The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945 (3 page)

MAP 2 Lower Franconia

EVEN to some astute political observers in Berlin, Adolf Hitler's grasp on power seemed at best tenuous on the day of his appointment as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. President Paul von Hindenburg, who agreed to accept him, had to overcome some last-minute qualms, but comforted himself with the knowledge that Hitler's cabinet would be dominated by a majority of conservative ministers. One of the men responsible for pressing Hitler's appointment, now named Hitler's Vice-Chancellor, the exChancellor Franz von Papen, thought that he would be able to manage the upstart. Papen was in for a shock, but in January he was able to draw satisfaction from the fact that non-Nazis had control of the military and held such key ministries as Defence, Finance, Economics and Agriculture, Justice, and Foreign Affairs. Convinced that he and his conservative-nationalist colleagues would have an easy time of it with the new Chancellor, Papen exclaimed to Minister of Finance Count Schwerin von Krosigk, `We have hired him!' Of a doubting acquaintance he demanded, `What do you want? I have Hindenburg's confidence. Within two months we will have pushed Hitler so far into a corner that he'll squeak."

That day, 30 January, was also a momentous one for Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's chief lieutenant in the capital city and the man responsible for Nazi Party propaganda. At 3.0o a.m. on 31 January, after an eventful evening, Goebbels wrote in his diary another interpretation of events:

It seems like a dream. The Wilhelmstrasse is ours. The Leader is already working in [the] Chancellory. We stand in the window upstairs, watching hundreds and thousands of people march past the aged President of the Reich and the young Chancellor in the flaming torchlight, shouting their joy and gratitude ... Germany is at a turningpoint in her history ... Outside the Kaiserhof the masses are in wild uproar. In the meantime Hitler's appointment has become public. The thousands soon become tens of thousands. An endless stream of people floods the Wilhelmstrasse ... The struggle for power now lies behind us, but we must go on working to retain it ... Indescribable enthusiasm fills the streets. A few yards from the Chancellory, the President of the Reich stands at his window, a towering, dignified, heroic figure, invested with a touch of old-time marvel. Now and then with his cane he beats time to the military marches. Hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands march past our windows in never-ending, uniform rhythm. The rising of a nation! Germany has awakened! In a spontaneous explosion of joy the people espouse the German Revolution ... The new
Reich has risen, sanctified with blood. Fourteen years of work have been crowned by victory. We have reached our goal. The German Revolution has begun!'

Like other Nazi leaders, Goebbels fully believed that real changes were possible. As Hermann Goring stated in a radio broadcast on the night of Hitler's appointment, 'We are closing the darkest era of Germany's history and are beginning a new chapter.'3
Within weeks what was left of the Weimar constitution was laid to rest and the rule of law suspended. By the middle of 1933 all political parties had been abolished and virtually all organized opposition was eliminated in the process of 'co-ordination' or Gleichschaltung.

There was a determination to Nazify Germany, but, given the `anti-practical nature' of Nazi ideology, it was not quite clear what this entailed; in the event `the most radical steps on any issue were always those which could be presented as "most national socialist"-there was no practical yardstick for judgement'.'
Even if the new holders of power were not as united as sometimes supposed, they could in general agree on the `desirability' of making the country `more National Socialist'. Politically it was expeditious to begin by removing from the body politic the parts that were at once damned by the Nazi Weltanschauung, and already on the margins of the existing society. The new masters, whether in Berlin or out in the provinces and small towns, thus proceeded by what has been called a `negative selection process'; with campaigns not only against the democratic system and old enemies, but those people who were to some extent already vulnerable-the Jews, Marxists (Socialists and Communists), pacificists, anti-social elements, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, criminals, and so on.'

The `new order' was hammered out in part by the use or threat of violence, and accompanied by an avalanche of laws, decrees, ordinances, or simply appeals and demands by local Nazis claiming to be acting in Hitler's name. It was uncertain for a time which organizations would be entrusted with implementing the policies hatched in the distant capital. There was, of course, the civil service, which for the most part dutifully stayed at its desk, but it was distrusted. The Nazi Party (NSDAP) itself was a prime candidate, with massive numbers (about 850,000 in early 1933) already enlisted. The sheer violence and numbers in Ernst Rohm's Brownshirts-the Sturmabteilung (SA)-advanced their claim to be a new and radical revolutionary army. From about 450,000 at the time of Hitler's appointment, it exploded to 2.9 million by August of the next year.6
As will be seen, there were problems with both of these organizations.

In 1933 there was also the much smaller and more elitist SS under Heinrich Himmler (the Schutzstaffel), which had only 52,000 members.'
Although in time the SS proved to be the ultimate victor, it grew to be too unwieldy and lacking in technical competence to operate as the enforcer in Nazi Germany. The result was that a novel executive machine 'was constructed from parts of the SS', a machine completely 'independent of the State administration and, as a matter of principle, subject to no official norms'.'
The other 'parts' comprised the technically competent members of already existing police bodies able and willing to make the adjustment to changed circumstances. This 'machine' was then assigned tasks of various kinds, or took the initiative on its own, both inside Germany and later in the occupied territories.

Arguably the most important cog in this new machine' inside the Reich was the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) or Secret State Police. It became, in Karl Dietrich Bracher's words, 'the institutional basis of [the] innermost reality of the Third Reich'.'
Just how that machine acquired and used its power is the subject of this book. From its central headquarters in Berlin's
Prinz Albrecht Strasse 8, the Gestapo became the key link in the terror system and police state, and attained a reputation for ruthlessness and cruelty, so that the very mention of the name filled the hearts of contemporaries with dread and foreboding. Even today it remains a token of the most sinister and horrific aspects of Hitler's dictatorship, including arbitrary arrest and detention, endless interrogations, forced confessions under torture in police basements, and wilful misuse of police authority.10

I. REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

The literature which has appeared on Nazi Germany since 1945 is vast, but the Gestapo, and particularly its everyday operations outside the gaols and concentration camps, have received little attention. Part of the failure can be attributed to the methods employed by historians. Much of the work to date either employs the methods of legal or administrative history, such as the examination of the SS state published by the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, or approaches the topic through the biographies of its leading figures."
Useful as these works are, only rarely do they venture into social history, so that they never really get close to exploring how the police went about enforcing policy. But the problem goes deeper than questions of methodology. Why is it that social historians of Nazi Germany have not got round to studying institutions like the Secret State Police, which played such a prominent role in Hitler's `new order'?

David Schoenbaum's innovative social history provides detailed treatment of the state and touches on nearly every branch of the civil service; yet the Gestapo is not mentioned at all.'
z Even in many of the recent books to appear on the 'history of everyday life' (Alltagsgeschichte) relatively little is said about the enforcement process-granted that part of the problem can be traced to the destruction, nearly everywhere, of many essential sources.'
3 On the other hand, why is it that oral-history projects have not explored this theme more
extensively? These experiences ought to have marked memories indelibly.14
While it is reassuring that the Gestapo and the Nazi Party (in its policing function) turn up in some recent social-historical literature, there are few attempts to integrate the local 'inputs' into the examination of the routine workings of the police.'
S

There has been a tendency to suppose that the 'police state' relied on an extraordinarily large police force, which in turn could count on the collaboration of an army of paid agents and spies. It is true that even in the Weimar years Berlin, for example, had more policemen than comparable cities in the United States, such as New York.'
6 Still, a detailed study of the local distribution of the Gestapo shows that the number of those involved was small."

Moreover, it is fair to say that, given the increasing reach of the regime into social life, the ever-expanding claims to watch and modify behaviour, there were certainly far too few to have accomplished their tasks even with the collaboration of other elements in the police network.'$
Overestimation of those involved seems to have been a widespread contemporary misperception, in society at large and especially on the Left. One man otherwise knowledgeable of the situation in the mines around Bochum wrote in 1936, for example, that there was 'one works spy for every twelve to fifteen workers'.19
Such a figure is almost certainly an exaggeration. How would the regime go about finding so many spies willing to go down the mines? In all likelihood such 'spies' were not the police plants often supposed, but insidersat the very least, residents of long standing in the community who came
forward, more or less voluntarily, for all kinds of reasons, not necessarily or even primarily because of allegiance to Nazism.2o

Only rarely have historians and political scientists offered suggestions as to how the Gestapo, in spite of its small numbers, attained its reputation for efficiency. Franz Neumann noted that the police represented `the most important instrument of the Nazi system', but said little about how it operated on a routine basis.21
E. K. Bramstedt touched on several important aspects of the problem, and suggestively pointed to the notion of `control by fear'.22
Martin Broszat's renowned account of the Nazi state never mentions the problem of enforcement as such, though he treats it by implication.23
In a neglected short essay on the political denunciations he discovered while working in local archives on the history of Nazi Germany, he points to a crucial feature of the enforcement process.24
Various sections in the standard work on the SS delineate the institutional evolution of the political police, but, because they adopt an exclusively institutional approach, much that is essential to questions raised here is not discussed.25
Hannah Arendt offers some ideas which pertain to the topic under examination and are worth recalling.

While Arendt exaggerates the role of agents in the operation of the political police, she highlights the significance of 'mutual suspicion' which came to permeate 'all social relationships'; she claims that in turn there grew 'an allpervasive atmosphere even outside the special purview of the secret police'.26
'Collaboration of the population in denouncing political opponents and volunteer service as stool pigeons', while they were not without precedents in earlier times and places, were in Hitler's Germany 'so well organized that the work of specialists' was 'almost superfluous'.21
If, by 'specialists' here, Arendt meant to suggest the full-time members of bodies such as the Gestapo, she was certainly correct. 'In a system of ubiquitous spying, where everybody may be a police agent', but almost certainly is not, it becomes possible for the police to work effectively.28