Academic research shows that [the average German] is not unusual in his/her rosy view of the regime during this period. Over 40 per cent of Germans questioned in a research project after the war said they remembered the 1930s as ‘good times’. As this survey was conducted in 1951, when the Germans knew the full reality of the wartime extermination camps, it is a telling statistic.
Unexpected as it may be to discover that many Germans were content during the 1930s, this news is as nothing compared to recent revelations about the infamous Nazi secret police - the Gestapo.
In popular myth the Gestapo have a secure and terrifying role as the all-powerful, all-seeing instrument of terror that oppressed an unwilling population. But this is far from the truth.
To uncover the real story you have to travel to the town of Würzburg in southwest Germany. Würzburg is a German town much like any other, except for one special attribute: it is one of only three towns in Europe where Gestapo records were not destroyed by the Nazis at the end of the war. Resting in the Würzburg archive are around 18,000 Gestapo files, which exist more by luck than design; the Gestapo were in the process of burning them as the American troops arrived. They had begun to burn them alphabetically, so there are relatively few A-D files left; otherwise the files are complete.
Professor Robert Gellately of Ontario was the first person to uncover the secrets of the files. As he started work on them, an old German man saw what he was studying and said to him, ‘Perhaps you’d like to interview me, because I lived here during that time and I know a lot about it.’ Professor Gellately talked to him over a cup of coffee and asked him how many Gestapo officials there had been in this part of Germany. ‘They were everywhere,’ the old man replied, confirming the conventional view of the Gestapo.’
Yet after studying the files, Professor Gellately discovered that the Gestapo simply couldn’t have been ‘everywhere’.
Würzburg lies in the administrative area of Lower Franconia, a district covering around a million people. For that whole area there were precisely twenty-eight Gestapo officials. Twenty-two were allocated to Würzburg, and almost half of those were involved only in administrative work.
The idea that the Gestapo itself was constantly spying on the population is demonstrably a myth.
So how was it possible that so few people exercised such control?
The simple answer is because
the Gestapo received enormous help from ordinary Germans. Like all modern policing systems, the Gestapo was only as good or bad as the cooperation it received - and the files reveal that it received a high level of cooperation, making it a very good secret police force indeed.
Only around 10 per cent of political crimes committed between 1933 and 1945 were actually discovered by the Gestapo; another 10 per cent of cases were passed on to the Gestapo by the regular police or the Nazi Party.
This means that around 80 per cent of all political crime was discovered by ordinary citizens who turned the information over to the police or the Gestapo. The files also show that
most of this unpaid cooperation came from people who were not members of the Nazi Party - they were ‘ordinary’ citizens.
Yet there was never a duty to denounce or inform.
The mass of files in the Würzburg archive came into being because some non-party member voluntarily denounced a fellow German. Far from being a proactive organization that resolutely sought out its political enemies itself, the Gestapo’s main job was sorting out the voluntary denunciations it received.
The files teem with stories that do not reflect well on the motives of those who did the denouncing. One file tells of a Jewish wine-dealer from Würzburg who was having an affair with a non-Jewish woman who had been a widow since 1928. He had been staying overnight with her since 1930 and they had declared their intention of getting married. The file demonstrates how Hitler’s becoming Chancellor coincided with the widow’s neighbours starting to voice objections to the presence of the Jewish man and confronting him on the communal stairs. As a result, he stopped staying overnight with the widow, but continued to help her out financially and to eat with her.
Then, a 56-year-old woman who lived in the same house sent a denunciation to the Gestapo. Her main complaint was that she objected to the widow having a relationship with a Jew, although it was not then an offence. From correspondence between the party and the police it becomes clear that she and a male neighbour pressurized the party into taking action. The local Nazi Party then put pressure on the SS, who, in August 1933, marched the Jewish man to the police station with a placard around his neck. The placard, with its despicable message painted in blood red, is still carefully preserved in the file. In neatly stencilled letters it reads, ‘This is a Jewish male, Mr Müller. I have been living in sin with a German woman.’ Herr Müller was then kept in jail for several weeks before leaving Germany altogether in 1934. He had broken no German law.
Denunciations became a way in which Germans could make their voices heard in a system that had turned away from democracy; you see somebody who should be in the army but is not - you denounce them; you hear somebody tell a joke about Hitler - you denounce them as well.
Denunciations could also be used for personal gain; you want the flat an old Jewish lady lives in - you denounce her; your neighbours irritate you - you denounce them too.
During his many months of research in the Würzburg archive Professor Gellately struggled hard to find a’hero’ - someone who had stood up to the regime, an antidote, if you like, to the bleak aspect that the study of the Gestapo files casts on human nature. He believed he had found just such a person in Ilse Sonja Totzke, who went to Würzburg as a music student in the 1930s.
Her Gestapo file reveals that she became an object of suspicion for those around her.
The first person to denounce her was a distant relative, who said that she was inclined to be too friendly to Jews and that she knew too much about things that should be of no concern to women, such as military matters. This relative said that he felt driven to tell the Gestapo this because he was a reserve officer (though there was nothing in being a reserve officer that required him to do so).
Totzke was put under general surveillance by the Gestapo, but this surveillance took a strange form: it consisted of the Gestapo asking her neighbours to keep an eye on her.
There follows in the file a mass of contradictory evidence supplied by her neighbours. Sometimes Totzke gave the ‘Hitler greeting’ (Heil Hitler) and sometimes she didn’t, but overall she made it clear that she was not going to avoid socializing with Jews (something which at this point was not a crime). One anonymous denouncer even hinted that Totzke might be a lesbian (‘Miss Totzke doesn’t seem to have normal predispositions’). But there is no concrete evidence that she had committed any offence.
Nonetheless, it was enough for the Gestapo to bring her in for questioning. The account of her interrogation in the file shows that she was bluntly warned about her attitude, but the Gestapo clearly didn’t think she was a spy, or guilty of any of the outlandish accusations made against her. She was simply unconventional. The denunciations, however, kept coming in, and eventually the file landed on the desk of one of the most bloodthirsty Gestapo officials in Würzburg - Gormosky of Branch 2B, which dealt with Jews.
On 28 October 1941 Totzke was summoned for an interrogation. The Gestapo kept an immaculate record of what was said. Totzke acknowledged that, ‘If I have anything to do with Jews any more, I know that I can reckon on a concentration camp.’
But despite this, she still kept up her friendship with Jews and was ordered once more to report to the Gestapo. She took flight with a friend and tried to cross the border into Switzerland, but the Swiss customs officials turned her over to the German authorities. In the course of a long interrogation conducted in southwest Germany, she said:
‘I, for one, find the Nuremberg Laws and Nazi anti-Semitism to be totally unacceptable. I find it intolerable that such a country as Germany exists and I do not want to live here any longer.’
Eventually, after another lengthy interrogation in Würzburg, Totzke was sent to the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück, from which we have no reason to believe she ever returned. Her courage cost her her life.
We decided to follow up Professor Gellately’s research with this file by trying to find living witnesses to Totzke’s denunciation. Eventually we traced Maria Kraus, who had lived with her parents less than a hundred metres from Totzke. At the time we interviewed her, she was 76 years old and no different in appearance from any of the respectable elderly ladies one sees on the streets of Würzburg, itself a solid, respectable town.
But lying in Totzke’s Gestapo file there is a denunciation signed by a 20-year-old Maria Kraus on 29 July 1940. The statement begins: ‘Maria Theresia Kraus, born 19.5.20, appeared in the morning at the Secret State Police.’
During our own interview with her we read her the statement, which includes the section:
‘Ilse Sonja Totzke is a resident next door to us in a garden cottage. I noticed the above-named because she is of Jewish appearance.. . I should like to mention that Miss Totzke never responds to the German greeting [Hell Hitler]. I gathered from what she was saying that her attitude was anti-German. On the contrary she always favoured France and the Jews. Among other things, she told me that the German Army was not as well equipped as the French... Now and then a woman of about 36 years old comes and she is of Jewish appearance ... To my mind, Miss Totzke is behaving suspiciously. I thought she might be engaged in some kind of activity which is harmful to the German Reich.’
The signature ‘Resi Kraus’ is under the statement. We asked Frau Kraus if it was her signature. She agreed that it was but said that she did not understand how the document could exist. She denies having given the statement and has no recollection of ever visiting the Gestapo. ‘I do not know,’ she told us. ‘The address is correct. My signature is correct. But where it comes from I do not know.’
Whether Resi Kraus’s amnesia was genuine or merely diplomatic is impossible to say. Of course, it is scarcely in anyone’s interests today to confess to having denounced one’s neighbour to the Gestapo. In a telling remark at the end of our brief interview with her she said: ‘I was talking to a friend of mine and she said “Good God! To think that they rake it all up again fifty years later”...I mean I did not kill anyone. I did not murder anyone.’
