NN book review: _The Third Reich: The Essential Readings_

[pynchonoid]

H-NET BOOK REVIEWS
Published by H-German at h-net.msu.edu (May 2003)

Christian Leitz, ed. _The Third Reich: The Essential
Readings_.
Oxford:  Blackwell Publishers, 1999. xii + 307 pp.
Notes, and index. 
$70.95 cloth, ISBN 0-631-20699-X; $30.95 (paper), ISBN
0-631-20700-7. 

Reviewed for H-German by Nitzan Lebovic
<nlebovic at ucla.edu>,
Department of History, University of California at Los
Angeles

[...] After decades of scholarship depicting the
Nazi regime as the epitome of racial coherence and
administrative
efficiency, many current studies emphasize
administrative disorder
and a widespread bureaucratic tendency to improvise as
the most
crucial features of the Nazi state.

[...] At the center of the book is the mechanism that
operated a range of
threats produced by the Nazi party, often implied or
hinted, yet
always present in the praxis of everyday life.  The
targets, in the
order they appear in _The Third Reich_, included the
lower classes,
much of continental Europe, the party system as a
whole, women,
conservatives, and Jews, leaving no space at all for
any mythology
of evil.  If the essays include anything remotely
mythological it is
a very casual Hydra, terrible in its lethal
everydayness, a lesson
about the violence that "systems"  often contain.  The
Hydra, we
learn, is as much the mute mass of obedient followers
and
administrators as it is the Nazi elite.  Several
questions arise:
Who stood behind this threat and how much of it was
planned in
advance?  To what extent does it merit the term
system?  Through
reading this book, the first question is easy to
answer:  little
planning preceded the Final Solution and the wars that
destroyed the
Third Reich;  orders were often verbal and contingent,
or never
given at all.  The second question can only be
answered
provisionally.  What structure did exist was highly
ambiguous and,
as a result, any reflections about the system can be
assessed only
against the background of results--actions and
decisions (Hitler's
appointment, political and judicial discrimination,
racial
persecution, annexations and wars, the attempted
annihilation of the
Jews).  The system cannot be conceptualized solely by
tracing the
sporadic planning process, the political negotiations
that preceded
implementation.

[...]  While
conventional histories of Nazi Germany always point to
one
intentional, crucial center, Adolf Hitler, this
collection portrays
Hitler as more of a symbol than an actual leader.  

[...] Fear and its manipulation by the Gestapo are the
theme of Robert
Gellately's article about surveillance and different
forms of
disobedience.  The Nazi party played up the myth of
Gestapo
efficiency to maximize the fear on which so much
depended.  As the
civilian branch of Germany's massive police apparatus,
the Gestapo
relied on the full cooperation it received from the
domestic
population.  By assessing the statistical data on
Gestapo activity
now available, Gellately shows that "the population at
large
internalized the norms of the regime to the point
where they acted
as unofficial extensions of the terror by keeping
their eyes and
ears open" (p. 201).  [...] 

see also:
<http://www.ushomeguard.org/>
<http://www.thememoryhole.org/policestate/iao-logo.htm>

<http://www.thememoryhole.org/policestate/ny-tips.htm>

"[...] the internet, a development that promises
social control on a scale those quaint old
20th-century tyrants with their goofy moustaches could
only dream about. [...] "
--Thomas Pynchon, Foreword to _1984_








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