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Paper short abstract:

The Nazi regime funded the construction of two cultures of observation and collection in nocturnal Berlin, terrestrial and extra-terrestrial. This paper examines the intersection of arrest culture and astronomical research under a dictatorship that sought to exploit and expand into the night sky.

Paper long abstract:

The secret state police in Nazi Berlin [the Gestapo] exploited the urban night to launch home invasions because operating under darkness minimized the likelihood of encountering resistance. Assembling lists of ‘political opponents,’ including but not limited to German Jews, communists, and homosexuals, they planned to apprehend victims in the midst of slumber, caught unaware and unable to evade detention and deportation. Darkness formed the foundation for the practice of systematically collecting innocents and served as a means to keep the extent of state surveillance and terror hidden from the wider public through reduced visibility.

At the same time that the regime was intertwining its arrest culture with a planetary cycle, it was funding research at astronomical observatories in Berlin to surveil, collect, and catalogue celestial phenomena as part of its program of space exploration. While the regime weaponized the night sky to consolidate power on Earth, so too did it “look up” with the megalomanic ambition of transforming the solar system into a future sphere of influence, of integrating it into an envisioned empire. This paper juxtaposes nocturnal cultures of observation and collection in the city in order to assess the regime’s ambitions in occupying, regulating, and expanding its authority into darkness. Examining the ways in which a political fanaticism simultaneously sought to destroy domestic and atmospheric barriers by financing night shifts at state agencies, it demonstrates that, under Nazism, the imagined idea of ‘total power’ was by no means limited to the terrestrial.