“Volksgemeinschaft” unter Vorbehalt. Gesinnungskontrolle und politische Mobilisierung in der Herrschaftspraxis der NSDAP-Kreisleitung Göttingen by Kerstin Thieler (review)

Thieler’s detailed, local study reveals how the Nazi party combined ideology and personal motivation to establish and then enforce control among citizens. While a number of scholars have described the NSDAP’s workings across Germany, Thieler offers us a unique glimpse of the practice of Nazi rule (Herrschaftspraxis), revealing the process by which the party attempted to craft a so-called “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft) in Göttingers’ daily lives. Her attention to everyday life and individual experience is impressive, as she offers a social history from the bottom up. Yet the book’s chief strength is that it uses the vantage point of those near to the top of the local party—neighborhood (Block-), district (Kreis-) and other local party leaders (Leiter)—to look at the population at large, including their social superiors. These Nazis became important instruments of state rule and helped politicize private life. But even as Thieler describes the party’s various incursions into the lives of Göttingers, she makes it clear that the Nazis worked less through mobilization and more by maintaining a “consistent atmosphere of capriciousness and uncertainty” (13). Her description of both the extent and limits of party influence in everyday life illustrates how the Nazi regime promoted the idea of the Volksgemeinschaft.

This book draws from an astounding 20,000 files from the denazification process in Göttingen and Lower Saxony. Thieler especially mines documents on party political judgments to show the everyday processes of “social discipline and self-mobilization” (12). Local party officials made these judgments about political reliability based on an individuals’ character, worldview, relationship to the NSDAP, social upbringing, professional position, and private behavior. In addition to a leading university and relatively thoughtful local leadership, the mid-sized town of Göttingen boasted early and strong support for the Nazi party, so it serves as an instructive site for her analysis. Despite a relatively brown outlook already by 1930, Nazi leaders there qualified claims of creating a Volksgemeinschaft “with reservations,” as Thieler’s title implies.

Tracing the history of the Volksgemeinschaft, Thieler argues that this aspirational idea of the 1920s changed in 1933 when new members joined the party in droves. The process of transforming a radical Nazi party, driven by a racist concept, into an established bourgeois organization required both inclusion and exclusion. Thieler goes on to describe the stabilization of the young Nazi regime through supervision, mobilization, and control, identifying the NSDAP Kreisleitung as an “agent” of implementing the Volksgemeinschaft. Her depiction of conflicts between party and local officials reveals the former’s bipolar reliance upon organization and capriciousness. Local Nazi party functionaries tried to instrumentalize both traditional social norms and Nazi ideology. Thieler closely studies political judgments as mechanisms for checking political reliability for everyone who lived in Göttingen, including Jews. These judgments make clear that the Nazi party relied upon the Volksgemeinschaft as an important tool for control, yet still depended upon the cooperation of neighbors, local officials, and the police. Tension emerged between Nazi party representatives and members of the city government and university. The NSDAP consistently harbored doubts about the reliability of the latter groups, despite their apparent support of the Third Reich. In perhaps the book’s strongest contribution Thieler fleshes out in the penultimate chapter the ways in which local leaders of civic government, party, and university worked together. Their complicated relationship epitomized the balance of public and private politics at the heart of Thieler’s study. She then shows how both the government and party radicalized their actions when World War II began. Tracing the party’s impact on families and women in particular, Thieler shows that the atmosphere of uncertainty the party had created intensified during the war.

The main question for any local analysis is what we learn more generally from a careful, close case study. Thieler skillfully connects her...