in this video i'm going to talk about how the nazis use terror to control the german people but before i start i'd like to start with an image because i think this image is going to sum up really the next three videos for me this image shows you the extent to which the german people were controlled by the nazi party every single person in this image you can see giving the hitler salute now they achieved that through two methods they achieved that control through two different ways firstly through fear that's what this video is going to focus on and secondly through propaganda which is what the next video is going to focus on when we think about fear and the nazi terror system you need to think about one man and that one man is heinrich himmler who is this man here he was in charge of the ss but more than that he was in charge pretty much of the entire system of fear and control he did lead the ss because i said he controlled the entire system the ss wore black uniforms they're known as the black shirts and they had reputation for obedience and commitment selection into their group was incredibly ruthless not everybody was allowed in only true aryans remember that aryan word means true germans were allowed in and this quote for me from himmler sums everything up the best political weapon is the weapon of terror cruelty commands respect men may hate us but we don't ask for their love only their fear and i think that to me sums up what the nazis were aiming for they were aiming to control people through being scared now let's look at how they did that and they did that using seven different elements and i'm going to talk about these elements today and i think it's really important you think not these elements working independently but working together as part of a machine so they're all cogs that are working together as part of that gene now the most important organization by far in this machinery of terror was the ss the ss as we already know we've seen this in previous videos with the elite nazi army they wore these black uniforms that you can see the men wearing here and on their lapels on their shoulder they had two lightning bolts next to each other a lightning box symbol now the ss unlike the sa was always kept really small and in 1933 it only had 52 000 members compared to the saa at this point which is somewhere over three hundred thousand after the night of the long knives which if you remember was the event when they got rid of rom and the sa leadership the ss had really proved their loyalty to hitler and himmler and the ss are given far more power himmler at this point in 1934 is then really put in charge of this whole system the ss run the concentration camps and after 1936 they run the german police the next part of the machinery of terror that was equally as important was the sds and the sds are the nazi secret service they're the eyes and the ears of the ss and they're led by this man reinhard heydrich who was so unpleasant even hitler himself said that this was he used to use the phrase that heydrich had an iron heart now the sd's task was to identify enemies with the nazi leadership they actually only had a few full-time agents but they had a lot of informants people that were spying on them and passed them information and the sd spied on everything in germany and they wrote really long reports about what they'd seen and what they saw in the german people they rarely took the action themselves but they passed on to probably the most famous group in this machinery of terror the gestalt now the gestapo who you can see pictured here were the nazi secret police they could arrest and imprison anybody in germany who was suspected of opposing nazi rule in the early days of the nazi regime they targeted political opponents but after 1936 they target jews homosexuals and religious opponents we will do more on that in future videos now interestingly the gestapo actually are really more famous than their number suggests so at its absolute height of power in nazi germany the gestapo only had 15 000 people now if you think about the size and the population of germany which was millions at this point that's a very small number of people but that small number of people put fear into everybody because they were really highly effective they tapped people's telephones they opened people's mail they got informants to pass on suspicions they knew everything about everyone in germany and that was quite terrifying informers were crucial in this system of terror so the nazis relied on tipoffs from the general public about potential opponents and people with these people were called informants essentially they were spying or dobbing in their mates is the easiest way of describing it and they informed the gestapo of who to arrest the nazis also employed a kind of official informers called block wardens and block wardens had a duty to get to know the concerns and the attitudes of people living in the 40 or 60 houses in their areas so essentially the nazis were also getting the public to spy on the rest of the public these people are called informants they also used the ordinary police so there was normal german ordinary police at this time in the same way that there are police in this country but the police at this time in the 30s and in the 40s in germany many of them actually really liked the nazi rule and so took an active part in its organization in 1936 the police were put under the control of the ss and the ordinary police which is known as the oppo at this time or the criminal police which is known as the crippo kept up their ordinary duties of searching for crime in the way that the police do this day but they also provided intention intelligence on potential enemies and they often help with arrests as well judges and courts were also brought under control from by nazi germany nazi laws were incredibly severe so in 1933 before they take over power there are only actually three offenses in germany that can lead to a death sentence by 1943 that number had risen to 46. so from 3 to 46 and in over 30 000 people are sent to their deaths as a result of these new laws many of the death sentences were issued by the people's court which you can see in this picture here which was the nazi special owned court and the people's court had no jury and the sentence was passed by the judge alone so it's actually really really unfair but all judges in germany had to swear an oath of loyalty to hitler and often even in courts as you can see in this picture here there was a statue of hitler behind them reminding them of who is in control the most famous and probably the worst element of the machinery of terror is the concentration camps though so those people who were often found guilty in the courts were often sent to concentration camps now concentration camps it's really important we understand this are different from death camps death camps of what we see at the end during world war ii we'll get to that but concentration camps at this point are places where they gather or imprison people who threatened the states now conditions in those camps were grim and awful and there were over 70 camps set up in 1933 alone in 1933 those camps got taken over by the ss organization who created death head units to run the camps there are those people who have skulls on their caps they set out a code of conduct to be used in those camps and there were really harsh punishments that ranged from not giving people food to whipping them in public and in 1937 himmler declared the cop camp guards couldn't be jailed for their actions and deaths at the camps rose the first camps really importantly though and this is again one of those really common misconceptions the first camps actually hugely imprisoned political opponents um and actually it's only really towards the end of the 30s that they're in that they're imprisoning probably the people that you'd imagine would have been in the camps so criminals work shy religious opponents and to a lesser extent jews after 1939 that's when jewish people are put into these camps so really before the war political opponents after the war that's when they go for the jewish elements now you can imagine that really together this was a machinery of terror because all of these parts were working together the most important as i said was the ss the sd is the secret service yes the gestapo is the secret police you've got the ordinary police the courts the informers the camps and they're all working together really under himmler's guidance to put the german public into an immense amount of fear immense they're scared of the german of the nazi state and that enables the nazis to control them so easily