While researching my doctoral dissertation on the origins of the Nazi political police, the Gestapo, I had occasion to review a sampling of investigative case files from one of the major offices, the Gestapostelle Wurzburg, the Gestapo office that covered the major German city of Wurzburg and its environs. Many Gestapo files had been burned in the final days of World War II, as the Nazi enforcers belatedly tried to cover their tracks, but, fortunately for my research, the Wurzburg files had escaped the bonfires.

One can only hope that freedom of speech may prevail, once and for all, and not only in Germany.
We usually associate the Gestapo with mass actions, the roundup of Jews or gypsies or communists, but its core functions included building prosecutable cases against ordinary citizens involving the commission of political crimes. Many of these crimes involved criminalized speech, a vast and ever-expanding category during the Nazi years. The Wurzburg files allowed a rare glimpse into such cases.
One such case has haunted me down through the years. A young workman had been reported to the Gestapo for repeatedly making jokes about Hitler and other prominent members of the regime. The young man didn’t belong to any of the usual suspect classifications and worked at an armaments factory, so, instead of simply being tossed into jail, his case was actually investigated. The two Gestapo officers who took on the case quickly became skeptical. The young man had just dumped his girlfriend for another woman, and the girlfriend’s mother was the source of the complaint. In other words, an obvious case of using the system for payback.
The Gestapo men were, in fact, veteran criminal investigators who’d joined the Gestapo as a means of getting ahead, a not uncommon career move among police officers under Nazism. Their file notations indicated a real aversion to pursuing the case, so much so that, after interrogating the young man, the girlfriend, and the mother-in-law, they consi...