essentially a terrorist dictatorship, which depended on force and instilling fear in the
subject population? Or could it draw on substantial reserves of voluntary support
from ordinary Germans?
Much work has been done on the state of `public opinion' in the Third Reich: writing
in this area focuses on questions of `morale' - ie the mood of the general population
and its attitude to the leadership. The key sources for such studies are the reports
submitted by police informers and compiled nationally by the Security Service (SD).
These reports are detailed but problematic, since they may be distorted by various
biases. We have touched on this issue in the lecture on propaganda. In this topic, we
shall focus not on morale in general, but on the willingness - or not -- of Germans to
collaborate practically in the aims of the regime. We shall approach this question by
examining the behaviour of specific groups of people.
(a) The Army
(i) support for the regime in the 1930s
(ii) loyalty to the regime during the closing phase of the war
(iii) consequences for the military resistance
(b) Collaboration with the authorities: denunciations to the Gestapo
(i) dependence of the Gestapo on voluntary assistance (R. Gellately)
(ii) denunciations as the `informal reinforcement of the terror system'
(W.S. Allen)
(c) Women - victims or participants?
(i) the Third Reich, a `masculine dictatorship'
(ii) women as supporters of the regime (Claudia Koonz)
(d) Doctors, nurses, parents and the euthanasia programme
(i) collaboration by health professionals
(ii) wider patterns of collaboration ( Michael Kater, Paul Weindling,
Michael Burleigh)
(e) The working class
(i) did the working class remain `immune to fascism'? (Tim Mason)
(ii) workers as willing servants of the regime (Omer Bartov)
(f) German youth
(i) expansion of the Nazi youth organizations
(ii) alienation and dissent inside and outside the Hitlerjugend (Detlev
Peukert)
(g) perpetrators
(i) `willing executioners', or `ordinary Germans'? (Daniel Jonah
Goldhagen vs Christopher Browning)
Conclusions:
The Nazi regime depended for its success on widespread voluntary collaboration.
This was certainly a more important factor in stabilizing the regime than the use of
terror, though the latter should not be overlooked. But a distinction should be drawn
between an emotional allegiance to the regime and a willingness to collaborate in its
work. By the third year of the war, the `popularity' of the regime was in any case
irrelevant, because Hitler's policy had placed the German people in a position where
the survival of the regime and the survival of Germany itself were one and the same
thing.
