Rating: 
Summary: First they came for the Communists
Review: When I read this book I wasn't surprised about its main thesis. It is a well-known fact that even the most dictatorial of governments manage to hang on to power only by judiciously dosing out the terror they choose to inflict. A regime that descends into an orgy of blood-letting against its own citizens, such as Pol Pot's Cambodia, or Idi Amin's Uganda or Macias Nguema's Equatorial Guinea can only become undone. It is also a well-known fact that most people have no strong views about events that don't affect them personally, and are willing to give significant leeway to the authorities provided they feel that they feel they are improving their own lot even if it comes at the price of persecutions against widely disliked miscreants such as Communist agitators, turbulent priests, religious sectarians (such as Jehova's Witnesses), homosexuals and Jews.In this book, Johnson analyses the Gestapo's modus operandi throughout the Third Reich. He uses a medium-sized city and the surrounding small towns and countryside to paint a picture of the whole country. He reviews the files for several typical crimes, such as listening to foreign radio broadcasts or criticising government policies or Nazi bigwigs. He also follows the career of the Gestapo officials in the region from the beginning to the end of the Third Reich. He concludes that most Gestapo officials were typical policemen, and many in fact had careers that dated to Weimar Republic and even Imperial times, that there weren't too many of them (contrary to popular belief, the Gestapo was not omnipresent and rarely acted unless called in by interested parties) and that, up to the end of the war, most people were left alone even when they violated the laws. Only targeted groups, such as those mentioned above, were persecuted mercilessly. In his interviews he concludes that most Germans did not fear the police, and in fact rarely came in contact with them at all. The ubiquitous informants that most of us associate with Nazi Germany never existed (they would become very real in the post-war German Democratic Republic), and such accusations, when they came up, were frequently disregarded by the Gestapo, who were aware that the denouncers were often disgruntled relatives or former friends of the accused, out for revenge. In short, the Gestapo were not a band of sadists and thugs, but a very professional tool in the hands of a ruthless government. Something that comes across very clear is that the type of person who went into the Gestapo was not politically motivated, but merely a more or less efficient follower of orders. Which is not to say that persecuted minorities had no reason to fear for their life and property. It is just to mean that an unusually orderly, law-abiding populace had usually no reasons to worry about this risk. The persecutorial madness actually came to happen in the last winter of the War, when the Gestapo seems to have gone berserk and dedicated itself to random imprisonment and torture, often of a vile nature. In Johnson's story there was even the obligatory B-movie sadistical female guard who organised orgies with unwilling prisoners, whom she killed by the score. The real nature of the regime, and its deep nihilism were exposed in its final throes. In the small corner of Germany covered by Johnson we see some of the horrible dispair and collapse of everything human that comes across so vividly in Beevor's "The Fall of Berlin 1945" and Trevor-Roper's "The Last Days of Hitler" (Joachim Fest has recently written a book on the subject "Der Untergang", but it hasn't yet been translated into English). Of great interest is finding out what happened with the Gestapo members after the War. According to Johnson most of them were purged from the police force, and a few were blacklisted from government employment, but most were quickly cleared of any wrongdoing, and a few went back to their old jobs (one hopes, having learned a few lessons-but maybe not). Most of them had no trouble producing character witnesses, including many from persecuted groups themselves. This is not surprising, given that authorities often spared some while persecuting others of the same group, and it would be hard to find someone who never helped anyone. Having read the book didn't change my views on the matter of the larger German public's responsibility for the Third Reich and the Holocaust. As Johnson shows, most people were remarkably free to gain information and disseminate it, and in several occasions were able to change government policies through organised protests (such as those against deportation or Mischlinge relatives of German citizens or forced euthanasia). The view that Germans were cowed by a totalitarian power that would have destroyed anyone daring to lift his or her voice is a fantasy. One thing I took from the book was new admiration for unlikely figures of sympathy: the Jehova's Witnesses. I formerly saw these sectarians as somewhat comical figures doggedly pursuing the uninterested with their tedious "Watchtower" journal. I now respect them. They had a power of resistance in the face of annihilation that is deeply respectable. In spite of the hopelessness of their task, they never surrendered, and bit the had that strangled them. When we see misfits such as Muslims or vagrants being mistreated or persecuted, let us never forget Pastor Martin Niemöller's famous lines: First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the communists
and I did not speak out - because I was not a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out - because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me -
and by then there was no one left to speak out for me.
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