Meanwhile, the Nazi regime was bolstered by an elaborate apparatus of terror. The first concentration camp for political opponents of the regime was opened at Dachau, near Munich, with considerable fanfare and publicity in March 1933. In subsequent years, well before the radicalization of the wartime period, a network of concentration camps was set up across Germany. These camps made use of prisoners as forced labour, sending labour gangs to Aussenlager or subsidiary camps, in the vicinity. Gangs of concentration camp inmates were marched through surrounding towns and villages to work long hours under inhumane conditions with very little food. Within the camps, brutality and violence were the norm. While certain methods of torture and execution were employed, these camps were not intended primarily for the physical destruction of their inmates (as were the extermination camps in the East that functioned from 1942). The SS, under the command of Heinrich Himmler, was able to arrest, detain, imprison, torture and murder, with little respect for any rule of law or putative notion of justice. Himmler, who between 1934 and 1936 took over the police powers of the Reich and State Ministries of the Interior, became on 17 June 1936 ‘Reichsführer-SS und Chef der deutschen Polizei im Reichministerium des Innerns’, thus effectively controlling the means of terror in the Third Reich. Fear of arrest, and fear of informers, led to public conformity and the leading of a double life for many Germans, who withheld their real views and feelings for expression only in complete privacy in the company of family and close friends.
The Nazis attempted to promote a great display of power and unity under the national Führer. The mass parades, the battalions marching past Hitler, the apparently adoring populace, hands raised in the Heil salute, fostered the image of a strong leader and a united people – as encapsulated in the slogan of ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!’ (‘one people, one empire, one leader’) – and indeed the myth of the Führer, above all the petty everyday conflicts and frictions, constituted a powerful element of cohesion in the Third Reich. But to a certain extent the Nazis’ self-promotion has been misleading. The myth of a strong leader in a one-party state, with a single official ideology and the back-up of force, fed into the concept of totalitarianism – a concept that proved particularly useful in the Cold War period after the Second World War when dictatorships of the Left and Right, communist and fascist, were simplistically equated. But it has become increasingly clear to serious analysts of the Third Reich that the monolithic image does not correspond to a more complex reality.
While the Nazis clearly took over the government of Germany, they never entirely took over the state: the tendency was rather to create new parallel party agencies, with spheres of competence and jurisdiction overlapping or competing with those of the existing administration, and armed with plenipotentiary powers directly dependent on the Führer’s will. In this ‘dual state’ there was no rational means of adjudicating between the rival claims of competing agencies to represent the undisputed fount of authority on a given issue – and there were, in addition to conflicts between party and state, also disputes between different party agencies. In the final resort, recourse had to be had to the Führer, and the ‘Führer’s will’ became the ultimate source of authority to resolve all disputes. The ‘Hitler state’, with the Führer often remaining the only final source of arbitration, was to some extent a structural result of this relative administrative chaos.
Since Hitler often stood aside from the fray, only to enter at the last moment to side with the emerging winner, historians such as Hans Mommsen have been inclined to see him as a ‘weak dictator’. However, as many others have rightly pointed out, when it mattered to Hitler he made sure his own views were predominant.3 The degree to which Hitler was able to realize given aims, or intervene in detailed policymaking, varied with respect to economic, foreign and racial policy in both the peacetime and wartime years. German society also proved somewhat resistant to its own reformation into a harmonious ‘national community’.
Society, Culture and Everyday Life
The Nazis wanted not only to control the German people but also to transform them into a cohesive, racially pure ‘national community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) of national comrades (Volksgenossen) that would of course exclude those ‘community aliens’ (Gemeinschaftsfremden) who were deemed inferior, ‘pollutants’ of the social body: Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, the hereditarily diseased and ‘asocial’ people. The 1939 edition of the People’s Encyclopaedia (Volksbrockhaus) defined the Volksgemeinschaft as ‘the life-community of people, resting on bonds of blood, on a common destiny and a common political faith, to which class and status conflicts are essentially foreign’.4 After the near civil-war conditions of the Weimar Republic, the notion of an organic, harmonious, biologically based racial community, with common political beliefs and a common historical destiny, transcending and healing the wounds of the preceding years, could sound intrinsically appealing to many Germans. Every effort was made by the regime to realize this concept of society, both through overt indoctrination and through the transformation of social organization and everyday experience.
Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment, created in March 1933, sought increasing control of all media of communication and culture. A symbolic early event was the burning of books written by Jews, socialists and other ‘undesirable intellectuals’ on 10 May 1933. Although instigated by radical students, the book-burning was given official blessing by Goebbels’ presence at the bonfires on Berlin’s central street, Unter den Linden. The event did not in practice succeed entirely in eradicating books by banned authors from libraries across Germany, but it certainly contributed to the ‘inner emigration’ – self-censorship and public silence – as well as the literal emigration of many authors, among them Thomas and Heinrich Mann and Bertolt Brecht. Subsequent cultural life in Nazi Germany was to a considerable extent reduced to the level of ‘German art’, typified by a mediocre realism in painting and grandiose schemes in architecture; in the fields of music and drama, some notable individuals compromised with the regime to continue to realize peaks of artistic perfection in the performance of German classics. Britain and, on a larger scale, the United States were the major beneficiaries of the mass exodus of cultural talent from Nazi Germany.
Goebbels also made use of the media of popular entertainment and less highbrow culture to attempt to influence the masses. Film was a highly effective medium for propaganda, and the Nazis became adept at producing short newsreel pieces glorifying the achievements of the Führer, illustrating popular adulation of Hitler and celebrating the achievements of the Reich as a result of its ‘national awakening’. Care was taken to stress positive aspects and downplay features that would tend to alienate people and lose popular support. The press, which under the Weimar Republic had been diverse and decentralized, was gradually subjected to Nazi control. This was done partly by the Nazi publishing house gaining an increasing share in the outright ownership of newspapers, partly by increasing control over publishers, editors and journalists, partly by censorship, and partly by feeding stories through a Nazi-run news service. By the later 1930s news reports for different newspapers were sufficiently gleichgeschaltet (co-ordinated) and predictable for most people to adopt a cynical approach and put little store by what was said in German newspapers. The radio was similarly co-opted to Nazi ends, and mass ownership of the ‘people’s receiver’ (Volksempfänger) was encouraged – which trebled ownership in the 6 prewar years, giving Germany the highest percentage of radio owners in the world. The emphasis was placed on a combination of light entertainment and snippets of slanted ‘news’ coverage.
In education there was a purge of teachers lacking the appropriate racial credentials or political views, at both school and university levels. While a large number of school and university teachers in the Weimar Republic had held conservative and nationalist views, by no means a majority were of Nazi leanings. Many leading academics were forced into emigration, including, for example, Albert Einstein. Attempts were made to influence the contents of what was taught as well as the people who taught it. While topics such as biology, history