How far do you agree that terror was the most important reason for the high levels of control exercised by the Nazi regime between 1933–45?
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Course
Unit 1G - Germany and West Germany, 1918-89
Institution
PEARSON (PEARSON)
An A-level standard essay arguing that terror was not the most important reason behind the high levels of control exercised by the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945.
How far do you agree that terror was the most important reason for the
high levels of control exercised by the Nazi regime between 1933–45?
I think for a regime’s most important reason behind exercising high levels of control
to be considered terror the following must be true; an ominpresent surveillance
organisation/secret police is present monitoring all citizens, the average citizen lives
in constant and well-founded fear of the possibility of coming to harm at the hands of
the government, and the people are averse to the laws made by the regime but are
too scared to be disobedient for fear of the consequences. It goes without saying
that the Nazis were ardent users of fear and intimidation tactics when it came to
controlling the German population, seen in their creation of concentration camps and
widespread police brutality. Despite saying this, I think that the extent to which terror
contributed to the Nazi’s high levels of control over the German population is
commonly overexaggerated and other factors such as the popularity of their policies
or efficacy of their propaganda are overlooked.
It is a commonly held belief that the most important factor contributing to the control
the Nazi regime held in the years 1933-1945 was terror, and it goes without saying
that there is a certain degree of truth to be found in this belief. It seems to me that
terror could be considered the most important reason for the high levels of Nazi
control specifically in the earlier days of the regime, following the Reichstag Fire in
1933 and the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. The Night of the Long Knives, in
which the SS murdered just under 100 SA members and arrested more than 1,000
perceived political opponents, marked an important moment in the Nazi control of the
population. From this point forward, it became clear that Hitler was a tyrannical figure
who would stop at nothing to eliminate anyone he perceived as getting in his way.
The establishment of the first concentration camps, Dachau (1933) and
Sachsenhausen (1936) for example, highlighted the tyranny of Hitler. At this stage of
Nazi government I believe terror’s role in controlling the population hit its peak, as
reports of what prisoners experienced at the hands of the SS in concentration camps
began to leak, considerably increasing the average German’s fear of being arrested.
Terror, however, was not limited to only the beginnings of the nazi regime, displayed
in the ruthless T4 euthanasia programme Hitler led from 1939 to 1944. The
"euthanasia" effort, which there was widepsread public knowledge about, is
estimated to have claimed the lives of 250,000 individuals who were deemed
‘disabled’ by the Nazis; this is just one example of a measure the Nazis took that
incited fear in the population as Germans came to realise the full extent of the
brutality of the regime that they were to obey. Considering the renowned
ruthlessness of the Nazi system, it is unsurprisng that data shows that under 1% of
Germans showed resistance to the Nazi regime as, although it is likely that many
people were privately opposed to the Nazis’ policies, the average German would
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