Название: Enemies of the People: Hitler's Critics and the Gestapo
Автор: J. Ryan Stackhouse
Издательство: Cambridge University Press
Год: 2021
Страниц: 330
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf, epub
Размер: 10.1 MB

How do terror and popularity merge under a dictatorship? How did the Gestapo deal with critics of Nazism? Based on hundreds of secret police case files, Enemies of the People explores the day-to-day reality of political policing under Hitler. Examining the Gestapo's policy of 'selective enforcement', J. Ryan Stackhouse challenges the abiding perception of the Gestapo as policing exclusively through terror. Instead, he reveals the complex system of enforcement that defined the relationship between state and society in the Third Reich and helps to explain the Germans' abiding support for Hitler and their complicity in the regime's crimes. Stories of everyday life in Nazi Germany paint the clearest picture yet of just how differently the Gestapo handled certain groups and actions, and the routine investigation, interrogation, and enforcement practices behind this system. Enemies of the People offers penetrating insights into just how reasonable selective enforcement appeared to Germans, and draws unavoidable parallels with the contemporary threat of authoritarianism.

On the 11th of October 1936, the Reichsführer SS and Chief of German Police Heinrich Himmler sat at the head table in a Munich conference room filled with legal experts. A photographer waited at the edge of the packed meeting to immortalize his address to a gathering of notables at the Academy of German Law. Tables, polished to a mirror sheen, snaked along the walls of the narrow chamber with seating crowded around both sides to accommodate the assembly. Schnapps glasses and a large ink blotter had been laid out in anticipation of the signatures to come.

Himmler had been invited as the newly appointed head of the recently nationalized police services. His keynote address was to mark the inauguration of a new working group for police reform headed by his Leader of Administration and Law for the Secret State Police (Gestapo) Dr. Werner Best, who, after straightening his papers, eyed the group with hands neatly folded on his lap. Himmler’s deputy Reinhard Heydrich, the Chief of Security Police and SS Security Service seated at his right hand, rested an elbow on the back of his chair as he impassively scanned the audience. Wilhelm Stuckart, coauthor of the infamous Nuremberg laws and department leader for constitutional matters at the Reich Ministry of the Interior, looked on with interest from his corner of the head table. Hans Frank, head of the institute and minister without portfolio, had just extended his welcome. Himmler stood, surveyed the crowded room, and began to speak.

The Reichsführer SS felt he could finally take a position since “gathering all police under a single hand.” He reminded his audience that “when we National Socialists came to power in 1933” the police had been “a blindly obedient instrument of power.” The strictures of liberalism left it “a helpless institution, bound hand and foot … while the criminals got away scot-free.” Himmler remarked that National Socialists had set to work “not without justice … but outside the law.” The new Chief of German Police had since reformed the system based on new principles: In fulfilling my duties for the Führer and the people, I followed my conscience and common sense. During the months and years in which the life and death of the German people hung in the balance it was inconsequential if other people yammered about “violations of the law.” As he explained, “they called it lawless because it did not correspond to their concept of law. In truth, our work laid the foundation of a new code of law.”

The Battle of Stalingrad was the beginning of the end for the Third Reich. A perpetual state of crisis gripped Germany after the Soviets encircled the Sixth Army amid the smoking ruins of the Hero City. The spectre of the stab-in-the-back haunted leadership as the initial onward rush of the Red Army could only be ground down to an inexorable march of military disasters raising fears of final defeat. The effects on political policing were far reaching. Leadership expected loyal Germans to recognize the gravity of the situation. Himmler had assumed control of the Security Police, including the Gestapo, after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in June 1942. His replacement, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, took office in January 1943 amid the unfolding crisis. In response, the new Chief of Security Police exhorted his officers to ever-harsher enforcement against any threat to morale. The barrier between actions and motives was collapsing. In the face of defeat, any criticism became an inherently subversive act.

The Gestapo were meanwhile preoccupied by a new threat. The war economy relied on slave labour by 1943. The possibility of a rebellion, emboldened by news of German defeats, could not be overlooked. When faced with a rising tide of critical opinion and mounting discontent among millions of slave labourers, the Gestapo focused on the greater of two evils. But the fortunes of war and lessons of history dictated that depressed morale could simply not be left to fester. Criticism also needed to be checked. It fell to the Party to step into the breach. New policies delegated responsibility to local political officials for the preliminary investigation of criticism and resolution of excusable offences. Indeed, the Party assumed an ever-greater role singling out subversive Germans with “doubtful attitudes” and warning “grumblers.” The Reich Security Main Office officially acknowledged this new division of labour by early 1944. The Gestapo were to handle offences that filtered up with greater severity and focus on keeping foreign workers under control. Selective enforcement would function through the Party.

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