The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945 (24 page)

The remainder of the book looks at the process by which racial policies were enforced. As will become clear, the regime was less dependent than might be expected upon an enthusiastic reception by all, or even most, citizens.

IF autobiographies of survivors and eyewitness reports are to be believed, inside Nazi Germany hardly anyone felt entirely safe, whether at work, play, during leisure activities, at school, or even in the privacy of the home.'
It can also be ascertained that the work of the Gestapo was deliberately shrouded in secrecy. The uncertainty, therefore, about the sources that moved it to act would have helped convey an impression of omnipotence.'
As Friedrich Zipfel remarked, secretiveness about the Gestapo was deliberately fostered in order to intensify the isolation of the individual citizen. 'One can evade a danger that one recognizes, but a police working in the dark becomes uncanny. Nowhere does one feel safe from it. While not omnipresent, it could appear, search, arrest. The worried citizen no longer knows whom he ought to trust.'3

It would be foolish to question the existence of such worries and exaggerations in Nazi Germany, and this study proceeds from the assumption that fear was indeed prevalent among the German people. The Gestapo had a reputation for brutality, and terror would seize individuals instructed by postcard to report to local Gestapo headquarters `for the purpose of answering some questions'.'
Rumours about what went on in Gestapo cellars served to intensify the fear of being informed on or of being turned in on suspicion of the least deviation. However, it is also true that the Gestapo lacked the physical resources to execute surveillance of the vast majority of the population. How was it structurally possible, then, that the population could become terrorized? No doubt many other officials were also concerned with monitoring behaviour, and this too was well known to most Germans. But to suggest that the function of surveillance and control was performed almost exclusively by institutions that formed part of the so-called police state tends to place undue emphasis on coercion, force, or even open violence, and to regard the populace
as essentially passive, apathetic, or just not involved. At least some degree of active participation of 'ordinary' citizens was required for the function of most policing or control organizations in Nazi Germany. This part of the book examines that participation. As will be seen, the key relationship between the Gestapo, German society, and the enforcement of policy was constituted by what can be termed political denunciations, the volunteered provision of information by the population at large about instances of disapproved behaviour. The present chapter moves beyond an investigation of the formal institutional development of the police to study as well what has been termed the process of 'informal social reinforcement of the terror system'.I

I. GESTAPO FILES AS HISTORICAL SOURCES

The Gestapo case-files are rare sources: they were destroyed nearly everywhere. Even in Wurzburg officials managed to burn all the files of persons whose names began with the letters A to G; all those between H and Z, except names beginning with V, seem to have survived intact.'
Each file was originally created by the police when for some reason or other an individual was brought to its attention. The dossiers are extremely heterogeneous: some contain only a tiny scrap of paper, while others run to many pages, complete with the transcript of interrogations, so-called confrontations between the accused and witnesses, an account of the trial and punishment meted out, and even at times correspondence from the concentration camp. Although the files do not appear to have been tampered with, it is clear that many potentially valuable kinds of information were never entered in the first place. For example, there is no mention of torture or even of the officially condoned 'intensified interrogation', a procedure described perhaps more accurately at the Nuremberg trials as 'the third degree'. The often brutal nature of the interrogation or the zeal of officials cannot be deduced from the written record; that side of the story can only be told through proceedings of postwar trials or the accounts of survivors.

Gestapo sources predominantly involve those at the lower end of the social scale. The extent to which people from the upper reaches of the officer corps, the upper bourgeoisie, or the nobility participated in the regularities of the Nazi dictatorship will have to be studied from other sources. Members of the nobility were certainly denounced by those of the same social standing, but not usually to the police, largely because they had other ways of seeking redress and of exercising social power. Furthermore, the police showed some respect for members of the nobility, and tended to hold any charges against
them in abeyance, or even in certain circumstances, to dismiss them.'
A noble from southern Germany, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, on visiting Gestapo headquarters found `quiet, dignified offices, courteous subordinates and as responsible officer ... a polite and tactful young man who asked leave to finish his cigar, and was, generally, the very model of a man of breeding and poise'.'
Reck was a man who got away with a great deal, though he went too far by refusing in 1944 to serve in the civilian home defence (the Volkssturm); he was shot in Dachau in October 1944 for `undermining the morale of the armed forces'.

Charges in Gestapo files, even signed confessions, cannot be taken at face value, as evidence that a 'crime' was committed. One recent study of the persecution of the Jews, based on selective use of the Dusseldorf Gestapo files, insists that when people slipped through the fingers of the Secret Police it was because they had 'managed to cover their tracks'-they had fooled the Gestapo.'
As explained below, however, they might just as easily have been falsely charged. In fact, the incidence of false charges was so great in Nazi Germany that they constituted a real problem for the regime, one it never

The Gestapo also used dirty methods such as intimidation, extortion, and blackmail to force victims to sign 'confessions'."
The extent to which these methods were used is impossible to judge, so the evidence in the files has to be treated with caution. Some officials acted with such brutality and applied such overwhelming pressure that some people saw no way out but to sign. The reality of Gestapo interrogation could be exhausting for the victims, with days and weeks filled with terror and anxiety; once temporarily released, some attempted suicide to escape the relentless cross-examination by the tireless officials.12
The agony could begin with an innocent visit to the Secret Police to report a lost passport; an official who was unwilling to accept that the item had been misplaced could turn the process into a nightmare of
outlandish allegations, beatings, and confinement overnight in a holding-cell where the mistreatment of others could be overheard.'
3

The police employed both agents provocateurs and entrapment, and when all else failed they were not above simply planting evidence. Such methods were used especially when it came to dealing with `opponents' such as the Communists and the Jews. This issue is explored in detail in the next chapters, but is mentioned here in order to clarify the limitations of case-files as sources. Nor did the Gestapo simply follow the exact letter of the law when it came to dealing with opponents. For example, it would not only enforce the countless hundreds of laws explicitly formulated to deal with the Jews, but would also use every other kind of law to harass them. Such a practice says a great deal about their modus operandi, and also entails that some of the files must be regarded as incomplete sources. At the same time it has to be recognized that even though the files are far from uniform, leave details unstated, and contain distortions, they nevertheless constitute an invaluable source for the social history of Nazi Germany.

2. DENUNCIATIONS, GESTAPO CASES, AND THE REGIME

Political denunciation, as a particular variety of ordinary citizens' participation in the functioning of the 'police state' in Nazi Germany, has received some general attention in a short essay by Martin Broszat, which grew out of research for the Munich Institut fur Zeitgeschichte's massive research project on 'resistance and persecution'.14
Using local Party and administrative materials, he makes it clear that denunciation represented an integral part of the social constitution of Nazi Germany and that it played an important role in the terror system. Reinhard Mann treats denunciations as one of the mechanisms that caused the Gestapo to move into action on any particular case."
His findings derive from a study of materials drawn from the 70,000 surviving Dusseldorf Gestapo case-files, but the operations of the police were sufficiently centralized and standardized, as indicated above, to justify combining them, with some qualifications, into an analysis based on materials from the 19,000 case-files in Wiirzburg.

Mann focused on a specific sub-group of the 70,ooo Gestapo dossiers, namely those classified by the Gestapo as 'local card-file Dusseldorf (Ortskartei Dusseldorf). These cards were for internal office use by the Gestapo, and were (and still are) the reference keys to the large collection of Gestapo case files. Under 'local card-file Dusseldorf there are approximately 5,000 cards, referring to specific case-files by number, divided into fifty-two subdivisions. Each division corresponds to an aspect of the Gestapo's daily workload and routine preoccupations. The largest single group of case-files pertains to the Communist Party (with 1,050 cards), with small numbers of cards on virtually every other political party (including the Nazi Party) and 'associations' of all kinds; there are also cards on the paramilitary organizations once prominent in the Weimar Republic-the police, the youth movement, pacifists, Freemasons, and monarchists; there are many more on all the religious denominations, and a large number deal with various 'sects', with others covering topics ranging from the press, radio, art and music, to the economy and trade unionism, to the resistance movement, 'opposition'. 'malicious gossip', treason, and sabotage. Mann's analysis deals with forty-one of the fifty-two categories, or 3,770 of the 5,000 case-files. His decision to exclude from the analysis approximately 1,230 cards, and hence case-files, is discussed presently. From the 3,770 cards he selected 825 case-files by random sampling techniques for close analysis. Additional files, some of which might have come from the 1,230 formally excluded, were drawn into the investigation through the procedure of a 'snowball selection' designed to trace social nets to which an individual might have belonged. For example, according to this procedure, once a file was selected in the main sample, other persons mentioned in that dossier would eventually be included in the study. An unknown number of cases would have been analysed through the adoption of this 'snowball' procedure. In the tables constructed by Mann only the 825 cases from the main sample are cited. His quantitative analysis is important especially because it removes much of the mystery about what the Gestapo did on a routine basis.