>
> > Never heard anyone debate it. Since Stalin's Russia and Hitler's
>> Germany are the two regimes out of which the ideal type of
>> "totalitarianism" was constructed, it would be kind of
>> silly to claim
>> that Hitler's Germany was not "totalitarian"...
>>
>> Brad DeLong
>
>Since we spent an hour in my graduate seminar a few weeks ago debating
>precisely that,
>I don't think that it is silly at all, actually. Totalitarianism as
>an ideal
>type was not based upon Nazi Germany - it was almost entirely
>constructed based on
>Stalin's Russia, with lots of people making assumptions about Nazi
>Germany that modern
>research now reveals to have not been the case. Unlike the Soviet
>Union, for example, Nazi Germany did not have a pervasive program of
>secret police and informers. Stanley Hoffmann defined a totalitarian
>government as one that rules through the application of terror across
>an entire population, and we generally came to the conclusion that
>Hitler's government was totalitarian only for a relatively short
>period of time in 1944 after the assasination attempt against him.
>The average German citizen had little to fear from the SS as long as
>he or she was not Jewish and did not engage in active resistance...
Don't make the big mistake of imagining that the Nazis ruled only Germans.
The average non-Jewish non-Romany non-labor union leader non-centrist
politician non-left wing politician non-political activist German
citizen not of Polish descent may have had little to fear from the
Gestapo as long as he or she did not engage in active resistance.
But what about the 3.9 million Russian prisoners of war captured in
the first eight months of the war in the east? IIRC, all but a
million of them were *dead* by February 1942. To have been behind the
Nazi lines on the eastern front--whether in Bohemia, Moravia, Poland,
Belorussia, Ukraine, or Russia proper--and ruled by the Nazis seems
to me to have been under the thumb of a regime an order of magnitude
more "totalitarian" than even Stalin's during the years of the High
Terror.
Brad DeLong
