Was it true that the Reich government or Gestapo could tap/eavesdrop on private conversations by mail or telephone?

[aa1874]

This is sometimes brought up to prove the "totalitarianism" of NS Germany: the claim that the Gestapo, as a measure to prevent the spread of communism in Germany, could tap/eavesdrop on all telephone calls (see Niemöller) and stalk on private mail during its delivery just like how communist East Germany did, and stifle freedom of association etc. Given that the Gestapo is said to be a pretty small, efficient police force that uses publicly available data at most cases, is this true, or just another Allied propaganda?

[Otium]

The idea that the Third Reich was "totalitarian" is a discarded myth. It's only pushed by the uninformed leftists and conservative types who have no actual knowledge about National Socialist Germany yet want to use it as an example to further their own political agendas.

The same is true of writers who depicted the Third Reich as a totalitarian dictatorship. One of the prime examples was Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) which suggested that Hitler’s regime was very similar to Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. In practice, however, Nazi government was much less totalitarian than the USSR. The German public had far greater latitude to grumble and criticize than was previously supposed. The original concept of totalitarianism now seems a deeply flawed way to explain Hitler’s rule.4

Source: Frank McDonough, The Hitler Years: Triumph 1933-1939 (Head of Zeuz, 2020), Pp. 9

The work of Peter Hiittenberger, in particular, with some support from the more detailed work of Martin Broszat's The Hitler State, has demolished the notion of the Third Reich as a monolithic power bloc, a dictatorship organised in the smallest detail, affecting every sector of German life. An early American pioneer of this revision was Edward N. Peterson in his The Limits of Hitler's Power. Sociologists such as Ralf Dahrendorf in his Society and Democracy in Germany have already at an early stage pointed to the obvious conclusion that National Socialist Germany was for most of its existence nowhere near as totalitarian as it and historians subsequently claimed, a point driven home with a vengeance in the cultural sphere by H. D. Schafer's Das Gespaltene Bewusstsein: Deutsche Kultur und Lebenswirklichkeit 1933-45.

Source: H.W. Koch, Aspects of the Third Reich (Macmillan, 1985), Pp. 183-84

Hitlerism and Stalinism, what we ought to consider now is the incorrect application of "totalitarianism" - meaning total state rule - not only to the Third Reich but to the very ideas (and some of the practices) of Adolf Hitler.

To begin with what is (or should be) obvious: the total rule of the state is impossible. Even at the peak and at the maximum extent of a modern tyrant's rule, there remain people and islands of life that are surprisingly untouched by the police rule of the state. Still, the term "totalitarianism" may seem reasonable when it is the practical intention of the tyrant or tyrants ruling a state to exercise total control over it's inhabitants. But there is room for a serious question whether that was Hitler's intention. His intention was to rule with the active consent of the majority of his people, among whom the potential opposition of small minorities would be insignificant and entirely ineffectual. It may even be said that while Stalin (not unlike other, mostly Oriental rulers) was exercised by the danger of potential opponents, whence his purges), Hitler (and also Himmler, the SD, and the Gestapo), while aware of the existence and the locus of potential opponents, were principally interested in discovering evidence of any actual opposition.

[...]

Of course, Germany was not Russia; and the Hitler revolution in Germany was not at all like the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Except for Jews, there was more individual and even political freedom in National Socialist Germany than in Communist Russia - a greater variety of publications in the sciences and in the arts, and more elbow room for individual endeavour. As one reads about the reconstruction of the various German opposition groups against Hitler, one is struck by their relative liberty of movement within that police state; by the relative ease with which some people flittered back and forth between Germany and abroad, or met foreign diplomats in Berlin, talking cautiously but almost freely. This kind of behaviour would have been inconceivable in the Soviet Union (and some other police states too).

Source: John Lukacs, The Hitler of History (Vintage Books, 1998), Pp. 114-115

Fest's insight is considerable "Hitler never wanted to establish a tyranny (Gewaltherrshaft]." And: "A mere hunger for power is insufficient to explain the Hitler phenomenon, which cannot be studied as [yet] another form of modern tyranny." We have seen Hitler himself that he was not a dictator and did not wish to be one. Kershaw expressed this, in a judicious sentence: "To suggest that Hitler's power rested on 'totalitarian terror' - leaving aside the difficulties with the concept of 'totalitarianism' - is to state only partial truth."

Source: John Lukacs, The Hitler of History (Vintage Books, 1998), Pp. 116

Hitler was not a tyrant imposed upon Germany. He was in many respects, until well into the war, a highly popular national leader.

Source: Ian Kershaw, The Hitler Myth: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (1987), Pp. 194

As for your question about the Gestapo it's most certainly a lie, and a substantially unrefined one at that. The Gestapo, as admitted by all mainstream historians wasn't an all powerful all encompassing police force. They had a few thousand people at best. As is pointed out in the Kerry Bolton article, they didn't have the manpower for ground work let alone checking mail or tapping phone calls. It's an impossibility, they had next to no manpower and sometimes a handful of agents to "monitor" populations in the 10s of thousands. Most of the Gestapo were desk clerks from the former Weimar police force.

The physical presence of the Gestapo in German life in the 1930s should not be exaggerated. In 1937 it employed only 7,000 people, including secretaries and other assistants, in a total population of some sixty million, in contrast to the Stasi's 90,000 regular employees in East Germany's population of seventeen million.

[...]

Most of the people arrested by the Gestapo were "asocials," not jokesters or grumblers, who, when they did get in trouble, had been denounced by neighbours or acquaintances, usually for personal rather than political reasons. In fact, Nazi leaders regarded most denunciations as frivolous. Nonetheless, stories and rumours abounded; the the unlikelihood of denunciation or arrest did not undo the unpredictability of state surveillance.

Source: Thomas Childers: The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (Simon & Schuster, 2017), Pp. 113

To put the level of Nazi state coercion of its citizens into perspective: Communist East Germany would later employ 190,000 official surveillance experts and an equal number of “unofficial collaborators” to watch over a populace of 17 million, while the Gestapo in 1937 had just over 7,000 employees, including bureaucrats and secretarial staff. Together with a famaller force of security police, they sufficed to keep tabs on more than 60 million people. Most Germans simply did not need to be subjected to surveillance or detention. By the end of 1936, four years after the Nazis had become Germany’s largest political party and once their initial period of terror and violence against opponents was over, only 4,761 people—some of whom were chronic alcoholics and career criminals—were incarcerated in the country’s concentration camps.

Source: Götz Aly, Hitler's Beneficiaries (Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2007), (Don't know the page number, read it in the epub version, it is in Chapter 1 though)

our survey evidence shows that most Germans had little contact with either the newly established Gestapo or the other organs of Nazi terror [...] The evidence provided in the table shows that only 47 of the 2,601 people who answered this question in the four cities we surveyed were ever arrested or interrogated by either the Gestapo or the regular police during all the years of the Third Reich. This means that an average of less than 2 percent of the non-Jewish people in these cities--even though many of them hailed from former left-wing backgrounds and most (as will be shown below) had broken the laws of the Third Reich in the course of their daily lives--were ever accused of wrongdoing in Nazi Germany, much less punished for such activity [...] If this evidence calls into question the long-held notion that terror was ubiquitous in Nazi Germany, the evidence in the table showing that most survey respondents did not personally know anyone who had ever been accused of committing an illegal act calls it further into question. Only in dresden, which lies in Saxony, where communist and socialist activity was perhaps more pronounced than in many other regions of Germany, did more than 30 percent of arrested or interrogated. Thus, in the other three cities, over 70 percent of the respondents knew nobody at all who came afoul of the Gestapo or the police.

Source: Eric Johnson, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany (Basic Books, 2006), Pp. 348

To put it simply, it was impossible for the Gestapo to do this. Hitler's Germany wasn't a totalitarian state that spied on everyone. It's a farce to pretend it was.

[eRika]

The Dr. Bolton article isn't actually linked here, although is mentioned. Its URL is: https://inconvenienthistory.com/8/3/4172

That was published in 2016.

This thread started in 2020.

Only 8 days ago no December 27th 2022 a mainstream youtube video appeared on the same topic that I am sure they used this thread and Dr. Bolton's article for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEs3hMp60JM

[Otium]

Only 8 days ago no December 27th 2022 a mainstream youtube video appeared on the same topic that I am sure they used this thread and Dr. Bolton's article for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEs3hMp60JM

Even these people are behind the times. The Gestapo didn't use torture, certainly not to the degree that people believe. This was most recently shown in J. Ryan Stackhouse's book 'Enemies of the People: Hitler’s Critics and the Gestapo' (Cambridge, 2021).

Contrary to what one might think with the benefit of hindsight, the extreme extent of the encroachment of the police and the courts over the rights of individual citizens in Germany was not preordained. From the beginning to nearly the end of the Third Reich, leading politicians (including Hitler at certain points) expressed varying degrees of concern about the impact on the utopian goal of a harmonious "community of the people" (Volksgemeinschaft) that came with the extension of arbitrary police powers and erosion of protections offered by the rule of law. Part of the worry was that these developments opened the door to abuses by those who would go to the police with frivolous charges and utilize the new system to pursue selfish goals. Even in preparing war measures designed to prevent a much feared repetition of the revolution of 1918, the Himmler-Heydrich team did not have everything its own way. For example, on September 18, 1939, Heydrich could not convince the new Ministerial Council for the Defense of the Reich (created at the end of August 1939 to coordinate Germany's administration and economy) to introduce a general duty of denunciation for citizens who suspected that certain deeds might adversely affect the German people's ability to resist the enemy.30

Robert Gellately, "Review: Situating the "SS-State" in a Social-Historical Context: Recent Histories of the SS, the Police, and the Courts in the Third Reich", The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Jun., 1992), pp. 338-365, here, p. 345.

We'd know a lot more about who were invesitgated by the Gestapo (racially, religiously, politically etc.) how often, and how many if historians actually bothered to comprehensivy survey the 100s of thousands of card files assembled by the various regional and city-wide Gestapo headquarters which listed various details about those they came into contact with. But I guess these historians have better things to do? One really wonders what the hell they do at all? Write obtuse books which are vague and make various proclamations without any real evidence to back up anything they say. Certainly they don't seem to have any comprehensive data, because they've just ignored sources that would provide it:

It is only in the last fifteen years that historians of the Third Reich and post-war Germany have taken interrogation transcripts seriously as sources for the history of the period, and it is even more rare that the textual structures and semantics used in these sources have explicitly been studied. Good examples can be found in the works by Reinhard Mann and Bernd A. Rusinek on everyday practices of resistance and repression in Diisseldorf and Cologne respectively, and in studies by Insa Eschebach on trials conducted in the GDR against former concentration camp warders. Historians of the early modern period have, in general, produced more innovative methods for dealing with this kind of source material. That historians of Nazi Germany have so far largely neglected interrogation transcripts can certainly be attributed to the fact that they imagine that this type of source might provide scant insights. These statements, made under extreme pressure and transcribed by Gestapo officers, neither appear to provide reliable information on facts, nor can they be trusted, or so it seems, to reveal the 'real' thoughts of those interrogated. However, although there can be no doubt about the basic hermeneutic principle which must govern any work with these sources, namely, that interrogation transcripts should primarily be regarded as the interrogators' texts, they quite frequently contain passages in which the suspects' voices and their hopes for survival are clearly recognizable. I shall therefore start from the assumption that, even under the often brutal conditions of interrogation, individual strategies of speaking were possible and can be discerned in the documents.

Isabel Richter, "Faced with Death: Gestapo Interrogations and Clemency Pleas in High Treason Trials by the National Socialist Volksgerichtshof", in: Willibald Steinmetz (ed.), Political Languages in the Age of Extremes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) pp. 151–167, here, pp. 153-154.

Of course what Richter doesn't say, is that these transcripts might allow us to see how the Gestapo itself behaved; and of course, many of these criticisms apply under every regime that has ever existed.

Reinhard Mann for example, one of the historians mentioned by Richter conducted one such limited study of these Gestapo files, but he died before the project could be completed - and in any case wouldn't have been comprehensive anyway. He wrote a book entitled: 'Protest und Kontrolle im Dritten Reich: Nationalsozialistische Herrschaft im Alltag einer rheinischen Großstadt' which, so far as I know, nobody has bothered to really follow-up on in terms of continuing the comprehensive process of data collection he pursued while resesarching the files of the Düsseldorf Gestapo headquarters.

Though there are some document collections out there that have printed Gestapo situation reports and political reports:

Margot Pikarski and Elke Warning, eds., Gestapo-Berichte uber den antifaschistischen Widerstandskampf der KPD [Gestapo Reports on the Anti-Fascist Resistance Struggle of the KPD], vol. 1, Anfang 1933 bis August 1939, vol. 2, September 1939 bis August 1943, vol. 3, September 1943 bis Anfang 1945 (Berlin, 1989-90).

Peter Brommer, ed., Die Partei hort mit: Lageberichte und andere Meldungen des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS aus dem Grossraum Koblenz, 1937-1941[The Party is Lisening: Situation Reports and Other Messages from the SS Security Service in the Greater Koblenz Area, 1937-1941] (Koblenz, 1988).

Thomas Klein, Die Lageberichte: Der Geheimen Staatspolizei Uber Die Provinz Hessen-Nassau 1933-1936 [The Situation Reports of the Secret State Police on the Province of Hesse-Nassau 1933-1936], 2 pts. (Cologne and Vienna, 1986).

Robert Thevoz et al., Pommern 1934/35 im Spiegel von Gestapo-Lageberichten und Sachakten [Pomerania 1934/35 in the Mirror of Gestapo Situation Reports and Subject Files], vol. 1, Darstellung, vol. 2, Quellen (Cologne and Berlin, 1974).

Klaus Mlynek, ed., Gestapo Hannover meldet: Polizei- und Regierungsberichte für das mittlere und südliche Niedersachsen zwischen 1933-1937 [Gestapo Hannover reports: Police and government reports for central and southern Lower Saxony between 1933-1937] (Hildesheim, 1986).

Wolfgang Ribbe, ed., Die Lageberichte der Geheimen Staatspolizei über die Provinz Brandenburg und die Reichshauptstadt Berlin 1933 bis 1936 [The Situation Reports of the Secret State Police on the Province of Brandenburg and the Reich Capital Berlin from 1933 to 1936], vol. 1, Die Regierungsbezirk Potsdam, (Köln/Weimar/Wien, 1998). - So far as I can tell, only this one volume of a projected 5 volumes has appeared.

Hermann J. Rupieper and Alexander Sperk, eds., Die Lageberichte der Geheimen Staatspolizei zur Provinz Sachsen 1933-1936 [The Situation Reports of the Secret State Police on the Province of Saxony 1933-1936, vol. 1, Regierungsbezirk Magdeburg, vol. 2, Regierungsbezirk Merseburg, vol. 3, Regierungsbezirk Erfurt (Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 2006).

[Nazgul]

Land line phones of the day worked by the wires and underground transmission aka "earth". This is the AC system used today.
This means that the modulations beneath the ground can be detected. The modulations extend much further than the imaginary line between sources.
This was used to intercept telephone communications by all secret services including the Gestapo.

[Hektor]

The idea that the Third Reich was "totalitarian" is a discarded myth. It's only pushed by the uninformed leftists and conservative types who have no actual knowledge about National Socialist Germany yet want to use it as an example to further their own political agendas.
.....

That depends also on what one considers as totalitarian. NS-Germany was unapologetically an authoritarian state. They had one government party, mass organizations, banned other parties and detained their more rabid opponents. Was that totalitarian? Depends on what you mean by that... the term was actually initially coined by Mussolini. But neither Fascism nor National Socialism went ever as far as Communists revolutionaries and regimes who essentially try to control all aspects of life and have huge spy networks to control the population. Simply compare the size of the Stasi with the size of the Gestapo.

It should also be considered that the NSDAP and Hitler had high approval ratings for years... probably only collapsing during the last two years of their rule. The approval ratings remained fairly high during the first two decades after world war two... After the numbers of those with first hand experience in Germany did decline. I recall that even opponents of National Socialism hardly ever claim that Germany had 'bad governance' then. The critique always revolves around Holocaust, War and not being a Democracy.

Ethnic conflict, war and using 'undemocratic' means for political goals are however in no way unique to National Socialism. Except for Communists - who are rather extreme on this, Liberals do use them as well. They are however far more dishonest about it and try to deflect from this. Concerning elections and freedom of expression one needs to consider that in democracies this is mostly of value to those that already have organizational or financial power. The rest can be marginalized quite easily. Journalists write what their bosses do like they themselves or others want to read. If a journalist deviates to far from his bosses agenda, they can look for other jobs.

[Turpitz]

The plans the Jew, Klaus Schwab and the U.N., with all their comrades have for the west, with their planned Digital-Gulag will make the Gestapo tapping a few phone lines look like paradise. Jenny Jerome's drunken son, Copper-knob, had a policy of assasination of high-ranking Germans if I recall, so it is understandable in many ways. Then, I suppose after what he did at Dresden one might argue he had a policy of assasinating any ranking German, including women and children trying to escape Ehrenburgs rapists.. This is understandable though as he was on Zion's payroll.

[Hektor]

Mind you the Gestapo still was limited to exceptional investigations. Anything else won't be feasible.
Presently the aim is total control of everyone. And it doesn't seem as if the purpose is intercepting with subversives or intelligence services. Although they may use it as an argument. A sales pitch to persuade people that this is necessary to 'combat terrorism'.

Klaus Schwab is an interesting character. There is nonsense making the rounds about him.... Something that he is 'a Rothschild'. I deem that planted disinformation to make his critics look like loons. He does however come from a family that was also previously engaged in projects of an exceptional kind (Escher Wyss AG). They claim that his family was observed by the Gestapo. Could be playing the victim, but it is at least plausible given the nature of his work.

[Turpitz]

As Agenda-21 ("Agenda for the 21st Century", not the 21st year as many wrongly think it is) rolls ever onward, S.M.A.R.T. meters (Self Monitoring Analysing Reporting Technology) in your house so you can be remotely, and anonymously switched off at any given time,and on an individual house-to-house basis. You power consumption monitored and used to as a means to punish you if your "carbon footprint" exceeds your monthly, allotted allowance.

Anyway, it is a multi-faceted assault on every apsect of your existence, down to the minutest detail all under the guise of a load of megolomaniacs, deviants and murderers claiming they care about the world. Let me tell you, these people care about nothing other than thermselves. They are the worst custodians one could ever bestow upon anything

To quote the Club of Rome's book "The First Global Revolution" an organization set up in 1968 by the Rockefeller Dynasty and Maurice Strong, the commie capitalist, and recited at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit:

"In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. In their totality and in their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which demands the solidarity of all peoples. But in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap about which we have already warned namely mistaking systems for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself."

Anyway, talking of The Germans tapping phones during wartime, see what the U.N., W.E.F. subordinates in Westminster have lined up for you:

https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/draft-legislation-to-help-more-people-prove-their-identity-online/consultation-on-draft-legislation-to-support-identity-verification

Of couse this will happen everywhere. Whilst everyone was scared about having a cold for the last few years, great moves have been made across the board. Sweden quietly slipped in their “Circular Economy – Strategy for the Transition in Sweden” which will see a forced collectivisation and proletariisation system. Everything will happen incrementally across all countries. This method along with the distraction of media induced trivia will help to stop the dumb-Goy noticing a pattern.

It will mean the end of any freedom of expression without the fear of arrest.

https://www.stopcommonpass.org/uk-govt-awards-contract-to-help-spy-on-citizens/

[hermod]

Reconsidering Hitler's Gestapo
Review
Kerry R. Bolton

The Gestapo: The Myth and Reality of Hitler's Secret Police. Frank McDonough. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2015).

Dr. Frank McDonough, professor of international history at Liverpool John Moores University, has written a book that will be of much interest to “historical revisionists.” Like Robert N. Proctor’s Nazi War on Cancer1 it is a revisionist work, and McDonough describes it as such. McDonough is by no means an apologist for any aspect of the Hitler regime. However, McDonough concludes with the obligatory moral outrage; after having questioned the primary assumptions on Gestapo villainy, he ends with a lamentation on how the Gestapo got off so lightly after the war.

McDonough shows mainly through an examination of primary documents that the Gestapo was an efficient police force, small in number, not the omnipresent terror arm of a terror state; scrupulous at all levels with facts and the accuracy of records, focusing on the recruitment of university graduates, particularly to doctoral standard, while retaining the services of mostly non-Nazi, Weimar-regime, career policemen; quick to arrive at conclusions based on objective investigation, and promptly dismissing most accusations brought to their attention without undue delay.

The book opens with an account of the “first Protestant Evangelical preacher killed for defying the Nazi regime on religious grounds,” Paul Schneider, at Buchenwald in 1939. He had been incarcerated there in 1937 after being warned many times about his criticism of the regime, including his ridicule of the stormtrooper martyr Horst Wessel. He had been freed from custody due to the lobbying of his parishioners. Two hundred local ministers, and a crowd of local parishioners attended his funeral.2 Hence one already might ask questions: Why hadn’t this monstrous terror state quietly eliminated Schneider in 1933, when he had already started critiquing the new regime? Why was he given so many warnings? Why did such a supposedly totalitarian state heed the lobbying for his release by parishioners? Why did he receive a widely attended public funeral, when he might have been quietly executed, and some pretext offered?

Despite the popular, and the academic, image of the Nazi state as all-embracing and Hitler as all-powerful, the German people as brainwashed, and the Gestapo as “a huge organization with agents everywhere,” “in reality any person who accepted and supported the Nazi regime enjoyed enormous individual freedom. Hitler’s regime was hugely popular. Once you appreciate this essential fact you begin to understand the reality of life inside Nazi Germany.”3

In 1969 Martin Broszat in The Hitler State questioned the image of the Nazi state and called Hitler a “weak dictator” who presided over many factions.4 The six-volume study under his direction, Bavaria in the National Socialist Era, examining resistance to Nazi rule, concluded that the regime was not as totalitarian as assumed, and that there had been “much greater latitude to criticize.” 5 German historian Reinhardt Mann examined the Düsseldorf files of the Gestapo and found that the police apparatus was not pervasive, that the organization was much too small. The Gestapo were not “brutal, ideologically committed Nazis,” but mostly veteran career detectives. Mann’s study, states McDonough, was the basis for what has become “the revisionist interpretation” of the Gestapo.6 The American historian Robert Gellately showed in his 1990 book The Gestapo and German Society, that they relied on public support, and that the “Gestapo posed no real threat to law-abiding citizens in Nazi Germany.” American historian Eric Johnson in his 1999 book The Nazi Terror, based on court files from Cologne and Krefeld and from interviews, showed that loyal Germans were treated with “kid gloves,” and that “most Germans did not fear [the Gestapo] at all.” He did differ from Gellately in considering Gestapo officers as more proactive and brutal. While these studies were limited as to localities, McDonough sought a broader study of Gestapo files.7

Continued here: https://inconvenienthistory.com/8/3/4172

French Gestapo Trials And Other Articles - New Edition
by Vincent Reynouard
Translated by Carlos Whitlock Porter
https://archive.org/details/FrenchGesta ... NewEdition

The Myth of “Nazi Terror”
by Nigel Winters
Published: 2021-11-24

[The pernicious myth that the Brown-shirted Stormtroopers (Sturmabteilung or SA) of the National-Socialist Movement were “violent thugs” is a popular political slander, concocted by disingenuous “historians” from half-truths, while neglecting inconvenient facts.

It is true that the National Socialists participated in their fair share of brawls, however, they were comparatively much less violent than the other para-military formations of the “Left-Wing” parties. At most, they could be just as violent, but certainly no more than was typical at this particular time in history.

The myth is not so much of the violence itself, but of the alleged one-sided violence that is ascribed only to the National Socialists, while the violence of other political movements is routinely ignored for the sake of presenting a politically white-washed image of left-wing groups as merely on the “defensive” rather than an autonomous political force with goals of their own. This is despite, for example, the self-styled image of the German Communist Party (KPD) as fierce political revolutionaries, inspired by their Russian counterparts who themselves had participated in a violent revolution starting in 1917. For the sake of cleansing the history of the KPD of all possible blemishes, the Communists in Germany are presented not as they were and saw themselves to be, that is, as revolutionaries with a vendetta against the state and its democratic institutions;[1] but instead as mild-mannered, sensible and almost inherently non-violent, which couldn’t be further from the truth. One would have to forget the Communist tradition of violent political action, and the Marxist philosophy which justifies it, in order to believe such a thing. Such a pacifistic view doesn’t align with the sacrosanct political doctrines and images of Communism’s leading political figures whom the KPD idolized: Lenin, Stalin etc.[2]

To give us a glimpse into who was more likely to be responsible for violent clashes just before the ascent of the National Socialists to power, we can see from statistics gathered by the Prussian ministry of the interior that “acts of terror” were largely the result of Communist and other assorted left-wing agitation, whereas the National Socialists were still present but by no means as rowdy as is commonly maintained. From this ministry report we read that cases of terror documented in Prussia a few months prior to the November 1932 election, excluding Berlin, showed that from 1 June to July 20, 1932, in 322 recorded cases of street terror, there were 72 deaths and 497 seriously injured. Those responsible were Communists in 203 cases, National Socialists in 75 cases, and members of the Reichsbanner (a para-military formation dominated of Germany’s Social Democrats) in 21 cases.[3] Those responsible for the remaining 23 cases are unknown. Violence clearly wasn’t a one sided affair.

Continued here: https://codoh.com/library/document/the- ... terror/en/