Hitler’s True Believers

Over the past three decades, historians have become increasingly preoccupied with the subjectivities of ordinary Germans under the National Socialist dictatorship. These had previously been marginal to a historical literature focused much more on the interplay between state and party institutions in Nazi policy formation. This structural, ‘functionalist’ approach began to crumble in the 1980s with the arrival of Alltagsgeschichte (the history of everyday life) and a broader cultural turn in the humanities that promoted belief and mentalities as topics of scholarly enquiry. The historian Robert Gellately made his name as a historian of Nazi Germany at the intersection of these paradigms with an important case study of policing in Lower Franconia, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933–1945 (1990). Gellately showed that the Nazi state’s secret police lacked an all-pervading apparatus of surveillance over German society and depended to a hitherto unappreciated extent on denunciations and tip-offs by ordinary citizens. Their subjective motivations for so doing ranged from petty rivalries to ideological enthusiasm for Nazi racial goals. Gellately pressed the voluntaristic character of ordinary Germans’ transactions with the state still further in perhaps his best-known work, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (2001). Here state terror disappeared entirely into the background of ordinary Germans’ social calculations, which, he argued, were characterized instead by an all-pervading and unwavering devotion to Adolf Hitler.

German · Ideology · Nazi Germany · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · European history and politics · German History and Society · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law