NAZI TERROR: The Gestapo, Jews, And Ordinary Germans

black hardcover 8vo. (octavo). dustwrapper in protective plastic book jacket cover. vg cond. binding square & tight. covers have couple of faint smudges. bottom rear corner rubbed through. top edge has some minor soiling, other edges clean. erasure spot on front flyleaf, tiny bit of red ink on last page of index (bindery defect), faint smudges on pp. xv~xvii, otherwise contents free of markings. dustwrapper in vg cond. rear bottom corner missing 1cm piece, not price clipped. good used copy. clean text, good binding. no library markings, store stamps, stickers, bookplates, no names, inking, underlining, remainder markings etc~. first edition. first printing (#1 in # line). xx+636p. glossy b&w photo illustrations. 19 tables. notes. bibliography. index. world history. world war ii. nazi germany. third reich. ~ Nazi Terror tackles the central aspect of the Nazi dictatorship head on. Its devastating central argument is this: the Nazis did not rule by terror and terror rarely touched the lives of most ordinary Germans. The terror apparatus at the dark heart of Nazi Germany, set in motion by the Nazi Party leadership in Berlin, employed a selective terror that concentrated almost exclusively on Jews and other specifically targeted enemies of the Nazi regime. It depended for its implementation and effectiveness, however, on the cooperation and often voluntary participation at the local level of the broad mass of ordinary German citizens who themselves suffered little or not at all from Nazi terror. A small but growing contingent of historians of Nazi Germany have begun to view the Gestapo not as an omnipresent organ of terror but as a relatively small organization with few officers and few spies, reliant on the complicity of a meek and "ordinary" German population that largely policed itself: Not until now, however, have these provocative and controversial claims been so convincingly and thoroughly substantiated. By focusing on the role of the individual and on the role of society in making terror work, Johnson is able to definitively and dramatically answer such questions as these: Who were the Gestapo officers? Were they merely banal paper shufflers, as Hannah Arendt depicted Eichmann, or were they hideously and recognizably evil? What tactics did they use? What was it like to be arrested and interrogated by them? Were they motivated by an eliminationist antiSemitism? Did the average German know about the mass murder of Jews and other "undesirables" while it was happening? Exactly how was Nazi terror applied in the daily lives of ordinary Jews and Germans? Johnson spent five years researching in Gestapo and justice archives in three Rhineland communities ~ Cologne, Krefeld and Bergheim ~ reading and analyzing more than 1,100 Gestapo and "special court" case files. He conducted surveys and interviews with German perpetrators, Jewish victims and ordinary Germans who experienced the Third Reich at first hand. Nazi Terror examines more than one thousand individual cases of persecution pertaining to the entire spectrum of people who suffered from Nazi terror~Jews, Communists, Socialists, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, clergymen, the disabled and others. It deals in flesh and blood narratives~sometimes quite graphically~as well as in facts and statistics to tell the story of how the terror~perhaps the defining characteristic of the Nazi dictatorship~was imposed by the Gestapo and tolerated by ordinary Germans. These gripping, shocking and powerful firsthand accounts take the reader into the very heart of darkness: inside the Gestapo headquarters where the victims of Nazi terror were tortured and interrogated. Consequently, Johnson's book is able to settle many nagging questions about who, exactly, was responsible for what, who knew what and when they knew it. Destined to become the classic study of terror during the Nazi dictatorship and the benchmark for the next generation of Nazi and Holocaust scholarship, Eric Johnson's Nazi Terror.…