Enemies of the People: Hitler’s Critics and the Gestapo

Abstract

Perspectives on the relationship between regime and people in Nazi Germany have shifted considerably from the popular postwar image of a nation terrorized by a brutal dictatorship and its repressive police and security forces to that of a society largely made up of compliant or acquiescent individuals, ‘beneficiaries’ of Nazi rule. While the image of Germany (and Europe) under the jackboot has endured in popular culture, a more complex and nuanced understanding of the German police state has emerged, Stackhouse argues, characterized by ‘selective enforcement’. The unrestrained and arbitrary terror that accompanied the establishment of the dictatorship was highly targeted, and directed above all at the Nazis’ political opponents on the Left—some five million socialists, communists and trades unionists—along with the country’s Jewish community. Together, these victims comprised less than 10 per cent of the population. The terror was known of by many, but experienced by (relatively) few; nor did the threat of terror pervade the Third Reich: selective enforcement by the Gestapo meant that while organized resistance and targeted minorities were persecuted, dissent was silenced with warnings and a backlash against the authorities was avoided.