This week we were asked to state our reactions to an article about the Gestapo agents at work in a town called Stettin in Germany.  The article painted a picture of "regular," family guys with minimal education , who methodically and obsessively investigated targets of Nazi suspicion, like the Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals and of course, Jews.  It was surprising to see that they let some people go, if they were hard working, "orderly" individuals.

I honestly had no idea that there were any Jehovah's Witnesses or Seventh Day Adventists in Germany at that time (or even now). I always thought of those religious sects as American groups, so that was one surprise.

My impression of Gestapo agents conformed to the stereotyped image of merciless Nazi bigots, so Prof. Hoerle's lecture did challenge me to think of them as ordinary people. This week's lecture showed that the Stettin Gestapo officers were just regular guys with an unusual job. As Prof. Hoerle points out in this week's lecture, the strongest Nazi supporters came from "Germany's lower-middle classes" and the Stettin Gestapo agents were representative of this group, valuing "order, familiarity, and consistency" (Lec. 9). I'm only 1/2 German, born in the U.S.A. but I know all about their cultural bias toward "orderliness" and hard work. It was really fascinating to see how their orderly world view affected their decision to arrest a particular suspect or not. Being a lazy mess was even more repugnant to them than being a member of one of their (non-Jewish) targeted groups. I was also not surprised at the realization that the Gestapo, and Germans in general, have an "excessive obsession with details" (Hoerle, Lec. 9). I remember hearing in a movie about the Nuremberg Trials that the German's own meticulous record keeping provided the most startling evidence against them.

It made me think about our people in Homeland Security, the TSA agents at the airport, and how cops use "racial profiling" (even though they're not supposed to) in an effort to keep us all "safe." I'm sure they all bring their own biases and cultural conditioning to their jobs also. They are also typically representative of the lower middle class, like the Stettin Gestapo. It also made me think about that Stanford University psychology experiment where volunteers acted as prisoners and guards. Given human tendencies toward abusing power when given the chance, the Gestapo officers actually showed surprising restraint. I believed they would have been more likely to seize any small opportunity to throw the targets of their persecution into the concentration camps. As it turned out, the only group that was not going to be spared no matter how "orderly" was the Jews. "When it came to the Jews, certain qualities that the Stettin Gestapo upheld in good “Aryans” did not apply" (Hoerle, lec. 9). Apparently, racism trumps orderliness.