Nazi State Terror 1933 -1945
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party controlled Germany from 1933–1945, within this short period of time is one of the darkest chapters in human history. Hitler and the Nazis were able to gain control of the country through dubious methods and once in power ruled the state as an authoritarian dictatorship. The Nazi’s long-term goal was to create Lebensraum (living space) for their master race, the Aryan people. In this living space there would be no room for Jews, homosexuals, communists, or anyone else deemed to be an enemy of the state and to achieve this the Nazis would be willing to kill millions of people. Through state agencies like the RSHA, the SS, the Gestapo, and existing law courts the Nazis were able to create a terror state which allowed them to carry out the holocaust and keep their people living in fear
Joseph Goebbels studied psychology in university and quickly mastered the art of manipulating public opinion through the use of propaganda. Hitler adored Goebbels as he used his skills with language and speech to become the main instrument to spread the views of the Reich. Before the Nazis took Germany, Goebbels was instrumental in getting Hitler into power and changing public opinion. Goebbels headed the newspaper Der Angriff with the main goal of using it is as a vehicle to disseminate Nazi ideology. The paper attacked the Nazi’s enemies, democracy, and the Jews claiming they were the creators of Bolshevism. In the pages of this paper Jews became the scapegoat of all of Germanys ills. The paper presented Nazism and Hitler as the solution and portrayed Hitler as a leader whose main motivation was his love for his people. At its peak the paper had 100,000 daily readers and gave Goebbels an opportunity to refine the propaganda techniques he would later put to use in controlling the German population.
Within the complex network of bureaucratic organization created by the Nazis some departments had overlap in their mission. The Gestapo were the secret political police of the Reich, the SS were responsible for enforcing policies of the Nazis, and the SD were the intelligence agency of the SS. The Gestapo and SD had a relationship that was defined by unity and shared goals not by rivalry, this in theory allowed them to collaborate and be even more effective in their mission but was not always a reality. The SD’s area of expertise was science, race, art, education, the state and more while the Gestapo’s expertise was with Marxism, treason, and emigrants. The Gestapo and SD shared responsibilities of the churches, religions, ideological groups, pacifism, and Jews. The SD and Gestapo also collaborated closely with the Abwehr on matters of counter intelligence aiming to combat any acts of espionage against the Reich. Although their relationships were defined by unity these overlapping goals eventually bread rivalry with economic incentives arising to outperform one another.
The deprivation of rights for Jewish people in Germany began in 1933 with the “law for the restoration of the professional civil service.” This new law forced Jewish civil servants to retire from their positions in government offices. On the same day Jewish lawyers could now have their legal certifications withdrawn. A few weeks later Jewish doctors and dentists had been stripped of their right to receive payments from medical insurance companies. Within the span of a few weeks the Nazi government made it next to impossible for the Jewish professional class to financially survive. Matters got worse in 1935 under the “Reich citizens act” which took civil rights away from German Jews. One more law introduced in 1935 was the “Law for the protection of German blood and German honour” which made marriage between Jews and non-Jews illegal. Through hijacking the legal system, the Nazis essentially made Jews in Germany lesser people furthering public perception of them as an other.
In 1933 Heinrich Himmler head of the SS was made chief of the Munich police, with this move the Nazis could now incorporate the state police into their master plan. As the merging of state apparatus and the Nazi system progressed, Himmler later became “Chief of German police in the Reich interior ministry” and with this title became only responsible to Hitler. With this position the SS and Police could officially merge. Himmler began to restructure the police force to align with the Nazi’s principles with some offices being put on equal ground as top-ranking departments of the SS. The police were no longer an apolitical organization.
A stunning example of political violence the Nazis carried out on their own party members is the Night of Long Knives in 1934. During this act, the chief conspirators ran through hit lists of those in the Nazi party that had offended them, opposed them, or were in their way. This event became so violent that Hitler personally had to put a stop to it. In Berlin, SS squads commanded by Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich arrested 150 SA officers. Over the course of a few days many German citizens perished, the SS commandos targeted politicians, communists, police officers, and innocent civilians. Taking things too far without having direct orders from Hitler is something that the SS will be known for throughout its time. The Night of Long Knives was not the first time the Nazis carried out a political purge doing something similar the year prior when they targeted a third of the electorate that voted for the left in the last German election. The Nazis were able to successfully identify and target their opposition with help from the mass surveillance networks they had established.
Not only did the Nazi state take over the media and justice system but also more unsuspecting public utilities like the rail road and the post office. The Reich Railway was tasked with border control and surveilling the movement of citizens around the Reich. The post offices became responsible not only for delivering the mail but also monitoring the content of the mail. Local passport offices were used for their existing database of citizens to construct the Gestapo’s registry system. Tying in all these other elements of the state with block wardens and denunciations made the Nazis surveillance capabilities extend far beyond the gestapo, using the existing state and private citizens an essential tool for their terror.
With the Gestapo setting up posts in all of Germany’s major cities their presence was known giving people a general awareness that they were everywhere and anyone could become a target of their spying. What the Gestapo relied on for leads even more than their sophisticated surveillance efforts was self-surveillance of the public in the form of denunciations. Denunciations were voluntary and came from all angles of German society regardless of social class and usually remained anonymous. At first denunciations were usually made when an individual was observed in public acting in a manner that was forbidden by the national socialist state. This quickly morphed into colleagues and peers denunciating each other over petty disputes to neighbours reporting each other out of envy or revenge. Denunciations allowed the German population to control itself, while on trial one Gestapo officer stated that “officers let things come to them.” In one case even a priest was denounced for preaching against what the Nazis were doing.
The law against treacherous offences was created in 1934 which sought to place statements that were made in private on the same level as those made in public. This law against treachery opened the flood gates for denunciations as now people had legal grounds to report behaviour only they saw. By 1937 there were 17,000 denunciation cases before the special courts, so many that the Gestapo couldn’t even keep up with them. This caused the rules to be changed for non-Jewish Aryan first time offenders to let them off with a warning. If the courts did find any evidence of you being a member of any of their targeted class it was quite certain you were not getting off with a warning, as Heydrich stated, “only genuine pests of the people should be punished.” This shows the immense fear and terror the German citizens were living under, that when given the chance they would turn on each other in order to prove their allegiance to the Reich. Nazi propaganda encouraged denunciations, something as small as making a joke about the Führer could land you before a special court fearing for your life.
In November of 1938 the persecution of Jews reached a turning point with the events of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. This effort all across Germany was planned and directed by Hitler and Goebbels and resulted in tens of thousands of arrests, destruction of over 250 synagogues, hundreds of murders, and ransacking of 7,500 Jewish owned businesses and apartments. The actions were led by the SA paramilitary group, but ordinary citizens were quick to join in on the attacks escalating it to that of a vicious and deadly riot. Kristallnacht marks the escalation of taking rights away from the Jews to violent physical actions against them not just from Nazi officials but from the ordinary citizens of Germany itself.
The attack on Poland in 1939 lead to the creation of the RSHA, the Reich Security Main Office. The RSHA merged the main offices of security police and the SD creating a new organization that had double status of ministerial authority and SS’s main office. Within the RSHA were departments named Office 1 to Office 7, these offices dealt with various issues concerning the Reich. Office IV was the most important instrument of terror for the RSHA as it dealt with investigating and combating opponents of the state. Within Office 4 were more sub-departments that specialized in different objectives of the Reich, these were numbered Office IV A to Office IV F. Office IV B was headed by the infamous Adolf Eichmann and was titled “Persecution of Churches and Jews.” Office IV as a whole was responsible for all Gestapo outposts throughout the Reich giving them orders and receiving information from their initiatives. The RSHA grew into a massive and complicated bureaucracy that involved meticulous planning, organization, and administrative tasks. Within this labyrinth of bureaus, offices, sections, and sub sections was a maze of overlapping and competing segments which lead to many inefficiencies and errors.
Many actions were taken by the Nazis to ensure that when the time came to commence the mass executions of people in concentration camps, they would not have much resistance from the German people. By then the Jews were already stripped of most of their legal rights, subjugated to ghettos, and persecuted by their peers through denunciations. The last piece of legislation before the Holocaust started was a nail in the coffin for Germany’s Jews that had not yet escaped. In 1941 Hitler banned emigration and deportation of Jews meaning the only place they could go would be to concentration camps. After a partially successful assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich, then chief of the RSHA, Hitler and his top men put into motion the extermination of Jews and anyone else who’s fate landed them in a concentration camp. The military project was named operation Reinhard in commemoration of Heydrich.
By 1935 the SS was fully in charge of the concentration camps and often constructed them near major economic centres. Concentrations camps were not just institutions to go to die but also places where every bit of labor the SS could squeeze out of its prisoners was exploited. Women and children were not exempt from working in brutal conditions under Nazi watch. When Operation Reinhard was set into motion the SS realized it would be a costly matter to execute every single last prisoner with bullets, so they decided to do something more economical. The SS had experience using the deadly gas Zyklon B as it was already being used to execute the patients of Germany’s insane asylums, killing 70,000 patients by 1940. The Genocide had now begone, but even before Operation Reinhard the SS had already flirted with the notion of mass executions and the German people were indifferent to it.
Nazi state terror was not confined to the borders of Germany as they took over surrounding countries like France, Poland, and Hungary. A good example of how the Nazis operated as foreign occupiers is what they did in Hungary. The Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944 out of fear that Hungary was going to pull out of the war. The Einzatsgrupen and Einsatzkommando considered emergency death squads led by Adolf Eichmann tasked themselves with the final solution to the Jewish question inside of Hungary. The Hungarian people and authorities were complicit in Eichmann’s mission assisting him with their activities and denunciating one another. While in Hungary the SS committed many crimes that were outside of the scope of their mission like raiding and ransacking Jewish homes. In a very small amount of time Jews in Hungary were stripped of their rights and forced out of Hungarian society.
By 1944 approximately 200,000 Jews were subjugated to makeshift ghettos within the country. RSHA officers held them in the ghettos while they got ready to deport them mostly to Auschwitz and In the frame of a few months 400,000 people were deported. In an act of defiance against the Nazis, Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy halted the deportations under pressure from foreign governments and the Pope. The Nazis responded to this by forcing Horthy to step down and replacing the Hungarian government with the countries Fascist Arrow Cross Party lead by Ferenc Szálasie. Under Szálasi the volume of deportations increased so greatly that there weren’t enough trains to move all the people. Tens of thousands of people were forced to walk from Hungary to concentration camps on what was referred to as “death marches”, those who were too weak to complete the walk were shot on the spot. The atrocities that happened in Germany over the course of a decade occurred in Hungary in under a year with 500,000 Jews being deported to mainly Auschwitz.
In 2019 there is no longer an official Nazi party, but some factions still do exist under the guise of Neo-Nazis, these people know the history of what the Nazis did and believe it was justified. Recently in 2017 several thousand Neo-Nazis emerged in Charlottesville Virginia making no effort to conceal their identity chanting “Jews will not replace us.” Even though the holocaust happened over 50 years ago anti-Semitism and violence against Jews has still not faded away. In 2018 an anti-Semitic terrorist opened fire on a Synagogue in Pittsburgh while Shabbat morning services were being held killing 11 people and wounding 7. All of this is made worse by a president of the United States who has gained support from groups with anti-Semitic messages. Former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke, a notoriously anti-Semitic organization endorsed president Trump. To this Trump never stated that he did not want his support.
Nazi state terror and the holocaust that resulted at its climax was by no means just a consequence of war. The Nazi system was calculated and bureaucratic through Organizations like the RSHA, SS, SD, SA, and all of their various sub departments. The German people were fed pro-Nazi propaganda for decades which resulted in their ideological indoctrination to the party’s cause. With the Nazis in control of the governments and all elements of it like the courts they were legally allowed to strip away the rights of Jews creating a persecuted under class. The people of Germany effectively took matters into their own hands through denunciations against their peers with encouragement from laws like the Treachery Act. While the Nazis were on track to achieve their goals within the German Reich, they exported this system of terror to surrounding countries like Hungary, Poland, and Austria. At the end of the war the Nazis were eventually defeated but in their wake of terror they left millions of innocent people dead and an uncomfortable reminder as to what humanity is capable of under evil but highly effective leadership.
