Who were the Gestapo officers? Were they merely banal paper shufflers, or were they recognizably evil? Were they motivated by an eliminationist anti-Semitism? Did the average German know about the mass murder of Jews and other undesirables while they were happening? Exactly how was Nazi terror applied in the daily lives of ordinary Jews and Germans? Eric A. Johnson answers these questions as he explores the roles of the individual and of society in making terror work.

Based on years of research in Gestapo archives as well as extensive interviews with perpetrators and victims, Nazi Terror settles many nagging questions about who was responsible for what, who knew what, and when they knew it. It is the most fine-grained portrait we may ever have of the mechanism of terror in a dictatorship.

Destined to become the classic study of terror in the Nazi dictatorship, and the benchmark for the next generation of Nazi and Holocaust scholarship, Nazi Terror tackles the central aspect of the Nazi dictatorship head on by focusing on the roles of the individual and of society in making terror work.