- Position‹3 of 3
- Both coercion and consent
- Argument
The successful rule of Nazis within Germany was due in part to initial consent, coercion only taking place later
Consent within the early days of the Nazis mixed with government-mandated programs that promoted intense instances of societal pressure created the perfect environment for Nazi rule.
The argument
Consent and coercion walk hand in hand. That is to say, one does not often give consent without having been coerced, so the two are better understood as ends of a single continuum than as alternatives a society must be sorted into. Thus, although doctors and nurses participating in the T4 euthanasia programs consented to their involvement — they were not marched into the wards at gunpoint — they were cash incentivized into reporting "feebleminded" children: a form of coercion. An inducement attached to a choice does not remove the choice, but it shapes it, and a consent produced that way cannot be treated as freely given. Yet, evidence of this dark mixture does not stop here. Instead, consent and coercion are repeatedly witnessed in a variety of other aspects of Nazi German society, and the regime's popularity is what allowed the mixture to work. For example, it is without a doubt clear that the National Socialists were popular— people willingly supported their rise to power; therefore, systematic intimidation and terror were unneeded. A movement that already holds the assent of most of the population has no need to compel it, which is why the early years can be described in terms of consent at all. Yet, this does not mean that informal forms of coercion were not exercised. In other words, this support created an intense form of peer pressure, which did the work that official terror would otherwise have had to do. As a result, if an individual would choose to not participate in this Naziist society, they would face social ostracization on the local level — pressure applied by neighbours rather than by the state, but pressure all the same, and enough to make participation the only comfortable option.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Claiming that any form of coercion is involved, is dispelling any accountability. The holocaust could not have happened without the consent of the German population. Robert Gellately, a historian at Oxford University, conducted a widely respected survey of the German media before and during the war and concluded that there was substantial participation and consent from large numbers of ordinary Germans in various aspects of the Holocaust, that German civilians frequently saw columns of slave laborers, and that the basics of the concentration camps, if not the extermination camps, were widely known. However, Gellately is not the only historian who has come to this conclusion. Instead, German scholar Peter Longerich concluded that: "General information concerning the mass murder of Jews was widespread in the German population." Longerich estimates that before the war ended, 32 to 40 percent of the population had knowledge about mass killings. British historian Nicholas Stargardt likewise presented vast evidence of widespread knowledge, agreement, and collusion concerning the destruction of European Jewry, as well as other groups. If 40 percent of the German population rose up against such injustice, the third Reich would have fallen much sooner. Instead, they silently consented.