Why did Nazism thrive in Germany?

JerryClower

Why did Nazism rise to power so quickly before and during World War 2 in Germany? Did Germany as a whole know that Hitler was killing Jews? Do you think something like Nazism will ever be able to thrive in Germany again?

cesiumfrog

Isn't that like asking whether Americans knew (after fire-bombing scores of Japanese cities and nuking Hiroshima) that their government would nuke Nagasaki? Whether they knew Bush would attack Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan without waiting for UN direction?

In your country, are people more encouraged to fly a national flag rather than to think of themselves as citizens of the world?

JerryClower

Oh, Good point.

zoobyshoe

Every biography of Hitler addresses the question of how he could possibly have come to power and the answer mostly lies in the state of chaos Germany was in after WWI. He didn't have the general support some people assume. There were substantial parties like the Social Democrats and the Communists who were a serious threat to the Nazi's power base. Hitler was more savagely aggressive than either of those parties and he eventually crushed his competitors for political power using every means at his disposal.

Hitler came off as exceptionally dedicated, organized, nationalistic, and he offered a clear cut enemy to destroy. For many people he was the "Man With The Plan" who could stop the political and economic chaos and get Germany back on it's feet, pull it out of the quagmire of post WWI chaos. With this image, he was able to acquire a large body of willing, even fanatic, followers and, once he had, he used them to beat down (often literally) his potential rivals within Germany. The first country he conquered was, really, Germany itself. The early Nazi Party was like an exceptionally well organized street gang taking over turf: Communists, Social Democrats, and Jews were cornered on city streets and beaten up.

There were widespread rumors that every German had heard.

No. I think there's an erroneous notion that there was a particularly strong strain of anti-semitism in Germany always waiting to be tapped. In fact, back then, a political party with anti-semitism as a major point of policy could have arisen in Poland, France, Russia, maybe even in the US. There was a lot of low-grade anti-semitism all over the place. Today Germany is too well fed and satisfied to find a fanatic of any ilk appealing.

That is small comfort since there are plenty of 'Nazi-like' groups all over the world, in that they're essentially violent, power hungry, and have singled out racial, ethnic, or ideological enemies to exterminate. Since Hitler there's been Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, to name a few.

SW VandeCarr

That's true. Hitler was defeated by the incumbent 83 year old Paul von Hindenburg in the April, 1932 presidential election. In Germany, at that time, the chancellor (prime minister) and cabinet required presidential approval to hold office; something Hitler had been unable to get. The Nazi Party spent millions on the election, while Hitler traveled all over Germany in an American style campaign. Hindenburg stayed home and gave a few interviews. Hitler got about 37% of the vote while Hindenburg got 53%. The party was nearly broke, and lost financial backers. The Nazis lost seats in the Reichstag later that year. It looked as if Nazi fortunes had peaked and were now receding. Hitler himself apparently thought so.

In early January, 1933 a group of politicians led by former chancellor Franz von Papen called on Hitler in Munich and proposed a power sharing deal. They were reluctant to give Hitler the chancellorship in a new government (von Papen wanted that for himself), but gave in to Hitler's demands. Faced with a majority coalition, von Hindenburg had no choice but to appoint Hitler chancellor on January 30, 1933.

http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-hitlerdemo.htm

EDIT: In the second paragraph, I'm apparently wrong about Hindenburg "being forced" to appoint Hitler. It seems that even with his deal with von Papen, the coalition lacked a clear majority. So Hindenburg could have refused to appoint Hitler chancellor as he had done in the past. It appears the old man simply caved under heavy pressure from a variety of quarters. The point is that Hitler came to power by a series of backroom intrigues by people who thought they could control him and had no expectation of what actually would happen.

zoobyshoe

Exactly. He did not get into power by popular vote. After his appointment as Chancellor he sprang what he called the "Nazi Erhebung" (Nazi Uplifting): nine months of internal terror during which all the remaining opposition leaders and spokespeople were killed or taken to the camps. After he had thoroughly intimidated all possible opposition he then held another election which he won by an overwhelming majority. No one dared vote against him at that point.

brainstorm

Someone told me that after Nazism was taught at her school, some of the kids started identifying a certain teacher as being a nazi. They had to explain to the kids that ganging up on that teacher was very similar to what nazism was about.

Although many people found national-socialism offensive as a result of depictions of nazi attrocities, it is ironic that much of the post-WWII reaction against nazism came in the form of feelings of national superiority over Germany. People identified themselves as victims or innocents on the basis of national identity, and identified nazism with Germanness, which was the same kind of ethnic stereotyping that was so offensive about nazism to them in the first place.

Ironically, when people are pointing their finger at someone else, they are often unaware or even resistant to acknowledging the same thing in themselves. To use Christian language, "the one without sin casts the first stone."

russ_watters

More to the point, imo, the very concept of Nationalism has fallen out of favor in the western world.

...though yes, general stability is key too.

DaveC426913

Just a point of order: Jews are a popular target of holocaust accounts, so many people do not know that millions of Russians, Poles, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses and myriad other groups suffered the same fate.

When accounting for these other groups, the number of holocaust victims rises well above the common "6 million" number to between 11 and 17 million.

Carry on.

brainstorm

Yet there is resistance to globalism, migration, and ethno-national integration at the global level.

Interestingly, one of the stereotypes of Jews that was pushed by nazism was that they were not loyal to any nation. I wonder if this wasn't mainly strategic to generate solidarity among different brands of nationalists for unifying Europe.

I.e. if all nationalists could be unified in solidarity against Jews, they would not fight each other, which nationalists tend to do, no?

I even think there is a similar ideology in anti-globalization against the US as the demon cultural-imperialist. This creates solidarity among distinct ethnic identity-groups in preserving cultural traditions against "globalization"

cesiumfrog

In a similar vein, one would think that if there were one group of people who should have learned from all this never to force another ethnic group into walled ghettos (and then shower them with a chemical weapon) ...

I'd like to share that opinion, do you have evidence to base it on?

brainstorm

He's right that some governments have made laws against nationalist expression as an attempt to prevent populism similar to that of nazism. I think this happens mainly in NW Europe, but it may occur elsewhere as well.

russ_watters

The existence of NATO, the EU and UN.

MotoH

Nazism is banned in Germany.

Hitler was actually a very stable man leading up to the invasion of Poland and the campaign shortly there after. Against Rommels will Hitler would ride with the troops on the front line, which gained him huge respect from the Wehrmacht. It wasn't until later that he turned into a sorry excuse for a human being.

Germans needed someone to blame for the mess, and the "degenerates" were the ones that the Nazi party blamed.

hamster143

In the western world, yes. It is alive and kicking east of Germany. Nationalism was the driving force behind the break-up of the Soviet bloc, and the cause of all major conflicts there: Nagorno-Karabakh, Yugoslavia, Abkhazia, Baltic states ... Baltic states managed to separate relatively painfully because the Soviet government was weak and let them go without trouble. (However, to this day, 20 years after the fact, ethnic Russians are still persecuted and treated as second-class citizens in all three Baltic states.) Things were particularly nasty in Yugoslavia because there was a nationalist party in each subregion (Kosovans vs. Serbians vs. Bosnians, etc. etc.) and they all refused to deal with each other nicely.

TheStatutoryApe

I've read differently. That Hitler was never particularly intelligent or good at his job but simply had drawn intelligent and effective leaders to him (or that they were using him as a figurehead depending on the source) and eventually began to distrust them and relied more on less intelligent and effective party members. He had the support of great strategists and leaders, which reflected well on him, until they began to point out the folly of his plans.

MotoH

Oh don't get me wrong, Hitler was a horrible military strategist. Rommel fought the whole African campaign with very little guidance from Hitler. If Hitler would have stayed out of the eastern front, it might have been a different story. Hitler had a lot of really brilliant men around him that did most of his work, and like you said, Hitler was the face of the organization. The big turn of Hitlers more intelligent men was around the time that Rommel came back to the European campaign, this was when Hitler was seen as the truly crazy man by his actual followers.

Rommel was actually going to surrender the Wehrmacht to the allied forces as soon as they got Hitler out of the way because he saw the war was already lost.