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Loading... Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (edition 2002)by Robert Gellately
Work detailsBacking Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany by Robert Gellately
His argument is not entirely convincing. The early years of Hitler's regime found the German public more than willing to carry out the Nazi agenda. Hitler was surprised by the level of cooperation in getting rid of undesirable, i.e. the Jewish society. (  ) phillund | Mar 3, 2012 |  interesting approach. interesting history but becomes very redundant. i get the message real quick and don't need so many examples but i do understand that when a historian does all this research he wants to publish it. I am reading it for a course at Cambridge. (  ) SigmundFraud | Jul 23, 2011 | 3834. Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, by Robert Gellately (read 13 Dec 2003) The question of how evil could come to power in Germany is one which has never ceased to fascinate me. The author finds that many Germans welcomed the crackdown on crime which accompanied the onset of Nazidom and that if this included such evil as did not concern a lot of Germans, they did not object. Though of course many were cowed by Hitler's terroristic methods. But it is deeply disturbing that so many Germans assisted in the horrible disregard for decency and law. It is a sad book, and one cannot help but wonder what would have been my reaction if I had been a German boy of four when Hitler came to power. Undoubtedly such would have depended on the influences surrounding me. ( )1  Schmerguls | Nov 10, 2007 | Using newspapers and radio broadcasts of the day as evidence, Gellately (The Gestapo and German Society), Strassler Professor in Holocaust History at Clark University, effectively demonstrates how "ordinary Germans" evolved into a powerful base of support for the Nazi regime. Although Hitler and the National Socialists had never garnered an outright majority in elections before 1933, the author convincingly shows that "the great majority of the German people soon became devoted to Hitler and they supported him to the bitter end in 1945." The Nazis achieved this political miracle by "consensus." The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci argued that political regimes could hardly expect to use unlimited terror against their subjects a technique combining the threat of terror and coercion would be more effective. Using Gramscian theory is hardly new in an analysis of Nazi Germany, but Gellately does make a provocative claim: that the Nazi use of terror against certain categories of "undesirables" (first Communists, Socialists and trade unionists, then Catholic and Protestant opponents, then the mentally and/or physically impaired, then the Jews and Gypsies) was purposively public and that most Germans agreed with such policies. Decrees, legislation, police actions and the concentration camps were not meant to be hidden from the German people, but in fact were extensively publicized. Some of the same arguments have been made in Adam Lebor and Roger Boyes's Seduced by Hitler, but readers will notice that Gellately offers a far more sophisticated argument and more abundant evidence than Daniel Goldhagen's cause celebre, Hitler's Willing Executioners, which saw the persecution of the Jews as mono-causal - to lie in anti-semetism. In truth, Gellately's work is what Goldhagen's book could have been, but wasn't; that is, a closely reasoned and tightly constructed analysis. Gellately analyzes the role of "ordinary" Germans in the Nazi persecution of those deemed social and political outsiders. Under the guise of "law and order," the Nazis suspended regular jurisprudence and substituted arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. Far from carrying out their activities in secret, the Nazis publicized them as steps to the social, political, and racial regeneration of Germany. Many ordinary Germans actively participated in this process, denouncing neighbors as "asocial" elements for associating with Jews or for "suspicious" activities. Denunciations derived from a variety of motivations personal grudges, economic self-interest, or ideological commitment with the full knowledge of what would happen to the victims. By effectively overturning the belief that Hitler and the Nazi party imposed their ideology upon the German people and maintained control through massed police terror, Gellately's book forces us to consider the role of the ordinary citizen in the maintenance of the Nazi dictatorship. 2 |  antimuzak | Aug 3, 2007 | no reviews | add a review
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