The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945 (4 page)

An approach to the problem of enforcement is offered from another angle by Ian Kershaw's recent book on the role and social reception of the consciously produced 'Hitler myth', While giving due weight to the accomplishments of Joseph Goebbels and Nazi propaganda, Kershaw rightly points out that

propaganda was above all effective where it was building upon, not countering, already existing values and mentalities. The ready-made terrain of pre-existing beliefs, prejudices, and phobias forming an important stratum of the German political culture on to which the 'Hitler myth' could easily be imprinted, provides, therefore, an equally essential element in explaining how the propaganda image of Hitler as a 'representative individual' upholding the 'true sense of propriety of the German people' could take hold and flourish.29

Gestapo power was built upon many of the same pre-existing beliefs. As well, long-standing attitudes to crime, and the stigmas attached to those branded as criminals and delinquents, worked on behalf of whoever wore the police uniform, and against those whom they anathematized.30

This book combines administrative and social history and attempts to deal with the everyday interaction between the Gestapo, German society, and the enforcing of racial policy. It asks what were the preoccupations of the Gestapo? How was it organized locally, who served in it, how did it go about its tasks, and, most importantly, how did it initiate cases? What was its relationship to the Nazi Party and other elements in the police system? How and why do its tasks change over the course of the twelve-year history of the Third Reich? How, to mention but one example, was it quite evidently able to enforce decrees that encroached upon the most private sphere of personal, family, and sexual life? The regime could promulgate many kinds of anti-Semitic policies, but how were they enforced? Its racist `intentions' have long been the subject of historians' research, but how it went about realizing them has not received the attention it deserves.

With the outbreak of war, when an army of 'racially inferior' peoples had to be brought to Germany to work, all kinds of race regulations were issued to ensure that no 'racial mixing' took place. How were these regulations policed? If Polish workers, for example, were sent in small handfuls about the rural landscape as workers and quartered in farmhouses, how could prohibited sexual or even friendship ties be prevented? How successful was the Gestapo in policing the vast array of measures in the whole field of racial policy? What were the limitations on the 'success'?

The theme explored throughout is that the enforcement of racial policies designed to separate the groups defined by the Nazis as 'racially foreign' required the co-operation or collaboration of 'ordinary citizens'. Given the small numbers of Gestapo agents and the often minute detail about private matters that was required for the successful execution of Nazi policies, these simply could not have been enforced without the support of those members of the population who came forward with the necessary information. It needs to be said that such participation, as referred to here, came from people not formally members of nor honorary or paid agents of the Gestapo and/or other Nazi organizations. Moreover, by no means were those who passed on information to the police invariably acting out of explicit loyalty to Nazism or Hitler as such. As will be seen, the issues surrounding motivational questions are far more complex than one might assume.

This book suggests that social historians ought to deal more systematically with institutions, particularly the Gestapo, which played such a profound social role, and at the same time it reminds those who are concerned with institutional histories and 'high politics' to consider shifting the emphasis somewhat away from decision-making and institutions. Until now few historians of Hitler's Germany have been prepared to focus on enforcement even though this is the sphere in which official 'intentions' run up against 'structures'. Far from any trivialization, which some might feel to be the consequence of moving away from a preoccupation with Nazi leaders in order to incorporate social-historical findings, such research indicates that responsibility for the criminal features of the regime cannot be dismissed as simply the work of a handful at the top.31
It should not be forgotten that 'ordinary' citizens played a key role in their own policing and helped make possible the murderous deeds of the regime.

2. PERSECUTION, CONSENSUS, RESISTANCE, DISSENT

There are a number of fine works on dissenting opinion or behaviour, as well as resistance and persecution, and henceforth social-historical work on Nazi Germany must take 'popular opinion' into account.32
Far from speaking with monolithic unanimity, the German people counted in its ranks numerous grumblers, malcontents, dissenters, and opponents. Displeasure with how things were going, of one sort or another, could be witnessed in virtually all groups in society, at least on occasion. Ian Kershaw points out that by 1939 (if not earlier), particularly on the 'Jewish question', there was a consensus 'based on the passivity and apathy of the vast majority of the population', behaviour which was nothing less than a 'deliberate turning away from any personal responsibility'. However, this moral abdication was reinforced by the more active participation of at least some people because 'the conditions
of Nazism encouraged the full flourishing of denunciation as an effective form of social control, in which neighbours and workmates collaborated with "active" not "passive complicity" in building the climate of repression and apathetic compliance'.33

In their understandable efforts to uncover popular forms of resistance, historians have frequently lost sight of the broad field of consensus. As Marlis Steinert reminds us, the German government, like any other one, could not have carried on for very long without a good deal of consensus, 'whether forced or passive, of a broad social stratum'.34
This book sets out to examine the bases of support on which the regime was able to rely. The theme pursued throughout is that the Gestapo, and, by extension, the regime, could not have enforced racial policy on its own. It is necessary to recall with Detlev Peukert that the 'fondly drawn pictures of everyday non-acceptance' that began streaming from the presses in the Federal Republic with the approach of the fiftieth anniversary of the 'seizure of power' took place 'against the background of the majority's passivity, conformity or even enthusiastic support'.35

The ability of the regime to carry on, at least until the middle of the waryears, was not seriously affected by the existence and persistence of dissent, which flared into opposition and even resistance on rare occasions. A close look at the way the regime isolated the Jews socially reveals that, in spite of a few stumbling-blocks and miscalculations which caused ripples of public consternation, it was able to enforce policies with remarkable 'success'. Kershaw has made a convincing argument for the 'indifference' and lack of concern most citizens entertained when it came to the fate of the Jews. But one has to ask whether 'indifference' is not a form of 'passive complicity'.36
Regardless of the terminology, this stance was not incompatible with the relatively smooth implementation of public policies aimed at gradually separating Jews from other citizens.

But while this book is less concerned with dissent and resistance than with compliance and persecution, it will have implications for anyone interested in the former. If, as Barrington Moore would have it, the one prerequisite for expressions of disobedience to take place is the existence of 'social and political space within the prevailing order' in which a minimum of mobilization can occur, it can be said that the same process by which it proved possible for the
Naxi regime to enforce its policies simultaneously had the effect of eliminating-or reducing drastically-the 'more or less protected enclaves within which dissatisfied or oppressed groups have some room to develop'.37
In so far as the growing effectiveness of the Gestapo helped produce compliance, the space for resistance was reduced.

3. TERROR, FORCE, 'BLIND OBEDIENCE', OPPORTUNISM

Much has been made in the literature of the general atmosphere of terror and fear faced by contemporaries inside Nazi Germany. According to many reports, from the first days of the 'new order' brutality was applied against actual and potential enemies, not without considerable effect even on people not personally at risk. William Allen states that 'in the atmosphere of terror, even people who were friends' concluded that they had to betray each other to survive.38
He also points out the significance of the 'social reinforcement of the terror system'-how people such as the (non-Nazi) school headmaster began, without ever having been ordered to do so, to encourage changes in students' behaviour more appropriate to the new state of affairs.39
Much more was involved than blind obedience, and even when people were ordered to desist from giving knowingly false tip-offs to the Gestapo-in order, for example, to get one's spouse placed in custody to obtain a more favourable divorce settlement-such instrumental use of the police persisted.

Quite apart from the need to explore how the propensity ever arose for people such as the school headmaster to become unofficial enforcers, the motivation cannot be reduced to fear, as is often done (although not by Allen). It is also misleading to mention only negative factors, because more positive ones were also at work. The 'legal' facade surrounding the seizure of power no doubt led many law-abiding citizens, out of respect for the legal norms, to comply. Because the take-over was not patently illegal many could choose to ignore its revolutionary character, especially after the radicals were subdued following the purge in June 1934. That purge not only 'offered the Nazi leadership a belated opportunity to rediscover its moral standards', as Richard Bessel maintains, but beyond that allowed the 'unpolitical German' to see 'National Socialist institutions as a constituent part of his bourgeois normality'.40
But even before the so-called 'night of the long knives' put an end to Storm-trooper radicalism, the regime was welcomed by many.

Hans Bernd Gisevius, a member of the Gestapo in 1933, later recollected that many people fell in line of their own acord: 'There was, to be sure, a tremendous amount of bitterness and distrust, and frequently open revolt appeared. But there was at least an equal amount of enthusiasm and devotion, not to say fanaticism. Seldom had a nation so readily surrendered all its rights and liberties as did ours in those first hopeful, intoxicated months of the new millennium."What
struck him most forcefully was what he called 'individual Gleichschaltung', by which he meant a kind of willing self-integration into the new system. `Not one of these zealots would confess to another whether his principal motive as idealism or opportunism. But all of them understood that they could no longer hang back.'42
As Fritz Stern rightly points out, in an essay suggestively entitled 'National Socialism as Temptation', it is a mistake to think that the chief motive was opportunism when the 'voluntary, preemptive acceptance of the conformity ordered or expected by the regime' grew `out of a whole range of motives'
.41

Equal care should be taken to avoid placing too much weight on the use of compulsion or force. A modern industrial society as complex as Germany's cannot be enslaved entirely by `force'. For Michel Foucault

the exercise of power is not violence; nor is it consent which, implicitly, is renewable. It is a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of actions. A set of actions upon other actions.

The exercise of power therefore presupposes the existence of some degree of individual freedom.44
He adds that while Nazi Germany suffered from a 'disease of power', that is, experienced a pathological form of power-relations, we should be aware that, notwithstanding its historical uniqueness, it was ,not quite original' but `used and extended mechanisms already present in most other societies'. Beyond that, in spite of its 'own internal madness', it used to a large extent the ideas and devices of our own political rationality'.41

In Hitler's Germany a combination of positive and negative factors, continuities and discontinuities, contributed to the creation of a `disciplined' or
`carceral' society.46
Not all members of such a society will lend a hand in policing, nor is it necessary that all of them do so.

4. ENFORCING POLICY

The term `enforce' carries with it a wide range of lexical meanings, including 'urge, press home (argument, demand); impose (action, conduct, (up)on person etc.); compel observance of (law etc.)'.47
The Gestapo certainly urged, imposed, and compelled, and also elicited much co-operation. The ways in which it proved structurally possible to enforce racial policy are the focus of this study.

The notion of 'policy-enforcement' (rather than 'law-enforcement') is used primarily because institutions such as the Gestapo and even the NSDAP took it upon themselves to enforce not merely laws (or decrees and ordinances), but the far broader range of behaviour thought by them to fall outside the spirit or ideology of the 'new order'.48
For example, the Gestapo sought to enforce the anti-Semitic laws and various regulations, but also pursued a whole range of behaviour (such as 'friendship towards the Jews') made formally illegal only later.49
Such deviations would constitute apparent nonacceptance of Nazi 'policies concerning the Jews' or Judenpolitik.

At the street level, effective enforcement required a minimal degree of popular co-operation. It was quite beside the point to ascertain whether the people who provided information to the Gestapo, the denouncers or informers, agreed with the decisions taken at the highest level (part of the time, or at all), let alone whether they shared their leaders' political or ideological views. Thus, it is important for historians to distinguish the regime's popularity or acclaim from the question of the degree to which it was actively or passively supported. Although many citizens, especially in the working class and/or Catholic-peasant milieux, might have been happy to see Hitler ousted, especially after the opening of hostilities against the Soviet Union, the regime's efforts in enforcing its racial policies to separate Jews from non-Jews (to keep to this example) were never jeopardized.