Judge Thy Neighbor, by Patrick Bergemann (chapter 4 excerpt)

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A SYSTEM OF UNEASY COOPERATION If the Nazis expected German citizens to denounce out of ideological support for the regime, this illusion was shattered almost immediately. No clearer indication is there than Hitler’s 1933 declaration that “We are living at present in a sea of denunciations and human meanness.” Only months into his first year in power, he was already aware of the fact that Germans were not denouncing in the way that he intended.

Other officials were also well aware that denouncers were not behaving as desired and made statements to that effect throughout the course of the regime. Top Nazi official Hermann Göring echoed this sentiment in 1939. Although he was satisfied with the progress of the removal of Jews from society, he expressed dismay at “German fellow citizens” being denounced “because they once bought something in a Jewish store, lived in the same house as Jews, or otherwise had had business relations with the Jews.” Regardless of how important it was to explain to the people the need to remove the Jews from the German economy, that should not have led to “the spying out and denunciation of such long-past events.”78 Reinhard Heydrich, the director of the Gestapo, complained in 1943 that his agency had become something between a “maid for all occasions and rubbish-bin for the Reich.”79 Local officials were also aware of the problem. In November 1941, the mayor of Theilheim was asked by the Gestapo to investigate a rumor relating to Jews in his town. The mayor refused, declaring that he was fed up with investigating complaints that inevitably failed to lead to any actual crimes.80 As Werner Best claimed at the Nuremburg trials, “ninety percent of the cases were not worth dealing with.” 81

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Given that the Nazis were well aware of the misuse of denunciations, this raises the question of what they did to curtail this undesired behavior. Their response can be summarized in a single word: ambivalence. Despite complaining repeatedly about petty and false denunciations, every time the Nazis made a move to slow down the torrent, they backtracked almost immediately.

In April 1934, Germany’s minister of the interior inveighed against denunciations based on local conflicts and demanded that something be done. Yet in the very same month, Reich Minister Rudolf Hess announced that “every Party and folk comrade impelled by honest concern for the movement and the nation shall have access to the Führer or to me without the risk of being taken to task.” 82 In other words, Hess viewed prosecuting petty denouncers as antithetical to the Nazi agenda. Similarly, in 1943 the minister of justice wrote a letter to judges across Germany that decried the false denouncer as a scoundrel.83 Yet he continued his letter by declaring that prosecuting thoughtless and careless denouncers could cause all denunciations to dry up, which was not in the interest of the regime.84 The Nazis’ reaction to denunciations between spouses is particularly illustrative. In 1941, the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin sent a letter to all its local branches concerning the matter of denunciations between relatives. The letter gave an example of an actual case, where a man denounced his wife for espionage. The woman was jailed for an extended period of time while the case was being investigated. Ultimately, the authorities concluded that the accusation was baseless; the man had not lived with his wife for years and was hoping for a favorable divorce settlement.

The letter concluded by urging investigating officers to question married men under oath as to whether divorce proceedings had already commenced or were contemplated. However, again the Nazis were unwilling to be overly forceful. A subsequent letter

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on the same topic by Minister of Justice Otto Thierack, while again warning against denunciations made between spouses for personal purposes, noted that denouncers might nevertheless put the police on the trail of criminal deeds.85 The Gestapo occasionally published reminders that they were not the complaint bureau for personal spitefulness or base denunciations. In 1937, authorities went so far as to place an article in the Frankfurter Zeitung announcing a reward of one hundred marks for information about false denouncers.86 Such an unambiguous step, however, was atypical. Possibly the biggest change that the authorities made to curb unwanted denunciations occurred after the war started, when the Gestapo advised some people who had been falsely denounced to initiate legal proceedings against their denouncers.87 Yet even this reflects the authorities’ longstanding ambivalence; they did not prosecute or punish such denouncers themselves, but left it up to affected citizens to take action on their own. The Gestapo never took substantive action in terms of explicitly changing institutions of social control. In the words of Jan Ruckenbiel, the Nazis were perpetually “Janus-faced.” 88 Even when a crime actually took place, there was no legal mandate requiring witnesses to make a denunciation, though this matter was discussed internally. Gestapo director Reinhard Heydrich was strongly in favor of imposing penalties on those who failed to report relevant information. Eventually, however, the idea was abandoned so as to avoid undermining national solidarity.89 Unsurprisingly then, petty, self-serving denunciations persisted throughout the entirety of the regime, and the Gestapo continued to follow up and investigate them regardless of the denouncers’ motivations. In the words of Reinhard Mann, “the incidence of false charges was so great in Nazi Germany that

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they constituted a real problem for the regime, one it never solved.”90 This quote somewhat overstates the issue; the incidence of false charges was a problem the authorities chose not to solve because the benefits of the established system of social control were perceived to be too great.

These benefits are not difficult to observe. Members of the Gestapo were few and far between, with estimates of the total number of officers across all of Nazi Germany in 1937 at no more than seven thousand. By 1941, this number had climbed to only 7,600 in a population of approximately 80 million people.91 The Gestapo did have the cooperation of local police forces, but it was not unusual for branch offices to complain of having inadequate resources to fulfill their responsibilities.92 Accepting questionable denunciations was also necessary due to the failures of Nazi propaganda.93 Had propaganda been more successful, a much larger proportion of denunciations would have originated from political rather than personal motives. Yet despite the Nazis’ best efforts of “alignment,” “ideological schooling,” and “coordination”94 and an emphasis on Volksgemeinschaft, Hitler never stopped worrying about having the support of the general populace. His concern was warranted: a nonscientific poll carried out in 1942 among Nazi Party members found that 69 percent were indifferent to the Jews and only 5 percent called for their extermination.95 As one historian summarized, “Historical scholarship has been very attentive to signs of whether Germans internalized National Socialist ideology. The consensus is that they did not.”96 In fact, it has been suggested that the primary or only domain in which propaganda was effective was among the Hitler Youth, though even this has been contested.97 The Nazi propaganda machine, often touted as a perfect inculcator of ideology, did not result in large-scale ideological denouncing. With a small secret police force and a nonzealous populace,

Praise for

hy j u d g e t_ neighbor “Social scientists neglect negative interpersonal ties. While lab experiments on the willing assumption of malevolent authority open a window on this topic, Patrick Bergemann is the first to examine betrayal and denunciation to the authorities in natural settings, and to theorize the common causes and patterns over the centuries.

A fascinating opening into a dark side of human behavior.”

M A R K G R A N O V E T T E R , Joan Butler Ford Professor, Stanford University “The nastiest feature of living in oppressive regimes is the pressure to denounce other people. But Bergemann shows some surprising patterns. Regimes can be inundated with unreliable information and petty grievances, and some incentives have more costs than others. This history is highly relevant in today’s era of whistleblowers, snitching, and online accusations.”

R A N D A L L C O L L I N S , author of Interaction Ritual Chains “Denunciation is more pervasive than we think, yet remains poorly studied and understood. Using three case studies, Bergemann advances new hypotheses and helps shed light on this intriguing social phenomenon.”

S TA T H I S N. K A LY VA S , author of The Logic of Violence in Civil War “Research on deviance typically focuses on those who violate prevailing norms. Bergemann turns the camera around: What if the real deviants are the accusers, not the accused? By applying alternative theoretical models to three historical cases, Bergemann identifies the viral strains in epidemics of denunciation, with stunning new insights. This exquisitely crafted study is a must-read not only for students of social control but for anyone who wonders if law enforcement should be crowdsourced.”

M I C H A E L M A C Y , Goldwin Smith Professor of Arts and Sciences, Cornell University THE MIDDLE RANGE SERIES ISBN: 978-0-231-18016-0

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