Robert Gellately
Earl Ray Beck Professor, Department of History
"Never forget!"
Few disagree with keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive.
But the question of what to remember is still in debate, and one of the most respected and persuasive voices belongs to Robert Gellately, the Earl Ray Beck Professor of History, whose work challenges the central notions of the role played by "ordinary" German citizens in the rule of the Gestapo (secret state police).
Gellately had already published a book on German anti-semitism before the First World War and was doing research in a German archive when a librarian alerted him to a collection of Gestapo files—19,000 of them—that Nazi officers had not had to time to burn before the Allies arrived.
"I started to read these files about all the victims in just one region of Germany that the Gestapo had processed," Gellately says. "It would have taken a large force of secret police to collect information on so many people. I needed to know just how many secret police there really were. So I asked an elderly gentleman who would've lived through those times, and he replied, 'They were everywhere!'"
That was the prevailing myth.
"But I had evidence right there in my hands that supported a different story," Gellately explains. "There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn't the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors."...
