Why did People vote for Hitler? - TIKhistory, 17 December 2019https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ydx72tT552kMinute 18:21 – 28:50
During the recession, people looked for alternatives to the old liberal, capitalist, and conservative policies and parties. They no longer wanted laissez-faire policies—they wanted a strong state that could take control of the economy and resolve the crisis. So, they cast their votes for the party that offered the strongest and fastest solution to the economic depression. The people (as usual, unaware of basic economics) believed that the solution to bad socialist economic policies was dictatorship and even worse socialist economic policies.
As a result, some of them supported the Communist Party, but especially the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). The Nazis achieved their most spectacular success in the September 1930 general election, when they gained an additional twelve seats in the Reichstag, bringing their total to 107. That was a 95-seat increase overnight from the previous election in 1928—before the Great Depression had begun. They overtook the Marxists of the KPD and became the second-largest party after the Social Democrats. This put them in a strong position to advance further in the next election.
As Evans explains, the Marxists in the KPD gained support from unemployed workers. However, the Nazis attracted votes from employed workers, including the self-employed. These people feared the Bolsheviks would take over and seize their hard-earned property.
"Where the traditions of the Social Democrats or Communists were strong, unions were powerful, and the labor movement culture was active and well-supported, the cohesive strength of socialist communities generally proved resistant to the appeal of Nazism. In other words, the Nazis reached parts of the working class that the traditional left-wing parties had failed to reach."
Reference: The Coming of the Third Reich, "The Crisis of Democracy"
The Nazis also drew support from white-collar workers, shopkeepers, small business owners, farmers, civil servants, women, and first-time voters. They even gained a share of professional and bourgeois votes. This has led historians to conclude that the Nazis had broad appeal—and indeed they did. But this broad appeal has also confused historians. If the Nazis were popular across all social classes, then what kind of party were they? Worse still, the Marxist explanation—that Hitler’s party was a bourgeois party—is unsatisfactory because middle-class votes were also split.
"Middle-class voters, still disgusted by Nazi violence and extremism, turned to breakaway right-wing groups… increasing their representation in the Reichstag from 20 to 55 seats, but a large number also flocked to the Nazi Party in September 1930…"
Reference: The Coming of the Third Reich, "The Crisis of Democracy"
Evans also shows that even as late as 1932, the Nazis had yet to receive significant support from large industrialists, who were disappointed with the vagueness of Hitler’s economic policies. In fact, contrary to popular belief, the Nazi Party was largely funded by its grassroots. Even during the Depression, people had to pay admission to hear Nazi speakers, and that’s where much of the money came from. This is why the KPD was largely unsuccessful—they appealed to the unemployed, and the unemployed had little money to offer the Marxist Party.
Reference: The Coming of the Third Reich, "The Crisis of Democracy"
(Marxists were broke, attracted the broke, and had bad economic policies. Clearly, there has to be a better explanation for the rise of the Nazis.)
"Hitler’s Germany is unique among all regimes in human history in at least one respect: serious historians agree in judging it as a catastrophe without redeeming features. No other regime, not even the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, can claim such a dubious distinction."
Reference: Hett, The Death of Democracy, p. 12
(This is a historian who needs to do more research. Serious historians have judged several regimes to be total disasters—the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, Cambodia under Pol Pot, or Mao’s China. So I’m not sure why he says otherwise unless he’s trying to downplay the hundreds of millions of deaths caused by those regimes. Anyway—)
But that’s where the agreement ends. Hitler’s Germany is a kind of historical Rorschach test: we project onto it whatever we believe to be the worst imaginable political feature. What you see depends on who you are. These projections shape how we explain Hitler’s rise to power, which is why historians continue to offer conflicting narratives about the fall of the Weimar Republic.
Reference: Hett, The Death of Democracy, p. 12
And as I always say—where there is contradiction, there is distortion of history. It seems that historians are circling around the most obvious explanation—the one that resolves all contradictions.
"...Nazi ideology and goals were always deliberately vague and ever-changing. Hitler grandly announced the 'Twenty-Five Points' of the Nazi program in 1920 and declared them immutable. He then proceeded to ignore them, and they had nothing to do with what he actually did once in power."
Reference: Hett, The Death of Democracy, p. 117
And as I said earlier, this is a historian who hasn’t read Mein Kampf.
"This struggle must be carried on, since its aim is not the establishment of a people’s state, but the destruction of the Jewish state which now exists. As so often happens in history, the hardest thing is not to establish a new order but to clear the ground for its establishment."
Reference: Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 410
And there you have it. Hitler said—before coming to power—that he would destroy the "Jewish State" (which meant the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union and the so-called "international Jewish capital") before he could implement his version of socialism. He could not apply full socialism without first clearing the way, and without acquiring Lebensraum and resources in the East, which he believed were necessary for implementing full socialism.
As Zitelmann points out, the limited autarky Hitler enforced before the conquest of the East was only a temporary and ‘limited’ measure—not full autarky. Only after conquering Lebensraum could Hitler create full autarky. (‘Autarky’ means economic self-sufficiency and is closely related to the idea of socialism—which is why Lenin, Stalin, and syndicalists in Spain and elsewhere also tried to implement it.)
So, when Hitler said he would implement the Twenty-Five Points, he really meant it—but only after the conquest of Russia. Until then, he only implemented a limited form of socialism. However, in the early 1930s, voters were promised everything they wanted by the Nazis—from the unification of all Germans into a Greater Germany, the conquest of Lebensraum, the end of corrupt democracy, the creation of a strong state, equal rights for Germans, full employment, nationalization of industries, a welfare state, robust education, a national army, and the exclusion or relocation of non-Germans after confiscating their land and property for Germans. It’s hard to see why German voters wouldn’t want this in 1930. And the Nazis achieved most of what they outlined in the program—except, obviously, that they lost the war and could not implement all policies related to the conquest of the East.
Reference: Feder, The Program of the NSDAP, RJG Enterprises, 2003
The German people chose a radical solution to the "crisis of capitalism." They wanted a radical form of socialism—on a national or racial level—with promises of full employment, a strong military, redistribution of wealth, land, and businesses, and so on. And unlike the Communists, the National Socialists wanted to do all this legally, without a destructive civil war, economic collapse, or famine like what had happened under the Marxists in the Soviet Union. So this was Socialism without Bolshevism, designed specifically for the German people. And since the Germans were fed up with democracy, liberalism, capitalism, and foreign domination, the National Socialist German Workers' Party was the only party that made sense to them.
Bibliography / Sources :1. Brown, A.
How 'Socialist' Was National Socialism? Kindle, 2015.
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The Problem with Socialism. Regnery Publishing, Kindle, 2016.
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The Coming of the Third Reich. Penguin Books, Kindle, 2004.
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The Third Reich in Power, 1933–1939. Penguin Books, Kindle, 2006.
5. Feder, G.
The Programme of the NSDAP: The National Socialist German Worker's Party and Its General Conceptions. RJG Enterprises Inc., 2003.
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The German State on a National and Socialist Foundation. Black House Publishing LTD, 2015.
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When Money Dies: The Nightmare of the Weimar Hyper-inflation. Old Street Publishing, 2015 (originally 1975).
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Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. Vintage Books, 2008.
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The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power. William Heinemann, Kindle, 2018.
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Depression, War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy. Oxford University Press, 2006.
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Mein Kampf. Jaico Publishing House, 2017.
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Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. Martino Publishing, 2012 (originally 1949).
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Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. Liberty Fund, 1981 (1969 edition; originally 1922).
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America's Great Depression. Fifth Edition. Ludwig von Mises Institute, Kindle, 2000.
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Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian. Kindle, 2014.
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Age of Inflation. Western Islands, 1975.
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The Downfall of Money: Germany's Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.
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Hitler: The Policies of Seduction. London House, 1999.
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Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse. Arlington House Publishers, PDF, 1974.
Recall :The society which was created after the NSDAP achieved power was in many ways a compromise. Hitler himself admitted (to Leon Degrelle among others) that it would be the next generation - the Hitler Youth generation - which would create a genuine National-Socialist society. Organizations such as the SS and the Hitler Youth were steps toward the creation of such a National Socialist society, and it was these organizations which implemented the ideal of personal honour, and respect for others, of whatever race and culture. As Hitler and his true followers, such as Rudolf Hess, matured in understanding, so too did National-Socialism. National-Socialism was not born, fully developed and fully-understood, in the early years of the NSDAP - it developed slowly, over several decades. Thus, as Hitler admitted, Mein Kampf was never intended to be some kind of bible of National-Socialism: it was the product of its time and while most of the underlying principles of National-Socialism were laid down in that book, some principles were not. What was written was subject to change, to revision, as National-Socialism itself developed. - David Myatt, March 2011
Source :
David Myatt: A National Socialist Ideologist by Rachael Stirling page 14
https://archive.org/details/dm-ns-ideologist/page/n13/mode/2up“Quite right. And I frequently regret that I did. But at the time, when I was in Landsberg after November 9, 1923, I thought everything was over. I was in captivity, I was deprived of my freedom, the party was expropriated, dissolved—everything seemed at an end, even worse than Germany after the Great War. I wrote Mein Kampf as a kind of report to the German Volk, chiefly in memory of the martyrs of November 9. I wrote it out of the narrowness of my cell.
“When I was released, I had Mein Kampf printed. Perhaps, I hoped, it would serve to rally my old friends. And that really happened! That is how it came about.
“But gradually, I saw that many things were, after all, different from the way I had seen them through prison bars and from the way I had figured them out. And soon I set out to draft changes, improvements. But they only turned out to be changes for the worse. I thought about withdrawing the book. But it was too late. It made its way through Germany, it was even spread abroad, and what was right and positive about it did not miss its mark. So I kept hands off. I made no more changes. The book even gave me the financial basis for reconstructing the party. If I were to write it today, a lot would be different. But today, I would not write it at all
Source :
Wagener - Hitler Memoirs of a Confidant page 143 and 273
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