While we easily see the brutality of totalitarian regimes such as fascist Italy and the USSR, I believe that Ayn Rand more correctly developed a fuller picture in which the nominal rulers live by the understanding that those who would have mankind on a leash must realize that a leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends. It may seem incongruous to us that the Nazis developed sophisticated reporting mechanisms for public opinion polling. Dictatorships, no less than democracies, claim to be expressions of popular will. The excerpts below are from a 16-page paper.
The Public Opinion Reports of the Nazi Party by Aryeh L. Unger. The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Winter, 1965-1966), pp. 565-582. (Dr. Unger is an Instructor in Government at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.)
Modern totalitarian rulers find it more necessary and in some ways also more difficult than autocrats of earlier vintage to secure reliable and comprehensive information on the state of public opinion in their domains. … In the circumstances, totalitarian rulers seek to develop to the utmost such channels of communication as modern technology and totalitarian political organization place at their disposal.
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As part of their “leadership of men,” or Menschenfuehrung, Nazi Party organizations from the level of the local group (Ortsgruppe) upward were required to submit periodic “Political Situation Reports”(Politische Lageberichte). The reports dealt with a wide variety of subjects, but their principal concern was with developments in the realm of public opinion; in fact, internal party communications often referred to them simply as “Morale Reports”(Stimmungsberichte). At the end of 1938 a detailed classification scheme was evolved which divided the contents of the situation reports under thirty headings-and eighty-two subheadings-ranging over such subjects as Morale Survey of the General Political Situation, Propaganda, State Enemies, Justice, Commerce and Crafts, Social Questions, and Armed Forces.
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A major concern of the party's situation reports was to expose deficiencies and malpractices of official organs, with the contention, not always explicit, that they jeopardized popular morale. Almost every report included some such criticism ...
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Inquiries and intervention often followed upon the receipt of such complaints from subordinate party organizations. The concern of the leadership to uncover and, where possible, to remedy even relatively insignificant manifestations of public life that threatened to impair popular morale is demonstrated by the many cases in which the Party Chancellory itself followed up information contained in the weekly reports of the regional leaders, either with requests for further details or with corrective action where it was deemed appropriate.
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A far more irritating and persistent source of embarrassment to the regional leaders, and indeed to the Party Chancellory, was the reports of the security services. The latter had no vested interest in concealing manifestations of popular discontent. Menschenfuehrung was not the responsibility of the SD. Indeed, if anything, the efficiency and skill of any individual agent or head of a regional security branch were judged by the number of “subversive statements” and “hostile acts” they managed to detect. ... Thus, where the reports of party organizations were heavily weighted in the direction of overestimating the caliber of popular morale, those of the security services may well have been weighted in the opposite direction.
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It is difficult to say which of the two channels of information had greater influence on the policies of the Nazi leadership in general and on its public opinion policies in particular. On the face of it, one would expect that the SD reports were regarded as the more reliable guide to popular morale, if not by the Party Chancellory then at least by the majority of other Reich agencies that had access to both. But the circle of Nazi leaders who were allowed insight into the reports of the SD contracted progressively as the contents of the reports became more disturbing. “The SD report is full of mischief,” reads Goebbels' diary entry for April 17, 1943.
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Between the poles of silent negation and vociferous affirmation there lay a range of neutral subjects, from the distribution of consumer goods to the quality of air-raid precautions, which, within limits, were discussed freely and frequently. And what the people thought of these and related matters was clearly of some importance to the regime, if only because it could assist it in adapting its propaganda accordingly. However, while information from both these sources was relatively freely accessible to local party organizations, it suffered significant distortions in its progress to the summit of the party hierarchy. Some of these distortions were incidental and might have been eliminated with a more scrupulous approach to the task of reporting. Others were deliberate and endemic. For the party leaders could not be at one and the same time both the manipulators of public opinion and its impartial observers.
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