The Nazi regime is the most familiar and dramatic instance of state terrorism in modern Western history. In the following essay, we will discuss the motives and political character of Nazi state terrorism, evaluate each of the hypotheses set forth in Unit Two in the context of the Nazi state terror experience, and consider whether the current upsurge of right wing violence in Germany, including a strong anti foreign and antisemitic component, may presage a future resurgence of state terrorism in Germany.
The total number of victims of Nazi state terror was probably smaller than that of the victims of Stalinism. But, since the population subject to Nazism was smaller than that subject to Stalinism, it is arguable that Nazi state terror was more intensive; that is, it terrorized or exterminated a greater proportion of the populations subjected to it. Above all, the Nazi system of state terror is distinguished for its arbitrary character. In purely amoral and Machiavellian terms, much of Stalinist state terror can be understood in terms of the imposition of the Stalinist social model (e.g., the engineered famine in the Ukraine) and the eradication of all possible opposition (e.g., the Party and military purges of the late 1930s).
In contrast, the enduring legacy of Nazism can be expressed in the phrase "six million Jews." In fact, the five to seven million European Jews who were killed by the Nazi terror machine constituted only a modest majority of the total victims of Nazi state terror; some five million non Jews were also exterminated in the death camps, by roving massacre units (the Einsatzgruppen) and by other components of the Nazi terror machine. But the destruction of European Jewry stands out to us for its thoroughness in application of genocide in the strongest sense of the word to an entire people.
The Shoah, or Jewish holocaust, also stands out for its arbitrariness and disconnection fr...