The issue of terror and coercion within the Third Reich is a complex one. Of course, the dictatorship itself prided itself on its willingness to use violence against traitors within the nation or to whip recalcitrant Germans into line. The immediate postwar generations often used a general fear of state power as an alibi for their conformity. But the reality of coercion within the Third Reich undercut the popular image of this dictatorship as a grim totalitarian prison. State-directed terror and pressure were definitely present, but it coexisted with softer means of coercion as well as a good deal of voluntary conformity to Nazi ideals among the Aryan German population.

The NSDAP's takeover of the German state in 1933 did lead to an initial orgy of violence directed against the party's political enemies. In addition to KPD and SPD politicians and figures, the newly-deputized SA brownshirts also targeted other groups such as prominent Jews or German local figures who had clashed with local NSDAP members prior to 1933. This violence not only aimed at settling political scores, but as a signal to the German public that the new state was a break from the Republic. The violent detention of political enemies was a symbol of the dictatorship's power. SA men would often brazenly flaunt their violation of existing German law and often used their new-found powers as police deputies in a liberal fashion. It was not uncommon, for example, for the hard-drinking SA men to claim that attempts to stifle their benders were a form of political resistance.

But while the Nazi takeover was not just limited to political violence and purging of political enemies from civil service. There was a considerable degree of voluntary joining into the ranks of the NSDAP. The "old fighters" of the NSDAP, i.e. those who joined the party prior to the party's political ascent in the early 1930s, termed these late-comers Märzgefallenen (March fallen) or Märzveilchen (March violets) as a form of scorn. This aspersion was a pun not only referencing a sort of sudden spring of NSDAP support in the March elections of 1933 as well as referencing the fallen 1848ers who died in street clashes in March 1848. The German left had sometimes used the term Märzgefallenen as a reference to fallen martyrs. The NSDAP's leadership was alarmed by what they feared was an opportunistic influx of new members and imposed a moratorium on new members in April/May 1933. There were exceptions to this membership ban. Germans involved in NSDAP youth organizations prior to 1933 were allowed to join the party as adults and the NSDAP actively courted business and cultural elites for whom the ban was no barrier to joining the party. The NSDAP lifted the ban in 1937, but it was still leery of opportunistic joiners and still retained a loose control over membership. It was only in 1939 that the party leadership felt comfortable enough to allow for more or less open enrollment into its ranks.

While NSDAP membership between April 1933 and 1937 was the exception rather than the rule, the dictatorship exerted considerable pressure to Nazify German society. This process of Gleichschaltung (coordination) was a multifaceted one. Outright legal bans of German organizations and groups and their replacement by NSDAP ones was one part of this process. The state dissolved SPD-affiliated Arbeiterwohlfahrt social welfare agency and erected the Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt (National Socialist People's Welfare/NSV) as an umbrella agency that could enfold the politically-acceptable voluntary welfare associations. The dictatorship was very keen to dissolve preexisting German labor unions and replace them with the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labor Front/DAF). Yet the wholesale ban of non-Nazi agencies and their replacement by Nazi ones was limited to cases where the former had a strong relationship to the pre-1933 German left. It was much more common for the dictatorship to "insist" that German organizations conform to new order either through incorporation of Nazi ideology or accepting NSDAP members into leadership positions. In the latter case, the social-climbing ambitions of the largely middle-class Old Fighters allowed them access into local leadership positions in which they had previously been excluded.

There was though a considerable volunteerist aspect of Gleichschaltung within the German population. A good many German institutions had a strong conservative and anti-Republican bent among its leadership. While some of these mandarins looked down on the NSDAP as lower-class rabble-rousers, they approved dictatorship's destruction of the German left and abandonment of the Versailles system. The German military was a prime example of this process. The military was arguably the only institution that the NSDAP could not threaten with outright dissolution and the military was keen to preserve its institutional independence. Military officers, for example, were not allowed to be members of the NSDAP and were to resign their membership. While this ban would be honored more in breach than practice, it was a sign that the military enjoyed a certain degree of political independence within the dictatorship. Despite the thinly-veiled scorn of some members of upper echelons of the German officer corps held for the NSDAP's members, they pliantly went along with Hitler's program of rearmament and foreign expansion. Much the same process was replicated within the German judiciary, law enforcement, and educational system. The initial purge of politically-unreliable members and Jews in 1933 in these institutions was not merely a reflection of obedience to state decrees, but also reflected a desire among German elites to cast off the Republic and expunge the memory of the November 1918 revolution. On a local level, the dictatorship also offered considerable carrots for Gleichschaltung. No only did Nazified institutions have a sense of national purpose but they also enjoyed a degree of state economic support that was wanting in the lean years of the Weimar's terminal phase. This support was fickle and often predicated on an organization's particular "German" orientation, but it was present.

The dictatorship though did apply the stick to organizations and individuals that did not quite fit into its ideological precepts. The state did twist the screws on German religious organizations and groups from the mid-1930s onward. Dissolution of religious organization did occur as did periodic anti-religious campaigns that targeted clergy. But such repression paled in comparison to the suppression of the German left in 1933. The establishment Protestant and Catholic churches found their activities curtailed and an increasing chillness in their relationship to the state, but there was little threat of the state would dissolve the churches. Bishops and other church leaders like Theophil Wurm maintained channels of direct contact with the upper echelons of the dictatorship, even if they often were speaking to a blank wall.

The Third Reich was not a particularly strong police state despite popular memory holding it as the archetype of one. The Gestapo was relatively understaffed when compared to either its contemporary Soviet counterpart, the NKVD, or the postwar East German Stasi. While the Gestapo could and did launch its own investigations into state enemies, it was very much reliant upon denunciations and cooperation with the larger population for its day-to-day activities. When it came to clearly-defined state enemies and activities, such as Rassenschande (racial defilement) or male homosexuals, the Gestapo had a straightforward response. Things became more murky when applied to the wider German population. For example, there were strict wartime laws against listening to foreign radio or telling anti-state jokes, but these activities were so ubiquitous that Gestapo investigations often concluded with warnings rather than detention into the growing prison system. Much of the Gestapo's wartime policing of the Aryan population was directed at social outsiders, such as alcoholics and "work-shy" individuals. The worsening war situation after Stalingrad did lead to an expansion of state terror, especially after the 20 July plot, but there were still restraints.

Based on survey of respondents and the existing Gestapo records in the Cologne area, the historian Eric Johnson in his book The Nazi Terror:

the uncomfortable truth that the overwhelming majority of German people complied willingly with Nazi ideology and policy and suffered little if at all as a consequence of their occasional and largely harmless indiscretions.

While some historians, most notably Richard Evans, have contended that approaches like Johnson's underplay the coercive nature of the regime, this critique misses the forest for the trees. What mattered for the Third Reich's dictatorship was not its actual use of violence, but the threat of it. Within the triptych of victims-persecutors-bystanders, the line between bystander and potential victim was thin and ill-defined. There was always a latent threat within state repression that who was an enemy of the Volk could be expanded. But instead of cowing the German populace, this threat encouraged either an inward retreat into personal spheres, the so-called "inner-emigration", or enabled Germans to become accessories or direct participants in state repression.

Sources

Fritzsche, Peter. Hitler's First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich. New York: Basic Books, 2020.

Johnson, Eric A. The Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews and Ordinary Germans. London: John Murray, 2002.

Koonz, Claudia. The Nazi Conscience. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005.

Wildt, Michael. Hitler's Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion: Violence against Jews in Provincial Germany, 1919-1939. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014.