Hitler's Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany by Nathan Stoltzfus (review)

The public tends to understand the Nazis as an almost unstoppable malevolent force, capable of imposing its will through terror and violence. Those standing in the way of Nazi policies, both at home and abroad, quickly found themselves crushed, it is believed, and only the combined armed might of the Allies could reverse Hitler's will. German resistance, according to this view, played an insignificant role. Nathan Stoltzfus's latest work seeks to challenge this perception, demonstrating the ways that Germans' resistance, while certainly not toppling Hitler, did constrain his actions and forced important compromises.

Stoltzfus argues Hitler based his political legitimacy on the idea that he embodied the national will. Thus any challenges to the image of national unity under the Führer's leadership demanded Hitler's attention. In cases where public demonstrations challenged Nazi policies, Hitler intervened to diffuse tensions, preserving his aura of concern for the public's welfare. Hitler was not, of course, a benevolent overlord merely concerned with fulfilling his subjects' wishes. Indeed, he propagated an ideology that challenged fundamental moral beliefs and social traditions, and he aimed to remake Germany in his own image. Many Germans found the injunctions to persecute the weak to serve the strong, or the state's intrusion into the private sphere of family life, at least mildly unsettling. Yet these measures stood at the core of Nazi ideology, which sought to undermine traditional moral beliefs and impose a bleak vision of racial struggle and self-sacrifice on Germans. Only by gingerly guiding the populace to accept the darker aspects of Nazism, Hitler believed, could he achieve a popular embrace of his ideology.

Stoltzfus focuses on several episodes in which Hitler backed down or changed plans to avoid a confrontation with the public. This pattern of accommodation arose already in 1925, with his decision to achieve power via the ballot box rather than by force. This choice, Stoltzfus maintains, highlighted Hitler's long-term project of not just ruling the Germans, but winning them over to his worldview. Once in power, Hitler made a rather dramatic use of violence in the Night of the Long Knives to quell opposition within his own movement, but this was not necessarily at odds with public opinion. The fact that he did not employ these methods against the sources of opposition described in the rest of the book underlines Hitler's desire to avoid a public confrontation with the people.

Hitler compromised, Stoltzfus stresses, in cases where opponents mobilized en masse to challenge Nazi policy. Such episodes were rare but not unheard of. The churches, in particular, could use their moral authority to challenge Hitler's will. The Protestant bishops of Württemberg and Bavaria, for instance, successfully rallied their flocks in 1933 to public demonstrations against the Nazi project of welding the various Protestant state churches into a unified Reich church. Likewise, public protests by Catholics in Oldenburg and East Prussia against the removal of crucifixes from their classrooms in the late 1930s succeeded in getting Gauleiters to back down from their attempt to fully secularize schools. In each of these cases, religious authorities succeeded in mobilizing their constituents against the state, and in each—despite local Nazis demanding radical measures to suppress the dissent—Hitler compromised in the interest of maintaining his legitimacy.

Besides religious attitudes, the affective relationships within families stymied Nazi efforts to remake German society. The project of evacuating children from cities vulnerable to bombing, starting in 1940, provided Nazi officials with a significant opportunity to mould German youth. Removed from their families, neighbourhoods, churches, and schools, the Nazis hoped to capture the hearts and minds of children in relocation camps. Yet many parents refused to be parted from their offspring, and as Stoltzfus points out, Hitler forbade Gauleiters from using even mild methods of coercion against them, fearing widespread resistance. And while Hitler did endorse the intimidation of Germans and Jews in so-called...