Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany

In Backing Hitler, Robert Gellately shows us what a true police state looks like. The police state as it emerged in Nazi Germany starting in 1933 was very extreme, as is widely known. But there is much to learn by examining the details and coming to understand the dynamics of its operation and development.Gellately’s initial theme has to do with Nazi concern for public opinion. Even while the Gestapo and other police organizations were on the rise, while police were increasingly given new authority to convict and punish without involving the courts, and while the courts were constantly under pressure to hand out only the stiffest of penalties, and the vast network of concentration camps was established and individual rights were on the steep decline, it was not terror alone that the Nazis utilized to gain domestic control. The Nazis were always concerned with public opinion, and to that end Nazi propaganda took shape. Hitler and his minions were always careful not to cross certain lines that the public might have a problem with, and were careful to justify their actions in the press. The extent to which the public bought into the Nazi racist and political propaganda over time was very extreme, and this was achieved through careful consideration of public relations.Understanding the true nature of life in Nazi Germany has many purposes, and Backing Hitler sheds light on each of them, even those it does not directly address. It tells us who the victims were - and there were many different groups that suffered at the Nazis’ hands. The first were the opposing political leaders, especially the socialists and communists. The two socialist parties in Germany in 1933 together represented a majority. Things might have gone differently in Germany had these two parties been able to get along with each other. But when Hitler took over in 1933 the opposing political leaders were the first to see the inside of a camp. Later there was the rounding up of many under the Nazi racial ideology which included Poles and other Slavs, and of course there was always special treatment for the Jews. But the persecution was not just based on political and racial concerns. As the war progressed ideological purity was stressed it became illegal to listen to foreign radio broadcasts, and many were arrested for saying things, even in private, against the government or the army, even for saying anything pessimistic about the war. And so many Germans were arrested and put in the camps alongside Jews and Poles and so forth. And most Germans who were arrested had been turned in to the police by co-workers, neighbors, and even family members in response to calls for citizens to police those around them. Understanding the attack on human rights in the police state known as Nazi Germany helps us understand the complete nightmare that existed for anyone who held on to any sense of human decency.There has been a growing literature of Nazi apologists and others who question some of the official historical narrative of WWII. Certainly, there is much that passes for history that is biased and written for reasons other than to portray the truth with all its blemishes. On the other side, there is much supposedly corrective literature that is also problematic. Backing Hitler is refreshing in that it tells the horrible truth that holds nothing back, but at the same time seems, at least, to contain a good measure of objectivity and is well founded in copious research. It makes holocaust denial seem quite pointless since, even if Auschwitz did not use a specific chemical with which to gas the inmates, the obvious response has to be: So what? The situation in Nazi Germany was horrible beyond imagination, and no one can deny that the Jews played a central role in the Nazi agenda.Backing Hitler, as mentioned above, shows what a true police state is like. Going unchecked, a police force can terrorize a community. And going after one group at a time, like the Nazis did, does not mean they won’t come after you eventually. No one is safe in a police state. And by reading Gellately’s book we hopefully can get clued in to what the early stages of a developing police state looks like. What does it mean, for example, when an incarceration rate is extremely high, a court system is corrupt and too closely associated with the police, when children are being separated from their parents and put in corporate prisons that even members of Congress have a hard time gaining access to? If our own political and justice systems are in decline, then where are we headed?A final word is this. The perfect book to follow up Backing Hitler with is Savage Continent by Keith Lowe. This book details the horrible aftermath of WWII. The horror did not stop with VE Day, but continued on for years afterwards. There was no infrastructure to speak of. There was no government. And everyone was out for vengeance. And the Marshall Plan was not instituted until several years after 1945. This is a chapter in history that is typically overlooked, but Lowe presents it in its horrible details. He is also a voice of reason in regards to certain controversial issues.One of the horrible details of the time had to do with the millions of German POWs in American, British, Soviet, and even French prison camps. The Soviet camps were the worst, Russians having suffered most among the allies in WWII and therefore most intent upon revenge. But life in each of these camps was abysmal. And since the usual historical narrative glosses over this chapter in history, the issue is left prone to exploitation by those who would demonize Eisenhower and others. The reader may or may not be aware how hot a topic this is in some quarters, but for some it means that none of the history told can be trusted, and that Nazi atrocities are overstated. From this reviewer’s perspective Lowe is a voice of reason. He is explicit about how much guesswork and estimation is involved given how evidence is so often lacking, but he also has a good handle on the proper range of estimates within which statistics should be. From an objective point of view there are no participants whose hands are clean. War is a bloody mess. In Savage Continent as well as in Backing Hitler, the reader gets a much clearer picture of what Germany and the rest of Europe had to deal with in this most terrible or wars. If we don’t wake up to the realities of war, then we will remain asleep until it is too late to stop the next calamity.

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.

I've been reading WW2 for nearly 40 years but have never come across a book like this. For one, by going through Gestapo records it gets into the weeds of everyday German life before and during the war, and unmasks the myth that the German people were unaware of many of the lethal excesses of the Nazi party and the Gestapo. Instead it puts the population among in the many work camps throughout the country that were so crucial in manufacturing munitions and other necessary supplies for the war effort. Contact with prison workers, who at one point numbered nearly 6 million was not infrequent. Rather than unaware, the German people seem to have bought into Hitler's racial superiority theory and treated workers from other countries and Jews with an aristocratic disdain. When the Gestapo kangaroo courts were taken out from the review of ordinary courts, and imposed death sentences for minor thefts or for listening to foreign broadcasts, it didn't stop or even slow Germans from denouncing to authorities their own people and even fellow family members. Hitler seems to have been obsessed with public opinion and he carefully calibrated what he thought he could get away with. When the people didn't like some an anti-Jewish boycott, he backed off. This suggests that the people, had they been appalled by what they saw, could have stopped at least some of the killing and mistreatment. Great book.

This book had been well researched;it just seemed like the same facts were given over and over. That being said it definitely supported it's point that the German people knew and approved by and large of the persecution of the undesirables of their society.

£10.83 for an e-book is not cheap and yet the publisher cannot even be bothered to produce a decent version with the pictures included, or was this simple process beyond them technically? Spoilt an otherwise informative book.

very good look at those within Germany during the Nazi years and how they supported and more importantly why they supported what was happening. Good read.

Interesting read, different points of view

A truly excellent book. A bit of this, a bit of the Banality of Evil, a quick look at the news and you shouldn't need any more sleep for the rest of your lives : Ρ

A fascinating and carefully crafted book.