The battalion arrived in Bialystok on July 5, and two days laterwas ordered to carry out a "thorough search of the city , , , forBolshevik commissars and Communists," The war diary entry of,the following day makes clear what this meant: "a search of theJewish quarter,"

. Ifit would make their task any easier, the men should rememberthat in Germany the bombs were falling on women and children.

Well-appointed homes were ransacked and formerly prominent cit-izens tormented because Jews were regarded as profiteers whosewealth and social standing mocked the probity of the Volksgemein-schaft; children and the elderly were terrorized because they were“the Jew” whose very existence threatened Germany’s moral, polit-ical, and economic revival

fears based on recollections of the general strikes in 1919and 1920 and gruesome stories about atrocities in the Russian civilwar. It also fortified the image of the Jew as an intractable, immedi-ate danger.

Jewish men who were imagined to prey on Germanwomen: the gender of the Jewish peril was male, while Aryan vul-nerability was female

It was along this circuitry,in which Germans imagined themselves as the victims of Jews andother “back-stabbers,” that “self-love” could turn into lethal “other-hate.”

part of a larger struggle to protect what so many Ger-mans regarded as the wounded, bleeding body of the nation.

Thecalamity of the unexpected surrender, the “bleeding borders” re-drawn in the postwar settlement at Versailles, and the overwhelm-ing chaos of the inflation in the early 1920s were collective experi-ences that made the suffering of the nation more comprehensible.During the Weimar years, the people’s community denoted the be-leaguered condition Germans shared, while expressing the politicalunity necessary for national renewal.

“the police have theresponsibility to safeguard the organic unity of the German people,its vital energies, and its facilities from destruction and disintegra-tion.” This definition gave the police extremely wide latitude. Any-thing that did not fit the normative standards of the people’s com-munity or could be construed as an agent of social dissolutiontheoretically fell under the purview of the police.

heNazis responded to an intense desire for order in Germany in 1933.Fears of Communist revolutionaries mingled with more generalanxieties about crime and delinquency.

Racial thinking presumed thatonly the essential sameness of the German ethnic community guar-anteed biological strength. For the Nazis, the goal of racial puritymeant excluding Jews, whom they imagined to be a racially alienpeople who had fomented revolution and civil strife and divided theGerman people.

. It drew up a long list of internaland external dangers that imperiled the nation. At the same time, itrested on extraordinary confidence in the ability of racial policy totransform social life.

but even then nothing made the “com-munity of fate” more compelling than “the conviction that therewill no longer be future for Germany after a lost war.”

“Ifonly the good old days would come back again, just one more time.Why do we have to have this dreadful war, which has disrupted ourpeaceful lives, broken our happiness, and dissolved all our big andlittle hopes for a new house into nothing?”

crowds acclaimed the reestablishment of amass conscription army, the Wehrmacht, recalling for observers the“August Days” of 1914. Again socialists conceded: “For the over-whelming majority, 16 March is the definitive end to a shamefulpast, much more so than 30 January 1933; the day marks ‘the dawnof a new age.’” All this patriotic hoopla mattered; Versailles hadleft deep wounds, and, anyway, Germans were apt to be “childishlyproud of their army.”

heexplained in tears that her two sons had fallen in battle and the bal-lot had been their voice. 61The text precisely captures the way many people thought of Ger-many: as the tenacious underdog finally asserting its rights.

the reports indicate that “workers not only wereunfree . . . but that most of them felt they were unfree, exploited,discriminated against and the victims of an unfair, class-ridden soci-ety.” Even during the boom years of 1937–39, “signs indicated thatNazism was further losing ground among workers.”

Interweaving economic opportunity with the dangers thatmight prevent it, whether it was the threat of air attack, the pres-ence of “asocials,” or the power of Jews, Winter Relief and air-de-fense campaigns made the premises of the people’s community tan-gible and persuasive

Propaganda displays of bombs andbombers, and the destruction they could wreak, revealed the ex-posed, trembling body of the nation, which the Nazis claimed toprotect through a nationwide program of air defense.

sincediscussions about Jewish suffering frequently switched to the sub-ject of German suffering: “Versailles” had taken the “opportunitiesfor life” away from Germans, who were now “completely under-standably” fighting back on behalf of their “own sons.”