The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945 (29 page)

In due course some of the heterogeneous group described above as the social misfits' were themselves termed 'enemies of the community' (Gemein- schaftsfremde). Had the regime lasted longer, this loosely defined category of people would surely have been subjected to treatment much like the kind administered to the Jews and others."`

One final point concerning the relationship of these characters and the regime's police system needs to be mentioned. Local police officials could always exercise their prerogative to follow up denunciations. However, the Gestapo acted far more rigorously in cases of accusations against 'opponents'. As will be seen in the next chapters, the police's level of tolerance was at its lowest when it came to any hint of 'race crimes'. Jews and other racial 'outgroups', such as the Poles, Eastern workers, and prisoners of war, were held
in particular contempt. Before too long the Gestapo was paying attention to the town drunk, the work-shy person, the man always at loggerheads with his neighbours, who wanted to complain about a Pole who was riding a bicycle or drinking at the local pub. But one should avoid concluding that denunciations were chiefly the work of the misfits one might expect to find in any society. For one thing, in Nazi Germany there were an awful lot of 'social misfits': it is safe to say that in this period their numbers swelled to include people who would normally not be so labelled. However, solid citizens, such as teachers, priests, and medical doctors, also denounced 'crimes' that came to their attention. During a visit to their family doctor in Schweinfurt in August 1941, the father of a 15-year-old young girl told the doctor that a Polish foreign worker had made her pregnant. 'In order to protect the remaining youth in the area' the doctor reported the matter to the magistrate, who passed it on to the Gestapo. After 'hard-nosed lying', the deed was admitted under questioning, and not one but two Polish workers were sent to a concentration camp, where they died from 'special handling'."'
The above-mentioned cases cited by Minister of Justice Thierack as examples of the dubious use of denunciation include no marginal social types. There were (i)a 46-year-old technical school teacher and his wife; (2)a husband and wife in their thirties, both medical doctors; (3) a merchant (Kaufinann) and his wife; (4) a lawyer and his wife; and (5) a Nazi Party official, listed simply as a 'camp-leader' (Lagerfuhrer), and spouse. If anything linked these people, it was not an inferior social status.]
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6. CONCLUSION

The Nazi regime criminalized any behaviour that might have an oppositional aspect to it. Apart from helping the regime to enforce policies of all kinds, this practice, as Peter Huttenberger explains, permitted the regime to pick up 'dissatisfaction of the population in areas where social assistance was not effective'; thereby, the regime 'strengthened its domination down to the lowest levels of society, in that it picked up non-conforming types of behaviour that were already developing and, by isolating the individual concerned, destroyed them. The denunciation constituted an important precondition for this.''
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One might have expected more attention to popular forms of denunciation in the many books recently devoted to the `history of everyday life' (Alltagsgeschichte) and those that focus upon `resistance and persecution'. However, for the most part, such studies tend to touch on the police only in passing. This chapter has suggested that an adequate assessment of the terror system is essential to any consideration of social behaviour and that establishing the degree of ordinary citizens' participation in the police state is relevant to any local or regional case-study that, which has to be concerned at least in part with evaluating the extent and bases of popular consensus.

The motives for offering information to the authorities ranged across the spectrum from base, selfish, personal, to lofty and 'idealistic'. The records project an image of the denouncers-who, not surprisingly, tended to come from the same milieu as those on whom they informed-as drawn largely from groups at the lower end of the social scale. This image is probably correct, but must be qualified lest these groups be judged too harshly. It needs to be borne in mind that upper-income groups and the nobility for the most part did not need to utilize the police, since they had other and more effective avenues through which to exercise social power. Moreover, the police, themselves largely drawn from the lower social orders, were more deferential in cases involving the nobility and the upper bourgeoisie, and pursued individuals from the lower end of the social hierarchy with greater alacrity. Even so, individuals from all social classes offered information to the police. The regime was bound to have second thoughts about this participation when, at times, it was inundated with charges, too many of which were careless or just plain false. But, despite some misgivings, it was felt better to have too much information and co-operation than too little.

N A z i racial policy was codified in a series of laws, ordinances, and decrees which began in 1933 and grew in scope with the increasingly radical approach adopted by the regime. A recent collection of official measures applied to the Jews has many hundreds of separate entries, and even then makes no claim to being complete.'
Police regulations designed to establish the racial segregation of foreign workers, who were brought to Germany with the onset of war in 1939, are recorded in a volume that exceeds 2o0 pages in length.'
In addition, there was a vast array of racially inspired measures, of many kinds with respect to the German people themselves, quite apart from the other steps that were undertaken to monitor, control, and modify their thoughts, words, and deeds.'

The final chapters of this book focus on the enforcement process-how the regime went about implementing this vast racist repertoire. As suggested in the last chapter, an essential ingredient for enforcement was the provision of information, which was volunteered, solicited, coerced, or collected by agencies of Party and state. Moreover, information was required of such a nature and in such quantities that it could be produced only with the help of `ordinary' citizens. With such co-operation, the regime found it possible to infiltrate all kinds of social spaces, eventually overriding conventions so as to breach the private spheres of family, personal, and sexual life.'

Given the countless forms racial policy assumed, it is necessary to restrict the focus of the examination. This chapter and the one following deal with certain limited aspects of the anti-Jewish policies, while the last chapter examines cases involving Polish workers. An attempt is made to assess the effort to separate these ethnic groups from the population at large. The examination is based primarily on Gestapo case-files from Wiirzburg, and is supplemented by selective use of those in Dusseldorf.

The Gestapo, as already indicated, was the local body ultimately responsible
for the fate of the Jews, up to and including their deportation to the death camps in the east. Particularly illustrative of the enforcement practice are the large number of files pertaining to those accused of (vaguely defined) 'friendship' with Jews, as well as those charged with 'race defilement'. As is rightly pointed out by Sarah Gordon in her study of Dusseldorf, one way to evaluate this behaviour is to look at what happened to social and personal ties that crossed the ethnic boundary. The regime gradually made such trangressions subject to ever harsher punishments.'

In spite of the threat of sanctions, some people refused to comply, and kept up or even established new social contacts with the Jews when such behaviour was criminalized and exceedingly dangerous. Those known to have been picked up by the Gestapo are studied in this chapter. The next one will show how the Gestapo applied pressure in order to obtain compliance. Of course, as the examination will make clear, such a division is somewhat arbitrary, because any evaluation of the courage and commitment of the dissenters must take into consideration the nature of the situation they faced and the size of the odds against them.

1. PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS IN GESTAPO FILES

'Race defilement' (Rassenschande), forbidden (extramarital) sexual intercourse between Jews and 'non-Jews', was declared a crime according to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935.'
Even 'friendly' or social relations with Jews constituted an area of potential 'criminality', but not officially a specific crime as such. 'Behaviour friendly to the Jews' (judenfreundliches Verhalten) was a term of abuse and a catch-all accusation that could be levelled at persons who had uttered a mild disagreement with some aspect of the racial policies, or had otherwise given reason for suspicion that they did not accept the letter or spirit of Nazi anti-Semitism. Such people were also termed 'friends of the Jews' (Judenfreunde) or 'slaves of the Jews' (Judenknechte), although they might simply have retained purely economic, instrumental contacts with them.'
The Gestapo was exceptionally sensitive, and ready to act on any information that helped to enforce racial/sexual segregation.

The absence of a single anti-Semitic 'law' did not hinder denunciations, but in a sense encouraged them, since the vaguely defined policies and
prohibitions allowed for virtually unlimited areas of potentially 'criminal' behaviour. Some Gestapo dossiers begin with the cryptic remark 'suspicious behaviour'; others state, without another word in the dossier, that a citizen brought to police attention for unstated reasons was also 'known to be a friend of the Jews', or another file begins simply with the cryptic remark 'according to a reliable report' the accused person 'continues to maintain contacts with Jews'.'
The doctrine might be reduced to the imperative, 'avoid Jews everywhere', but even in Nazi Germany the general accusation of being friendly with Jews had to be fitted into some specific law or other, such as that against malicious gossip, or the many flowing from the emergency laws of 1933, or the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. But these kinds of 'political' charges were taken very seriously because they might indicate that the individual concerned was rejecting the Nazi regime's doctrines on race.'

As shown above, from the time of the Nazi `seizure of power', sexual and social relations between Jews and non-Jews had to be kept as inconspicuous as possible. Even before such imperatives were codified into law, Nazi radicals, as well as some `ordinary' citizens, occasionally took it upon themselves to confront people who seemed unconvinced by the teachings on race. As the racial doctrine received more publicity and what was expected was made abundantly clear, the social and sexual contacts between Jews and non-Jews became more discreet. Not content with that, the regime sharpened its efforts.

Although the intensification of official pressure was important, the Gestapo on its own could not enforce racial policies designed to isolate the Jews. Table 3 suggests that more public co-operation through the provision of information was required in order to enforce racial policy, and more co-operation of this kind was attained than might be gathered from Mann's figures (as suggested in the last chapter, Table 2). Thus, for example, of the 175 cases pertaining to the separation of Jews and non-Jews in the Wurzburg files in the specific area of sexual and social relations, 5 7 per cent began with a denunciation from a citizen. Mann's study of the Gestapo case-files in Dusseldorf, on the other hand, indicated that information from the population initiated about one-third of all cases. However, part of the explanation for the different figures can be traced to Mann's sample. which specifically excluded the files of the Jews (indeed, it left out i i categories of case-files which pertained not only to the Jews, but several others defined by the regime as foreigners or as 'racially foreign'). Some of the sympathizers with the Jews, and many who voiced doubts in public about the regime's anti-Semitic policies or actions, to mention but two examples, would almost certainly have been covered by Mann's study if they had been accused of the more general 'crime' of 'malicious gossip', or if the Gestapo had put their case into one of the other categories covered by Mann's study, such as 'resistance' or 'opposition'. All that can be suggested here is that had Mann's sample been drawn from the full range of Gestapo activities, especially if it had included the Jews, then in all likelihood the overall percentage of cases which began with denunciations would have been higher. Some of the justification for that suggestion can be seen in Table 3, which is based on a study of Gestapo case-files in Wurzburg.