Joan, there was an interesting book review this week in the dreaded bastion of the liberal media elite that discusses some of these issues. Hitler's Silent Partners, nytimes.com , a review of "Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and ordinary Germans", by Eric A. Johnson. A clip:
Johnson explains that the Gestapo performed its duties not through indiscriminate terror but by methodically singling out particular groups of victims and going after them with every pretense of legality. The Jews weren't even the first targets. They were not as dangerous to the state as the Communists, the Social Democrats and other organized political enemies, who were crushed with speed and ruthlessness after the Nazis took power. Next came the religious opponents, including the Jehovah's Witnesses. Jews didn't become a priority of the Gestapo until 1939 and the war, even though the Nuremberg Laws and a host of other restrictions had already reduced them to the direst circumstances.
The other side of the Gestapo's policy was that nontargeted Germans were left pretty much alone. Johnson's statistics show that very few of these Germans -- in Krefeld the figure was about 1 percent -- were ever bothered by the Gestapo. Most of them didn't fear the Gestapo, or even know anybody who had had a run-in with the secret police -- and not because laws weren't being broken. Low-level defiance, Johnson shows, was extremely common: people told Hitler jokes, they listened to BBC broadcasts, they went to swing clubs and danced to decadent American music. But the Gestapo had more important things to worry about.
In what may be his most provocative statement, Johnson says that 'most Germans may not even have realized until very late in the war, if ever, that they were living in a vile dictatorship.' This is not to say that they were unaware of the Holocaust; Johnson demonstrates that millions of Germans must have known at least some of the truth. But, he concludes, 'a tacit Faustian bargain was struck between the regime and the citizenry.' The government looked the other way when petty crimes were being committed. Ordinary Germans looked the other way when Jews were being rounded up and murdered; they abetted one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century not through active collaboration but through passivity, denial and indifference.
Offhand, I'd summarize this as saying the Nazis were pretty sophisticated at harnessing the dark side of human nature for political purposes. It's particularly interesting that they cultivated and used hatred of the political opposition before moving on to the Jews. It makes Slobo and Rwanda style ethnic cleansing politics seem pretty crude by comparison, though the end result is similar. Maybe it's just harder to get a police state established than to use it once you're in control.
(Taboo but irresistible aside on the political opposition: Communists and Social Democrats, er, um, in the "Sanity" view of the world I think that means anybody who's not a Republican. Of course, paradoxically, there was always the line that the rise of Hitler was due to the liberals, so never mind. In fact, never mind this last paragraph in general, it's just OCD again).
Cheers, Dan. |
