[hnbad]

Do you base this on the last "free election" that literally just had a large circle for "I want Adolf Hitler to be the Führer and sole leader of Germany" and a smaller one for "no"? Because in the last election before that[1], the Nazis didn't even get 50% of the vote and that was after heavy suppression of dissent and left-wing parties.

I don't think there were any objective opinion polls you could base this on after the point at which disagreeing with the Nazi regime resulted in a visit from the police or worse.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1933_German_federal_elec...

This was the last federal election in Germany and followed the Nazis openly attacking left-wing parties, fully controlling state propaganda, practically prohibiting all opposition parties from campaigning and literally shutting down opposition newspapers, plus staging the Reichstag fire -- and they still only got 43.9% of the vote at a 88.7% turnout.

The previous federal election only got them 37.3% of the vote at a 80.6% turnout but this was enough to get Papen and Hindenburg to form a coalition government with Hitler at the helm.

[FiberBundle]

That's just my take from reading history. I think it's the general consensus in scholars who study Nazi Germany that the Nazis had the support of the population after having gained power. Evans [1] e.g. goes into depth on this, though I, unfortunately, don't have the time now to look up any references.

[1] Richard J. Evans - The Third Reich in Power

[hnbad]

I think you're conflating different factors to create a false, but common, narrative that obfuscates the banality of the Nazis' rise to power.

The Weimar Republic was in essence Germany's first real experiment with democracy so many people in positions of power were still heavily invested in the old ways (whether directly as in the monarchists who wanted to reinstate the emperor, or less directly as in those who wanted to scale back democracy to establish a form of new aristocracy). At the same time you had communist movements trying to take democracy to its logical conclusion (but they were also split into competing factions because things like the Bolshevik revolution were happening around the same time) and a general populace exhausted from a long and failed war of attrition that had seen more death and suffering than any previous war on German territory.

The Nazis didn't get into power by winning the hearts and minds of the people, they got into power by allying with wealthy conservatives who were afraid of leftists and saw the Nazis as a natural antidote against communism. This allowed them free rein to suppress the opposition while also playing out the conservatives as too timid and ineffective because they had been unable to form a stable coalition government.

The death bed wish of Hindenburg was for Hitler to step down and restore the Hohenzollern monarchy. This was after Hitler had already become chancellor and was on his way to becoming the unchecked autocrat via the Enabling Act, which the conservatives co-signed. Hitler of course ignored this but it should tell you all you need to know about the delusions of the conservatives who enabled him.

Once the Nazis were in power, of course their support in the population grew because they claimed responsibility for everything good while creating a smokescreen of grandiose nonsense achievements, breaking ties and treaties with other countries as a show of force (which after the defeat of WW1 rekindled the national pride) and eventually "fighting back against Polish aggression" to start WW2. But at that point all political opposition had been silenced or murdered so of course people were more likely to support them. Questioning the government was not just frowned upon but became actively dangerous. And of course as the war progressed for many it became a sunk cost fallacy.

Reducing this to "actually the Nazis were popular" creates a false sense that there must have been something unique about 1930s Germans to have elected such an obvious evil as the NSDAP when in reality 1) the 1933 NSDAP still allowed for plausible deniability much like certain far-right parties do today, 2) the right (i.e. conservatives) saw the NSDAP as a stabilizing force because they saw the left as a threat to order and 3) even at their peak they couldn't get the majority of votes in a fair election.

People support institutions that do bad things if those bad things are sufficiently normalized. And a good dose of nationalist fervor or revanchism helps the medizine go down.

[FiberBundle]

I never said that the Nazis came to power by winning the majority in an election and am well aware that they only came to power as a result of a huge mis-calculation of the conservatives.

What I claimed was that the Nazis were popular after having gained power. In fact Nazi ideology even remained popular after the Nazis were defeated. Tony Judt has survey results [1] in his book 'Postwar', e.g. a majority of Germans were of the opinion that Nazism was a good idea but poorly applied. 37% in the US occupied zone said that the extermination of the Jews was warranted.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification#Surveys

[hnbad]

Yes. Propaganda works. I'm not sure what your point is.

The problem with Denazification is that it wasn't very thorough. The Allied (and US's in particular) post-war plans was to ramp up defensive capabilities for the Cold War that had slowly manifested itself during WW2. While several high ranking Nazis were executed or at least tried, some fled the country, some died and some were recruited by the victors (e.g. Operation Paperclip) it was considered more important to have "qualified people in charge" to rebuild the country than to avoid putting Nazis back in their positions of power, so back in positions of power many of them went.

Modern Germany made a big show of combatting Nazism but due to the Cold War for a long time that had to go hand in hand with combatting "communism" (e.g. banning the KPD on a legal basis that is today considered to have been largely bogus), making the messaging incoherent by failing to address the disease (protofascism) rather than the symptoms (e.g. symbology).

But my point was that calling the Nazis popular at the time is in the most literal sense survivorship bias. While most people think of the people the Nazis killed outside of Germany when they think of their victims, they also killed and displaced a lot of German residents. So even without the propaganda and the appearance of prosperity, it's iffy to call them "popular" when the people they were very much unpopular with largely died, fled or were imprisoned (and in some cases continued to remain imprisoned after the war, like those accused of homosexuality or being too left wing).

The reason I object is that Nazis (and their ideological analogues in other countries and times) aren't popular. They have to lie, kill and oppress in order to acquire and maintain power and they only become popular with lies and scams: selling a narrative of a chosen people and raiding society for a fiction of wealth. It's an utterly self-destructive ideology and requires constant purges and the designation of new enemies within.

We have culturally gained an understanding in the West that the Nazis were the bad guys of WW2. Thanks to banning their symbols in countries including Germany, and thanks to a very productive movie and television industry, especially in the US. But you will still find large minorities in many countries that would find the fiction the Nazis created about themselves appealing as long as you change the labels and avoid obvious historical details. And if you give them the right justifications, they too will likely think exterminating an entire minority could be "regrettable but necessary". That's a problem.

Sorry if I'm rambling too much. This struck a nerve because the claim "the Nazis were also popular" is too often used to suggest that the Nazis gained power through being popular (which is often used to denounce any political position that's popular as inherently worthless or dangerous) or that there was something unique about Weimar Germans making them so naive or wicked to support the obviously evil Nazis (which is often used to deflect any notion that it could literally happen here/again because we're smarter and morally superior). Modern Germany's treatment of the Third Reich tends to mix the two by insisting that "the Nazis" were all just inherently evil somehow (which means any modern politican who is politically aligned with them can't be a Nazi) but "the Germans" supported them because they were promised good things (so promising good things is deceptive and we simply can't have nice things).

[FiberBundle]

Yes, propaganda does work and I never said that there was another reason for the Nazis' popularity, though I would claim that most (or at least many) Germans at the time were attracted towards authoritarianism. It would probably have been much more difficult for the Nazis to become that successful in the US, though I could be wrong here given how an economically neglected part of the US population was drawn towards Trump.

My original post was aimed as a response to a post implicitly claiming that it was only a certain minority in Germany that sympathized with the regime. Whether that sympathy was due to successful propaganda or not isn't really the point when refuting that original statement, as is the way the Nazis came to power. From what I've read (and you also seem to agree with this) the majority of Germans supported the nazi regime while in power.

It would be interesting if you had any numbers for the number of displaced or killed German citizens. There were about 500 thousand Jews in Germany before 1933, most of which probably either left Germany or were murdered. People from the political opposition who had deeply seated beliefs that wouldn't have been subject to propaganda and who just continued to live in Germany in fear, were probably the largest percentage of those that didn't support the Nazis, but I don't have good numbers here. I would assume those would constitute at least 25% and at most something like 40% of the population, but those numbers are speculative. It does seem reasonable to assume that a majority of those who voted for the other conservative parties in the last election would have come to support the Nazis and those plus the people who actually voted for the Nazis already constituted a majority of the German population.

[wwtrv]

Nazis weren't really that popular until the beginning of WW2, just that the opposition parties hated each other even more and were unable to unite in opposition (a bit like the Russian revolution).

The conquest of France was an unifying (and legitimizing) moment when even the people who were passively skeptical of the regime mostly got behind it (actual opponents were almost all in exile or imprisoned by that point)

[watwut]

By the time WWII started, opposition was closed in literal concentration camps. There was heavy suppression of oth democratic and communist parties from the moment Hitler took power on 1933.

Also, the calls for opposition to unifie miss who the opposition was. As in, it was composed of both pro democratic and actual communist party that took directions from Stalin. Who were pro dictatorship too at that point.

I mean, it is popular talking point from from tankies. But, social democrats not unifying with actual communists despite Hitler propaganda claiming they are the same makes sense.