Denunciations in Twentieth-Century Germany: Aspects of Self-Policing in the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic

Abstract

One of the duties of the "good citizen," as constituted in modem Europe, was to inform the authorities in order to hinder the commission of crimes, track down criminals, or uphold the existing order. The surveillance societies that emerged over the past two centuries can be distinguished from their predecessors in part on the basis of their new formal policing activities, but particularly because of the role envisaged for citizens, whose duty became to watch, listen, and inform the authorities. As this participation became more systematized and became an integral part of routine policing, "panopticism" was establishedthe all-seeing society in which no one ever felt beyond surveillance. The theory of panopticism is identified now with the work of Michel Foucault. In a few oblique but illuminating phrases he directed attention to the development in modern Europe of a "faceless gazeH-that is, a "permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance" that "transformed the whole social body into a field of perception: thousands of eyes posted everywhere, mobile attentions ever on the alert, a long, hierarchized network" that extended into all parts of society.' It is only recently that historians have begun to investigate the importance for modem political systems of denunciations, understood broadly as a variety of popular informing to the police or other authorities. This has been associated in the literature on German history with Hitler's dictatorship and, more recently, with the Communist regime of the German Democratic Republic (GDR).2 If denunciations have occurred in most modem political systems, historians are, nonetheless, concerned about their specificity. In what follows I shall attempt to show-on the basis of a study of their role in the operation of the Gestapo and the Stasi, the two secret police forces in Germany's two dictatorships-that denunciations vary in many important respects such as their fre

Following Snowden, German uncertainty about monitoring

“…(Tudge, 2010) My analysis of 175 case files involving efforts to enforce the social and sexual isolation of the Jews concluded that 57 percent began with an identifiable denunciation from the population at large. (Gellately, 1996) Despite their anti-communism, the Nazi regime were inspired by and emulated or expanded upon the Soviet NKVD's (the fore-runner of the KGB) surveillance techniques for control of the population (Tudge, 2010). In the Soviet zone of occupied Germany which became the GDR, therefore, it is hardly surprising that state surveillance was a key element of the regime.…”

“…The secret police of the East German state, the Ministry of State Security -commonly referred to as The Stasi, employed one of the most comprehensive population surveillance systems ever developed, doing so primarily using paper and analogue sound and video recordings rather than mechanical or electronic computation (Ash, 1997), although indexing of the paper material was done using an electronic databank, (perhaps unfortunately) destroyed in February 1990 by the group charged with dealing with the Stasi's legacy (Miller, 2002). In addition to a huge workforce of direct employees (91,000 by 1989) and informers (174,000 by 1989) (Miller, 2002), like the Nazi regime, the Stasi gathered data not only from its specific employees but also encouraged the general populace to engage in denunciation of their fellows, both for personal gain and for "the good of the community" (Gellately, 1996), with Gellately also pointing out (p. 955) that the 170k+ unofficial employees had a high turnover rate in the 80s (around ten percent per year). Gellately concludes that "one in every eight person in the country was formally involved in the effort to generate Stasi files, and that perhaps a third of the population, more or less, had worked for the Stasi".…”

Financial Crimes: Psychological, Technological, and Ethical Issues

“…That was predicated on the assumption that past action is a reliable indicator of future behaviour and that reports by colleagues and neighbours about sobriety, continence, domestic violence, personal hygiene and spending patterns truly reveal the past and future 'inner man' (Sandage 2005;Norris 1978). We no longer live in a village society, where the neighborhood busybody (Fitzpatrick and Gellately 1997;Ash 1997;Funder 2003) or the Nazi party blockleiter (Kater 1983;Gellately 1996;Figes 2007) knew exactly what was happening behind every lace curtain. Fear of litigation is reducing the reliability of written references as indicators of character, although people continue to rely on such documents, which may or may not have been sighted by the ostensible referee.…”

Figures de l'officier traitant à travers les archives de la Stasi

“…Toutefois, dans le cas de l'Allemagne de l'Est, une comparaison historique était inévitable. On doit à Robert Gellately un constat précieux pour la compréhension du fonctionnement interne de la RDA : selon ce spécialiste du Troisième Reich, contrairement à ce qui se passa sous le régime nazi où la délation fut un phénomène social spontané, en Allemagne de l'Est, il fallut l'organiser 2 . Ce fut là l'oeuvre des « officiers traitants » dont l'écrivain tchèque (et piètre informateur), Bohumil Hrabal, nous a sans doute donné à lire l'un des rares portraits dans cette nouvelle « confessante » empreinte d'auto-ironie qu'il eut le courage d'écrire peu avant sa mort 3 .…”