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204 7 Administration FOR MANY YEARS, a technician at Senking had rented an apartment from Heinrich Weber’s parents. This man wore a large party insignia with an extra rim to show that he was an old party member. He was also literally a Standard Bearer for the SA: the man who carried the flag when the group marched. As soon as Hitler took power in Germany, the Standard Bearer also assumed command of the building. As the owner of the house, Heinrich’s father was still the house manager de jure, but the Standard Bearer assumed this role de facto. The Standard Bearer “pushed himself in the middle of everything” in the neighborhood. “Suddenly, you no longer complained to the owner of the house about something.” The Standard Bearer had to know about it first. When Heinrich’s father wanted to rent an apartment to someone, the Standard Bearer decided first if the person was acceptable, and he based that decision on whether the prospective renter was a sufficiently good Nazi. “Not in this house,” he would say. “I will lay claims here.” The Standard Bearer justified his minor coup by citing the Nazi maxim that placed common good over personal property (Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz; see also Allen 1992), but it was his connections in the Nazi party that gave his bark its bite. The head of the local party organization, who determined which people got which local party offices, lived literally next door. Increasingly over the course of the 1930s, ardent Nazis “called the shots in almost all areas.” The prime movers here were not the Nazi regime as such but individual neighbors proactively laying claim to status and power, conscious of the power of the regime behind them but relatively independent of it nonetheless. Appropriately, Heinrich depicted this revolution in neighborly hierarchies as a usurpation in keeping with the analogous story of the Nazi seizure of power. Over the course of the 1930s, the Nazi regime and its neighborhood officers increasingly assumed the role of watchdog over the local moral community (Gellately 2001). Yet ordinary Hildesheimers also placed the Nazi regime and its local representatives in this new position of moral authority in order to keep themselves ordinary. The archival data here is scanty due to the destruction of Nazi era records on 22 March 1945 by Allied bombs, Administration 205 but that which survived, when combined with testimony from interviews, will show that the coordination of conviviality to fit Nazi principles in fact undermined the functionality of neighborliness as a medium to communicate and negotiate identities. As seen in the case of hats, salutations, flags, and uniforms, this contradiction hindered the construction of a moral community more generally and made ardent Nazis insecure about the state of the volksgemeinschaft in particular. For both reasons, ordinary Hildesheimers relied increasingly upon the Nazi regime to manage from above what had been negotiated through conviviality from below: the scatological boundaries of the moral community. Encouraged by ordinary Hildesheimers to clean up the neighborhood of pollution, the Nazi regime proceeded to actually engineer social relations in keeping with its totalitarian image and for purposes of racial hygiene. Though based on informal customs of conviviality, this formal administration of the local moral community proved to be far more brutal and inexorable. Intertwined in all aspects of everyday life, this racist system presumed the collusion of ordinary people. Yet because Nazi policies were based on pre-existing habits, they could act as if this violent, racial order was perfectly normal. Hat Tricks In his neighborhood, Heinrich Weber had a reputation for being a reluctant Nazi—at least in his memory. He tried to avoid Nazi activities, but this was not easy for a town bureaucrat, even in a lower position. “You can imagine that a state scribbler like me would have been a welcome addition to the local party group—to organize all the written junk, you know.” The Standard Bearer in particular tried to pressure him to get involved a bit more regularly. “The best possible response was to avoid him.” Take for example the so-called educational evenings: these were meetings designed to inform those Aryans who demonstrated an insufficient understanding of, or support for, national-socialist doctrine. Heinrich’s father attended them because he feared that the Nazis would call for a boycott of his painting business if he did not. But Heinrich found them to be an inconvenient waste of time: he preferred to work in his...

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