Third Reich in Power

'Authoritative history... impressive sweep... This essential book comes as a stark reminder, should we need one, of how much freedom a people is prepared to give away in a political climate dominated by fear.'
Daily Telegraph

Extract from The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939 by Richard J. Evans

Despised minorities were, to be sure, put in the concentration camps; but to focus exclusively on this ignores the much larger number of political and other deviants condemned by the courts and put in state prisons and penitentiaries.nbsp; The further in time we get from Nazi Germany, the more difficult it becomes for historians living in democratic political systems and in cultures which respect the rights of the individual to make the leap of imagination necessary to understand people's behaviour in a state such as Nazi Germany, where imprisonment, torture or even death might await anyone who dared to voice the slightest criticism of the regime and its leaders.nbsp; Those who approved of such repression were in all likelihood a minority, active supporters and functionaries of the Party like the Block Wardens, and a good number of middle- and upper-class, conservative Germans who thought the best place for Marxists to be was in prison anyway.nbsp; Even they, however, knew well enough that they had to be careful about what they said and did, and the dangers of not doing so became abundantly clear once opposition began to spread among these groups too.nbsp; The shots that killed Kurt von Schleicher, Herbert von Bose, Edgar Jung, Gustav von Kahr, Erich Klausener and Kurt von Bredow at the beginning of July 1934 were also a warning to upper- and middle-class conservatives to keep their heads down if they did not want them to be blown off.

Ordinary conservative citizens like Luise Solmitz, who harboured no thoughts of political activism, may have turned aside from the bleak fact of the regime's willingness to murder its opponents, revealed so starkly in late June and early July 1934, in their relief that the order they craved had been restored; to such people, Rouml;hm's stormtroopers seemed as great a menace as the Reichsbanner or the Red Front-Fighters' League of the Weimar years.nbsp; Yet behind closed doors they cannot have been oblivious to the fate of the conservative clique around Vice-Chancellor von Papen.nbsp; It was not only the third or so of the population who had been committed to the Marxist left before 1933 that was subject to massive intimidation.nbsp; Indeed, scarcely had the murderous violence of the 'Night of the Long Knives' receded, than an even larger minority than the Marxists, that of the German Catholics, began to be prosecuted and imprisoned as they gave vent to their increasingly critical views of the regime in public.nbsp; More general still were measures such as the Law on Malicious Gossip, which clamped down on the most trivial expressions of dissent and put people who told jokes about Hitler and Gouml;ring in prison.nbsp; These were mainly members of the German working class, it is true, but the working class after all made up around half the entire population, and middle- and even upper-class offenders in this respect were brought before the Special Courts as well.nbsp; Successful prosecutions under this law were a

Książka "Third Reich in Power"
R. Evans; Richard J. Evans