In 1938 and 1939, the Order Police expanded rapidly as theincreasing threat of war gave prospective recruits a furtherinducement. If they enlisted in the Order Police, the new youngpolicemen were exempted from conscription into the army.

After the Nazi regime was established in 1933, a "police army"(Armee der Landespolizei) of 56,000 men was created. Theseunits were stationed in barracks and given full military trainingas part of Germany's covert rearmament.

counterrevolutionaryparamilitary units known as the Freikorps

The Jews had instigatedthe American boycott that had damaged Germany,

on 30 January 1939, Hitler prophesied “the annihilation ofthe Jewish race in Europe” in the event that “international financeJewry” succeeded in “plunging the nations once more into a worldwar.”

apoliceman’s “perp book”: “a small selection” of photographs fea-tured photographs of the imprisoned physicians, lawyers, and otherprofessionals whose newly shaven heads created the “eternal sem-blances” by which Jews dissolved into criminals.1

fears based on recollections of the general strikes in 1919and 1920 and gruesome stories about atrocities in the Russian civilwar. It also fortified the image of the Jew as an intractable, immedi-ate danger.

In the context of the Spanish CivilWar, which broke out in July 1936, the Moscow “show trials”against old Bolsheviks in August 1936, and the November 1936anti-Comintern pact between Germany and Japan, the Nazis persis-tently linked Germany’s Jews to the Communist threat.

Jewish men who were imagined to prey on Germanwomen: the gender of the Jewish peril was male, while Aryan vul-nerability was female

“What am I going to do?” won-dered Richard Tesch, an owner of a bakery in Ballendstedt’s mar-ketplace: “Israel has been buying goods from me for a long time.Am I supposed to no longer sell to him? And if I do it anyway, thenI’ve lost the other customers.

The acknowledgment that there was a fundamental differencebetween Germans and Jews revived much older superstitions hold-ing that physical contact with Jews was harmful or that Jewish mendefiled German women.

It was along this circuitry,in which Germans imagined themselves as the victims of Jews andother “back-stabbers,” that “self-love” could turn into lethal “other-hate.”

part of a larger struggle to protect what so many Ger-mans regarded as the wounded, bleeding body of the nation.

the Nazis considered theJewish threat to be “lethal” and active, a perspective that gavetheir assault on the Jews a sense of urgency and necessity that madeGerman citizens more willing to go along

The idea of normality had become racialized, so that entitlement tolife and prosperity was limited to healthy Aryans, while newly iden-tified ethnic aliens such as Jews and Gypsies, who before 1933had been ordinary German citizens, and newly identified biologicalaliens such as genetically unfit individuals and so-called “asocials”were pushed outside the people’s community and threatened withisolation, incarceration, and death.

Hermann Aue “(very Left),” thoughtthe Nazis would be gone within a year, so he was inclined to stickwith the Social Democrats. But several Communists who had re-portedly joined a local SA group suspected that the Nazis would bearound for some time.

Thecalamity of the unexpected surrender, the “bleeding borders” re-drawn in the postwar settlement at Versailles, and the overwhelm-ing chaos of the inflation in the early 1920s were collective experi-ences that made the suffering of the nation more comprehensible.During the Weimar years, the people’s community denoted the be-leaguered condition Germans shared, while expressing the politicalunity necessary for national renewal.

In this case it was the Nuremberg Laws, which distinguished Ger-man citizens from Jewish noncitizens: “hunting down innocentpeople is expanded a thousand times,” he raged; “hate is sown amillionfold.”

The fact is that it is totally possible,” he carefully noted,“that the National Socialist state would use such a law to make it aduty for those without means and who are dependent on handoutsfrom the state to more or less ‘voluntarily’ take their lives.

The euthanasia “actions” anticipated the Holocaust. Figuringout by trial and error the various stages of the killing process, fromthe identification of patients to the arrangement of special trans-ports to the murder sites to the killings by gas in special chambersto the disposal of the bodies, and mobilizing medical experts whoworked in secret with a variety of misleading euphemisms to con-ceal their work

ventuallythe criminal charges that relatives threatened to bring against hos-pitals, the dismay of local townspeople who wondered why the pa-tients “are never seen again”—“in one south German village, peas-ant women refused to sell cherries to nurses from the local statehospital”—and finally, in August 1941, the open denunciation ofinvoluntary euthanasia by Clemens August von Galen, the Catholicbishop of Münster in Westphalia, prompted Hitler to order the spe-cial killing centers dismantled.

he sterilization proceedings put the voices ofvictims into the historical record, an unusual occurrence in NaziGermany. Whether they were “pleading or imploring, beseechingor threatening, complaining or accusing, bitter or outraged, fright-ened or self-confident, resigned or enraged, oral or written, rhymedor unrhymed,” the appeals were generally free of the “condescend-ing” scientific language of biological racism

The rou-tine intervention of the police in the corners of daily life of Germancitizens explains why the Gestapo assumed the “almost mythicalstatus as an all-seeing, all-knowing” creature that had placed itsagents throughout the land to overhear conversations in order toenforce political conformity

“the police have theresponsibility to safeguard the organic unity of the German people,its vital energies, and its facilities from destruction and disintegra-tion.” This definition gave the police extremely wide latitude. Any-thing that did not fit the normative standards of the people’s com-munity or could be construed as an agent of social dissolutiontheoretically fell under the purview of the police.

However, crime could be reduced by removing the dan-gerous body, either by isolating “asocials” in work camps or bysterilizing genetically “unworthy” individuals. In the Nazi legal sys-tem, genetics replaced milieu as the point of origin of crime

heNazis responded to an intense desire for order in Germany in 1933.Fears of Communist revolutionaries mingled with more generalanxieties about crime and delinquency.

We have to go with the times, even if thereare many, many things that we do not agree with. To swim againstthe current just makes matters worse.”

Racial thinking presumed thatonly the essential sameness of the German ethnic community guar-anteed biological strength. For the Nazis, the goal of racial puritymeant excluding Jews, whom they imagined to be a racially alienpeople who had fomented revolution and civil strife and divided theGerman people.

. It drew up a long list of internaland external dangers that imperiled the nation. At the same time, itrested on extraordinary confidence in the ability of racial policy totransform social life.

During the war Klemperer, like so manyother Jews, was forced to move into the drastically smaller quartersof a “Jew house,” which meant that he had to dispose of books andpapers. “[I] am virtually ravaging my past,” he wrote in his di-ary on 21 May 1941. “The principal activity” of the next daywas “burning, burning, burning for hours on end: heaps of letters,manuscripts.

all the humor about Jewishness in Germany, the fear of stum-bling upon Jewish grandmothers and the relief when only a “Jewishgreat-grandmother,” “who cannot hurt you anymore,” turned up,did not dispel the suspicion that Jews were different.

the sheerforce of the imagery and the busy schedules of national acclamationmade dissent politically risky; but even more: dissent also appearedto be futile.

Thus, for leading opponents of the Nazis, and for the Jews andother minorities that the regime tormented, there seemed to be littlealternative but to abandon Germany altogether. Since most exilesnever returned, Germany’s political and intellectual life continuedto be structured by the Nazis long after their defeat

but even then nothing made the “com-munity of fate” more compelling than “the conviction that therewill no longer be future for Germany after a lost war.”

“Ifonly the good old days would come back again, just one more time.Why do we have to have this dreadful war, which has disrupted ourpeaceful lives, broken our happiness, and dissolved all our big andlittle hopes for a new house into nothing?”

However, Germans did not want the war Hitler was determinedto wage in order to gain living space and empire.

Interweaving economic opportunity with the dangers thatmight prevent it, whether it was the threat of air attack, the pres-ence of “asocials,” or the power of Jews, Winter Relief and air-de-fense campaigns made the premises of the people’s community tan-gible and persuasive

Propaganda displays of bombs andbombers, and the destruction they could wreak, revealed the ex-posed, trembling body of the nation, which the Nazis claimed toprotect through a nationwide program of air defense.

Ger-mans wore special badges to show they had donated their marks;the badges functioned so as to make citizens accountable to them-selves. “On Sundays,” Hauser remarked, “when collecting for theWinter-Relief Fund is going on in the streets no one would darewalk abroad without a badge pinned conspicuously to his coat.”

One-potmeals on the first Sunday of every month provided opportunitiesfor party representatives to go from door to door in the evening asthey collected the pfennigs that had been “saved,” and to snoop.

Working-classchoirs had a better chance of survival if they rewrote club statutesto exclude Social Democratic activists from leadership posts.

Coordination, or Gleichschaltung, hit working-class as-sociational life especially hard.

the stunning media spectacle of thespeeches and celebrations of 1 May also contrasted with 2 May,when stormtroopers sealed off and took over the operations of thesocialist Free Trade Unions and incorporated them into what be-came the German Labor Front, an integral part of the National So-cialist apparatus.

The construction of the firstconcentration camps to media fanfare in March 1933, and therapid migration of the shorthand kz, for Konzentrationslager, intoordinary speech, left the public well aware that Nazis recognizedonly friends or foes;

the Nazis recognized only Volkskameraden, people’s com-rades, and Volksfeinde, enemies of the people, whom they sub-jected to deliberate and refined cruelties in a “willful transgressionof norms.

The state of permanent emer-gency declared by the National Socialists helps explain the tremen-dous efforts that they and their followers made to reconstruct thecollective body and the satisfaction they took in images of unityand solidarity. It also helps explain the violent exclusions they ac-cepted as part of the rebuilding process.

National Socialism offered acomprehensive vision of renewal, which many Germans found ap-pealing, but they combined it with the alarming specter of nationaldisintegration.

. It was the experience of conversion, which left peoplelike Dürkefälden and Ebermayer isolated, that was new and pro-vided the Third Reich with legitimacy and energy.

“he doesn’t want to take part in any waragain,” Karl reported; “he has had enough.”

the prospect of a new war, a topic Germanfamilies discussed frequently in the years after 1933

restricting their rep-resentation in the professions to their proportion in the population:“that is one percent.” Moreover, she explained, “Jews want to rule,not serve.” The proof: “have you ever heard of a Jewish maid or aJewish laundry woman?”