The early phase of the Third Reich was a precarious one for the Nazi regime. Although the Nazis had received the highest percentage of votes in the last Reichstag elections, the other parties still posed a potential threat to the new regime. However, in the wake of the Reichstag fire, within one month after Hitler’s coming to power, the Nazis took drastic steps toward eliminating all political opposition. The first wave of arrests began immediately after the fire and was directed primarily against members and functionaries of the Communist Party who were accused of setting the fire.
For these arrests, the SA rapidly opened concentration camps all over Germany—in schools, hotels, and even youth hostels. Among those held in concentration camps were groups such as the communists—which had regularly engaged in street fights with the Nazis, often with considerable casualties. But some who had opposed the Nazis less violently, such as social democrats and unionists, were also arrested. The Jews were not specifically targeted at this point. If some Jews were arrested, it was usually due to their political convictions.
In general, the early concentration camps existed only a short time; nonetheless, several thousand people fell victim to all kinds of violence as the Nazis consolidated power in 1933. Around 100,000 people were arrested and temporarily jailed.1 Even when these initial detainees were released—some after a long term of imprisonment—their freedoms were still constricted, and they remained under surveillance.
One of our respondents from Dresden, whose relatives, both male and female, had been members of the Communist Party, reported that his father was taken to the concentration camp in Hohenstein near Dresden in 1933: “It was around five or six months. Then he came back. . . . Once a week he had to get in touch with the mayor [to show] that he hadn’t left [Dresden] and was always there. He had to report to the mayor’s office because a police station was there.”2
The attack on members of other parties, however, did not eliminate all opposition. After the Communist and Socialist Parties were banned, many of their members decided to work undercover against the regime. While these groups were loosely connected, they were nevertheless centrally operated to a considerable extent (the communists from Moscow and the exiled Social Democratic Party from Prague).
Our findings from Cologne and Krefeld show the extent to which political activities were carried out, especially in a communist setting. In the Krefeld and Cologne surveys we asked respondents to specify their parents’ political orientation. Of respondents who identified their parents as “communist,” nearly half (46 percent) said they knew people personally who had actively opposed the regime. Among those who identified their parents as “social democrats,” this figure was still 25 percent. In the remaining categories—including the Catholic Center Party—these figures were lower; less than one-sixth (approximately 16 percent) of these respondents personally knew people who actively opposed the Nazi government.
Of course only a fraction of the original members of the outlawed political parties took the dangerous route of underground opposition. Many withdrew from political life because they saw no possibility of mounting a successful opposition to the Nazi regime, since the leaders of their organizations were arrested or went into exile. Many refrained from opposition because they did not want to endanger themselves and their families—or because they found ways to benefit to some extent from the new regime. And this regime was well suited for such “defectors.” From the very beginning, the Nazi regime’s strategy was to exert terror on those it considered to be a threat while at the same time trying to win over those it did not consider true opponents.
Harassment by the new regime was not limited to former functionaries and members of the banned political parties and unions. Even those who made snide remarks about the state and its representatives risked arrest and punishment. The Heimtückegesetz (law against political libel and slander) of 1934 greatly curtailed freedom of speech and made the prosecution of such criticisms of the Nazi regime and its leaders possible. As a rule, these new types of offenses were not punished severely, but sometimes they were, and they were plentiful in the early Nazi years. In 1937 alone, 17,200 cases were initiated.3
Despite this relatively large figure, our survey evidence shows that most Germans had little contact with either the newly established Gestapo or the other organs of Nazi terror. In one of the most important questions dealing with the issue of terror in our survey, we asked the respondents to tell us if they themselves had ever been arrested or interrogated by either the Gestapo or the police during the years of the Third Reich and if they personally knew other non-Jewish people who had been either arrested or interrogated in the course of a criminal investigation. We then provided them with a list of different types of people (including relatives, friends and acquaintances, work colleagues, neighbors, and others) and asked them to indicate which if any of these types of people they had known personally had cases started against them. Those who neither had a criminal case started against them nor knew anyone personally who had been arrested or at least interrogated were asked to indicate this as well. The responses we received to this question are displayed in Table12.1.
The evidence provided in the table shows that only 47 of the 2,601 people who answered this question in the four cities we surveyed were ever arrested or interrogated by either the Gestapo or the regular police during all the years of the Third Reich. This means that an average of less than 2 percent of the non-Jewish people in these cities—even though many of them hailed from former left-wing backgrounds and most (as will be shown below) had broken the laws of the Third Reich in the course of their daily lives—were ever accused of wrongdoing in Nazi Germany, much less punished for such activity. Only in Cologne, where sympathy for the Nazi movement was lowest among the four cities, was the percentage of respondents involved higher than 1 percent. Older respondents had somewhat higher rates, yet a systematic relationship with age did not`same.
If this evidence calls into question the long-held notion that terror was ubiquitous in Nazi Germany, the evidence in the table showing that most survey respondents did not personally know anyone who had ever been accused of committing an illegal act calls it further into question. Only in Dresden, which lies in Saxony, where communist and socialist activity was perhaps more pronounced than in many other regions of Germany, did more than 30 percent of the respondents answer that they knew somebody personally who had been arrested or interrogated.4 In the other cities the respective rates were lower.
Still, it was not unusual for people to know someone who had been arrested or interrogated, and in most instances the people they knew had acted individually as opposed to in a group. In the few cases that involved groups, typically they were associated with former political parties, especially the social democrats and the communists. Among the more typical cases involving individuals who acted alone, the people who were referred to were equally divided among the respondents’ relatives, friends, acquaintances, and neighbors in each of the four cities.
Table 12.1 People Known Personally by Respondents Who Were Either Arrested or Interrogated for Illegal Activity, (Multiple Responses by City)
| Cologne (%) | Krefeld (%) | Dresden (%) | Berlin (%) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I myself | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Family members | 10 | 9 | 9 | 8 |
| Friends, acquaintances | 13 | 13 | 11 | 11 |
| Work colleagues | 3 | 1 | 4 | 2 |
| Neighbors | 8 | 6 | 9 | * |
| Other people | 6 | 9 | 7 | 5 |
| Nobody | 70 | 74 | 69 | 76 |
| N of cases | 767 | 340 | 631 | 857 |
In a follow-up question, we asked respondents to specify the reasons for the cases that had been started against them or others they had known, and these reasons varied widely. When an arrest involved membership in one of the former political parties, it was more often the Communist than the Socialist Party. Members of the Center Party were seldom mentioned—even in the Catholic Rhineland. However, church activity was often mentioned as the reason for Gestapo involvement, although it was never as decisive a factor as the underground political opposition of groups such as the communists or socialists. Among the other cases, many involved illegal statements of opinion against Hitler and the Nazi regime, and many involved doubts about Germany’s ultimate victory in the war. Political activities deemed by the regime to be especially dangerous—such as high treason, sabotage, or active resistance—made up only a minority of the cases.
Among respondents who had been arrested or interrogated by the Gestapo or the police, a broad spectrum of activities were the causes for suspicion—from maintaining contact with forbidden youth organizations to direct or indirect participation in active political resistance. Some of the respondents were also interrogated because their fathers had engaged in political activities against the Nazis and they were suspected of knowing about or being involved in those activities as well.
From another follow-up question, we learned that the arrests or interrogations that the respondents recalled were spread out over the years of the Third Reich. The first large wave came in 1933, the year that the Nazis came to power, when they carried out mass arrests in an attempt to crush existing political parties and organizations. There was a reduction in the number of arrests and interrogations that the respondents mentioned in following years, but their number began to climb again in the second half of the 1930s. The highest number of arrests and interrogations the respondents mentioned was reached during the war years between 1942 and 1944, and these numbers correspond to the numbers of internments in concentration camps.5
After we asked the respondents to tell us why and when they or others they knew had been arrested, we then asked them to specify how these cases had been initiated and we provided a list of possible answers to choose from, including various types of civilian denunciations as well as police raids, Gestapo spies, and reports from the Nazi Party. Thus, when the respondents were asked how the Gestapo or the police had found out about the alleged illegal activity, around 40 percent in Cologne and Krefeld identified informants in their immediate surroundings—primarily neighbors—followed by colleagues and finally by relatives and family members as the cause. Another 25 percent of respondents mentioned Gestapo spies, 11 percent police raids, and 11 percent notifications from the Nazi Party. These figures are similar to those given by the respondents in Dresden (we did not ask this question in the Berlin survey). This evidence, which shows that voluntary reports from fellow citizens often provided the Nazi policing authorities with the information they used to begin criminal cases against alleged wrongdoers, jibes with evidence found in earlier studies based on Gestapo and Nazi criminal court records.6
Although some scholars have argued that these civilian denunciations reflect the high degree of consensus that existed within the Nazi regime, more importantly they underscore the difficulties the Gestapo had in gaining direct access to people’s private lives as well as the Gestapo’s general lack of interest in pursuing such access. The Gestapo knew that most cases begun by civilian denunciations involved only trivial offenses and generally it did not want to waste its own limited resources on policing such minor matters.7
Based on the evidence provided by the survey respondents, the number of people who had cases started against them through information provided by Gestapo spies was notably high. But the extent to which these putative spies were in fact spies remains unclear, for many people may have assumed they were being spied on by Gestapo agents and surrogates when in fact the infor-mation that was used to initiate cases against them came from civilian denunciations or party officials. In fact, the Gestapo had a limited number of spies, and they usually concentrated on organized political groups and targeted enemies like Jews. We suspect that in many cases the real informer remained unknown to the respondent, so that he or she could only imagine that information from a spy triggered the arrest.
Above all, spies were named as the source of the Gestapo and police information in cases involving unlawful activity associated with church matters. In many cases, the alleged spies may have been Gestapo officers who attended church services dressed in civilian clothing and took notes on the sermon. In small communities, where everyone knew everyone else, the village policeman occasionally fulfilled this function:
The village policeman. He stood in the back of the church and listened. We were already wondering why the man was standing there. He wanted to hear what the pastor said. He wasn’t there to worship. He only went to listen in. But our pastor was a very intelligent man, and he already knew you shouldn’t say too much.8
Aside from cases involving the church, spies mostly were mentioned in cases directed against the members of former political parties. This is not surprising. These organizations were suspect to the Nazis from the start, and people who had been active in them were also suspect.
What did the respondents believe happened to the people they knew who had cases started against them by the Gestapo or the police? Not all respondents knew the final outcome. Perhaps some of them only recalled the most spectacular cases, especially those involving severe punishment. Nonetheless, the respondents’ subjective perceptions of what happened in the cases they were aware of are at least as important as the objective situation.
From the answers they gave to a question we asked about what happened to the people they had known who had cases started against them by the Gestapo or the police, the respondents said that 36 percent of the people mentioned in the Cologne and Krefeld surveys were soon released after their initial arrest or interrogation. While this was what the respondents believed to have been the most frequent outcome in these cases, the rest of the cases often resulted in more dire outcomes for the accused persons. Thus, according to the respondents, 10 percent of the cases resulted in the accused persons being sent to jail or prison, 21 percent in their being placed in “protective custody” or sent to a concentration camp, and 4 percent in their being executed. The remaining respondents mentioned other outcomes, such as a combination of various measures, sometimes even including court acquittals followed by confinement in a concentration camp.9
In Dresden, the number of those who were released without being sentenced or sent to a concentration camp was similar, around 31 percent. The percentage of people in Dresden who were placed in protective custody or were sent to a concentration camp, on the other hand, was 37 percent and thus somewhat higher than among respondents from the Rhineland. The share of those executed in Dresden was around 7 percent. The reason for stronger repressive action presumably lies in the fact that the leftist political opposition was more strongly organized in Dresden, and therefore subjected to more persecution.
Some of the released prisoners who were mentioned by the respondents were people whose offenses could not be proven or whose complicity in delinquent acts was doubted by the Gestapo. In many cases, this was because accusations were based on suspicions and false assumptions and often malicious intent by the accusers. The Gestapo was well aware of this problem. Although denunciations against political dissidents were welcomed, false accusations meant extra work and detracted from other activities. Having limited personnel, the Gestapo sought to discourage false accusations.
According to the respondents, the Gestapo occasionally took the popularity of the person in question into consideration. Possibly the Gestapo feared that measures taken against a popular individual could result in public unrest and could potentially threaten the legitimacy of the political system. Thus, for example, one of the Cologne survey respondents reported that a popular priest who was critical of the Nazis was repeatedly arrested and repeatedly released.
The gravity of the offense was also decisive. While the Gestapo often treated less serious offenses with leniency, especially in cases involving what it considered to be thoughtless outbursts of opinion made by otherwise loyal citizens, it would proceed ruthlessly in punishing those it considered truly dangerous. Thus, for example, when priests or clergymen were too outspoken in their opposition to the Nazi regime and openly condemned measures taken against Jews or against the Church—as was the case of Minister Lichtenberg in Berlin—their popularity made little difference.10
During the Third Reich, the politically controlled press strove to make the Gestapo appear legitimate and all powerful at the same time. The media portrayed it as an institution that dealt harshly but fairly with criminals, traitors, and agitators, and this helped deter the regime’s enemies while silencing the rest of the population. Regardless of the press image, many people considered the Gestapo brutal and violent. Ample evidence for this is found in our survey data. When we posed a question in our Cologne and Krefeld surveys about popular awareness of Gestapo torture practices during interrogations, 28 percent of respondents answered that they had been aware of it, and another 14 percent answered that they had suspected it. Thus the proportion of those who associated the Gestapo with violence and torture amounted to 42 percent.
People who came in direct contact with the Gestapo were the most likely to have heard about the use of torture. Only a small fraction of respondents were subject to violence themselves, but others who had been interrogated by the Gestapo or had visited imprisoned friends and relatives found out about these torture practices secondhand. Thus, according to our survey, the percentage of respondents with knowledge of torture rises with the number of people they knew personally who had come into conflict with the Gestapo.
In addition to this, the existence of concentration camps on German territory was no secret. Mention of concentration camps often appeared in newspapers, especially in the early years of the Third Reich.11 Naturally, this was done in a way that sought to legitimize the new regime. Hence concentration camps were presented as correctional facilities, where criminals, “work-shy” individuals, and political opponents were given their hard but just punishment; finally they would learn to do real work. The camps were portrayed in the popular media as model rehabilitation facilities.
Many people therefore had a false impression of what was happening in the concentration camps. The fact that not only political enemies but also “work-shy” persons and criminals were among the concentration camp detainees— and even made up the majority for some time in the 1930s—no doubt led some to equate work camps (which also existed) with concentration camps.12 Thus several respondents did not perceive the concentration camps to be necessarily condemnable. “Detainees were brought there, but that was entirely natural,” one interviewee stated. Another interviewee explained that the people in the camps simply “were criminals or something.”13 One interviewee added, “One assumed that they were guilty of theft, robbery, or murder, or something.”14
Large numbers of people who were incarcerated in the 1930s were eventually released. In the summer of 1933, more than 26,000 people were being held in large and small concentration camps and prison-like facilities. These were mostly political opponents. Two years later, in the summer of 1935, fewer than 4,000 inmates were still locked up in the camps, which shows the extent to which the Nazis had established themselves and no longer feared organized resistance.15 In the following years, the figures started to go up again, and the number of those affected finally reached—over the entire period of the Third Reich—a considerable size. Although great numbers of people who were sent to concentration camps were Jews, according to one estimate, more than half a million Germans—including communists and political opponents—spent time in a concentration camp between 1933 and 1945.16
Released inmates were told not to disclose any information about what took place in the concentration camps. They had to pledge in writing not to report anything about what they had seen and experienced. Otherwise, they faced severe penalties, including being sent back to concentration camp. Some inmates, though, did not bear external marks of the pain they had suffered, and what they related about their experiences in the camp was rather reserved:
The father-in-law of my oldest sister, he came into a concentration camp in ’36 because of communist activities. He had handed out fliers. Then they interned him. They talked of work camps for reeducation. He came back out after two years, that’s when they released him. Then he worked in the moor. He never said anything about torture. My father asked, “How was the food there?” “Good,” he said, “normal. We had to work there, all day. ‘Work sets you free!’ was written up there.” And when he was released, he said nothing more [about his experiences in the concentration camps].17
Those who bore marks of violence when they left the concentration camps warned those who saw them not to say anything to others, lest it cause problems for released inmates. “We knew that there were concentration camps,” reported one of the Berlin respondents. “One day, they came and picked up our employee. He came back without fingernails or toenails. We were strictly forbidden to say a word about it.”18
In light of the large number of individuals arrested by the Gestapo and temporarily detained in concentration camps and the cruelty of the Gestapo’s conduct—especially where the extortion of confessions was concerned—many authors have assumed that the fear of falling into the hands of the Gestapo constantly plagued everyone in the Third Reich and concluded that fear and terror were the decisive factors in shaping the German population’s everyday behavior.19
Our survey evidence, however, does not support this assumption and conclusion. When we asked the people in our survey if they had lived in fear of being arrested by the Gestapo during the Third Reich, only a minority of the respondents responded affirmatively. As shown in Table12.2, the percentage of respondents in each of the four cities we surveyed who said that they had “always” feared being arrested by the Gestapo was remarkably consistent and varied from a low of 3 percent in Berlin to a high of 7 percent in Krefeld. In addition to this, the percentage of people who said that they had “occasionally” been afraid of being arrested was also consistently low among the four cities, ranging from 13 percent in Berlin to 20 percent in Dresden. This strongly suggests, of course, that the majority of German citizens did not fear arrest. In fact, between 76 and 83 percent of the survey respondents in the four cities answered explicitly that they never feared being arrested by the Gestapo for any reason.
Table 12.2 Fear of Arrest by Gestapo (by City)
| Own Fear of Arrest | Fear of a Family Member’s Arrest | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cologne (%) | Krefeld (%) | Dresden (%) | Berlin (%) | Cologne (%) | Krefeld (%) | Dresden (%) | Berlin (%) | |
| Constant | 5 | 7 | 5 | 3 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 7 |
| Occasional | 19 | 17 | 20 | 13 | 29 | 26 | 22 | 22 |
| None | 77 | 76 | 76 | 83 | 62 | 65 | 69 | 71 |
| N of cases | 851 | 372 | 613 | 812 | 839 | 366 | 604 | 805 |
After we posed the question about the respondents’ own personal fear of arrest, we then asked them if they had feared the arrest of a family member. As Table12.2 demonstrates, the answers we received demonstrate that not only did most Germans not fear arrest for themselves, most did not fear that members of their families might be arrested either. Between 62 percent and 71 percent of the respondents in the four cities reported that they had never feared that anyone in their own family circle (Familienkreis) would ever be arrested.
Not only do our data indicate a consistent lack of fear among people who lived in different German communities, we also found that respondents of different gender, age, educational, and religious backgrounds all reported consistently that they had not feared Gestapo arrest. Minor caveats here are that Catholic respondents in each of the four cities feared arrest somewhat more than Protestant respondents, and female and older respondents tended to have slightly more fear than male and younger respondents in the majority of the cities. The respondents’ educational level made no consistent difference whatsoever in the level of fear.
Because our evidence shows that only a small fraction of the respondents were ever arrested or even interrogated by the Gestapo or the police during the years of the Third Reich and that a majority did not even know anyone personally to whom this happened, it does not seem at all surprising that people who answered in our surveys that they had been in sympathy with the Nazi regime answered negatively to the question we asked about fear of arrest. But it is somewhat surprising that a majority of those who say that they had opposed the regime would also say that they had not feared being arrested by the Gestapo. While the level of fear among those who had opposed the regime was slightly higher than among those who had supported it, the difference between these two groups was rather modest. In Cologne, 90 percent of the respondents who were pronounced supporters of the Nazi system claimed not to have feared arrest; among those classified as consistent opponents, the proportion was lower, but it still only amounted to 60 percent.
Table 12.3 Percentage of Respondents with Occasional or Constant Fear of Arrest (By Gender, Year of Birth, Education, Religion and City)*
| Cologne (%) | Krefeld (%) | Dresden (%) | Berlin (%) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gender | ||||
| Male | 22 | 17 | 24 | 16 |
| Female | 24 | 27 | 24 | 18 |
| Year of Birth | ||||
| Before 1911 | 32 | 28 | 22 | 26 |
| 1911—1916 | 22 | 33 | 31 | 23 |
| 1917—1922 | 23 | 24 | 26 | 17 |
| 1923—1928 | 22 | 18 | 21 | 14 |
| Education | ||||
| Low | 26 | 24 | 26 | 18 |
| Medium | 17 | 24 | 24 | 14 |
| High | 18 | 23 | 23 | 12 |
| University | 28 | 26 | 17 | 19 |
| Religion | ||||
| Catholic | 26 | 29 | 27 | 22 |
| Protestant | 18 | 15 | 22 | 15 |
*The percentage of respondents without fear is not listed in the table. This percentage brings the total to 100%.
It is possible that some respondents were deceiving themselves concerning their feelings, turning their earlier experiences into positive ones in the process of looking back and overestimating the “normality” of their everyday lives back then, while underestimating their level of fear. Indeed, not everybody who once violated the law and feared punishment will remember the particular situation and the feelings it produced. But those who were repeatedly exposed to such a situation will be more likely to remember the fear associated with such moments. From this perspective, generally dominant experiences should be reflected in our respondents’ answers.
Table 12.4 Involvement in Illegal Activities Among German Respondents (Multiple Responses by City)
| Cologne (%) | Krefeld (%) | Dresden (%) | Berlin (%) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Member of illegal youth group | 6 | 7 | 2 | 4 |
| Listened to illegal radio broad—casts | 46 | 47 | 40 | 49 |
| Told anti—Nazi jokes | 33 | 35 | 24 | 32 |
| Criticized Hitler | 15 | 15 | 14 | 11 |
| Criticized Nazis | 21 | 21 | 17 | 16 |
| Spread anti—Nazi fliers | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 |
| Helped people threatened by Nazis | 12 | 14 | 11 | 11 |
| Active resistance activity | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Other | 1 | 1 | 2 | 4 |
| None of the above | 37 | 36 | 43 | 43 |
| N | 842 | 367 | 615 | 904 |
Why was fear of the Gestapo so uncommon among the German population? The most important reason is probably because the majority of citizens supported the regime or at least conformed to the system. When they violated Nazi laws, they did so in a manner that guaranteed the most secrecy and the least risk. Realizing the specific risks involved, they developed coping mechanisms that usually enabled them to avoid punishment. The assumption therefore is that conforming behavior and selective risk and information management does much to account for the lack of fear that respondents remembered.
Concerning conformity, two lines of empirical evidence are of interest. First, many respondents, when asked whether or not they had feared being arrested by the Gestapo, answered “no”, since they had done nothing wrong. Second, behavior that was most likely to be met with heavy sanctions and actually was associated with fear was too infrequent among them to raise the overall level of fear among the population.20 In other words, most people did not behave in ways that they believed would put themselves in real danger.
This does not mean, however, that most Germans refrained completely from activities that were considered illegal in the Third Reich, because in fact a majority of the respondents told us that they had indeed been involved in at least some kind of illegal activity during the Nazi period. People understood the difference between the forms of illegal activity that would place them in true danger of being punished and those that would not. Therefore, when we asked people about forms of illegal behavior that they had been involved in and provided them with a list of possible answers ranging from trivial offenses like offering criticisms of the regime or its leaders in the course of conversations with friends and acquaintances to real acts of political disobedience like belonging to an underground resistance group, we learned that only a tiny percentage of the respondents had ever actively resisted the regime even though most people, as shown in Table12.4 (57 percent in Dresden and Berlin; 63 percent in Cologne; and 64 percent in Krefeld), had broken Nazi laws in one way or another.
Thus, whereas only 1–3 percent of the respondents in the four cities had ever taken part in serious acts of political opposition such as distributing illegal fliers and leaflets or joining an anti-Nazi resistance organization, much higher percentages of people had committed minor infractions such as participating in illegal youth organizations (2–6 percent), retelling anti-Nazi jokes (24–35 percent), criticizing Hitler (11–15 percent) and other Nazi leaders and policies (16–21 percent), or offering help to people who were threatened by the Nazis (11–14 percent). Far and away the most common form of illegal activity that German citizens involved themselves in, however, was listening to illegal foreign radio stations. Nearly half of all the respondents in the four cities surveyed reported that they had done this at least on occasion even though this was strictly forbidden during the war years and could result in stiff punishment, including death.
One reason why so many people broke this law without any great fear of arrest was that they only listened sporadically. Those who listened to foreign radio stations did not necessarily start doing so the moment the Nazis came to power, or when the BBC began its German-language programming. And those who listened did not necessarily do so on a daily basis. In our Berlin survey, for instance, only 14 percent of those surveyed said that they had listened regularly to foreign broadcasts. A larger percentage, 36 percent, said they had listened only occasionally.21
A much more important reason, however, why listening to foreign radio broadcasts did not appear to arouse much fear lies in the individual’s sense of control. As opposed to being involved in direct resistance activity, which might easily be found out, radio listening was easier to keep secret and less likely to come to the attention of the authorities. The risk of detection could be minimized by turning down the volume, putting a pillow on the speaker, or huddling under a blanket while listening. As one not atypical Berliner told us, “Later, during the war, we put a pillow over the radio set and listened to the BBC. We did that in secret. There were Nazis living above us and below us. We couldn’t let them find out about this. We just had to listen closely and we always hoped that this would soon be over.”22
Hence the danger of detection was quite low so long as one listened secretly and did not tell anybody about it. In a number of cases, however, people did talk with others about what they had heard. What they divulged and to whom depended on the level of trust they felt. In this way they acted as they generally did in their everyday interactions with both ordinary citizens and Nazi Party officials, such as the ubiquitous Nazi Party block leader, who typically supervised forty to sixty households in their residential areas.23 Thus most of our respondents believed that they had to be careful in how they acted and what they said in front of certain people within their intimate social circle as well as with people generally.
The respondents’ level of openness vis-à-vis another person varied according to their prior knowledge or assessment of that person. If they knew that someone was a Nazi sympathizer, they refrained from making statements on certain subjects and behaved “diplomatically,” as one respondent called it. They emphasized their similarities and suppressed differences. With strangers, however, things became more complicated and they would usually display considerable caution. People under these circumstances had to infer loyalty toward the system from appearances and behavior. For example, they would notice if the person in question had said “Heil Hitler” on entering a store or had made critical remarks about the regime.
The caution that most people displayed toward others with whom they spoke is reflected in the statements of one of our interviewees from former East Berlin who compared his experiences in the communist period with those in the Nazi era: “In the course of time, all people became cautious. They simply didn’t speak with people anymore. It was similar to when one knew that someone belonged to the Stasi here [the former German Democratic Republic]. Then people were careful too. We all knew each other from work, so you knew that certain individuals [had contacts with the Stasi], same as with the Nazis.”24
So what is the conclusion? In contrast to what has often been portrayed in the literature, the Gestapo was not an institution that governed the thinking and daily behavior of most citizens. Most Germans did not live under constant fear of being picked up, interrogated, beaten, or sent to a concentration camp by the Gestapo. As is evident in many of the interviews we conducted (see, for example, our interview with Hubert Lutz from Cologne), many people instead experienced a kind of “normality” in their daily lives in the Third Reich, albeit a normality that depended on their acceptance of the Nazi regime and their keeping their heads down and not acting conspicuously. From this perspective, most Germans did not live in fear. But they knew well that rash, politically unacceptable remarks and corresponding behavior could lead to serious punishment and possibly endanger their lives. Many people, therefore, retreated into their own private sphere and often turned a deaf ear to political issues. Unlike Jews, anti-Nazi activists, and other targeted enemies, however, they had the option of retreating in this way.