When historians or political pundits talk about Nazi Germany, they love to talk about terror, concentration camps, prisons, the whole "totalitarian" parade of coercion. In the case of Nazi Germany, you don't see the same things as you'd expect to when hearing these same people talking about it. In real numbers, and in practise, National Socialist Germany appears to be a relatively free society.
Nazi Germany was open to the world, unlike the Soviet Union. The Nazi press published news about concentration camps in local papers, excessive violence was punished which I personally would suspect was an institutional obligation. Not a singular occurrence. And only a very minute number of people, from particular groups were, in my mind, rightfully discriminated against and removed from society. Mainly Marxists and Jews. Of course, these groups overlapped. Really, the only people sent to camps or to prisons as political prisoners were the nucleus of this kind of political subversion and hostility to the National Socialist state.
Source: Nikolaus Washsmann, Hitler's Prisons (Yale University Press, 2004), Pp. 392-403
If you were to compare any of these statistics to the Soviet Union, or even our societies today, in countries with much smaller population sizes, I'm certain that the Third Reich's numbers here wouldn't even come close to matching any of them.
What I believe we're seeing, is a magnification of terror where it largely didn't exist.
