Gestapo received a denunciation, and it was the Gestapo’s active pursuit of deviance and dissent that was the only thing that gave denunciations meaning. After they had broken labour movement resistance, the Gestapo turned to suppressing a far broader range of less ideological forms of dissent, and the consequences for those whom it brought in for questioning and prosecution could be serious indeed, beginning with brutal violence and torture meted out by Gestapo officers themselves, or under their supervision, in the course of interrogation, and ending in the courts, the prisons and the camps.236 In this process, the Gestapo called on a network of local officials of the regime, from the Block Warden upwards, and the very existence of such a network, with the Gestapo at its centre, was in itself an incentive to denunciation. Nazi officials knew that failure to pursue dissent could easily land them in trouble themselves; they also knew that bringing it to the Gestapo’s attention could earn them approbation as true servants of the Third Reich. Ultimately, it was the Gestapo and the agencies it employed, exploited or worked alongside, who kept Germans under surveillance, not the Germans themselves.237

  In defence of the argument that the overwhelming majority of Germans approved of the repressive policy of the regime, it has been pointed out, correctly, that the Nazis, far from concealing the existence of repressive institutions and practices, regularly announced executions, prison sentences, court verdicts against dissent, ‘malicious gossip’ and so on, in the newspapers and other propaganda organs of the regime. Therefore, the argument continues, the vast majority of ordinary people who read the newspapers had no objection to these practices. But such publicity cut more than one way, and a major function of advertising the terror imposed by the regime on deviants and dissenters was to deter millions of ordinary Germans from going down the same road. The open threat of concentration camp for people who spread rumours about the Röhm purge only made explicit what was implicit in every report of this kind. In a similar way, the fact that top police and SS officials like Reinhard Heydrich and Werner Best saw the Gestapo as working on behalf of the German people and with its co-operation in a kind of ethnic and political purification, encompassing the whole of society, should not simply be taken at face value: Nazi ideology constantly reiterated the belief that the regime in all its aspects enjoyed the support of all the people, but in fact the openly proclaimed vastness of the Gestapo’s ambition was yet another instrument of terror in itself, fostering the belief amongst the broad mass of Germans that its agents were everywhere and knew everything that was going on.238

  Despised minorities were, to be sure, put in the concentration camps; but to focus exclusively on this ignores the much larger number of political and other deviants condemned by the courts and put in state prisons and penitentiaries. The further in time we get from Nazi Germany, the more difficult it becomes for historians living in democratic political systems and in cultures which respect the rights of the individual to make the leap of imagination necessary to understand people’s behaviour in a state such as Nazi Germany, where imprisonment, torture or even death might await anyone who dared to voice the slightest criticism of the regime and its leaders. Those who approved of such repression were in all likelihood a minority, active supporters and functionaries of the Party like the Block Wardens, and a good number of middle- and upper-class, conservative Germans who thought the best place for Marxists to be was in prison anyway. Even they, however, knew well enough that they had to be careful about what they said and did, and the dangers of not doing so became abundantly clear once opposition began to spread among these groups too. The shots that killed Kurt von Schleicher, Herb
ert von Bose, Edgar Jung, Gustav von Kahr, Erich Klausener and Kurt von Bredow at the beginning of July 1934 were also a warning to upper- and middle-class conservatives to keep their heads down if they did not want them to be blown off.239

  Ordinary conservative citizens like Luise Solmitz, who harboured no thoughts of political activism, may have turned aside from the bleak fact of the regime’s willingness to murder its opponents, revealed so starkly in late June and early July 1934, in their relief that the order they craved had been restored; to such people, Röhm’s stormtroopers seemed as great a menace as the Reichsbanner or the Red Front-Fighters’ League of the Weimar years. Yet behind closed doors they cannot have been oblivious to the fate of the conservative clique around Vice-Chancellor von Papen. It was not only the third or so of the population who had been committed to the Marxist left before 1933 that was subject to massive intimidation. Indeed, scarcely had the murderous violence of the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ receded, than an even larger minority than the Marxists, that of the German Catholics, began to be prosecuted and imprisoned as they gave vent to their increasingly critical views of the regime in public. More general still were measures such as the Law on Malicious Gossip, which clamped down on the most trivial expressions of dissent and put people who told jokes about Hitler and Göring in prison. These were mainly members of the German working class, it is true, but the working class after all made up around half the entire population, and middle- and even upper-class offenders in this respect were brought before the Special Courts as well. Successful prosecutions under this law were a further instrument of mass intimidation, adding to the general climate of fear and helping to create the spiral of silence in which the regime could commit ever greater crimes without fear of public censure or opposition.240

  The truth is that far from Nazi terror being levelled exclusively against small and despised minorities, the threat of arrest, prosecution and incarceration in increasingly brutal and violent conditions loomed over everyone in the Third Reich, even, as we have seen in the cases brought before the Special Courts, over members of the Nazi Party itself. The regime intimidated Germans into acquiescence, visiting a whole range of sanctions upon those who dared to oppose it, systematically disorienting people, and depriving them of their traditional social and cultural milieux, such as the pub or the club or the voluntary association, above all where these could be seen as a potential source of resistance, as in the case of the labour movement. Fear and terror were integral parts of the Nazis’ armoury of political weapons from the very beginning.241 The state and the Party could use them because within a few months of Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor, they had systematically deprived all Germans of virtually every basic human and civil right they had enjoyed under the Weimar Republic. The law was no protection against the state if the state or any of its agencies suspected that a citizen was disinclined to demonstrate approval of its policies and purposes. On the contrary, vast numbers of new, often draconian laws were decreed that gave the police, the Gestapo and the SS a virtual carte blanche to deal with anyone suspected of deviating from the norms of human behaviour laid down by the Third Reich for its citizens. In this situation, it was not surprising that ordinary people and lower-level officials of the Nazi Party began to reinforce the atmosphere of pervasive terror and intimidation by sending their own unsolicited denunciations of deviants to the Gestapo.

  At the same time, the Gestapo was only one part of a much wider net of surveillance, terror and persecution cast by the Nazi regime over German society in the 1930s; others included the SA and SS, the Criminal Police, the prison service, the social services and employment offices, the medical profession, health centres and hospitals, the Hitler Youth, the Block Wardens and even apparently politically neutral organizations like tax offices, the railway and the post office. All of these furnished information about deviants and dissidents to the Gestapo, the courts and the prosecution service, forming a polymorphous, uncoordinated but pervasive system of control in which the Gestapo was merely one institution among many.242 Everything that happened in the Third Reich took place in this pervasive atmosphere of fear and terror, which never slackened and indeed became far more intense towards the end. ‘Do you know what fear is?’ an elderly worker asked an interviewer some years after it was all over: ‘No. The Third Reich was fear.’243 Yet terrorism was only one of the Third Reich’s techniques of rule. For the Nazis did not just seek to batter the population into passive, sullen acquiescence. They also wanted to rouse it into positive, enthusiastic endorsement of their ideals and their policies, to change people’s minds and spirits and to create a new German culture that would reflect their values alone. This meant propaganda, and here too, as we shall now see, they went to unprecedented lengths to achieve their aims.

  2

  THE MOBILIZATION OF THE SPIRIT

  ENLIGHTENING THE PEOPLE

  I

  ‘The revolution we have made’, declared Joseph Goebbels, on 15 November 1933, ‘is a total one. It has encompassed every area of public life and fundamentally restructured them all. It has completely changed and reshaped people’s relationship to each other, to the state, and questions of existence.’ This was, he went on, a ‘revolution from below’, driven on by the people, because, he said, it had brought about ‘the transformation of the German nation into one people’. Becoming one people meant establishing a unity of spirit across the nation, for, as Goebbels had already announced in March: ‘On 30 January the era of individualism finally died . . . The individual will be replaced by the community of the people.’ ‘Revolutions’, he added, ‘never confine themselves to the purely political sphere. From there they reach out to cover all other areas of human social existence. The economy and culture, science and scholarship, and art are not protected from their impact.’ There could be no neutrals in this process: no one could stand aside under false claims of objectivity, or art for art’s sake. For, he declared: ‘Art is no absolute concept, it only gains life from the life of the people.’ Thus: ‘There is no art without political bias.’1

  The revolution of which Goebbels was speaking was not a social or economic revolution along the lines of the French Revolution of 1789 or the Russian Revolution of 1917. Nor was it a revolution of permanent upheaval such as Röhm and the stormtroopers had seemed to envisage before they were crushed in 1934. It was a cultural revolution. It envisaged the deepening and strengthening of the Nazis’ conquest of political power through the conversion of the whole German people to their way of thinking. Not 37 per cent of the people, as Goebbels said on 25 March 1933, referring to the highest proportion of the vote the Nazis had ever succeeded in winning in a free German election, but 100 per cent of the people must be behind them.2 It was to this end that Hitler had created a new Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda on 13 March 1933 and put Goebbels himself into the Ministry, with a seat in the cabinet.3 On 25 March, Goebbels defined the Ministry’s task as the ‘spiritual mobilization’ of the German people in a permanent re-creation of the spirit of popular enthusiasm that had, so the Nazis claimed, galvanized the German people on the outbreak of war in 1914. The Nazis’ belief in the positive power of propaganda also owed a great deal to the experience of the First World War, when, they felt, the British had succeeded in purveying damaging myths about Germany. Goebbels’s Ministry, staffed by young, committed Nazi ideologues, sought not just to present the regime and its policies in a positive light, but to generate the impression that the entire German people enthusiastically endorsed everything it did. Of all the things that made the Third Reich a modern dictatorship, its incessant demand for popular legitimation was one of the most striking. The regime put itself almost from the very start in a state of permanent plebiscitary consultation of the masses. It went to immense trouble to ensure that every aspect of this consultation delivered a resounding and virtually unanimous endorsement of its actions, its policies and above all, its Leader. Even if it knew, as it must have done, that this endorseme
nt was in reality far from genuine, the mere appearance of constantly renewed mass enthusiasm for the Third Reich and hysterical mass adulation of its Leader would surely have an effect in persuading many otherwise sceptical or neutral Germans to swim with the tide of popular opinion. It would also intimidate opponents of the regime into silence and inaction by persuading them that their aim of gaining the support of their fellow citizens was a hopelessly unrealistic one.4