This research emphasised by implication ordinary Germans’ relative freedom of choice to resist or not to resist, and thus restored an element of voluntarism to their relationship with the Nazi regime. Local and regional histories uncovered a wide and changing variety of popular attitudes towards the Third Reich and its policies. 1 From the late 1960s onwards, however, this interpretation began to be pushed aside, as a new generation of historians began to explore the inner contradictions and instabilities of the Third Reich’s system of rule.
The view that what principally characterised the Third Reich was the total destruction of civil freedoms and the rule of law in what the German political scientist Karl Dietrich Bracher called ‘the German dictatorship’ in his classic book of that title, went together with an emphasis on the top-down nature of decision-making in the Nazi regime, putting Hitler at its centre in what came to be known as the ‘intentionalist’ approach to the study of Nazi policy, in which things were seen to have happened because the Nazi leader wanted them to. Its all-encompassing apparatus of surveillance and control allowed the individual citizen little freedom of thought or action. In the decades that immediately followed the end of the Second World War, there was a general consensus that Nazi Germany was a police state.
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