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Debate still rages over how much ordinary Germans knew about the concentration camps and the Gestapo's activities during Hitler's reign. Now, in this well-documented and provocative volume, historian Robert Gellately argues that the majority of German citizens had quite a clear picture of the extent of Nazi atrocities, and continued to support the Reich to the bitter end.
Culling chilling evidence from primary news sources and citing dozens of case studies, Gellately shows how media reports and press stories were an essential dimension of Hitler's popular dictatorship. Indeed, a vast array of material on the concentration camps, the violent campaigns against social outsiders, and the Nazis' radical approaches to "law and order" was published in the media of the day, and was widely read by a highly literate population of Germans. Hitler, Gellately reveals, did not try to hide the existence of the Gestapo or of concentration camps. Nor did the Nazis try to cow the people into submission. Instead they set out to win converts by building on popular images, cherished ideals, and long-held phobias. And their efforts succeeded, Gellately concludes, for the Gestapo's monstrous success was due, in large part, to ordinary German citizens who singled out suspected "enemies" in their midst, reporting their suspicions and allegations freely and in a spirit of cooperation and patriotism.
Extensively documented, highly readable and illustrated with never-before-published photographs, Backing Hitler convincingly debunks the myth that Nazi atrocities were carried out in secret. From the rise of the Third Reich well into the final, desperate months of the war, the destruction of innocent lives was inextricably linked to the will of the German people.
The last nail in the coffin of the 'good German'
| Customer Rating:   | There is no point, at this late date, for retelling German horrors, unless the retelling provides an insight into what was behind them. This Robert Gellately's "Backing Hitler" does, successfully but in irritating fashion.
He also adds some new information not used by earlier historians, from newspapers and Gestapo files.
For a long generation after 1945, most reports of German atrocity, if they tried to maintain any balance at all, just threw up their hands and asked "How could this have happened?" Stated or implied was a caveat: Germans were human beings, too, so this inhuman behavior could not really be explained.
Few indeed turned that conundrum on its head to propose that Germans were not humans, at least not humans advanced out of savagery. It was scarcely 10 years ago when Daniel Jonah Goldhagen seriously suggested, in "Hitler's Willing Executioners," that savagery ran deep and true in Germans. The outrage that greeted Goldhagen's book was, in the most charitable light, testimony to the reluctance of most people to think anybody could sink so low as Goldhagen sank the Germans.
Less charitable commentators, like me, saw the antagonism to Goldhagen as the late 20th century expression of 1930s appeasers who declared that Germany could not be nearly as bad as its enemies portrayed it, because Germans had written so much lovely music. This infantile outlook has been all too powerful in the historiography of the Hitler era.
Gellately knocks the idea in the head, stuns it and drags it off to history's towering scrapheap of silly ideas. "The great majority of the German people soon became devoted to Hitler and they supported him to the bitter end in 1945" sums the findings.
One myth is easily disposed of: the claim that the "good Germans" were unaware of what the Nazis were up to. Gellately finds front page stories in mass circulation newspapers and magazines in which the German public was told about the concentration camps, from the start of Hitler's regime, and told that they were a good thing -- originally to dispose of "Communists." Some Communists were indeed disposed of, along with, as time passed, an expanding menagerie of unGermans: Gypsies, drunkards, the mentally ill or physically handicapped, even a few Catholic priests who, although the Roman church got on well with Hitler, persisted in a sentimental appreciation for the Catholic Center Party.
The German version of the Gallup Poll, the Gestapo listeners-in, found that the good Germans massively approved of it. The village of Heuberg preferred to have a concentration camp nearby because it displaced a children's home, which the Heubergers found offensive.
Really, it is hard for civilized people to comprehend, much less understand, how German the Germans were. Gellately doesn't make it much easier. The first half of "Backing Hitler" is mostly a recapitulation of atrocities that are well known already to anybody who has studied Hitlerism.
Also, he fails to make the crucial distinction between German love of Hitler and love of Hitlerism. Not all Germans loved Hitler, even if most did. The social elite despised him as a common Austrian who spoke German with a hick accent. They sat around, drinking stolen wine and whispering to each other how Germany would be better off without that schwein. Not without his policies, which satisfied them very well, just without the individual.
In the second half of the book, the pace picks up and Gellately summarizes dozens and hundreds of examples of how ordinary Germans cooperated with the regime. The police state could not have operated without that. There were never more than 7,000 Gestapo men in Germany, a nation of nearly 70 million. Any medium-size American city has more cops.
There were other police, the uniformed Order Police, the detectives or Kriminal Police, and the rural constables, but for a police state Germany had remarkably few cops. (During the war there were plenty of German cops in the conquered lands, but Gellately explicitly limits his history to Germany proper.)
The argument of "Backing Hitler" is powerfully persuasive. It offers to English readers a taste of what a new generation of German historians has produced at home, although their books have not generally been translated into English.
Now the bad word. Gellately is a scholar, but practically illiterate. "Backing Hitler" was not edited or even proof-read. In general, the sense of Gellately's sentences is clear, although there are a few exceptions, but the book is an agony to read.
Nevertheless, it should be read, at least until a better version of the same facts is given us by a better writer. |
Fantastic history of National Socialist Germany
| Customer Rating: | Traditionally, I have read books on American history rather than European history, but this one caught my eye because of the premise - that ordinary Germans played a role in enforcing Hitler's mandates of Aryan supremacy.
Backing Hitler: Consent & Coercion in nazi Germany is a thought-provoking book that looks at ordinary German citizens and their involvement in the governmental policies of forcing "racial purity". By examining the police (both ordinary uniformed police and undercover officers), Gellately has given us a view into Hitler's Germany that hasn't been explored much before.
Gellately explored the police and contends that ordinary people made up the police force and were consentually backing Hitler's policies. These people opted to enforce the policies, regardless of whether they felt that the policies were right because their personal experiences told them so or that the propaganda won them over. The folks that were coerced into compliance were often herded into concentration camps such as Auschwitz or Dachau.
The concepts in the book are well argued, though it appears that the author is not overly familiar with all of the rules of English grammar (i.e. placement of commas, etc.), thus making the book a touch more difficult to read, but it is a book that really should be on your list if you are interested in German history between 1933-1945. |
How The Germans Accepted Nazism And Hitler
| Customer Rating: | | Robert Gellately's "Backing Hitler" may be the most thought provoking, extensive study as to how and why the German people ultimately embraced both Nazism and Adolf Hitler during the course of the Great Depression and World War II. Gellately makes the startling claim that most Germans were aware of Nazi atrocities - though not necessarily the worst - and yet found them tolerable as a means to combat crime. Indeed, he notes how Germans embraced Nazism as a succesful antidote to the financial and cultural corruption they'd seen in the 1920's and early 1930's during the Weimar Republic. With the notable exception of the Holocaust, Nazi goverment officials and agencies such as the Gestapo and the SS did not hide the existence of concentration camps and torture from the general public, but instead, allowed them to be published both in Nazi popular journals and daily newspapers (And the Holocaust itself was not hidden, except for its most virulent, deadly phases, in which Jews were dealt with via "special handling", the Nazi euphemism for genocide.). Only towards the end, during the final months and weeks of the war, did the German public see the most brutal aspects of the Nazi regime. Yet surprisingly, many Germans continued to support the regime until the very end. Gellately's premise may seem unoriginal in light of Daniel Goldhagen's popular book indicting the entire German nation for the Holocaust, yet unlike Goldhagen, Gellately offers substantially more persuasive evidence to demonstrate how a social consensus was reached within German society in support of the Nazi regime. Gellately's book may be the seminal work looking at how the Nazis successfully used the media in disseminating their philosophy to Germany. |
Interesting Mess
| Customer Rating: | | I looked forward to reading this volume with great anticipation. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. While the subject matter is certainly interesting, the editing (or lack thereof) is so unacceptable as to make several lengthy passages almost completely unintelligible. For my money, "Hitler's Willing Executioners", which covers the same topic, is much more well-constructed, if a bit dry at times. |
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