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By the end of 1934, Hitler had combined the offices of Chancellor and President, destroyed every rival political party, purged the SA, and secured the personal loyalty of the German army. The remaining question was how a regime with such ambitious aims — the racial reordering of Europe, rearmament in defiance of Versailles, eventual war — could persuade or compel the daily compliance of 65 million Germans. The answer lay in two mutually reinforcing systems. The first was the police state — a layered apparatus of SS, Gestapo, SD, concentration camps and politicised courts that made dissent dangerous and often lethal. The second was the propaganda state — Goebbels's Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, which colonised the press, radio, cinema, visual art and public ritual in an attempt to shape not only what Germans could say but what they would think. Together they produced a society of extensive public conformity. They did not produce, as the regime sometimes claimed, a society of universal belief: historians working in Gestapo archives since the 1990s have uncovered abundant evidence of private scepticism, grumbling and selective non-cooperation. This lesson examines both sides of the dictatorship — terror and persuasion — and the space in between.
The Schutzstaffel (SS) began in 1925 as a small bodyguard unit within the SA. By 1929, when Heinrich Himmler became Reichsführer-SS, it had around 280 members. By 1934, after its role in the Night of the Long Knives, it had outgrown the SA; by 1939 it numbered around a quarter of a million. Himmler conceived of the SS as a racial elite — a "state within the state" whose recruits were required to prove "Aryan" ancestry back to 1750 and whose purpose was nothing less than the enforcement of Nazi racial policy across Europe.
The SS developed several sub-organisations, each with a specialised function:
| Branch | Role |
|---|---|
| Allgemeine-SS (General SS) | Political and racial police work inside Germany |
| Waffen-SS | Armed military formations fighting alongside the Wehrmacht |
| SS-Totenkopfverbände ("Death's Head Units") | Ran the concentration camps from 1934 |
| Sicherheitsdienst (SD) | SS intelligence service under Reinhard Heydrich from 1931 |
| RSHA (from 1939) | Reich Security Main Office combining SD, Gestapo, and criminal police |
By 1936 the SS had absorbed effective control of all police functions in Germany. From 1939 Himmler was simultaneously Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police; the line between state and party police had effectively been erased. In the occupied territories after 1939 the SS ran the ghettos and, from 1941, the killing units (Einsatzgruppen) and extermination camps — subjects for later lessons, but the institutional foundations were laid in the first years of the dictatorship.
The Geheime Staatspolizei — "Secret State Police", abbreviated Gestapo — was created by Hermann Göring in Prussia in April 1933 out of the existing political police. In 1934 it was transferred to Himmler and from 1936 merged with the SD under Reinhard Heydrich.
The Gestapo's legal basis was the Reichstag Fire Decree of 28 February 1933, which allowed "protective custody" (Schutzhaft) without trial. A 1936 Gestapo Law placed it explicitly above the ordinary courts: its decisions could not be challenged by administrative tribunals. It could therefore arrest, interrogate and imprison without being answerable to any court.
It is a surprise to many students to discover how thinly staffed the Gestapo actually was. Research by the historian Robert Gellately on local Gestapo offices in cities such as Würzburg found that a single officer might be responsible for policing hundreds of thousands of citizens. In the Düsseldorf area the Gestapo had roughly one officer per 10,000–15,000 people.
How could such a small force be so feared? The answer is that much of its information came from ordinary Germans denouncing their neighbours. Gellately's studies of the Würzburg files showed that a large majority of Gestapo cases originated in tip-offs from members of the public — disputes with colleagues, jealous neighbours, family feuds, or ideologically motivated informers. The block warden (Blockwart) system, run by the Nazi Party, placed a party loyalist in every apartment block or street; he was expected to know the political attitudes of every household. Hitler Youth members were encouraged to report parents; teachers to report pupils; pupils to report teachers.
The result was a climate in which many Germans self-censored not because they were watched but because they could not tell who was watching. Historians speak of auto-Gleichschaltung — self-coordination: people aligned their behaviour with the regime's expectations in order to be safe.
The first concentration camp, Dachau, opened on 22 March 1933 in a disused munitions factory near Munich. Initially it held Communist and Social Democratic political prisoners arrested under the Reichstag Fire Decree. Its early brutality — beatings, forced labour, murders disguised as "shot while escaping" — set a pattern. In 1934 the camps were brought under SS control; Theodor Eicke, as Inspector of Concentration Camps, standardised their brutal regime across the whole network.
| Camp | Opened | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Dachau | March 1933 | Initial pattern camp; political prisoners |
| Sachsenhausen | 1936 | Near Berlin; administrative HQ of the camp system |
| Buchenwald | 1937 | Near Weimar |
| Mauthausen | 1938 | Austria, after Anschluss |
| Ravensbrück | 1939 | For women |
The categories of prisoner broadened through the 1930s: from the original political opponents to Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, the "work-shy", "asocials", and Jewish Germans in increasing numbers from November 1938 onwards. Prisoners wore coloured triangles identifying their category. Although the pre-war camps were not yet the extermination facilities of the wartime period, deaths from beatings, exhaustion and disease were routine.
The Nazi regime did not abolish the ordinary courts. Instead, it subordinated them. A law of 1935 required judges to decide cases according to "the sound feelings of the people" — a deliberately vague criterion that let Nazi ideology override existing statute. Judges took a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler. The German Judges' League was coordinated into a Nazi body. Jewish judges had already been dismissed in April 1933 under the Civil Service law.
For political cases, new courts were established:
flowchart TD
A[Hitler / Führer] --> B[Himmler: Reichsführer-SS and Chief of Police from 1936]
B --> C[Heydrich: SD and Gestapo]
C --> D[Gestapo - secret political police]
C --> E[SD - intelligence]
B --> F[Allgemeine-SS]
B --> G[Totenkopfverbände]
G --> H[Concentration camps e.g. Dachau 1933, Sachsenhausen 1936]
B --> I[Waffen-SS from 1939]
A --> J[People's Court 1934]
A --> K[Special Courts 1933]
L[Block wardens on every street] --> D
M[Denunciations from ordinary Germans] --> D
This diagram shows the distinctive feature of the Nazi police state: it was not a single bureaucracy but a set of overlapping agencies, all ultimately answerable to Hitler but competing with each other. Historians have sometimes called this a "polycratic" dictatorship. The rivalries were deliberate — they prevented any single subordinate from becoming too powerful — but they also produced duplication, inefficiency and a constant radicalisation as agencies tried to outdo one another in zeal.
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