Soldaten

To believe that a modern dictatorship like National Socialism integrates a populace by homogenizing them is to mistake the way it functions socially. The reverse is the case. Integration proceeds by maintaining difference, so that even those who are against the regime—critics of the Nazis’ Jewish policies or committed Social Democrats—have a social arena in which they can exchange their thoughts and find intellectual brethren. This mode of integration extended all the way down to the storm troops and reserve police battalions, which by no means consisted solely of Nazified, unthinking executioners, but included rational people who reached agreement with one another about what they did and whether they did it for good or evil purposes.³⁵ The mode of social integration in every government office, every company, and every university was difference, not homogeneity. In all those social realms, there were subgroups that differentiated themselves from the rest. This always destroys the cohesion of the social aggregate. Difference lays the foundation for the aggregate.

The Nazi regime ended freedom of the press, censored criticism, and created a highly conformist public sphere with the help of extremely modern, mass media propaganda. This, of course, did not leave individual Germans untouched. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that differences of opinion and discussion were completely eradicated. To quote historian Peter Longerich:

From more than two decades of research on the social history and changes in mentality of the Nazi dictatorship, we know the populace of the German Empire between 1933 and 1945 did not exist in a condition of totalitarian uniformity. On the contrary, there was a significant amount of dissatisfaction, non-conformist opinion and varied behavior. What is, however, especially characteristic of German society under Nazism was that expressions of such resistance took place above all in the private sphere and at most in a kind of semi-public sphere that included circles of friends and colleagues, people who regularly met in bars and immediate neighbors. Such encounters happened within existing structures in traditional social milieus that had been able to preserve themselves in the face of the Nazi racist community: in church parishes, the relations between neighbors in villages, elite conservative and bourgeois social circles, and those parts of the socialist community that had not been destroyed.³⁶