Robert Gellately's books repeatedly revolve around the problem of German society's involvement in National Socialism. In 1990, he presented The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933–1945, a brilliant study in which he demonstrated how much the Gestapo depended on denunciations from the population in its persecution practice, especially with regard to the persecution of so-called “racial shame” i.e., alleged sexual relationships primarily between Jewish men and non-Jewish women. At the same time, Gellately destroyed the myth of the all-powerful, all-knowing Gestapo. In 2001, he published Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, 1933–1945, in which he analyzed newspapers and proved that they by no means concealed the violent measures of the Nazi regime, but reported extensively, for example, on concentration camps. In 2020, his new study on the many supporters of the Nazi regime was published. In it, he attempts, on the one hand, to identify individuals and groups who actively supported National Socialism and, on the other hand, to identify topics and political events that were important for the German population's approval of the Nazi regime.
In his first chapter, Gellately outlines how Hitler's worldview developed. In the context of existing research – surprisingly, the authoritative biography of Hitler by Ian Kershaw hardly plays a role in this chapter – Gellately traces Hitler's path from Vienna to Munich, describing his reading and processing of experiences. The First World War and the revolutionary months of 1918–1919 are certainly of decisive importance as they intensified Hitler's antisemitism, which had already been stirring during his years in Vienna. Hitler's Mein Kampf takes up a great deal of space in Gellately's work, whereby he benefited from being able to refer to the excellent edition of Mein Kampf compiled by the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich.
Gellately then introduces early National Socialists such as Ernst Röhm, Hermann Göring, Julius Streicher, Heinrich Himmler, Dietrich Eckart, and Alfred Rosenberg, who, like other anti-Bolshevik émigrés from the Baltic, played an important role in the fledgling NSDAP by ensuring the spread of that poisonous phantasm of “Jewish Bolshevism” that formed a central part of National Socialist ideology. Gellately devotes further chapters to the National Socialist “left” around Otto and Gregor Strasser, to which Joseph Goebbels also belonged for a time, and to the young militants in the SA (such as Horst Wessel) as well as the NSDAP. The numerous biographies Gellately presents reveal nothing surprising. Studies such as those by Peter Merkl or Jürgen Falter already showed the contempt for the Weimar Republic and democracy, the struggle against the Versailles “truce of shame,” the violent anti-communism and ever-present antisemitism, and the vision of a “Volksgemeinschaft” among the early supporters of National Socialism. In these parts of the book, one would have liked to see a longer discussion of the works by Sven Reichardt and Daniel Siemens, whose analyses of the SA pointed to the connection between community foundation and the willingness to use violence.
As expected, Gellately focuses on the “Volksgemeinschaft” and the numerous inclusive measures of the Nazi regime, with contemporary diary entries forming an important source here. The dimension of persecution and exclusion is the subject of a separate chapter, in which Gellately describes many, local, vivid examples of antisemitic violence. This separation is a pity, because the two processes belong together. Inclusion in a racist, antisemitic “Volksgemeinschaft” was accompanied by the exclusion of Jews, Roma and Sinti, so-called “asocials,” or disabled people. In this respect, it would have been more innovative to present both processes as intertwined.
The chapters on war and genocide deviate more and more from the basic concept of the book. Here the focus is no longer on ordinary people, but on Hitler and the SS and military leadership. Gellately outlines the main features of the policy of extermination from the invasion of Poland to the mass murder sites at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz. This rather conventional account is surprising, because, for example, the studies of Thomas Kühne, Christopher Browning, and Omer Bartov could be used to show the participation of ordinary people in the war of extermination, not only for the German side of the perpetrators, but also on the side of the occupied countries, where there was willing cooperation even in the mass crimes of the Nazis.
Thus, Gellately's book leaves an ambivalent impression. Its main merit is undoubtedly that he uses his competence to bring current research on National Socialism to an Anglo-Saxon audience. However, his account remains within the horizon of a mainstream narrative into which the new controversies and questions of Holocaust research have not yet entered. Antisemitism and the murder of European Jews were undoubtedly at the heart of National Socialist policy, which was at the same time deeply racist, persecuting Roma and Sinti just as much as Jews and just as much as it wanted to enslave, expel, and even murder the East European peoples. As Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann have pointed out some thirty years ago, the first systematic mass murder in 1939–1940 was of sick and disabled people, who were defined in racist terms as hereditarily inferior. In 1941, the Wehrmacht leadership let more than two million Soviet prisoners of war die because it refused to care for these people interned in makeshift camps – a mass crime whose number of victims at that time still far exceeded the murder figures of the SS Einsatzkommandos against the Jewish population.
Gellately's own claim to pursue the question of how ordinary people became Nazis is met above all by the chapters on prewar history, although here, too, the books by Peter Fritzsche and Andrew Bergerson have already anticipated much of what Gellately elaborates in his book. Given the scholarly achievements we have come to expect from him, this book is, on the whole, not one of his best.
