IN THE DECADES THAT immediately followed the end of the Second World War, there was a general consensus that Nazi Germany was a police state. Its all-encompassing apparatus of surveillance and control allowed the individual citizen little freedom of thought or action. The view that what principally characterised the Third Reich was the total destruction of civil freedoms and the rule of law in what the German political scientist Karl Dietrich Bracher called 'the German dictatorship' in his classic book of that title, went together with an emphasis on the top-down nature of decision-making in the Nazi regime, putting Hitler at its centre in what came to be known as the 'intentionalist' approach to the study of Nazi policy, in which things were seen to have happened because the Nazi leader wanted them to.' From the late 1960s onwards, however, this interpretation began to be pushed aside, as a new generation of historians began to explore the inner contradictions and instabilities of the Third Reich's system of rule. Local and regional histories uncovered a wide and changing variety of popular attitudes towards the Third Reich and its policies. This research emphasised by implication ordinary Germans' relative freedom of choice to resist or not to resist, and thus restored an element of voluntarism to their relationship with the Nazi regime.

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What implications, finally, does this conclusion have for the task, if we wish to pursue it, of reaching a moral judgement on these people's behav-iour between 1933 and 1945? As Neil Gregor has recently pointed out in a critique of what he calls 'the voluntarist turn' in historical studies of the Third Reich, reaching a moral judgement does not require that all those who lived under the Third Reich 'were faced with completely free choices, the outcomes of which were determined only by their own personal convictions, moral codes, or desire for blood'. 4 'Human agency', as Tim Mason pointed out, is defined or located not abolished or absolved by the effort to identify the unchosen conditions' under which it is exer-cised. What we have to recognise in this context, hard though it may be, is the absolute centrality of violence, coercion and terror to the theory and practice of German National Socialism from the very outset.