As Robert Gellately of Florida State University has highlighted, Germans under Hitler denounced their neighbors and friends not because they genuinely believed them to be a security threat, but because they expected to selfishly benefit from doing so, both financially, socially and psychologically via a pavlovian need to be rewarded by their masters for their obedience.
"I started to read these files about all the victims in just one region of Germany that the Gestapo had processed," Gellately says. "It would have taken a large force of secret police to collect information on so many people. I needed to know just how many secret police there really were. So I asked an elderly gentleman who would've lived through those times, and he replied, `They were everywhere!'"

That was the prevailing myth.

"But I had evidence right there in my hands that supported a different story," Gellately explains. "There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn't the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors."

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As he was uncovering who was acting as the Gestapo's unsolicited agents, he also began to discern what motivated neighbor to inform on neighbor. The surviving myth told the story of informers who were motivated either by a commitment to the Third Reich or by a fear of authority.

But the motives Gellately found were banal--greed, jealousy, and petty differences.

He found cases of partners in business turning in associates to gain full ownership; jealous boyfriends informing on rival suitors; neighbors betraying entire families who chronically left shared bathrooms unclean or who occupied desirable apartments.

And then there were those who informed because for the first time in their lives someone in authority would listen to them and value what they said.

There seems to be no good option.  I think I would rather err on the side of "something" than "nothing," unfortunate though the phrasing was and untrustworthy the organization who came up with it.

...And applauding the government for sticking its long nose into the Washington Redskin matter....

Excuse me... I gotta go read all the nutritional information on my breakfast cereal and decide if I can have one lump or two in my decaf...