The Nazi terror state
The Nazi Terror State
The Nazi regime combined organised terror with manufactured consent. It was not purely a coercive state imposing its will on a passive population — historical scholarship has shown that the terror apparatus relied heavily on ordinary Germans who reported neighbours, colleagues and even family members to the authorities. Understanding how the terror state worked means understanding both its institutions and the social behaviour it encouraged.
The SS and Himmler’s Empire
The SS began as Hitler’s personal bodyguard but was transformed by Heinrich Himmler into a state within a state. By 1936 Himmler had been appointed Chief of German Police, unifying the SS with all police functions across Germany. The SS controlled the Gestapo, the concentration camps, the SD (Security Service), and by 1939 the newly created RSHA (Reich Security Main Office). This gave Himmler command of an apparatus with no parallel in German history.
The SS presented itself as an ideological elite — racially pure, physically impressive, ideologically trained. Members swore personal loyalty to Hitler and were told they were the vanguard of a new Germanic civilisation. This combination of elite self-image and unconstrained power made the SS capable of crimes that ordinary bureaucracies might have resisted.
Dachau opened in March 1933, just weeks after Hitler became Chancellor — the first of the Nazi concentration camps. Initially used for political prisoners (Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists), it became the model for the camp system that would later be used for racial persecution and mass murder.
The Gestapo: Terror and Denunciation
The Gestapo (Secret State Police) was created in Prussia by Hermann Göring in 1933 and placed under SS control in 1934. It became the primary instrument for hunting down political, ideological and racial enemies of the regime. Its powers were extraordinary: suspects could be arrested, held without trial under “protective custody,” and sent to concentration camps without any judicial process.
Historians Robert Gellately and Eric Johnson have both shown, through analysis of Gestapo files, that the organisation was far smaller than its fearsome reputation suggested. There were only about 7,000 full-time Gestapo officers for the entire Reich. This tiny force could not have monitored millions of Germans — it relied overwhelmingly on denunciations from ordinary citizens. Neighbours reported neighbours; colleagues reported colleagues; some used the Gestapo to settle personal scores.
The SD (Sicherheitsdienst, or Security Service) was the intelligence arm of the SS, founded in 1931 and led by Reinhard Heydrich. The SD compiled detailed reports on public opinion across Germany — what ordinary people were saying about the regime, how morale was holding up, what resentments existed. These reports were remarkably frank: SD officers reported discontent accurately, which gave Hitler information about where support was soft.
In 1939 the Gestapo, SD, criminal police and other security services were merged into the RSHA (Reich Security Main Office) under Heydrich’s command. This consolidated all repressive and intelligence functions under a single SS-controlled apparatus — an institutional arrangement that would prove critical during the Holocaust.
The Courts: Bending Justice to Serve the Regime
The regular legal system was partly maintained, partly corrupted. The People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof), established in 1934, handled treason and political cases. Under its president Roland Freisler — who presided from 1942 — the court became notorious for screaming denunciations of defendants and death sentences handed down after what amounted to show trials. Defendants in the July 1944 bomb plot were treated with particular savagery.
Regular courts also bent to Nazi pressure. Judges who acquitted defendants the regime wanted convicted found themselves subject to review or removal. The independence of the judiciary, which had been a feature of the Weimar Republic, was systematically destroyed.
The Gestapo had approximately 7,000 full-time officers for the entire Reich. Historians Gellately and Johnson found that most Gestapo investigations began with a denunciation from a member of the public — showing that Nazi terror was participatory, not just imposed from above.
The concentration camp system expanded in stages. In 1933 camps were established primarily for political prisoners — Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, clergy who criticised the regime. Conditions were brutal: hard labour, beatings, malnutrition. Some prisoners were released after months or years if they showed “rehabilitation.”
From the mid-1930s onwards, the camps increasingly held Jews, Roma, homosexuals and others the regime defined as racial or social undesirables. The formal Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938 saw around 30,000 Jewish men arrested and sent to camps. The camp system that had begun as political terror was being re-tooled as the infrastructure of racial persecution — and would eventually be transformed, after 1941, into the machinery of the Holocaust.