4 ideas
'March Violets' was the scornful name for Germans who joined the Nazi Party only after the March 1933 elections showed which way power was going. They joined for jobs, contracts and protection rather than belief, so the regime they filled was held together less by ideology than by self-interest. That made it corruptible and transactional all the way down.
In Berlin in 1936, steel magnate Hermann Six hires private detective Bernie Gunther. Gunther learns the jewels are a cover: what everyone wants is a set of papers from the same safe exposing corruption, and Göring's people and the Gestapo are also hunting them. The trail leads Gunther into Dachau to find a safecracker, which shows that an apparent ordinary crime was a proxy fight between rival power networks.
The Nazi regime appears here less as a single disciplined machine than as rival fiefdoms, like gangs dividing a city. Industrialists, Party bosses, the SS, Göring's apparatus and the Labour Front each extort, protect clients and cover up crimes. Seeing the state this way explains why official investigations go nowhere: every crime is someone's asset or someone's leverage.
Gunther can move between cops, criminals and Party officials only because he trades favours, takes dirty money and lies. Integrity under dictatorship therefore shows up as small refusals and selective loyalties inside complicity, not as clean opposition.