Conclusion

Abstract

Hannah Arendt suggests how easily threats to families can be identified as one of the important means used by totalitarian dictatorships to control the population. The situation which Arendt is actually describing is the potency of the threat of family punishment, as opposed to its actual infliction. Other totalitarian dictatorships in recent history have punished the families of opponents with far greater scope than anything done by the Nazis. Arendt suggests that the threat of such a punishment as a means of controlling a population was more valuable than its actual infliction. The words of two victims of Nazi terror, Berthold von Stauffenberg and Walter von Stülpnagel, articulate the difficulty in determining what really existed and what was feared about Sippenhaft in the Third Reich. The recorded conversation between Generals Schlieben and Rothkirch expresses the only real certainty that surrounds the concept: that during the Third Reich, in the consciousness of the public and the army, a gradually increasing sense of terror had developed amongst the German population. It has been argued here that Sippenhaft was one manifestation of this terror and that it was perpetrated by a multitude of agencies, including the Nazi Party, the Gestapo, and the Wehrmacht. The nature of Nazi terror, and how it is viewed, will be a continuing historical debate.