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JerryClower
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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?
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.JerryClower said:Why did Nazism rise to power so quickly before and during World War 2 in Germany?
There were widespread rumors that every German had heard.Did Germany as a whole know that Hitler was killing Jews?
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.Do you think something like Nazism will ever be able to thrive in Germany again?
zoobyshoe said: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.
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.SW VandeCarr said:That's true. Hitler was defeated by the incumbent 83 year old Paul von Hindenburg in the March,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 into Hitler's demands. Faced with a majority coalition, von Hindenburg had no choice but to appoint Hitler chancellor on January 30, 1933.
More to the point, imo, the very concept of Nationalism has fallen out of favor in the western world.zoobyshoe said: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.
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.JerryClower said:Did Germany as a whole know that Hitler was killing Jews?
russ_watters said:More to the point, imo, the very concept of Nationalism has fallen out of favor in the western world.
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) ...brainstorm said:it is ironic that much of the post-WWII reaction against nazism came in the form of feelings of national superiority over Germany[..] which was the same kind of ethnic stereotyping that was so offensive about nazism to them in the first place.
I'd like to share that opinion, do you have evidence to base it on?russ_watters said:imo, the very concept of Nationalism has fallen out of favor in the western world.
cesiumfrog said:I'd like to share that opinion, do you have evidence to base it on?
The existence of NATO, the EU and UN.cesiumfrog said:I'd like to share that opinion, do you have evidence to base it on?
russ_watters said: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.
MotoH said: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.
MotoH said: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.
SW VandeCarr said:During this period, some believe he contracted syphilis, and in later life may have been manifesting mental signs of late stage disease.
brainstorm said: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"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken/"the urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it.”
I agree. I think if you talk to nationalists of differing European ethnic-national identity, you will find that they continue to share an attitude of ethnocentrism which includes excluding each other. A pro-France nationalist and a pro-German nationalist may both agree that it is good for both France and Germany to exclude Islam AND each other in the interest of ethno-cultural solidarity within "homogeneous ethnic societies." This is why I don't see the politics of ethnic pluralism as anything more than a kinder gentler fascism. Some people act as if pluralist multiculturalism is the opposite of fascist national socialism but I think it's just a variation of it. The basic value is to "ethnically cleanse" people into separat(ist) societies by relegating difference to segregated macro-territories.alxm said:Doesn't really work though. Hungarians hate gypsies. Slovaks hate gypsies. But the fact that both of 'em hate gypsies doesn't really do much to mitigate the fact that they also hate each other. Their differences are simply irreconcilable since the fanatical Hungarian nationalist's dream involves Hungary owning Slovakia, and the fanatical Slovak nationalist's dream involves kicking the Hungarians out.
I am very concerned with cultural and language diversity and conservation. The frustration I have is with promoting it without falling into the assumption that culture is synonymous with racialized ethnicity. Ethnicity gets racialized when people assume explicitly or implicitly that birth and childhood socialization are the only social mechanisms for attaining ethnic identity and cultural capital. Migration is also a means of attaining these things, but it becomes more difficult when people resist recognizing that people can be multi-ethnic, and that ethnicity is acquired throughout the life course through everything from media exposure to work and other social interactions, through various macro and micro migrations. Even people who learn multiple languages often identify one language as their "own" ethnic language and others they speak as simply "second languages." Why shouldn't people see any language they speak as ethnic-acquisition such that they acquire multiple ethnic identities through learning language and other culture?Well, without endorsing xenophobia (which is a different thing entirely), I still think there are some legitimate reasons to be concerned about preserving and promoting smaller languages and cultures. They have it tough because global-market-economy makes it hard for them to compete (e.g. a Dutch-language film has a smaller market, and cannot possibly compete with a Hollywood blockbusters, which can have much higher production values and still cost less due to the economy of scale)
All of these attitudes are culturally constructed through discourse. It is very confusing to come to the recognition that cultural oversight and management are themselves forms of cultural knowledge. So ideologies about the influence and spread of Islam, Christianity, or "Americanization" are all cultural discourses that lead people to have certain attitudes and view and treat people in certain ways. In one way, anti-Islam and anti-Americanization are little more than ammunition in a culture war between EU right and left. The strategy almost seems to be a division of labor in a general xenophobic fascism. Before it was "Americans" and "Muslims," it was "Capitalism" and "Communism." Before that, it was "Germans" and "French" or maybe "British." For the KKK is it "blacks" and "jews." The underlying motive seems to be that people want to differentiate themselves ethnically from multiple identities in order to create a middle-ethnicity that serves as a hegemonic center. I believe this goes back at least to ancient Greek culture of differentiation from the barbarians to the east and those to the west. It's just a method of defining collective identity through differentiation and thereby producing cultural pressure for people to conform culturally on the basis of common identity.But a lot of these extreme-right/xenophobic/populist movements are not actually genuinely interested in that. The proof is in the pudding: They complain loudly about muslims and other foreign groups 'threatening their culture', but you'd be 100 times more likely to find an ethnic-Dutch person going to a Halloween party than to find them celebrating Ramadan! If you're actually interested in foreign cultural influences (and that alone) then the US influence is in fact much much bigger than the pressure from immigrants. But the extreme-right parties don't complain much at all about American cultural influences.
Probably intolerance and racism is the main culture that many people consider worth protecting. National socialism is essentially built on the mentality that an economy is not about productivity but about controlling the products. Once people come to see economy as mere distribution of a fixed supply of resources, they tend to fixate on 1) regulating distribution among individuals through equality or some system of meritocratic ranking and 2) increasing the ratio of benefits to beneficiaries. Intolerance and racism are means of doing #2 by reducing the number of beneficiaries who get access to available goods and services (including land/housing). It's a self-annihilating economic culture, imo.The reason is simple: They're not into 'preserving their culture'. They just use it as a fig leaf to mask their intolerance and racism. People who are into preserving their culture are the ones who join historical societies, read the classics of their literature, etc.
Maybe, but when I look at these fringe right-wing parties gaining public attention, it seems to serve as a scapegoat for all those people who basically hold the fascist national-socialist values of ethno-social solidarity in economics and territorialism but don't like to compare themselves to nazis. So these seemingly neo-nazis get chastized publicly and it makes everyone else feel moderate and anti-nazi, which prevents them from having to reflect on the similarity between their political-economic attitude and that of nazism/fascism. As I said in another post, the striking thing about post-nazi reactions to nazism is that they have often involved scapegoating of German-ethnicity, similar to the way Jewish-ethnicity was scapegoated in nazi ideology/propaganda. Somehow, hating nazism makes the haters feel superior to nazis and distinct from them, even though hate, superiority, and ethnic differentiation were the ideologies that made nazism what it was.But those right-wing-fringe parties did try to work together; they have their own voting block in the EU parliament.. It's hilariously disfunctional.. they don't get along at all.
zoobyshoe said:You might be interested in the chapter on Hitler in the book Pox: Genius, Madness, And The Mysteries Of Syphilis
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465028829/?tag=pfamazon01-20
SW VandeCarr said:I agree. Thanks for the reference. Hitler did not exhibit the classic neurological symptoms of neurosyphilis (ataxia, tabes dorsalis) and we was "crazy from the get go" in the loose sense of the word (although I don't think he was clinically psychotic until perhaps his very last days, when he was ordering massive counterattacks from his bunker by armies that no longer existed).
The big question is: How did someone like this get so much power and how did he achieve so much success before self-destructing and taking his country with him?
brainstorm said:Nationalist-socialist fascist citizenry sought a leader to give them what they wanted
Hitler was not a leader but a very strong follower
Every individual involved in any part of the systems, from officers to the wives and children of soldiers had the ability and opportunity to voice critical resistance to anything that was going on,
By "someone like this" you mean someone we both agree was essentially mentally ill by today's standards?SW VandeCarr said:The big question is: How did someone like this get so much power and how did he achieve so much success before self-destructing and taking his country with him?
I think the appeal of national-socialism had to do with the way it appealed to popular nationalism/patriotism and racism, i.e. the belief that "German Volk" were superior to other races and therefore that only oppression/sabotage of the nation could be the cause of economic problems and resultant suffering. If you read the way Hitler and Mussolini wrote about fascism and national-socialism, "socialism" refers to social solidarity among individuals of a "volk" as a sort of natural extension of direct "blood" relations. This idea of "blood" ties between people with the same national-racial identity is popularity because it promotes a biological basis for solidarity, which is of course the main interest in fascism, which views independent individualism as weak and selfish. Community strength is the goal, sociobiology of the "volk/race" is the ideology for naturalizing it, and removal of "pollutants" goes along with suppression of individuality/non-conformity. The result is lots of people who avoid dissenting from each other's will and end up with a strong death-drive as a result of self-repression in the interest of the imagined "group/volk/race."SW VandeCarr said:I'm not sure what you mean by this, but I think we established the facts earlier in this thread. The Nazis only got about a third of the popular vote in the last relatively free elections of 1932. The majority of the citizenry were not National Socialist. It's hard to say what they were after the Nazis took power, since there was only one "game in town". You played along or else.
It's easy to claim he had absolute power because he was portrayed as such, but what evidence do you have that Hitler himself, the individual, had absolute power over others? What means of enforcing his will, assuming he had an independent will, did he have over the other officers?Well, he managed eventually grab absolute power, so I would say he was a very powerful leader.
It seems clear that he was a very effective actor. I don't know if he wrote his own speeches, or if he did whether he had consultants that convinced him of which issues he should address in those speeches.It's true, he appealed to the "masses" by offering simple solutions to complex problems, and successfully blamed their misery on Jews, Communists, and even international capitalism. Few people know that the Nazis professed to be anti-capitalist, hence "National-Socialist" (nationalism+socialism). The main issue with the Communists was that they were "internationalist" and of course, part of a 'Zionist world wide conspiracy'.
It seems that everyone had their own ability to reference "Der Fuhrer" in the regime of nazism. I've worked in plenty of jobs where people do the same thing, i.e. any time they want to emphasize the importance of doing their will, they make reference to the manager who's not currently present. People would probably say to each other, "Hitler won't be happy if he hears you're doing that," etc. That way, people could draw on Hitler's strikingly angry personality to motivate others to do their will at any level.Maybe. It depends on where you stood with Der Fuhrer and how your opinions registered with his view of the world. Hitler had opinions on almost everything, and it was usually better to agree with him.
You really haven't read much about this subject, have you? The Roehm Purge made it abundantly clear that Hitler had life and death power over everyone and anyone in the Nazi party and Germany in general, answerable to no one. He could have had anyone taken out at any time: Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, anyone. He was not a figurehead. He was completely in charge and insisted on micromanaging everything from military operations to government architecture.brainstorm said:It's easy to claim he had absolute power because he was portrayed as such, but what evidence do you have that Hitler himself, the individual, had absolute power over others? What means of enforcing his will, assuming he had an independent will, did he have over the other officers?
zoobyshoe said:By "someone like this" you mean someone we both agree was essentially mentally ill by today's standards?
zoobyshoe said:You really haven't read much about this subject, have you? The Roehm Purge made it abundantly clear that Hitler had life and death power over everyone and anyone in the Nazi party and Germany in general, answerable to no one. He could have had anyone taken out at any time: Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, anyone. He was not a figurehead. He was completely in charge and insisted on micromanaging everything from military operations to government architecture.
zoobyshoe said:You really haven't read much about this subject, have you? The Roehm Purge made it abundantly clear that Hitler had life and death power over everyone and anyone in the Nazi party and Germany in general, answerable to no one. He could have had anyone taken out at any time: Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, anyone. He was not a figurehead. He was completely in charge and insisted on micromanaging everything from military operations to government architecture.
brainstorm said:Obviously some people wanted to build him up - so how do you know how much is really him and how much is propaganda imagery for the purpose of instilling terror?