An Army of Spies? The Gestapo Spy Network 1933-45

The contemporary belief of a Gestapo spy on every corner that, in turn, helped create a veil of fear over the German people has been too easily dismissed by scholars on the grounds that the Gestapo did not possess an 'army of spies'. The image of the Gestapo as a 'big brother' figure with eyes and ears everywhere has been discredited by historians such as Robert Gellately as a nazi fabrication. Gellately's important work on denunciations successfully pushed his thesis of a 'self-policing' society operating within a 'consensus dictatorship' to the forefront of historiography, but in a revisionist overstatement he exaggerated the significance of denunciations. This article hopes to address the current debate concerning the nature of policing in nazi Germany by demonstrating that there was a regular presence of paid informers alongside denouncers, reinforcing the proactive nature of the Gestapo in repressing dissent.