Eyes and Ears of the Reich

What was it like to be a citizen in the Third Reich? What were the concerns and hopes of Germans who lived through the insanity of the years under Hitler? How much of their time was spent thinking about the war, and how much on more trivial worries? What was their perception of the mind-boggling violence that was one of the primary tools of the regime? What were their views on propaganda, another important tool? What were their aspirations for the future after victory or, as became increasingly likely, defeat? These questions have been difficult if not impossible to answer ever since the collapse of the Reich in 1945. Though some Germans wrote memoirs after the war, and others delivered testimony as part of oral history projects, these sources are of somewhat dubious value as they necessarily were distorted by a great deal of rationalization and justification given the opprobrium associated with having been part of probably the most notorious regime in the history of mankind. There is a unique and copious source that offers direct insights into the minds of the Germans under Hitler: hundreds of top-secret reports-running to 6,700 pages-prepared by the SS intelligence service between 1939 and 1945, gauging the public mood on a range of issues-everything from the merits of the Nazi leadership to the price of vegetables-in meticulous detail. This information in these reports came from dispatches prepared by a dense network of informers throughout the Reich. The informers represented all social classes, all professions and all walks of life. As the SS made clear that it wanted not an embellished version of reality but information as close to actual conditions as possible in order to gain an accurate picture of the public mood, the result is a goldmine of information about all aspects of life in the Third Reich. They cover a broad range of topics: one single report covers from the relief shown by citizens to a rumor of peace with the Soviet Union; elderly citizens complaining of the rudeness of young Germans, in contrast to the official notion of highly regimented cohorts raised during Nazi rule; citizens complaining that they had to share doctors' waiting rooms with foreign workers, reflecting a great deal of grassroots racism; and skepticism at newspaper reports on alleged British postwar plans for a vanquished Germany, suggesting that the German citizenry knew they were not being given the whole truth in the official media. Drawing in detail on the original reports, Peter Harmsen offers insight into the thoughts and feelings of ordinary citizens who lived through the Third Reich.