| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Robert Gellately. Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany. New York: Oxford University Press. 2001. Pp. xvi, 359. $35.00.

This study builds on Robert Gellately's previous research on the Gestapo and German society. Based on his own investigations of the police in Würzburg and Düsseldorf and practices of denouncing individuals to the authorities in the Third Reich, he sketches a broader account of the extension and radicalization of the Gestapo and SS system of terror from 1933 to 1945. Gellately relies in the main on recent scholarship, and parts of the book read like a kind of compendium of relevant historical inquiry over the past fifteen years, principally by German scholars. 1

Initially, Gellately shows that Nazi terror was directed primarily against the Communists, wasting few words in this connection on the Social Democrats and trade unions. During the first year of Nazi rule, some 100,000 Germans were subjected to the tortures and indignities of the concentration camps; the author estimates that an approximately similar number of victims were tortured by the SA in other "wild" camps and cellars. Gellately argues that these numbers were relatively small in comparison to the massive abuses of the Bolshevik October Revolution or the Chinese Revolution; but for him to contend that the upheaval in Germany was thus "harmonious" is doubtless an exaggeration. Nonetheless, it is certainly accurate to note that the Nazis—who enjoyed the backing of some forty percent of the electorate before their seizure of power, and whose bitterest foes were within the ranks of the organized working class and among Roman Catholics—succeeded in expanding their base of support during the first four or five years of their rule. The main underlying factors were their evident successes in economic and employment policy and in the realm of foreign affairs, areas not explored in the present study. . . .

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