The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945 (55 page)

6 The figures are from Mathilde Jamin, Zwischen den Klassen: Zur Sozialstruktur der SA-Fuhrerschaft (Wuppertal, 1984), 2, 5.

7 For the figures and a brief introduction see George H. Stein, The Waffen SS: Hitler's Elite Guard at War, 1939-1945 (Ithaca, 1966), p. xxvi.

" Hans Buchheim, 'Die SS: Das Herrschaftsinstrument', in Hans Buchheim et al., Anatomie des SS-Staates, (Olten, 1965), i. 29.

9 Bracher, Die deutsche Diktatur, 382.

10 For an introduction see Johannes Tuchel and Reinold Schattenfroh, Zentrale des Terrors: PrinzAlbrecht-Strafe 8. Das Hauptquartier der Gestapo (Berlin, 1987), 63ff., and Reinhard Rurup (ed.), Topographie des Terrors: Gestapo, SS and Reichssicherheitshauptamt auf dem 'Prinz-Albrecht-Geldnde'. Eine Dokumentation (Berlin, 1987), 36ff.

See Buchheim et al., Anatomie des SS-Staates. Some accounts turn into mini-histories of the entire era: see e.g. Jacques Delarue, Geschichte der Gestapo, trans. Hans Steinsdorff (Dusseldorf, 1964); Edward Crankshaw, Gestapo: Instrument of Tyranny (London, 1956); Alain Desroches, La Gestapo: Atrocites et secrets de !'inquisition nazie (Paris, 1972).

12 David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany 1933-1939 (London, 1967), 202ff. Police and political police are mentioned once each and not cited in the index.

" An exception here is Detlev Peukert, Volksgenossen and Gemeinschaftsfremde: Anpassung, Ausmerze and AuJbegehren unter dem Nationalsozialismus (Cologne, 1982), 55ff. More attention might have been devoted to policing in the project on Bavaria. See Martin Broszat et al. (eds.), Bayern in der NS-Zeit, 6 vols. (Munich, 1977-83).

14 The theme might have been explored more, for example, by Lutz Niethammer (ed.), 'Die Jahre weiB man nicht, wo man die heute hinsetzen soil': Faschismus-Erfahrungen im Ruhrgebiet (Berlin, 1983). For an important analysis of the silence see in this volume the essay by Ulrich Herbert, "'Die guten and die schlechten Zeiten": Uberlegungen zur diachronen Analyse lebensgeschichtlicher Interviews' (pp. 67ff.): see also Annemarie Troger, 'German Women's Memories of World War II', in Margaret Randolph Higonnet et al. (eds.). Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven, 1987). 285ff. Cf. Bettina Wenke, Interviews mit Oberlebenden: Verfolgung and Widerstand in SOdwestdeutschland (Stuttgart, 1980), toff., and 98ff.: Lothar Steinbach, Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Glaube? Ehemalige Nationalsozialisten and Zeitzeugen berichten Ober ihr Leben im Dritten Reich (Berlin, 1983), 21ff.

On the policing function of the NSDAP see Michael H. Kater, The Nazi Party: A Social Profile of Members and Leaders, 1919-1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 19off. Kater quotes Hermann Rauschning's remark that the Nazi system worked as it did because 'everyone is the other man's devil, everyone supervises everybody' (p. 208). See also Aryeh L. Unger, The Totalitarian Party: Party and People in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (Cambridge, 1974), 83R.

James F. Richardson. 'Berlin Police in the Weimar Republic: A Comparison with Police Forces in Cities in the United States', in George L. Mosse (ed.), Police Forces in History (London, 1975), 79ff. For useful remarks on the different meanings of the concept of 'police state' see e.g. Brian Chapman, Police State (London, 197o), 11 ff.

'v From a contemporary document by Franz Vogt, 'Die Lage der deutschen Bergarbeiter (August 1936)' repr. in Detlev J.K. Peukert and Frank Bajohr, Spuren des Widerstands: Die Bergarbeiterbewegung im Dritten Reich and im Exil (Munich, 1987), 140.

" The exact figures are given in chs. i and 2.

See ch. 2 for details.

2" G. R. Elton, Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge, 1972), 3 31 f ., suggests that enforcement relied on 'amateurs' earlier as well.

21 Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (New York, 1966), 540.

22 E. K. Bramstedt, Dictatorship and Political Police: The Technique of Control by Fear (1945: New York, 1976), 137ff.

23 Broszat, Der Staat Hitlers, ch. ro.

24 Martin Broszat, 'Politische Denunziationen in der NS-Zeit: Aus Forschungserfahrungen im Staatsarchiv Munchen', Archivalische Zeitschrift, 73 (1977), 221 ff. For the post-war legal problem of dealing with the matter see Hans Carl Nipperdey, 'Die Haftung fur politische Denunziation in der Nazizeit', in H. C. Nipperdey (ed.), Das Deutsche Privatrecht in der Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts: Festschrift fur Heinrich Lehmann zum 8o. Geburtstag, i (Berlin, 1956), 285-307.

25 Buchheim, 'Die SS', riff.

28 Ibid.

26 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1966), 430.

21 Ibid. 431.

zv Ian Kershaw, The 'Hitler Myth': Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987), 4-5.

See e.g. George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York, 1978), 219ff.; Hans-Joachim Wring, Die Zigeuner im NS-Staat (Hamburg, 1964), 1 iff.

31 See Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933-1945 (Oxford, 1983). 4R.

See the examination of the charge in Mason, 'Intention and Explanation', 23ff.

" Ian Kershaw, 'German Popular Opinion and the "Jewish Question", 1939-1943: Some Further Reflections' in Arnold Paucker (ed.), Die Juden im Nationalsozialistischen Deutschland/The Jews in Nazi Germany 1933-1945 (Tubingen, 1986), 384-5.

Marlis G. Steinert, Hitler's War and the Germans: Public Mood and Attitude during the Second World War, ed. and trans. T. E. J. de Witt (Athens, Ohio, 1977), 1.

35 Detlev J. K. Peukert, 'Widerstand and "Resistenz": Zu den Banden V and VI der Publikation "Bayern in der NS-Zeit"', ArchivJur Sozialgeschichte, 24 (1984), 665.

3' Kershaw, `German Popular Opinion', 367. He quotes the latter concept from Otto Dov Kulka and Aron Rodrigue, The German Population and the Jews in the Third Reich: Recent Publications and Trends in Research on German Society and the "Jewish Question"', Yad Vashem Studies, 16 (1984).

37 Barrington Moore, jun., Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains, NY, 1978), 482.

i William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1922-1945• rev. edn. (New York, 1984), 189.

Ibid. 157.

Richard Bessel, Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism: The Storm Troopers in Eastern Germany 1925-1934 (New Haven, 1984), 139; cf. P. 140.

41 Hans Bernd Gisevius, To the Bitter End, trans. R. and C. Winstone (London, 1948), 101-2.

42 Ibid. 105.

" The article is in his Dreams and Delusions: The Drama of German History (New York, 1987) 169-170.

"Michel Foucault, `The Subject and Power', in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn. (Chicago, 1983), 220.

45 Ibid. 209.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 7th edn. (Oxford, 1982). 319.

I have discussed further issues in 'Enforcing Racial Policy in Nazi Germany'. a paper to be published in Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan (eds.), Re-Evaluating the 'Third Reich': Interpretations and Debates (New York: Holmes and Meier, forthcoming). Elton. 83ff., shows how a very broad notion of 'policy' was enforced earlier.

ae Peukert, Volksgenossen, 221 ff.

46 See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (New York, 1979), 293ff. For an analysis of the rise of the police see his'Politics and Reason' in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York, 1988), 58ff. Still useful is Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure (1939: New York, 1968), 177ff.

51 See Jurgen Kocka's remarks at the meetings whose transactions are printed in Alltagsgeschichte der NS-Zeit: Neue Perspektive oder Trivialisierung? Kolloquien des Instituts fur Zeitgeschichte (Munich, 1984), 53-4. Cf. Michael H. Kater, 'Begrifflichkeit and Historie: 'Alltag', 'Neokonservatismus' and 'Judenfrage' als Themen einer NS-bezogenen Sozialgeschichtsschreibung', Arch iv fur Sozialgeschichte, 23 (1983), 688-705, and his 'Nazism and the Third Reich in Recent Historiography', Canadian Journal of History, 20 (1985), 85ff. See the special issue of the New German Critique. 44 (Spring-Summer 1988) on the Historikerstreit, especially the article by Mary Nolan, 'The Historikerstreit and Social History', pp. 51-80: she is critical of approaches that emphasize the role of 'indifference or even opposition to the regime's racial policies' as decisive factors in the persecution of the Jews because of the tendency to 'ignore the pervasiveness of complicity' (p. 80). She is also right to insist that alternative approaches, such as the one adopted in this book, by no means represent 'a return to crude theories of collective guilt. Rather, they offer a way to link normality and terror, supporter/resister and victim, everyday life and Auschwitz.' I explore these issues in a paper entitled "'A Monstrous Uneasiness": Citizen Participation and Persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany' for a conference on 'Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World' at Northwestern University, November 1989. The transactions, edited by Peter Hayes, are to be published.

51 Reinhard Mann, Protest and Kontrolle im Dritten Reich: Nationalsozialistische Herrschaft im Alltag einer rheinischen Grofistadt (Frankfurt, 1987). Additional Gestapo case-files exist in the State Archive (LA Speyer) but cannot at present be used as they are unsorted. I understand that some case-files also survived for Stettin (Szczecin), and are presumably located in Poland.

52 For an analysis of recent writing on the terror system see my 'Terror System, Racial Persecution and Resistance in Nazi Germany: Remarks on the Historiography', to be published in a special issue of German Studies Review (forthcoming).

' See the remarks of Michel Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York, 1984), 831f•

Z Buchheim, i 16.

' See Runderlal3 des Preul3. Ministers des Innern vom 26.4.1933, given in full in Martin Hirsch, Diemut Majer, and Jurgen Meinck (eds.), Recht, Verwaltung and Justiz im Nationalsozialismus: Ausgewahite Schriften, Gesetze and Gerichtsentscheidungen von 1933 bis 1945 (Cologne, 1984), 326.

Bracher, Die deutsche Diktatur, 2o9ff.

8 Foucault, 'Subject and Power'. 219. In 1884 a French writer noted with irony that 'the citizen is free to do whatever he likes, but under police supervision': I. Guyot. La Police (Paris, 1884). quoted in Tom Bowden. Beyond the Limits of the Law (Harmondsworth. 1978), 138.

Broszat, Der Staat Hitlers, 426.

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 218, 273.

Ibid. 280.

' David H. Bayley, 'The Police and Political Development in Europe', in Charles Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, 5975), 378. For a different emphasis see Clive Emsley. Policing and its Context 1750-5870 (London, 5983), 562.

Charles Tilly, The Contentious French: Four Centuries of Popular Struggle (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 289.

See the contrasts summarized in Bayley, 341.

2 Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate 1648-1871 (Ithaca, 1971), 45-6. Reinhard Koselleck, Preul3en zwischen Reform and Revolution (Stuttgart, 1975), 462, claims that in Prussia after 1815 'effective police control of everyday life' did not exist, for there were too few in the police. In the face of rising population, social unrest, poverty, and so on, demands were made for increases but these were rejected by the ministry.

" Walker, 38 5.

" Wolfram Siemann. 'Deutschlands Ruhe, Sicherheit and Ordnung': Die Anfdnge der politischen Polizei z8o6-i866 (Tubingen, x985). 254ff.

" Ibid. 429-30. See also Hermann Reiter, Die Revolution von 1848/49 in Altbayern: lhre sozialen and mentalen Voraussetzungen and ihr Verlauf (Munich, 198;). 5ff.

17 For background to the professionalization of the political police in each German state see Siemann. 41 ff. For remarks on the poor quality of police in Germany before 1848 see Richard Tilly in Charles, Louse, and Richard Tilly, The Rebellious Century 1830-19;o (Cambridge, Mass., 1975). 218ff.

Ibid. 429.

" For examples of the extensiveness of the political police see Robert Gellately, The Politics of Economic Despair: Shopkeepers and German Politics, i89o-1914 (London, 1974), and Dirk Steg- mann, Die Erben Bismarcks: Parteien and Verbdnde in der Spdtphase des Wilhelminishen Deutschlands (Cologne, 1970).

'9 See Heinrich Hannover and Elisabeth Hannover-Dri ck, Politische Justiz 1918-1933 (Bornheim-Merten, 1987), 21ff.

21 Hsi-Huey Liang, The Berlin Police Force in the Weimar Republic (Berkeley, 1970), 6. For an introduction to Bavaria see Johannes Schwarze, Die bayerische Polizei and ihre historische Funktion bei der Aufrechterhaltung der offentlichen Sicherheit in Bayern von 1919-1933 (Munich, 1977), 16 ff.

21 See Hans Mommsen,`The Reichstag Fire and its Political Consequences', in Hajo Holborn (ed.), Republic to Reich: The Making of the Nazi Revolution (New York, 1973), 185.

22 For Prussia see Christoph Graf, Politische Polizei zwischen Demokratie and Diktatur (Berlin, 1983), 5ff.; for Bavaria see Shlomo Aronson, Reinhard Heydrich and die Fruhgeschichte von Gestapo and SD (Stuttgart, 1971), 94ff.

zs Ibid. 199: see also Karl Dietrich Bracher, 'Stufen der Machtergreifung', in Karl Dietrich Bracher, Wolfgang Sauer, and Gerhard Schulz, Die Nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung: Studien zur Errichtung des totalitaren Herrschaftssystems in Deutschland 1933/34 (Cologne, 1962), 82-8.

27 Ibid. On the popularity of anti-Communism see Timothy W. Mason, 'The Third Reich and the German Left: Persecution and Resistance', in Hedley Bull (ed.), The Challenge of the Third Reich (Oxford, 1986), 99.

See Hirsch, Majer, and Meinck, 89-90.

1fi Aronson, 66.

:4 See Mommsen, 'Reichstag Fire', 134

Kershaw, The 'Hitler Myth', 53.

ze Hans Tesmer of the Gestapo, quoted in Martin Broszat, 'Nationalsozialistische Konzentrationslager 1933-194.5, in Buchheim et al., ii. r i.

30 Ibid. 1 r-I 3.

" Rudolf Diels, Lucifer ante Portas.... Es spricht der erste Chef der Gestapo (Stuttgart, 1950), 166, Graf, 120.