The book The Nazi Seizure of Power sounds like a fascinating read. From one of the customer reviews at Amazon:
…[The Nazis] were masterful at marketing at the local level. They tailored their messages to the specific audiences they were trying to attract. So if they were holding a meeting for workers in a particular location, they would bring in a specific speaker with a specific message. If it was businessmen, the message and speaker would be entirely different (and often entirely contradictory). They would tell whoever they were talking to whatever it was they thought they wanted to hear. And they measured success by the number of people at events and the number of paid party memberships. It is a fascinating lesson in manipulation and lying. You get to understand why 35% of Germans voted Nazi in the last free elections.
[The author] illuminates how daily life changed post 1933 for the average person. How the Nazi party stopped caring about what people wanted to hear and started becoming a top down organization. The nature of social discourse changed fundamentally. Instead of social activities being undertaken voluntarily and because they were fun and of interest to the participants, everything became to be centered on Nazism. As clubs and organizations were Nazified, most disappeared as people stopped having fun at them and began resenting being forced to do things. Block leaders were avoided, heil Hitlers were done unenthusiastically or not done at all, people stopped talking to each other as much and some even stopped going out altogether except when they had to attend party events. Resentment bloomed as capable people were replaced by incompetents and thieves merely because they were long time party members. Allen really gives you a good sense of how daily life became stifling post ’33.
I have often thought in recent years that the most important course of all that could be taught and should be required in American schools (but is not) would be “how tyranny takes over.”
The Nazis rose to power in part because they were popular with the people; I’m not saying they weren’t. But they were not all that popular. For example, they never won a majority of the votes of the German people while elections were still free. One of the lessons of the Nazi rise to power it is important to learn is how a movement that is not supported by a majority of the population—such as, for example, leftism in the US—can nevertheless gain power in a democracy through democratic means, by conniving, lying about their intentions, ruthlessness, violence, threats and intimidation, cluelessness of their opponents about what they are up to, and a little bit of luck.
I’m no historian or expert on the Nazi takeover of Germany, but I’ve certainly read far more about it than the average person. And yet it is only recently that it has occurred to me that so much of what I’ve read focuses on the uniqueness of the German people: their unique racism, or rage, or obedience to authority, or attraction to demagogues, or militarism, or any number of other bad characteristics they exhibited. And no doubt there’s some truth in all of that; each people on earth is unique in its combination of national traits.
But at this point it seems to me it would be far more instructive to study the German people’s relative ordinariness, and the ruthless brilliance of the steps the Nazis took to quickly establish total control.
Another book[s] I haven’t read but probably should are the wartime diaries of Victor Klemperer, journals he kept secretly that chronicled the Nazi regime’s rise and then its effect on everyday life in Germany. The ax fell very quickly, as this Amazon reader review notes:
The real shock was how fast the Nazis were able to move as soon as Hitler managed to obtain the Chancellorship! I had always had the sense of something of a linear progression of oppression from Hitler coming to power to the end of the war. It has been something of a shock to have my nose rubbed in the reality of how fast the Nazis got out of the gate, so to speak!
Hitler became Chancellor on 30 January 1933. By 7 April Victor Klemperer was motivated to write, “The pressure I am under is greater than in the war, and for the first time in my life I feel political hatred for a group (as I did not during the war), a deadly hatred. In the war I was subject to military law, but subject to law nevertheless; now I am at the mercy of an arbitrary power.”…
By the 15th of May Victor writes, “The garden of a Communist in Heidenau is dug up, there is supposed to be a machine-gun in it. He denies it, nothing is found; to squeeze a confession out of him, he is beaten to death. The corpse brought to the hospital. Boot marks on the stomach, fist-sized holes in the back, cotton wool stuffed into them. Official post mortem result: Cause of death dysentery, which frequently causes premature “death spots.”
Before this, I didn’t realize at a gut level that things got this crazy before Hindenburg died in 1934! “Mein Kampf” is a blueprint for tyranny and this book is an eyewitness to that tyranny””in a civilized Western nation no less!
It goes without saying why I think this is important.
Here’s an excerpt from another comment at Amazon:
One thing I took note of was, at least from what Klemperer saw, perhaps half the German population sympathized with the Jews, if only in a quiet way. He writes about meeting ardent Nazis and people who try to make his life miserable because of his Jewishness, but more often he notes expressions of sympathy from strangers, shopkeepers slipping forbidden food into his basket, that sort of thing. He even wrote about a “Star Club,” a group of Aryans who went around giving friendly greetings to Jews on the street who wore the yellow star, just to show them not everyone hated them…The problem was, at least in Klemperer’s case, most of the people who sympathized with him did so in a very quiet, unproductive way: they were either too apathetic or too scared to take real action and provide serious, tangible aid. As some wise person once said, all that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
Still think that Germans were so very unusual?
Klemperer was protected from death because he was a Jew who had converted to Christianity (although his conversion didn’t seem to matter that much to the Nazis) and who was married to an Aryan woman (that, the Nazis cared about). Klemperer was a professor and had been a journalist when young, so he knew how to write. Here’s a sample of his style (also taken from one of the comments at Amazon):
For the moment I am still safe. But as someone on the gallows, who has the rope around his neck is safe. At any moment a new “law” can kick away the steps on which I’m standing and then I’m hanging.
From another comment at Amazon:
Klemperer reports that most Germans initially viewed Hitler as a loud-mouth provocateur but tolerated him as preferable to the threatening scourge of German Bolsheviks. Most expected Hitler to pass quickly from the scene. Their expectations were wrong, however, because he managed to seize power and began a campaign of eliminating his political challengers.
And here’s a comment that was written in August of 2006, years before the Obama administration:
I did come to the conclusion that part of the problem was: 1. the government spoke in slogans and lies and too many went along unthinkingly; 2. the media did not, and later was not able to, do their job; 3. the public was generally apathetic until it got to be too late.
Hmmm.
There is a sequel to Klemperer’s two Nazi-era journals, a third journal covering the postwar years of his life until 1959 (he died in 1960 at the age of 78). The title, The Lesser Evil, refers to his choice to return to his home city of Dresden (where he got his previously-confiscated house back and ended up a well-known and successful figure) and live under Communism—which he considered an evil, but a lesser one than capitalism.
Go figure.
This 2004 review of The Lesser Evil (by none other than Christopher Hitchens) takes up the puzzling question of why. Why did someone as astute, and contemptuous of Bolshevism and Communism and Marxism as Klemperer shows himself to be in his earlier diaries, not run for the hills (and the West?) after the war?:
A mixture of motives can be discerned. First, Klemperer feels that the most valiant anti-Nazis were the KPD and the Soviet Union. (That this conclusion involves some rewriting of history goes without saying.) And the VVN””the official association of victims of Nazi persecution, which he wishes to join””is quite clearly a Party front. But there is more to it than that. Deep down, and despite some memorable experiences to the contrary, he has ceased to trust the German people. In his mind, only a very strong regime will prevent the resurgence of anti-Jewish hatred that he regards as inevitable. This thought poisons even his better moments.
Well, perhaps. I don’t know; after all, I haven’t even read the book. But my gut tells me that, although that may have been part of it, it wasn’t the largest part. Klemperer had refused to leave Germany when Hitler came to power because he already considered himself old and ill, almost at death’s door, and already felt unable to start anew in a different country. So it’s hard to believe that he could have found the energy to do it after the war.
But even more importantly, throughout all the suffering of the 30s and WWII Klemperer continued to feel himself to be extremely German. What’s more, Dresden was his lifelong home, and it was located in East Germany rather than West. His house, position, and status had been taken away by the Nazis, but all were restored by the Communists.
You can’t go home again, not exactly. But Klemperer could try, and nearly succeeded. If the Nazis hadn’t been able to force him out of Dresden (until the very tail end of the war), how could he allow the Communists to do it?
