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Murder, Denunciation And Criminal Policing In Weimar Berlin, Sace E. Elder

Sace E. Elder

In the years since 1989, there has been a wealth of scholarly research into role of denunciation in supporting Germany’s two twentieth-century authoritarian regimes. The shocking revelation after the collapse of East German communism and the opening of the Stasi archives that hundreds of thousands of GDR citizens had served as ‘informal collaborators’ with the secret police seemed to help explain how a relatively small police organization managed to create a culture of terror and conformity. By focusing on the cooperation of ordinary citizens with policing institutions in the surveillance of public and private behaviors, scholars of Nazi Germany have …