Terror In Germany During The 1930's

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During the 1930's, the Nationalist Socialists experienced great popularity, evidence to this fact would be the elections and as Gellately states, 'there was much popular support'. This played a huge part in maintaining the power Hitler held in Germany. However, it would be foolish to assume the Nazis thrived off popularity alone and there were no other factors which contributed to the maintenance of their power.
Terror and Coercion played different for different sects of society, for example for Jews and Communists, terror played a huge role in their lives for the duration of Nazi power. This was because they were deemed undesirables to society and threats to the “sense of community and order”. However for many Germans it was more of a tool for them to protect …show more content…
This is totally different to the view of Evans who states that ‘the Third Reich was fear.' There were many misconceptions within Germany surrounding terror; firstly, the role of the Gestapo has been greatly exaggerated, ‘the Gestapo was merely one institution among many.' This view would suggest that while the terror was certainly there it wasn't such an important role in Hitler’s Germany dictatorship but maybe other factors such as popularity were just as important.

Richard Evans states that “Everything that happened in the Third Reich took place in a pervasive atmosphere of fear and terror and indeed became far more intense towards the end”. This is very much the opposite to that of Johnson’s interpretation as he states that the population were fairly happy to go along with the terror and coercion. This was as it benefited them and meant that they no longer had to deal with issues which had engulfed them in previous years. Issues such as mass unemployment, abject poverty and low morale had plagued the Weimer Government, therefore as Hitler had removed these problems he struggled little to gain support and power of the people. Gellately’s view is also similar such as the ones
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