The Gestapo And German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945 (1991) - Plot & Excerpts
Your local library probably won't have this one. And unless you're a history dork with a particular interest in the Third Reich, there's really no need to read it (but if you are, it's excellent). But I'm putting up a review nonetheless, because it illustrates a couple interesting trends very well.First, and contrary to widespread belief, the Gestapo wasn't some all-powerful organization that had tendrils everywhere. Like the rest of the Nazi bureaucracy, and like police forces everywhere, the Gestapo was first and foremost a bureaucracy. What got investigated, and what didn't, often depended just as much on the Gestapo's internal procedures than anything else. The vast majority of their files are gone, but from the surviving documents (mainly from the smallish Bavarian town of Wurzburg, with a sampling from the larger bureau at Dusseldorf), historian Robert Gellately is able to come up with a model of the Gestapo's day-to-day operation that's largely plausible for the rest of Germany. Turns out they never employed very many people, they had few paid informants and/or agents provocateurs, and their membership was by no means fanatically Nazi. They were tasked with enforcing the regime's political and racial policies, but they did so primarily as police, not as fanatics.This seems to be the case with all police forces in the West. Modern police have resources and technology the Gestapo could never dream of, but crimes, whether ideological or practical, are solved the same way -- with shoe leather and the active cooperation of the citizenry. Whether or not the German people were initially invested in an explicitly Nazi version of law and order (it's not clear from the surviving sources), they did want law and order in the abstract, which is the only way a police force can function. It wouldn't have taken heroic mass resistance to the Gestapo to stop them; indifference would've worked just fine. See, for example, American and British inner cities, where the code of "no snitches" almost invariably wins out over the values of law and order.Which leads to a second interesting aspect of the book. The Gestapo themselves, it seems, were active agents in the Nazification of the population. By choosing to actively investigate some crimes but not others, their day-to-day operation reinforced the regime's values. The Wurzburg Gestapo, for instance, vigorously pursued citizens for "friendliness towards Jews" well past the point of there being many Jews around to be friendly towards, but they often let pre-1933 criticism of Adolf Hitler slide. This selection of cases from the top made the regime's values clearer than a dozen propaganda speeches.Both of these lead to a depressing conclusion: While the Nazis' crimes were uniquely monstrous, they weren't accomplished by uniquely monstrous means. Plain ol' human social dynamics did much of the heavy work.The third and final point of interest centers on the way history is written. Historians are desperate to find "resistance," for motives that are part ideological, part commercial. The commercial aspect is obvious, and therefore uninteresting*. The ideology, though, can produce systemic errors. For instance: Almost all historians are leftists, and emotionally invested in their leftism. It's only natural to root for your guys, and I don't blame anyone for this. But "rooting for your guys" has in recent years come to mean something very close to "covering up for your guys" in far too many cases. Far too many historians have concluded that since it's impossible for a human being to be totally objective, we shouldn't even try. And thus we get the widespread assumption that undercover Gestapo agents were almost solely responsible for breaking up leftist resistance groups. That's what captured resistance fighters said, after all. Gellately shows that this is wrong -- syndicalists, trade unionists, and communists were about equally likely to inform on their colleagues when pressed as the average German citizen, and for motives just as petty.Does it matter? In this particular instance, probably not; there was very little chance of overthrowing Hitler no matter what these groups did. But it's all too easy to take the moral high ground when discussing the Nazis, and the supposed omniscience of the Gestapo is one of the things that makes it so. Gellately shows that that's not true, and it's worth pondering....*You don't get published -- and therefore don't get tenured -- explicating the status quo.
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