[xyzelement]

It occurs to me that anti-semitism is a disease that ultimately destroys its host.

If Germany "simply" wanted to win WW2, it should have cultivated its Jewish scientists (and by the way, 100K Jewish soldiers served their country in WW1) instead of eradicating them as per this article. Not to mention, diverting scarce wartime resources towards the program of concentration camps and ethnic extermination is not just pure evil - but strategically stupid.

It seems very clear that Hitler and his friends hated the Jews more than they wished for some positive outcome for Germany. This pattern repeats throughout history including in the modern day.

Ultimately, once you start optimizing for your hatred vs your love (of your own people, for example) you're going to make decisions that doom you.

[arp242]

From a Nazi perspective, what you're saying makes little sense. It would be similar to "we should enlist Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh in the army, because they've shown to be excellent at bombing stuff". That would be silly because these people and the organisations they associate with are considered a corrupting influence. In the Nazi view, Jews consisted a corrupting influence.

"Hitler and his friends hated the Jews more than they wished for some positive outcome for Germany" really misunderstands the world-view of the Nazis, and what Hitler did and didn't believe.

Anti-Semitism came rolling out of 19th century racial science; many people self-described themselves as such. As in: "against the Semitic race" (as opposed to the Aryan race), in the same way someone might describe as "anti-" any number of things today.

A number of organisations in the late 19th century carried the label (e.g. Antisemitische Volkspartei in Germany, or Antisemitic League in France), and a number of elected candidates from other parties were explicitly and proudly self-described anti-Semitic.

From outside the Nazi world-view, it of course makes a lot more sense. A lot of the Nazi rhetoric isn't even internally consistent and it was all a load of bollocks. But I don't think you can so easily separate Nazi-ism and the second world war.

[greedo]

Anti-Semitism as a 19th century development doesn't seem historically accurate. While anti-Semites in the 19th century glommed on to racial theories as backing for their hate, the origins of anti-Semitism are millennia old.

[adastra22]

It’s true in a very strict sense: before the 19th century it was called Jew hatred. “Antisemitism” was an attempt to dress it up in a veneer of science.l, and that does date to the late 19th/early 20th centuries.

[woooooo]

As a modern, industrial phenomenon about specifically jews as an ethnicity its unique.

People generically hated every religion that wasn't theirs for millenia. The idea of hating a Semitic race after God was pronounced dead is different.

[arp242]

It's not; anti-Semitism as we know today is very much rooted in racial science (well, "science") of the 19th century. Before that it was an anti-religious thing: anti-Judaism, which was a markedly different and similar to Anti-Catholicism, anti-Protestantism, and things like that.

Especially in the context of the Nazi ideology, this really matters. Recall that the Nazis killed more Slavs than Jews, who were also considered racially inferior, and the plan was to kill many more. Nazis treated the Danish, Dutch, French, English, etc. much better (no mass executions of prisoners of war, and the occupation of those countries was markedly different from the occupation of Slavic countries).

[tptacek]

There's a lot of weird things in this comment, but the weirdest is the claim that antisemitism is a 19th century innovation; Google "expulsion of the Jews from" and see where it autocompletes for you. Similarly: pogroms in the Pale of Settlement were not motivated by (and predate) 19th century race science.

[Kranar]

No one would dispute that hatred towards Jews existed for 1000s of years, but I think you're mincing words here and being somewhat uncharitable. The kind of anti-Semitism that was based on an innate racial inferiority rather than based on religion and culture was very much a 19th century development and it was that specific form of hatred towards Jews that was widespread across Europe and America rather than an opposition towards Jewish customs and beliefs.

Indeed the term "anti-Semitism" was coined to reflect the shift in hatred towards Jews from one rooted in culture and religion to one root in race. The very fact that you acknowledge that pogroms prior to the 19th century were not based on race suggests that if you had just taken the time to actually understand what was being said you could have avoided your confusion.

[adamwk]

But I don't think that's true either. See: the Inquisition where even converted Jews weren't safe

[mistermann]

> Indeed the term "anti-Semitism" was coined to reflect the shift in hatred towards Jews from one rooted in culture and religion to one root in race.

It's kind of interesting how any such distinctions have been essentially eliminated. Nature is very mysterious.

[mmorriso]

While the impact on Jewish individuals was the same, it's true that Nazi style antisemitism focused on them as a racial group (Their ancestry), whereas previously they were targeted as a faith group (What they believed).

Your example of the Pale actually makes the point; Converting to Russian Orthodox actually released you from the rules imposed on Jews within the Pale. Conversion wouldn't save you from Nazis.

[wolf550e]

Eh.

Russian folk wisdom says "Жид крещёный - что вор прощеный. Веры нет" - "A converted Jew (slur) is like a forgiven thief - no faith/trust".

And in later times, "бить будут не по паспорту, а по морде" - you'll get beaten up on your face, not on (according to) your identification papers, a play on words meaning if you look Jewish, it doesn't matter that your papers say otherwise.

[arp242]

I didn't claim that "antisemitism is a 19th century innovation", I claimed that Anti-Semitism in the sense of "against the Semitic race", as I described in my previous comment, is a 19th century invention. A distinction I made to describe a specific part of the Nazi world view.

This is not "weird thing", it's a mainstream view that I got from mainstream Jewish authors on the history of Jews. But hey, maybe those are also weird *shrug*

And your extremely condescending attitude is not appreciated.

[tptacek]

So, I didn’t read you that way, and, fair enough. But that’s still not true. Antisemitism was racialized in Spain, too, and I think you can find sources for earlier strains. And all “scientific racism” will of course stem from the 1800s, along with science itself.

[FdbkHb]

> Google "expulsion of the Jews from"

Hatred of a people based solely on religion while despicable has a different nature from racial hatred.

If you had googled "expulsion of jews from" you would notice there were many times they were allowed to stay if they converted (at least, give the appearance of). The Marrano during the times of the Spanish Inquisition is a notable example.

But if you are a jew in the era of antisemitism, there is nothing you can adopt to not be a jew. In the eyes of racists, you will always be a jew and the object of their hatred.

So, yes, 19th century antisemitism has a markedly specific nature that doesn't compare to the past.

[bsder]

Um, please explain The Merchant of Venice. c. 1600 in an England which basically had no Jews.

Or the Edict of Explusion c. 1290.

Or the Jews being under the direct whim and jurisdiction of the king. c. 1066

I can go further and further back ...

Anti-semitism is old.

[arp242]

Again, anti-Judaism is not the same thing. This is just "normal" religious persecution that has been around since forever and that many (if not all) religious groups have experienced at some point or another. Does this matter? Well, in the context of discussing Nazi world-views it does.

None of this is especially controversial among mainstream Jewish historians, as far as I know.

[reissbaker]

I think you're trying to draw a hard line distinction where only a blurry evolution exists. While antisemitism in the 19th and 20th centuries had some unique characteristics that co-evolved with other forms of racism, antisemitism existed before the 19th century and there are clear evolutionary roots e.g. "Jewish badges" [1] that date back to the 1100s, which the famous "Jude" badge from the Nazi era was a continuation of.

I don't know of many mainstream Jewish historians who would agree that antisemitism didn't exist prior to the 19th century. They would agree that racial antisemitism developed largely during the 19th century alongside pseudoscience about race in general, but that religious and economic antisemitism has existed for over a thousand years, and that the latter two also informed the development of the racial version. [2] For example, the Rhineland massacres in 1096 are generally considered to be antisemitic [3] and part of a sequence of historical mass murders of Jews that lead to the Holocaust, despite Europe not then having a clear concept of race.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_badge

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland_massacres

[greedo]

This is splitting hairs in an attempt to minimize both anti-Semitism and the acts of the Nazis.

[greedo]

But you're assuming Nazi ideology was coherent, when it clearly wasn't in almost anything. The "racial" anti-Semitism was merely a fig leaf provided by quack science of the times.

And yes, the Nazis viewed the Slavic peoples as "Untermensch", but didn't harbor as much animus towards them. They were simply in the way of the Nazi expansionist policy of Lebensraum. Whereas anti-Semitism was extremely widespread through German society and further inflamed by the Nazis.

And no, "anti-Semitism as we know today is very much rooted in racial science" is not accurate one bit. The majority of today's anti-Semitism is purely religious in nature. Oh, some white supremacists might try to invoke some bullshit the racial inferiority of the Jews, but the real hate is religious in nature. Combine that with anti-Zionism (which is often a mask for anti-Semitism) and it all falls apart.

And it's incredibly disingenuous to trot out the usual arguments about how the Nazis killed more Slavs than Jew, etc etc. These are part of the playbook that attempts to minimize the Shoah.

Finally, the bit about how the Nazis treated the Western countries much better, EXCLUDES the Jewish citizens of those countries.

I'm pretty sure you're not arguing in good faith at all, but you seem to be wanting to keep this going.

[arp242]

> But you're assuming Nazi ideology was coherent

I very explicitly said it's not: "A lot of the Nazi rhetoric isn't even internally consistent and it was all a load of bollocks"

Are you even reading what I'm writing? Your unhinged ridiculous accusations which directly contradicts what I wrote suggests you're not.

I did not mention or talk about contemporary antisemitism. Don't try to twist things.

And yes, obviously "they treated the Dutch, English etc. better" excludes Jews. It also excludes communists, and gays, and some other groups. This is a boring "gotcha" type argument.

[greedo]

You literally said:

"It's not; anti-Semitism as we know today is very much rooted in racial science (well, "science") of the 19th century."

So yes, you were talking about contemporary anti-semitism.

[paganel]

Anti-semitism wasn't a major factor in European history until the (second-ish part) of the 19th century, for the simple reason that the European Jewish population wasn't that big of a presence for hundreds of years. Once the Enlightenment and French Revolution happened and once the Jewish population started to get some rights (which gets us into the 19th century) then things changed.

Yes, I do know about the very unfortunate anti-semitic acts carried out in German cities as part of the First Crusade, but that kind of proves my point, starting with the 1200s-1300s the Jewish population throughout (what would later be called Western) Europe stopped being a thing.

[reissbaker]

Jews not "being a thing" in Europe from the 1200s until the 1800s is so preposterously wrong it's hard to know where to start. The Spanish expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, with the subsequent very famous Spanish Inquisition, might be a decent place to start reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Jews_from_Spain

Spain is about as West as you can go and still be in Europe...

And where do you think the Jews in the 1800s in Europe came from? Of course, they'd been there all along, except in the countries that actively ethnically cleansed them like Spain.

[paganel]

I didn't count the current territory of Spain up until the late 1400s as "proper" Western European, in fact most of the histories of Spain do not dwell on the history of Al-Andalus in the 14th century for too long, if at all.

> Spain is about as West as you can go and still be in Europe...

Geographically, of course, but in this type of historical discourse geography isn't the ultimate decider. Notice how Northern countries like Norway, Sweden and even Finland are considered as part of "Western Europe", even though there's only about a 3-hour drive between Sankt Petersburg and the Russian-Finnish border.

[reissbaker]

This is once again so wrong it's incredible. History of Spain not including 1492, the year Columbus set sail? Really? The beginning of European colonialism of the Americas is ignored by "most of the histories" of Europe and Spain?

By the way, historians refer to 1400s as the 15th century, not the 14th century. FYI. That's how century counting works.

And there was no Al Andalus at that point, either; the last trace of Muslim rule, the Emirate of Granada, had lost nearly all of its territory before surrendering their final fragment in January of 1492.

[chuckadams]

I wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition.

[arp242]

There have always been Jews in Europe. Martin Luther famously spent quite some time ranting about them.

All I said is that the shape of antisemitism was different before the 19th century, and that this distinction matters. Not that persecution of Jews didn't exist before that time, and certainly not that there were not Jews in Europe.

Whether it's a major factor in European history is somewhat subjective. It's certainly a major factor in Jewish history.

[seabass-labrax]

I wouldn't agree with the assertion that it wasn't a major factor. The repeated violence against Jews and their expulsion from various areas is not a singular event, but forms a significant common thread across European history. It has happened so many times that the idea of persecuting Jews became a part of European culture, and thus gave the Nazis their inspiration for the Holocaust.

The massacre at York in 1190 took the lives of about a hundred Jews, whilst the population of York at that time was somewhere around 7000. As a proportion of the population, that makes it as bloody, possibly considerably more so, than the Holocaust within their respective scopes. I would posit therefore that antisemitism was a very major factor, but the decentralised, often pastoral political geography of pre-industrial Europe makes it harder to see the extent of that antisemitism.

[paganel]

I did include the caveat "starting with the 1200-1300s", and I did have the expulsion of the Jewish population from England in mind when writing that down.

After that I wouldn't say that there were"repeated" violences against Jews (when it comes to Western Europe) for the simple reason that there were almost no Jews around against whom to have that violence anymore. All that changed starting with the 19th century.

[seabass-labrax]

For the scope of England, I think you are probably right. However, Wikipedia lists a number of events that occurred in western Europe well after the crusades, including one in Spain (referencing the Jewish Encyclopedia):

> https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/10442-martinez-f...: The great massacre occurred at Seville June 6, 1391, when several thousand Jews were killed and many forced to accept baptism.

If an estimate of Seville's population at that time at around 90,000 is to be believed, that would make the relative brutality equivalent again to the York incident.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1021985/thirty-largest-c...

This is rapidly exceeding my own background knowledge on the topic, but it looks to me as if re-settlement by Jews (and then subsequent violence against them) was a pattern all through the middle ages.

[WolfCop]

Yes, “very unfortunate”.

[te_chris]

Not to mention that Hitler took a lot of influence from Southern USA racists/Jim Crow. The idea of racial purity was thoroughly globalised by the time the Nazis took power.

[mrguyorama]

American's LOVED eugenics for giving them an excuse to keep believing what they already wanted to believe. Other southerners took the approach of letting their pastors tell them that "it was god's will that the negro serve us" and that keeping slaves was outright the morally upstanding thing to do with "savage races"

We also used eugenics as a "science" to make laws that allowed us to non-consensually sterilize "lesser" people.

We never actually dealt with this hateful undercurrent in our society. Large sections of america still believe in a hierarchical world order where their "type" of person is at the top and other "types" of people are less deserving. It has been holding us back and ruining our country for 250 years.

[antod]

You're mixing up the unintended consequences with the intended consequences. Persecuting jews (and others) was an intended consequence and started a lot earlier than WW2. Hitler wanted war, but just to the east - not a world war with the west. He was convinced the French, British and Americans wouldn't care enough to resist him. WW2 was an unintended consequence.

[littlestymaar]

This explanation fails to describe what happened in 1940: when Hitler invaded Poland, UK and France declared war, but they stayed in France and Belgium so if Hitler only wanted war on the East, he could very much have it due to the reluctance of the colonial powers to attack. He deliberately chose to invade France.

(And it was an overwhelming success by the way, his demise came from the betrayal of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (and the even stupider move by the Japanese to attack the US at Pearl Harbor): had the conflict settled, or at least stick to a stalemate, in the positions of May 1940, WWII would have ended as a complete German and Japanese success.)

[neffy]

It's an interesting question, and on the face of it, yes, the Nazi's probably would have won with the Jewish people on board. Similar arguments can be made about their invasion of Russia, given the support they would have received against Stalin without their accompanying genocide.

The big but in this, is whether they would have gotten there to begin with. Picking on the Jews was a huge cash/property grab, which was used to buy their support with general German population. Are the Nazis still the Nazis without the genocide? Do they even end up wanting to start a war?

[usrusr]

It was so much more than just a cash/property grab. It was also an accidental ideology hack to plaster over the unsolvable conflict between working class and capitalism.

Short reminder that by name, it was a socialist workers' party. But a socialist workers' party fooling themselves into believing that all strife of the working class could somehow be blamed on the subset of capitalists who happened to be Jews. And by doing so, they offered capitalists who were not a lifeboat to survive the upcoming revolution, survive with all their status and wealth, or more even. A revolution was coming, and they would rather have it brown than red. Many of the moneyed class despised Nazis as the uneducated roughlings that they were, but begrudgingly accepted them as lesser evil compared to red socialists. Before, in almost all cases I guess, eventually getting pulled in by all the cheering. It may sound absurd to us, but Nazism ran on positivity. "Be part of it, it will be awesome" (unless of course you happen to be one of those we need as common enemies to unite against, please be a good victim and just shut up while we remove you from existence. Don't worry, we'll find a substitute for you to push out next when you're gone)

Without antisemitism to distract the working class, nazism would have never grown beyond a group of sad drinking buddies with bad pick-up lines. The cash/property grab happened much later, about a decade after antisemitism enabled the unlikely alliance of (some) capitalists and (some) workers that carried them into power.

[nahuel0x]

You are right on the point. Also note that antisemitism was the ideological way to unify the image of a nebulous jewish german finance class with bolshevism, painting them as both sides of the same jewish conspiracy coin. This way the hatred to the capitalist class was diverted to hatred against bolshevism. Antisemitism was what made that ideological manoeuvre possible.

[greedo]

The only way the Nazis would have "won" is if they developed the atomic bomb before the US. Even with many of the emigres that helped with the Manhattan project, that might not have been possible. The Soviets were never going to surrender, same with the British, and once the Americans started supplying Britain with arms, they were safe. And then when Hitler declared war on the US, it was game over. The industrial might of the US alone was simply too powerful.

"You have horses! What were you thinking? Dragging our asses half way around the world, interrupting our lives... For what, you ignorant, servile scum!"

[neffy]

I think the cash/property grab aspect was there from the beginning, and even in the 20´s you see it manifesting itself on a local level with intimidation etc. Klemperer's, I will bear witness, diaries from Dresden in that period are a fascinating read on the day to day impacts. Then as you say, it escalates culminating in Kristallnacht.

But I think they would never have succeeded if it hadn´t been for the 1929 US crash, and the subsequent withdrawal of loans from Germany by the New York banks in response, which pushed Germany over the edge for the second time.

As to how Germany wins WW2, or at least fights into a Cold War like stalemate. Germany continues the Battle of Britain for another month, rather than switching to bombing London, the RAF runs out of operational pilots (rather than newly trained pilots with 8 hours flying experience who have yet to fire their guns, they had plenty of those.). Or just that the men who made up the Polish and Czech squadrons that had the most kills in the Battle of Britain don´t make it across Europe to fight on for the RAF.

Britain falls, the London government retreats to Canada, Hitler can now turn his attention to Russia, without having to fight a two front war. They might still have lost that one, Russia is big, and would presumably have been backed up by the USA and the remains of the British Empire, but the atom program in Germany isn´t that far behind, and they do have the V3 by 1944, so it hopefully? ends up in some kind of Cold War by the 1950´s. (Essentially the storyline of several alternate histories out there. and the SS-GB series.)

[greedo]

It's possible that had the Germans forced a surrender or armistice upon Britain, that the US never gets involved. Domestic sentiment against US involvement was pretty strong and took all of FDR's political skills to overcome for Lend Lease etc.

I'm not sure that Britain could fall though, especially with Lend Lease. The Luftwaffe, while able to initiate the BoB, had surprising losses in the invasion of France, Poland and the Low Countries. Given how the Luftwaffe rarely rotated pilots out of combat squadrons to train new pilots, these losses were difficult to replace, and probably were one of the reasons for the success of the RAF. Also, none of the German fighters really had enough range to escort their bombers over the UK. And the RN was a huge impediment to any invasion of Britain that I doubt could be overcome.

[neffy]

Lend lease was signed in March 1941 - Battle of Britain was Autumn 1940. It's hard to say how much the RN could have done, it's not that far across the channel, and it would have been potentially a very broad front.

Another fun read are Churchill's war diaries (all 6 volumes), where he reveals one of the first things he did was write a begging letter to Roosevelt to send 100,000 rifles to arm the home guard amongst others. Then as now, the UK was woefully ill prepared for war. They did manage to get copies of the "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster out though - it was printed to be displayed after a successful invasion.

[greedo]

Oh there's no doubt that the British Army was too small and had suffered tremendous losses before evacuation at Dunkirk. But the Germans had no transports that could have crossed the Channel, especially when challenged by the Royal Navy. And the Royal Navy got an infusion of 50 destroyers from the US (in exchange for overseas basing rights). These weren't the latest and greatest ships, but they were symbolic of the US commitment to Britain. This preceded Lend Lease.

There were several necessary prerequisites for invading Britain. First was destroying the RAF. Without absolute air supremacy, no invasion could be contemplated.

Second was destruction of the Royal Navy. Despite some success in attacking Scapa Flow with U-boats, the Kriegsmarine was simply incapable of challenging the Home Fleet, much less the combined might of the overseas fleets. The only hope would be from Luftwaffe bombers, primarily JU-87 Stukas. Unfortunately for the Germans, these suffered great losses in the Battle of France, as well as during the initial stages of the Battle of Britain. The Home Fleet was a considerable force in 1940: 4 battleships, 3 battlecruisers, 2 aircraft carriers, 20 cruisers, 25 destroyers, 23 submarines, and numerous smaller craft.

Finally, once ashore, the invasion force would have to overcome the British Army and the Home Guard. While these forces were seriously depleted, the Empire could have brought enormous numbers of troops from India, Egypt, and other regions. That this was never seriously considered might indicate that the British Army wasn't as weak as Churchill would have liked to portray.

I loved reading Churchill's diaries as a kid, but later on realized how much of them were self-aggrandizing and not as accurate as one would hope. Still a fascinating insight into one of the most important leaders of the 20th Century.

[myth_drannon]

Anti-semitism(or any other type of systematic hate) is not a disease but a symptom of a declining, rotten society. It's also wishful thinking that any society that engages in genocide will self-destruct. Plenty of historical examples exist where it continued to survive and collapsed for other reasons.

[Anotheroneagain]

That is, ironically, racist, as it sort of implies that jews are somehow the only ones capable of doing science.

[atq2119]

It's really not. It leaves open the possibility that others could fill in the gaps, given enough time. Their wasn't enough time, and path dependence matters.

[Anotheroneagain]

It doesn't seem like Germany suffered any setbacks in this regard. In fact it seems that this dispute was a major cause of antisemitism, rather than its result.

[mrguyorama]

This actually comes up a lot in the "alternative history" community, who like to imagine ways "the nazis could have won", and in the end, they always come down to "If the nazis had just been less nazi, they could have survived".

Nazism was society built upon hatred and lies, including lying to yourself. When you are no longer connected to reality in such a way, you miss very clear details, things like "Hey maybe we can't win against everyone at the same time"

[sebastian_z]

Indeed, that is what Sebastian Haffner argues in The Meaning of Hitler: In December 1941 he abandoned the goal of world conquest in favour of the Final solution–exterminating the Jews [1].

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

[jandrese]

The counterpoint is that Hitler wouldn't have been able to seize power so easily were it not for the clear "other" to demonize. That's just human nature. Fascists always need some identifiable enemy to rally against and there was no shortage of antisemitism already in the country to work with. This is why they also picked up on hating Gypsys and homosexuals. Fear mongering is one of the most efficient ways to gain power, but is a double edged sword since you can only ramp up the rhetoric if you want to keep your coalition together, the very force that brings you to power distracts you from your actual objectives.

[arp242]

Hitler didn't exactly seize power "easily"; it took an attack on the German parliament (possibly orchestrated by the Nazis themselves), a paramilitary force intimidating opposition parties (and at times directly preventing them from voting in parliament), and an assassination campaign.

In the end it's a "what if?" type question, but I think a decent case can be made that anti-Semitism was not key to the Nazi success, although it was part of it. The NSDAP was far from the first or only anti-Semitic party, even at the time. But it was the only major fascist party in Germany at the time. In other countries fascist parties managed without such strong explicit anti-Semitism, Italy and Spain being the most notable.

In my reading of events of the 20s and 30s, it was much more of an ideological battle and disappointment with the ruling class than anything else. This is also why the communist party did well at the time, and one reason the Nazis spent so much effort fighting them even though there are more similarities than both liked to admit.

Or in brief: most people voted mostly for the fascism, not anti-Semitism. The basic concept of "strong leader to get shit done" has been and remains popular in various forms for a long time, especially in times of hardship.

[greedo]

Hitler's ascension to power was aided and abetted by the ruling class which thought he would be a tool they could control. And the Reichstag fire was just a pretext for Hitler to assume complete control; the Nazis were already in control of the German government at this point.

And Hitler did seize power quite easily. After the Beer Hall Putsch was put down, he was given extremely light treatment for treason. Upon his release from Landsberg, he was funded by the industrialists and aristocracies who were afraid of a communist/socialist government.

If you've read Mein Kampf or listened/read many of Hitler's speeches from 1924 through his seizure of power in 1933, there's one thread that runs through them all; anti-semitism and blaming the Jews for all of Germany's woes.

[usrusr]

Without the "your enemy is not capitalism, it's the Jew!" ploy that entire "working class brownshirts beat up communists on behalf of industrialists" thing would not have happened at all. Antisemitism was the keystone that kept their self-contradicting ideological mess from collapsing before they even got a foot on the ground.

[kromem]

Well, "most people" didn't actually vote for the fascism. The ticket was split enough that it ended up being minority rule.

[arp242]

"Most people" of the people who voted for the NSDAP, obviously.

[actionfromafar]

Ah the fine line between fascist:

“if you died you were weak and deserved to die”

vs nazi:

“you are weak, you deserve to die”

[selimthegrim]

In the end, Hitler basically stated the first axiom about Germany, so it really wasn’t a difference

[timeon]

Yes he wouldn't have been able to seize power. But what is power for? If he had not sized the power he would be able to see his grandchildren grow.

[huytersd]

You have to tap into some strong basic instinct to get unquestioning massive support from the majority of the populace. In most cases, like in the case of Nazi germany, it is/was tapping into tribalism. Doing that builds up the in group’s self worth, imbues them with a feeling of superiority and generally makes them feel like they are living better, happier lives. Having someone to look down on is probably the easiest way to feel successful and happy. This isn’t rational thinking.