Nazi Terror

The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans

Contributors

By Eric A Johnson

Formats and Prices

On Sale
Dec 4, 2000
Page Count
664 pages
Publisher
Basic Books
ISBN-13
9780465049080

Price

$31.99

Price

$40.99 CAD

Format

Trade Paperback

Format:

Trade Paperback $31.99 $40.99 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around December 4, 2000. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

Eric Johnson’s exhaustive new history tackles the central aspect of the Nazi dictatorship – terror – head on. By focusing on the role of the individual and on the role of the society in making terror work, he is able to definitively and dramatically answer such questions as these: Who were the Gestapo officers? Were they merely banal paper shufflers, as Hannah Arendt depicted Eichmann, or were they recognizably evil? What tactics did they use? Were they motivated by an eliminationist anti-Semitism? Did the average German know about the mass murder of Jews and other undesirables while it was happening? Exactly how was Nazi terror applied in the daily lives of ordinary Jews and Germans? Johnson spent years of research in Gestapo archives in three Rhineland communities, reading and analyzing more than 1100 Gestapo and “special court” case files. He conducted surveys and interviews with German perpetrators, Jewish victims, and ordinary Germans who experienced the Third Reich at first hand. Consequently, his book is able to settle many nagging questions about who, exactly, was responsible for what, who knew what, and when they knew it. Nazi Terror is the most fine-grained portrait we may ever have of the mechanism of terror in a dictatorship.


Eric A Johnson

About the Author

Eric A. Johnson is professor emeritus at Central Michigan University. He served as a research professor at the University of Cologne from 1989 to 1995, was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton from 1995 to 1996, and was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study from 1998 to 1999. He is also the author of Nazi Terror and Urbanization and Crime. He lives in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan.
 
Karl-Heinz Reuband is professor of sociology, emeritus, at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. He lives in Cologne, Germany.

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