"...Neighbors turned surly; petty jealousies flared into denunciations made to the SA- the Storm Troopers- or to the newly founded Geheime Staatspolizei, only just becoming known by it's acronym, Gestapo (GEheime STAatsPOlizei), coined by a post office clerk seeking a less cumbersome way of identifying the agency."
The Gestapo's reputation for omniscience and malevolence arose from a confluence of two phenomena: first, a political climate in which merely criticizing the government could get one arrested, and second, the existence of a populace eager not just to step in line...but also to use Nazi sensitivities to satisfy individual needs and salve jealousies. One study of Nazi records found that a sample of 213 denunciations, 37% arose from ...private conflicts, with the trigger often breathtakingly trivial...Germans denounced one another with such gusto that senior Nazi officials urged the populace to be more discriminating...Hitler himself acknowledged..."we are living at present in a sea of denunciations and human meanness."
Really? You think so?
Those last two comments were from me!
From Erik Larson's bestseller "In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin", 2011.
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