The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945 (46 page)

PART I of the book suggested that historians and political scientists must bear part of the responsibility for misperceptions concerning the functioning of the police state. In spite of many works on the SS and concentration-camp system, we have been reluctant to deal in detail with the routine operation of the Gestapo outside the gaols and camps. Chapter i was intended to help correct some of our questionable impressions of the Gestapo by showing how it emerged by building on the traditions of the political police in the country, to a very large extent drawing the bulk of its personnel from the various police forces of the Weimar Republic. From these beginnings the Gestapo was able to attain central control of the country under Himmler and Heydrich, and was granted virtually complete freedom from the traditional constraints of the law, administration, and police. In Chapter 2 we saw that at the local level the Gestapo was far from being a numerically large body. It simply did not have the physical resources to accomplish the tasks assigned to it, especially as these increased in number and scope. And this point stands even when one includes the help it could count on from other organizations of the Nazi Party and German state.

Some historians have argued that the 'perversion' of the Gestapo resulted not because of the existence of the political police as such, but from external factors-the bosses in Berlin who issued criminal orders. However, a responsible account must also consider the internal dynamic of this police force, which led it to trample underfoot the civil and legal rights of citizens. Ambitious members in a secret or political police, given the ability to act almost with impunity, to detain suspects indefinitely, and to extort information from them at will, can hardly be expected to resist such temptations for long. Beginning in early 19 3 3, it proved to be an alarmingly simple matter to turn the existing political police into the dreaded Gestapo.

The transformation from the old decentralized political police forces across the individual German states did not require a widespread cleansing of the ranks or purge of the old political police. In a word, the police became Nazis or at least adjusted to Nazi conceptions of the police; there was no wholesale expulsion of the old custodians in favour of Nazi Party members, the Brownshirts (SA), or SS radicals. That said, there was some shuffling in some quarters: but, as we have seen, there is a considerable difference of opinion concerning the nature and extent of any 'purge'. The only way to settle the issue would be to carry out a full-scale quantitative analysis of Germany's various political police forces before 1933 (perhaps as far back as 1930), and then to trace what happened in the following years. This will be no simple task, because, unfortunately, while the individual records of all those who served in the Gestapo at one time or another are preserved in the Berlin Document Centre, their files have not been categorized separately but are scattered amongst all the Nazi Party members (over io million index-cards), SS leaders (over 6o,ooo files), and various other groupings. Only when a researcher has the specific names and birth-dates of the men who served in the Gestapo (or Kripo or SD, for that matter) is it possible to track down the data in the Berlin Centre.

With due regard to these difficulties, we saw that members of the Gestapo were not simply political appointees, or just fanatical Nazis who benefited from political patronage after the 'seizure of power'. While there was some 'cleansing', we concluded that it was too little to be termed a purge.'
In some places, such as Wurzburg, there was simply no purge at all, while in other areas the changes were minimal. The not surprising pattern among the political police (and other police forces, for that matter) was to stay on and make the adjustment; that propensity is consistent with the much wider pattern in German society by which various occupational groups came to terms with the new regime. Moreover, given the expressed desires of those in charge of the police, and the intentions of the new holders of powerespecially after the burning of the Reichstag buildings at the end of February 1933-to establish law and order and to support the police, it was particularly tempting for policemen to turn to National Socialism. Obviously, some of the old political police and others in the justice system were going to be sacked, either because they had alienated local Nazis too much before the 'seizure of power' , or because their views were too opposed or too well known for them to be able to work under the Nazis. For the most part, however, the inescapable conclusion is that the old political police tended to stay at their desks, and, in the Gestapo, played the part of loyal enforcers of the dictatorship's will.

Many career policeman did not 'stay at their desks' merely in order to prevent the worst', but took advantage of the greatly expanded opportunities offered under the dictatorship. Whether they joined the Nazi Party (as most eventually did) or the SS (in a minority of cases), these men hunted down opponents and acted with the greatest brutality towards the unfortunates caught up in their web. It would be less than accurate to suggest that these men remained the 'apolitical experts' they are alleged to have been. Many of them had, or at least developed, definite political views, and they found the powers of the police over suspects much more palatable than the far more restricted ones of the old Weimar democracy. They were every bit as interested in 'cleaning up the country' as their masters, and certainly needed little prodding to move with brutality and violence against the ever-increasing numbers of people who were declared opponents and criminals.

The effectiveness of any police is to some extent dependent upon cooperation from the society of which it is a part. Inside Germany the relations between the people and the police were varied. The routine operation of the Gestapo in Wurzburg and Lower Franconia, for example, needs to be situated within this local context. It would be one thing if the area was a hotbed of Nazism, where widespread co-operation with the police could perhaps be taken for granted, but quite another if the population was known to have had reservations about Nazism before 1933• and continued to harbour doubts thereafter.

As we saw in Part II, Wurzburg and Lower Franconia should not be equated with all of Franconia or 'Franken'-the latter usually identified with the two Protestant districts of Upper and Middle Franconia, and linked to a stronger tradition of anti-Semitism and support of Nazism. Wurzburg and Lower Franconia were largely unsympathetic to Hitler and the Nazi Party before 1933. Here was one of Germany's 'blackest' districts because of the population's overwhelming Catholicism and tradition of voting for the Catholic Party; it was among the most reluctant to vote for the NSDAP or join the Nazi Party. After the 'seizure of power', however, this area gradually-if perhaps only partially-fell into line, very much like the rest of the country. Indeed, as Peter Hoffmann remarks, 'on the whole, at all times from 1933 to 1945 the majority of German voters, indeed of the entire population, supported the government, albeit with varying degrees of willingness'.'

Although Wurzburg and Lower Franconia were thus not immune to the appeals of Nazism after I933, it is reasonable to suggest that the support there probably remained at the lower end of the scale, and that by extension the Gestapo attained minimal co-operation. In all likelihood the police had an easier time of it in areas which were more prone to Nazism before 19,33 and thus more outspoken in support of the regime thereafter. It is also reasonable to suggest that the Gestapo was able to count on more co-operation from the population when it came to enforcing anti-Semitic policies of all kinds in districts known to have traditions of anti-Semitism, such as in neighbouring Middle Franconia, where Gauleiter Julius Streicher set the tone, at least until he lost his post in 1939. Without pressing the point, it might be suggested that popular co-operation with the Gestapo in enforcing antiSemitic policies was at least as great elsewhere. Although the Gestapo was operating in less than an optimal environment from its post in Wurzburg, as the rest of the book makes clear, the police were able to enforce racial policy there without great difficulty until the latter part of the war.

One ought to be cautious, however, in extrapolating from Wurzburg to the rest of the country. Enforcement may have been easier to achieve in smaller cities and towns in rural districts. Keeping secrets or maintaining illicit and `dangerous' liaisons is always more difficult in such milieux. In addition, it would have been more hazardous to express any sympathy one might have felt for the plight of Jewish neighbours and friends. The big cities tended to provide greater anonymity, hence relatively more protection from the prying eyes of neighbours, and it was precisely for that reason that many Jews were increasingly drawn to larger urban centres after 1933. Going underground was at least a possibility in the metropolis, whereas not a single Jewish person managed to find refuge through the war years in all of Lower Franconia.

What could the people of the district have known about the persecution of the Jews? This question was raised in order eventually to evaluate the extent and significance of co-operation with the Gestapo on the 'Jewish Question' in the area around Wurzburg. We saw in Chapter 4 that the anti-Semitic excesses were widespread, public, and almost impossible to overlook, not least because Jews were scattered in numerous small clusters across the district. Given this pattern of settlement, Jews were known to many people, and, when anti-Semitism was stepped up, the people of the district had to bear witness. Everyday harassment was not uncommon, and the brutalities, especially during the pogrom of November 1938, were impossible to ignore. It was also clear what was in store for anyone who sympathized with the Jews or questioned official policy. Being turned in to the authorities for the smallest sign of non-compliance was too common not to have struck anxiety in the hearts of anyone who might under other circumstances have found no fault with the Jews.

It should also be kept in mind that the pattern of Jewish settlement in Lower Franconia was not typical for Germany as a whole. Some districts, even in Bavaria itself, had no Jewish population to speak of in the first place; in those areas the Gestapo was not faced with policing relations across the ethnic border at all.

In Part III we turned to the question of enforcement of Nazi racial policy. In Chapter 5 we examined political denunciations, or the provision of information from the population at large about suspected 'political' criminality. In the Gestapo case-files several kinds of phrases stand out. Some proceedings opened with remarks such as 'It has been reported that', or 'An anonymous telephone-caller said', or 'The Security Service in Aschaffenburg wishes investigated', and so on. In 1983, when I began this study, many books were being published on popular forms of resistance and dissent. It was beginning to appear as if German society under Nazism was a seething mass of discontent and disillusion, and one could only wonder how the Gestapo managed to function at all. Yet, reading through the Gestapo files, one could see many examples of what might count as some Germans' positive disposition towards or at least co-operation with the regime. Obviously some people had made the necessary adjustments and accommodated themselves to the new system, and some were clearly reaping personal advantages from the `terror system'. Denunciations turned out to be the key link in the three-way interaction between police, people, and policy. This is the theme followed up in detail throughout the remainder of the book.

Some historians are reluctant to label as denunciation all information on suspected 'criminality' which made its way into official channels, and was eventually passed on to the Gestapo. Ulrich Herbert, for example, prefers to characterize much of it as 'gossip and twaddle' ('Klatsch and Tratsch').3
The label we attach to this information is quite beside the point. As we have seen, all information from the population passed on to the authorities functioned as system-supportive, whether it originated as 'harmless' neighbourhood gossip or otherwise. It also did not matter all that much if, or when, the motive for informing was utterly self-serving. In fact, although the question of motives is bound to arise, the Gestapo did not greatly trouble itself about the source of information or the motives of informers. Reinhard Mann's study of 825 randomly selected files from the materials of the Dusseldorf Gestapo shows just how little the police worried about such matters. It will be recalled that Mann found no information on how or why the Gestapo began a file in 39 per cent of the cases, and that for an additional 3 7 per cent of his sample 'private' or instrumental motives were at work. In other words, a total of 76 per cent of his sample of Gestapo cases began when the motive, if known by the Gestapo, was presumably not important enough to have been noted, and/or when it was clearly based on personal or instrumental reasons rather than on 'proper' Nazi ones. He considered that only 24 per cent of all the cases in his sample were based on 'system-loyal' motives.'
If the Gestapo were to have delayed its routine operation until it received this kind of properly motivated information, its work-load-and presumably effectiveness-would have been reduced considerably.