Note: all underlines or italics within quotes are the authors’ own unless otherwise stated
Nazi Germany is often thought of as the epitome of a totalitarian regime, with omnipresent terror, enforced from above, implementing the government’s will. This image has influenced how historians analyse the period, and has created a historical and historiographical debate between those who see Nazi terror as totalitarian, revisionists who challenge this argument, and post-revisionists seeking to synthesise the two views to find a more balanced appraisal of terror in Nazi Germany.
This essay explores the debate by analysing the different arguments and comparing them to primary sources to test their credibility. Ultimately, the post-revisionist ‘middle way’ between totalitarianism and a self-policing society will emerge as a more nuanced and convincing argument. This is not to dismiss the role of terror in Nazi Germany, but an acknowledgement that both top-down terror and bottom-up complicity were needed to facilitate the extreme levels of repression seen during the Nazi dictatorship from 1939 to 1945; specifically, the idea of terror as more significant in the partnership than complicity, but both working together to create extreme levels of repression, is perhaps the closest historians have got to explaining the nature of terror in the Third Reich. Indeed, some may argue that the eagerness with which some people supported the regime implies a new understanding of totalitarianism, whereby popular collaboration enabled the creation of extreme terror that characterises a totalitarian regime.
In order to understand this debate, context about the Nazis’ terror structure is needed. Hitler rose to power in January 1933 after a successful election campaign, and immediately set about securing his position through terror. Opposition parties were outlawed, trade unions were suppressed, and the Sturmabteilung, the Nazi paramilitary force that threatened Hitler’s policy of ‘legality’, was eliminated as a challenge to his authority. This secured the ascendency of the SS-police terror infrastructure and was an ominous precedent for what was to come. During the following years, dissent was suppressed, with ‘preventative custody’ being used to arrest political, social, and religious ‘enemies’ and send them to newly opened concentration camps. The Gestapo, established in 1933 and consolidated under Himmler in 1934, and associated organs (such as the SS and concentration camps), became the principal methods of enforcing Nazi policy on the domestic population through terror. By 1939, the Nazi state had established a ruthless network that effectively suppressed dissent.
Scholarship on Nazi terror appeared soon after the war. Originally published in 1951, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism describes the police structure as the “sole organ of power” that enforced uniformity through terror, to the extent where it “succeeded in cutting the moral person off from the individualist landscape and in making decisions of conscience absolutely questionable and equivocal.”[1] This shifting of the concept of ‘good’ from objective to subjective allowed the Nazis to implement any policy they wished to, and suppress anyone who stood against them. She further argues that totalitarian regimes “demand unlimited power”, which could only be secured if “literally all men, without a single exception, are reliably dominated in every aspect of their life.”[2] This would imply that terror in the Third Reich was omnipresent in everyday life to the point where people’s decisions were influenced by the threat of the Gestapo and terror superstructure. This is supported by the account of a political prisoner who, after the liberation of Buchenwald, collected testimonies from other survivors. According to him, there was “no German who was not aware that concentration camps existed” and “no-one who did not fear them.”[3] This first-hand account of a political dissident who was targeted by the Nazi regime, and indeed his gathering of additional perspectives, reliably supports the idea that the terror that the state inflicted on ‘enemies’ was pervasive.
True, this source discusses the camps, and not the police structure, but the inter-connected nature of the terror system means that all terror agencies together played a part in creating the atmosphere of terror prevalent in the Third Reich. This is reflected in the diaries of Victor Klemperer, who recorded that “Frau Pick attempted suicide a second time, and this time successfully” due to a “fear of ill-treatment by the Gestapo during the transport, perhaps also fear of unknown Theresienstadt.”[4] This may be a singular example, but it explicitly shows that the Gestapo and camps had such a reputation of fear that it drove people to suicide, and is illustrative of the terror that even the threat of the Gestapo created. No form of resistance or dissent was tolerated; the Gestapo’s treatment of the Weiße Rose shows how ruthlessly resistance was crushed. The members published anti-Nazi pamphlets condemning the regime during the war, for which the leaders were condemned by the People’s Court and executed. Another example is that of Elise and Otto Hampel, who conducted a quiet propaganda campaign against the regime by leaving hundreds of postcards around Berlin, calling for civil disobedience and sabotage. They were caught by the Gestapo, publicly tried in the People’s Court, and executed in 1943, showing how all subversion was publicly eliminated. [5] Whilst these may be singular examples, they show how the state created an atmosphere of repression and terror that seeped into all areas of society, inducing historians to argue that the terror imposed on Nazi society was indeed totalitarian.
Arendt may be a philosopher, meaning her expertise as a historian may be somewhat limited, but historians have supported her totalitarian interpretation. In an early expression of his view, Richard Evans notes “the absolute centrality of violence, coercion and terror” to National Socialism “from the very outset” of the regime.[6] Indeed, he argues that terror was not merely applied to “despised and tiny minorities of social outcasts”, but rather to the “great majority” of their “fellow-citizens.”[7] Thus, according to Evans, universally applied terror was essential to the preservation of the dictatorship and the creation of a totalitarian society.
Evans later elaborates on his views in the Third Reich trilogy, writing that “everything that happened in the Third Reich” took place in a “pervasive atmosphere of fear and terror, which never slackened and indeed became far more intense towards the end.”[8] This repression can be seen when Clemens von Galen, Bishop of Münster, gave a series of sermons criticising the euthanasia programme Operation T-4. Priests who distributed copies of it were arrested, and Galen himself was intimidated by the Gestapo; his sister was arrested, but she escaped. This story is repeated across the country; Bernt Engelmann recalls in his memoirs that his local minister, Pastor Klötzel, was taken into protective custody for “misuse of the pulpit”, including his membership of the Confessing Church and the Pastors’ Emergency League, two anti-Nazi clerical organisations.[9] Other examples of political repression include the arrest of Communists in occupied territories; in October 1941 alone, 1518 people were arrested for “opposition” and 7729 for “ceasing to work”, labels that belie the political nature of their arrest.[10] This terror was not just political: homosexuals were arrested for their ‘deviancy’ because, in the eyes of the state, their sexuality threatened the reproductive efficiency of the so-called master race. Evans recounts the story of “H.D.”, who is arrested and tortured, sent to person for three and a half years, and then re-arrested and sent to Buchenwald.[11] Whilst this is a singular example, across the Reich, between 5,000 and 15,000 gay men were sent to concentration camps, half of whom perished there.[12] Society was monitored by the Gestapo, and all ‘deviancy’, even in the private sphere of the bedroom, was not tolerated. This supports the argument that the Nazis’ terror was implemented from above, even creating a totalitarian society in which all transgression, political or social, was not tolerated.
In the occupied territories, terror was equally if not more all-consuming; Mary Fulbrook writes that, in Poland, “SS units systematically rounded up and killed those whom they considered potential enemies or undesirables.”[13] These included “members of the Polish nobility, left-wingers and many Polish Jews” who were “simply murdered after the invasion of Poland.”[14] This systematic eradication of perceived enemies of the regime speaks of terror enforced from above, as an occupied population was cleansed of its dissidents and ‘undesirables’ by an invading regime. This terror is markedly different from that seen within Germany proper, as the vast majority of people neither anticipated the regime change nor wanted it, and the majority of people in the newly occupied territories fell into the category of racial minority or enemy, unlike in Germany. However, many people in occupied territories did collaborate with the Nazis; some historians argue that, for the ethnic Germans in Poland, “occupation appeared to be anything but foreign rule” as they benefitted from the incoming racialised discrimination.[15] Furthermore, many groups, such as Ukrainian nationalists and right-wing Poles, worked with the regime because they shared a “common ideological language” of antisemitism and anti-Sovietism.[16]Even so, the ethnic cleansing of Poles, Slavs, and other minorities precludes overwhelming collaboration from these social groups, implying that these and many other people experienced terror at the hands of the occupying regime. Thus, in occupied territories such as Poland, some people collaborated with the regime – especially if their interests aligned – but many others felt top-down repression at the hands of the occupiers.
This ‘top-down’ approach was developed by Raul Hilberg, whose argument posits that the Holocaust was implemented from above by the Nazi state and bureaucracy, using the terror superstructure. He argues that “the German bureaucracy” decided to “destroy, utterly and completely, the Jews of Europe”, pointing to a top-down process of repression enforced by increasingly radical state machinery and bureaucrats.[17] An example of this would be Adolf Eichmann, a bureaucrat who was responsible for the deportation and eventual deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews, first from Austria, and then the occupied territories. Hilberg’s interpretation is supported by the Wansee Protocol, which shows that the state planned the “final solution” of the “Jewish question” from at least the early 1940s.[18] We must remember that, as a source coming from the Nazi state, and Heydrich being ordered to formulate this plan by Göring, it is in the authors’ interests to present the Final Solution as a fail-safe pre-determined plan for extermination. Nevertheless, the concrete and highly detailed nature of the plans suggests that these were pre-existing and merely unveiled and solidified at the Wansee conference, belying earlier plans for extermination that would support Hilberg’s state-driven argument. Furthermore, a prisoner in the Warsaw Ghetto recorded that the Germans had “conceived and planned the extermination with exactitude, precision, and devilish shrewdness.”[19] Whilst his interpretation is framed by his life experiences as a victim of the Nazis, which would present them as powerful and terrorising from on high, it offers valuable insight into how the state’s terror was perceived to function. Therefore, Nazi terror could be considered totalitarian as it was enforced onto society by an increasingly radical bureaucracy that escalated antisemitic violence into genocide.
Hilberg is supported by Ian Kershaw, who posits that the result of people “working towards the Führer” was “the unstoppable radicalisation of the 'system' and the gradual emergence of policy objectives closely related to the ideological imperatives represented by Hitler.”[20] This saw zealous Nazis implementing increasingly radical policies they thought aligned with Hitler’s plans, which supports Hilberg’s thesis of an increasingly radical bureaucracy and adds a layer of analysis to the ‘top-down’ argument, whereby bureaucrats implemented terror from above to please their leader. In another work, Kershaw affirms that “the Nazi regime was a terroristic dictatorship – in a literal sense, a terrifying regime – which knew no bounds in the repression of its perceived enemies.”[21] This is supported by a bystander, who witnessed inmates at Stutthof “being hounded to work” by SS women “carrying whips” whilst she watches on, and opines that “feeling sorry for them was all we could do, nothing more.”[22] This source details Nazi terror on two levels: firstly, it shows that the inmates themselves were subject to extreme levels of terror at the hands of the SS. Secondly, it shows that bystanders felt they couldn’t step in to help victims because of the terror the SS inspired. True, she writes that “after all we too were having to work”, which would imply that she felt some level of moral equivalency with the prisoners; in her mind, they had to fulfil their tasks, as she did, which would imply that she would not have intervened even if she could have. However, the presence of the SS, and the fact that she writes she “could” do “nothing more” for the prisoners, would imply that she felt she could not help them due to her own fear of the SS and the terrifying consequences for her. This suggests that eyewitness accounts support Kershaw’s view that terror in Nazi Germany was unequivocal and absolute.
However, Kershaw maintains that denunciations remained a way of working towards the Führer; denunciations of jealous neighbours and doctors rushing to nominate people for the euthanasia programme are examples of people eagerly collaborating with the regime in order to fulfil what they believed Hitler expected of them.[23] Thus, Kershaw introduces a more nuanced ‘dual’ approach, in which both top-down bureaucratic radicalism and popular eagerness to collaborate with and ‘please’ Hitler created a society in which terror was imposed from above, but supported through complicity from below.
This argument is taken further by Robert Gellately, whose revisionist interpretation attempts to show that Hitler established a dictatorship through gathering support from the majority of the German people and not through imposing terror from above. He terms this a “plebiscitary dictatorship” that aimed to build a social consensus which was both fluid and active, and argues that the Nazis did this by reducing unemployment, overriding the Treaty of Versailles and appealing to Germany’s Imperial ‘glory days’.[24] Thus coercion was highly selective, and terror was not universally enforced; instead, society became ‘self-policing’, with denunciations becoming essential to the Gestapo’s success. Gellately goes on to write that denunciations “were crucial to the functioning of the Gestapo. We know that 26 per cent of all cases began with an identifiable denunciation, and this must be taken as a minimum figure.” [25] Thus terror was not totalitarian by Arendt’s standards, and was in fact maintained from below by ordinary people’s complicity. This is supported by Engelmann, who recalls a New Year’s party where, in reply to a Nazi toast, “God save our Führer!”, a man replies quietly, “and us from him!”[26] This man is later arrested by the Gestapo and killed in a camp near Esterwegen, denounced by a medical graduate, Dr Heinz, who was a member of the German Student League, a devoted group who became spies and informers. This may be one example, and of a particularly zealous Nazi informer (and thus might not be fully representative of the general population) but it is a first-hand account showing how people denounced others and, through the fear of this, other people kept silent, creating a self-policing society. Indeed, Engelmann continues that the Gestapo was an “omniscient secret police” that only “grew” over time, and details another example where Frau Meinzerhagen was threatened with denunciation by her neighbour because she woke him up from his afternoon nap.[27] This is reflected throughout Germany on a national scale; of Jewish survivors surveyed by Johnson and Reuband, nineteen percent recalled being spied upon by neighbours, fifteen percent by fellow pupils, five percent by co-workers, and eight percent by the police.[28] Thus, forty-seven percent of survivors recall being spied upon, but this says nothing about those who didn’t survive, where the number was undoubtedly higher, as a larger proportion would have been denounced for them to be sent to concentration camps. Further, thirty-nine percent of these spies were ‘ordinary people’, not the police, supporting Gellately’s argument for a self-policing society in which normal people helped to maintain the regime through surveillance and denunciation. Therefore, arguably Nazi Germany became a self-policing society in which denunciations created an atmosphere of terror from the bottom up, facilitated by the actions of ordinary people.
Other historians, however, have criticised Gellately’s stance; Claire Hall, a post-revisionist, has argued that Gellately “moved the argument on from the 1950s' totalitarian view of nazi [sic] Germany” but created a “revisionist overstatement” by exaggerating the significance of denunciations.[29] She concedes that “a police state does require some degree of co-operation from society”, but that ultimately “Nazi Germany was not a self-policed state” as the Gestapo acted as “both a reactive and proactive agent of repression”.[30] Thus, in her criticism of Gellately’s argument, Hall positions herself between those that think that Nazi terror was fully totalitarian, and revisionists who argue that Nazi society was self-policing. This ‘middle way’ is perhaps more nuanced than either extreme, allowing for an understanding of both terror and denunciations as a means of maintaining political power. Indeed, the figures mentioned above suggest that, if forty-seven percent of survivors were spied upon, a similar amount, to their knowledge, were not. This would suggest that just over half of the survivors interviewed experienced terror directly from the state, and just under half experienced the effects of a ‘self-policing’ society. Although this is not perfect, it seems to support Hall’s argument for a middle path in which terror was more significant, but denunciations also played a role in ensuring the suppression of ‘enemies of the Reich’.
This middle way is developed by Eric Johnson, who argues that both terror and complicity were required to effectively suppress dissent and create the atmosphere of terror present in the Third Reich. He writes that the Gestapo “was not all-knowing, all-powerful, and omnipresent”, meaning that “Nazi terror relied heavily on the complicity of the ordinary German population.”[31] However, he counterweights this with the reminder that some “underestimate and obscure the enormous culpability and capability of the leading organs of Nazi terror, such as the Gestapo” and “overestimate the culpability of ordinary German citizens”.[32] This means that, for Johnson, “some Germans were far more guilty than others”, clearly delineating between ordinary people and the agents of terror organisations.[33]
This analysis can be applied to both lower-level agents and their superiors, meaning that the higher up the ladder you climbed, the more complicit you were in the regime’s repression. An example of this would be Reinhard Heydrich, who was Chief of the Reich Security Main Office between August 1940 and June 1942. This gave him responsibility for the repression that was seen throughout the Third Reich, making him much more culpable than an ordinary person who, scared of reprisals, denounced a neighbour for listening to foreign radio stations. This also speaks of a spectrum of complicity, perhaps challenging the question of whether or not ordinary people were complicit by arguing that everyone was, to differing extents. This differentiation is seen in the example of Albert Emmerich, who witnessed the execution of Jews but, when asked if he would spread the word, said no, because “then it would have been our turn.”[34] Emmerich is complicit, yes, because he witnessed the execution of Jews and kept his silence. However, even though his silence facilitated further executions, the people actually committing these acts were far more to blame than him. Further, the terror of seeing the execution and being threatened with the same also acted as state-driven terror, forcing Emmerich to keep his silence. This example is illustrative of the spectrum of complicity that Johnson puts forward, challenging the innocence/complicity dichotomy. This means that terror was both top-down and bottom-up in the Third Reich, relying upon the actions of the state and the silence of citizens to reach the extreme levels seen during the Second World War. Thus, Johnson challenges both totalitarian historians and revisionists to forge a nuanced post-revisionist view of Nazi terror that accommodates for the complexity of human reactions to terror.
In their book The Gestapo, Carsten Dams and Michael Stolle also argue that both terror and denunciations together were necessary for the regime to suppress dissent. Although “the broad scale of denunciations certainly played its part in the innumerable misfortunes of the Nazi state’s victims, the active participation of organised [sic] state and party units and apparatus was more decisive.”[35] Therefore, along with Hall and Johnson, they argue that the regime relied upon both denunciations and terror, but that the latter was more important in suppressing dissent. They also critique the totalitarian argument, as the Gestapo’s “intentional self-image” reinforced its reputation as omniscient, and failure to see this means that a historian has bought into the Gestapo’s own propaganda.[36] Furthermore, the accounts of the persecuted depict a “strong, powerful Gestapo” by their nature, when in fact, it too was fallible and relatively small compared to other regimes’ secret agencies, such as the KGB and Stasi.[37] Indeed, the Gestapo was numerically small, with only forty-thousand agents for the entirety of Germany and huge cities like Hamburg having between forty and fifty.[38] This would suggest that much of the Gestapo’s reputation as the enforcer of totalitarian terror came from its projected image, and contemporaries who themselves were being persecuted had their judgements clouded by their personal, visceral fear of the Gestapo. Indeed, a contemporary later recalled that “denunciations weren’t even talked about. It was so taboo, you didn’t do that. From little on, you did not fink on your friends.”[39] Being interviewed after the fall of the Third Reich, he is perhaps aiming to present himself as an honourable person who did not facilitate the regime’s crimes by denouncing others. Nevertheless, his account suggests that the regime’s terrifying reputation meant that people were too scared to talk about certain subjects. This is a singular example, but if extrapolated suggests that many people didn’t talk about certain topics because they feared the consequences. This implies that the Gestapo was supported by denunciations and complicity, but its primary function was the terrorising of the population into submission and silence.
The question of Nazi terror is complex, and perhaps no historian can provide a definitive answer as to how far it was truly totalitarian. This essay has examined key theories concerning Nazi terror, from state-driven to popular approaches, and has compared them to source material, evidence, and statistics, in order to weigh up their credibility. All present valid and highly researched viewpoints, but the most convincing are ultimately those that take a more balanced, post-revisionist ‘middle path’, like Hall, Johnson, and Dams and Stolle. Their arguments appreciate the fact that both terror and complicity were needed for the Nazi dictatorship to function as it did, but they tend to weigh the activities of the terror apparatus as more important to the successful suppression of dissent. This is not to say that Nazi terror wasn’t all-consuming for many people – such as minorities and perceived enemies of the state – but that it often wasn’t aimed at ‘ordinary’ people, perhaps because the vast majority of them complied willingly with the regime. Thus, in my view, the arguments of the post-revisionists are more convincing because they appreciate that both terror and denunciations upheld the regime, but state-driven terror was more significant in this partnership.
Returning to Arendt’s definition of ‘totalitarian’, it describes a regime where the concepts of good and evil are manipulated by the state to the point where something objectively evil is considered good; for example, the murder of a Jew, heinous to everyone else, is praiseworthy to a Nazi. This was done through terror, yes, but also through indoctrination and by drawing upon long-standing nationalist and antisemitic sentiments latent in German society. These latter methods would induce people to denounce others who were seen to disobey, as the denouncers would view them as a challenge to the new world that the regime was trying to create. This is similar to the post-revisionist argument, where firstly terror, but also complicity, are both necessary to the regime. Therefore, perhaps the question is not of terror and complicity, but rather of a new understanding of totalitarianism, whereby both terror and ordinary complicity, even eagerness to participate in suppressing dissenting voices as treacherous, facilitated the creation of an atmosphere of terror so pervasive that it changed the very character of good and evil.
Callum Tilley has just completed his 1st year of a BA in History at Durham University (University College)
Notes: [1] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London, Ed. 2017), p. 549; Ibid., pp. 592-593 [2] Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 598 [3] Eugen Kogon, Der SS-Staat trans. Lesley Sharpe and Jeremy Noakes (Munich, 1946), pp. 331–3, from the Birkbeck archive, source no. 94, available from: http://www.camps.bbk.ac.uk/documents.html (last accessed 16th March 2023) [4] Victor Klemperer, The Klemperer Diaries 1933-1945 trans. Martin Chalmers (London, Ed. 2000), entry from 20th August 1942, p. 567 [5] See the appendix ‘The true story behind Alone in Berlin’ in Hans Fallada, Alone in Berlin (London, Ed. 2009), p. 589 [6] Richard J. Evans, ‘Raleigh Lecture on History: Coercion and Consent in Nazi Germany’, Proceedings of the British Academy 151 (May 2006), p. 81 [7] Ibid., p. 81 [8] Richard Evans, The Third Reich in Power (London, 2005), p. 118 [9] Bernt Engelmann, In Hitler’s Germany; Everyday Life in the Third Reich trans. Krishna Winston (London, Ed. 1988), pp. 52-54 [10] Richard Evans, The Third Reich at War (London, 2008), p. 365 [11] Ibid., p. 537 [12] Evans, The Third Reich at War, p. 537 [13] Mary Fulbrook, A History of Germany 1918-2008; The Divided Nation (Chichester, 2009), p. 80 [14] Ibid., p. 80 [15] Klaus-Peter Friedrich, ‘Collaboration in a "Land without a Quisling": Patterns of Cooperation with the Nazi German Occupation Regime in Poland during World War II’, Slavic Review, Vol. 64, No. 4 (Winter, 2005), p. 725 [16] Ibid., p. 717 [17] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New Haven, Ed. 2003), p. 6 [18] Anson Rabinbach and Sander Gilman (eds.), The Third Reich Sourcebook (California, 2013), p. 752 [19] Rabinbach and Gilman, The Third Reich Sourcebook, p. 778 [20] Ian Kershaw, ‘'Working Towards the Führer.' Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship’, Contemporary European History, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Jul., 1993), p. 117 [21] Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship (Bloomsbury, ed. 2015), p. 241 [22] Walter Kempowski, Haben Sie davon gewusst? trans. Lesley Sharpe and Jeremy Noakes (Munich, 1999), pp. 107-8, Birkbeck archive, source no. 100, available from: http://www.camps.bbk.ac.uk/documents.html (last accessed 28th March 2023) [23] Kershaw, ‘Working Towards the Führer’, p. 117 [24] Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford, 2002), p. 2 [25] Robert Gellately, ‘The Gestapo and Social Cooperation: The Example of Political Denunciation’ in Neil Gregor (ed.), Nazism (Oxford, 2000), p. 254 [26] Engelmann, In Hitler’s Germany, p. 50 [27] Engelmann, In Hitler’s Germany, p. 52 [28] Eric Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, What We Knew; Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany (London, 2005), p. 296 [29] Claire Hall, ‘An Army of Spies? The Gestapo Spy Network 1933-45’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Apr., 2009), p. 248 [30] Ibid., pp. 264-265 [31] Eric Johnson, Nazi Terror; The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (New York, 2000), pp. 483-484 [32] Johnson, Nazi Terror, pp. 483-484 [33] Ibid., pp. 483-484 [34] Johnson and Reuband, What We Knew, p. 248 [35] Carsten Dams and Michael Stolle, The Gestapo; Power and Terror in the Third Reich (Oxford, Ed. 2022), p. xiii [36] Ibid., p. 180 [37] Ibid., p. 180 [38] Geoff Layton, Democracy and Dictatorships in Germany, 1919-63 (London, Ed. 2015), p. 165 [39] Johnson and Reuband, What We Knew, p. 145
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