Amir Weiner Getting to Know You

GETTING TO KNOW YOU 43
large numbers of local informants. Yet, in the absence of a universalist ethos,
none sought the integration of either informants or the surveilled population
as citizens. Hampered by ignorance of indigenous societies and often unable
to penetrate their information systems, the security agencies strictly observed
and institutionalized a colonial hierarchy between rulers and “deceitful
natives” on racial and often-overlapping class lines. This hierarchy, in turn,
limited the formation of a common agenda between regime and population
and between agents and local informants. 121 Similar obstacles hindered
the Nazi continental empire when it engaged with the same populations
discussed in this essay, which it approached with a contrasting package to that
of the Soviets: an outdated operational intelligence, on the one hand, and
a formidable arsenal of social-cultural knowledge, on the other. Subjecting
these societies to their racial ethos, the Nazis maintained a rigid hierarchy
that a priori excluded locals, collaborators included, from integration into
the empire’s socio-political fabric. 122 Reflecting on both systems, a young
Frenchman who witnessed the Soviet operations in person in Estonia,
offered an apt observation. “[The SS] would not have done as well,” wrote
Jean Cathala. “What fascism lacked was … a structured power in which civil
society, the political regime, the economy and repression completely overlap
and, especially, the anchoring in one state of the mentalities and customs
that had been emerging from the beginning of time. National Socialism was
incapable of filling that hiatus except with atrocities.” 123
Modern nation-states that have coped with similar situations seem to
offer a more apt comparison to the Soviet imperial nation-state hybrid.
The tale of the Israeli security services and the Arab minority in Israel
121 C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in
India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Martin Thomas, Empires
of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2008).
122 On Nazi studies in the 1930s of societies they would later occupy, see Michael Burleigh,
Germany Turns Eastward: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988). On Nazi ethnographers’ encounters with the Soviet population, see
Eric J. Schmultz and Samuel D. Sinner, “The Nazi Ethnographic Research of George Leibrandt
and Karl Stumpp in Ukraine, and Its North American Legacy,” in German Scholarship and
Ethnic Cleansing, 1919–1945, ed. Ingo Haar and Michael Fahlbusch (New York: Berghahn,
2005), 51–85. It is important to note that when the entire number of Soviet informants is taken
into account—including party, Komsomol, and trade union members, street patrol forces, and
those involved in the constant mobilization campaigns—it more than matches the estimated
5–10% of voluntary informants in Nazi Germany. On the Nazi estimate, see Gieseke, Mielke-
Konzern, 118. For an informed challenge to the overemphasis of denunciations as the primary
tool in Nazi Germany, see Johnson, Nazi Terror.
123 Jean Cathala, Sans fleur ni fusil (Paris: Albin Michel, 1981), 97.