Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany [Paperback]

The hitherto unanswered questions of German culpability and the ordinary German citizen's knowledge of the horrors committed by the regime, have finally and systematically been addressed in Backing Hitler, Robert Gellately's forceful and provocative study of public responses to the Nazi challenge. Gellately contends in his wide ranging survey of Nazi crimes that terror was not, as has too often been presumed, hidden from the German people but that it was in fact carried out openly and with their consent. His research is impeccable throughout and consequently he leaves little room for doubt or counter-argument. It concentrates on three broadly representative areas of Germany: the Palatinate, Lower Franconia and the Rhine/Ruhr area centred on Duesseldorf, three demographically different areas that had not traditionally lent support to the Nazi party representing: city, town and country. His research is new and makes extensive use of hitherto untouched press and police reports to examine the public face of Nazi law and order. He argues that Germans were well aware of the existence of the Gestapo secret police network, the concentration camp system and the persecution of perceived enemies: communists, socialists, the Jews, the 'congenitally ill' and others regarded as racially inferior: the Gypsies and the Slavs and in doing so adds credible intellectual weight to the Goldhagen thesis. Moreover he makes clear that the return to 'normality' -that one could leave one's house unlocked- promised and seemingly delivered by Hitler necessitated the harsh methods employed by the regime to combat those held by most Germans to be responsible for Germany's decline; namely the socialists, communists, so-called 'asocials' and the Jews.

He also makes clear that the escalating terror of the war years met with the approval of large sections of the German populace, pointing by turn to the audiences attending those foreign workers publicly executed for alleged misdemeanours, to the results of Nazi opinion surveys and public responses to them which reveal not just consistent backing for Hitler but also calls for greater use of terror against perceived enemies in order to safeguard the Reich from within.

In essence Gellately's Germany, in which knowledge of Nazi crimes was widespread, gave its support to Hitler. However it is a picture that is as flawed as it is correct. That people had knowledge of the camps is not to say that people knew of the horrors that were committed in their name in those camps. The vast majority of people only had access to the sanitised image of the camps that the regime chose to trumpet in the press. This also assumes that press reporters entered the psyches of readers, something which is itself questionable; to what extent do we remember the content of yesterday's newspaper? Does it actually follow that because something is printed in a specialist journal (in this case the official journal of the SS -Das Schwarze Corp) the population at large must therefore have had knowledge of it. He convincingly argues that the experience of war barbarised and numbed people. The picture that Gellately paints of the participation of the local population in the forced marches of prisoners to the West that followed the closure of the death camps in the East is as vivid and chilling as it is revealing of the attitudes of ordinary Germans towards the victims of Nazi policy. Native German populations were were as culpable as members of the SS on guard duty for the slaughter of up to 250,000 people moved westwards in the closing months of the war. There is no doubt that many of Gellately's contentions hitherto are indisputable but that which he leaves unsaid -the implicit contention that if Germans were aware of Nazi terror in Germany then they must have been aware of the Holocaust- is more contentious.

Germans were clearly aware that the activities of the regime were often criminal. However the extent of their knowledge must be questioned and we cannot assume, as Gellately implies, that knowledge of certain aspects of Nazi policy is coterminous with knowledge of each and every aspect of the regime. The inference that Germans must have known about the Holocaust and the death camps in distant and occupied Poland is disputable, regardless of widespread knowledge of the appalling treatment meted out to German Jews before the outbreak of war. As has been demonstrated by Peter Longerich, the number of people involved in the planning and staffing of the camps was small (about 8000). Moreover German administrative life was fragmented and compartmentalised. Civil servants and soldiers might have had knowledge of aspects of the final solution but would not have known its full extent. If we also consider the difficulties involved in communications during the war and, that in contrast to the terror unleashed on the population of Germany, the final solution was very much kept secret and was not widely publicised in the press, then Gellately's argument seems difficult to sustain.

It is injudicious to criticise Backing Hitler too harshly. His book is a conscious polemic but it is a shame that Gellately failed to deal with the Holocaust explicitly. It is an obvious failing and mars an otherwise fine book that has gone some considerable way to answering questions about Germans knowledge of the activities of an evil regime. He also provides a convincing argument for sustained German support for Hitler even once it had become clear that the war was lost: realistic fear of Russian retribution; a belief in aspects of the Hitler project, particularly its vehement anti-Bolshevism and a belief that miracle weapons might forestall the Russian advance; and above all a sense of duty warped beyond any understanding of rationality by twelve years of Nazi governance. Most importantly Gellaltely's account of the reactions of ordinary Germans to the Nazi challenge not only greatly expands our understandings of popular reactions to all totalitarian regimes but also asks uneasy questions about our own reactions when faced with absolute barbarism.