National Socialism

Sources of support

Causes of Nazism

Nazi doctrine and policies

BIBLIOGRAPHY

National Socialism started as a political movement in Germany in 1919. Its official name was the “Nazionalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei” (National Socialist German Workers’ Party); it soon became popularly known as the Nazi party, and its followers were called Nazis. When Adolf Hitler joined the party, Nazism consisted of a little group of unimportant malcontents in Munich. Yet within fourteen years it became the greatest mass movement in German history, including in its ranks members of all groups of German society, from unemployed workers of the Lumpenproletariat to members of the imperial family of the Hohenzollerns and of several of the royal houses of the German states. By 1932 the Nazi vote had mounted to fourteen million; in the March 1933 election, the last in which opposing parties participated, seventeen million Germans (or 44 per cent of the electorate) freely voted for the Nazi party, not to speak of several more millions who voted for nationalist and militarist policies that were barely distinguishable from Nazi objectives. Thus well over half the German electorate voted for an antidemocratic, totalitarian, imperialistic program. After the elections, only the Social Democrats attempted to resist Nazism in the Reichstag (the Communists had not been allowed to take their seats in the Reichstag). Even the Roman Catholic (and generally democratic) Center party gave Hitler the dictatorial powers he asked for in the Reichstag on March 23, 1933. This was the only case of a modern totalitarian regime that was set up by a majority of the electorate and approved by the parliamentary body of the nation.

Once in power, the Nazi regime lived up to its promises. First, concentration camps were set up for political opponents. Very soon the political offenders were a small minority in the concentration camps; the large majority consisted not of persons who had committed a wrong but who (like the Jews) belonged to the wrong group. Later, during World War n, large numbers of civilians in the occupied countries were put into concentration camps, because they too belonged to a “wrong”social or political group.

Politically, the Nazis quickly effected complete uniformity (Gleichschaltung). All other parties, including the ultraconservatives, were liquidated within a few months of the Nazi seizure of power. Newspapers were either Nazified or, when they had an established liberal-democratic reputation, were abolished (as, for example, the Vossiche Zeitung and the Berliner Tageblatt). Education, from kindergarten to university, was put under strict party and government control, and the statesponsored Hitler Youth replaced all existing youth organizations. All labor unions, whatever their political sympathies, were outlawed and replaced by the government-sponsored Labor Front, incorporating both labor and management in one organization. The Christian churches were persecuted if they dared to resist the anti-Christian, racist policies of Nazi mass murders. Christianity was attacked as a Jewish contrivance to weaken the military spirit of the Germans, and attempts were made to substitute a new religion, “German Faith,” for Christianity. More extreme Nazis even went so far as to re-establish old Germanic, pre-Christian paganism as the only religion fit for the new Nazi Germany. Finally, even the traditional structure of the family was attacked. Children were encouraged to inform on their parents and unmarried women to breed a new Herrenrasse (master race) out of wedlock.

The Nazi regime introduced military conscription in 1935, militarized the Rhineland in 1936 in violation of treaty provisions, annexed Austria in 1938 and Czechoslovakia in 1939, and started World War n by the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. In the summer of 1940, France was vanquished, and Great Britain alone resisted the weight of Nazi power. In possession of virtually the whole European continent, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941 and declared war on the United States in December 1941.

Nazi Germany lost the war and surrendered unconditionally in 1945. Yet before going to defeat, the Nazis had accomplished one major objective: over six million European Jews—men, women, and children—were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and other extermination camps specially set up for wholesale killing. This extermination of the Jews in occupied Europe was called, in official Nazi language, “the final solution of the Jewish question.”

Of all the social classes in Germany before 1933, the urban working class was proportionately least affected by the appeal of Nazism. Membership statistics of 1933 indicate that manual workers were substantially underrepresented in the Nazi party, whereas white-collar workers and middle-class persons were greatly overrepresented in relation to the total German population. Urban workers largely followed the Social Democratic party. Neither Communist nor Nazi attempts to win the allegiance of German urban workers for totalitarian programs succeeded before 1933. Yet, while the German urban workers did not want Nazism, they did little to resist its coming into power or its operations once it was in power. The deeply ingrained respect for authority in most Germans made resistance difficult. Moreover, the Nazis managed to abolish unemployment by embarking on a war economy from the outset, as a result of which unemployment turned into full employment and even a shortage of labor. Many workers were willing to trade the loss of individual liberty and free labor unions for the gain of full employment and social security. As a result, the mass of the German workers acquiesced in the other Nazi policies, including the policies of imperialist expansion through aggressive war. The urban workers (unlike those of other countries under Fascist rule, such as Italy) played only a very minor part in whatever resistance groups existed in Nazi Germany.

The lower middle class—particularly the salariat —supplied the numerically strongest element of popular support for Nazism. Many persons in this class dreaded the prospect of joining the proletariat and looked to the Nazi movement for the saving of their traditional status and prestige. The salaried employee is jealous of Big Business, into whose higher echelons he would like to rise via the ladder of management, and he also fears Big Labor, into whose proletarian world he disdains to sink. Nazism very astutely played on these fears and anxieties by attacking both the “interest slavery of finance capitalism” and the “un-German” character of “Marxist Bolshevism.” Logically, propaganda directed against both capital and labor may seem self-contradictory, but its very inconsistency both reflected and appealed to the political confusion of the salaried class. Furthermore, Nazism promised them the identification with the “superior” Nordic master race. This racialism had a most impressive appeal to those groups of salaried persons—teachers and government employees— who were traditionally permeated with nationalist and racist ideas even before Nazism appeared.

As to the numerically less significant, but socially and economically important upper class of industrialists and big landowners, the support received from this group by the Nazi party even before 1933 was of great impact. On January 27, 1932, Hitler addressed the Industry Club in Düsseldorf, the center of Germany’s heavy industry; his success in winning over the leaders of heavy industry was impressive. Most notable among active supporters of Nazism before 1933 were such world-famous German industrial figures as Fritz Thyssen and the Krupp family. While looking down upon the Nazi leadership as a group of plebeian upstarts without the breeding and background of gentlemen, German industrialists and big landowners supported Nazism for two main reasons: first, the Nazis promised the abolition of free labor unions, and second, the industrialists understood that the remilitarization of Germany coupled with an aggressive foreign policy would be profitable for business. The support of the steel industry was particularly significant. Already during the Second Reich, the friendship between the Kaiser and the Krupp family pointed to the intimate ties between German heavy industry and militarism. The alliance between the steel industry and Nazism before 1933 was but a renewal of these historical ties between industry and a German government with an antisocialist, antidemocratic, and imperialistic policy. During World War n, German heavy industry profited from its ties with the Nazi regime, since it was the main beneficiary of the labor of millions of foreign workers deported to Germany.

Another group that was crucial in the rise of Nazism was the military, traditionally of great social importance in the fabric of German society and government. Even in strong and well-established democratic states, the professional military class tends to overestimate the virtues of discipline and national unity. Where democracy is weak, as it was in Germany during the Weimar Republic, the professional bias of the military class becomes a political menace. The top military leaders of Germany knew, before and after 1933, that a high percentage of Nazi leaders were criminals or psychopaths, yet they supported the Nazi movement as a step toward the desired militarization of Germany. Of the two greatest German military leaders of World War i, General Ludendorff and Field Marshal von Hindenburg, the former embraced Nazism in the early 1920s and the latter collaborated with it until his death in 1934. Yet it should be pointed out that, toward the end of World War II, high military leaders played an important role in attempts to overthrow the Nazi regime. These plots culminated in the attempt against Hitler’s life on July 20, 1944, an attempt that failed. It is noteworthy that the German generals did not hatch any resistance plans against Nazism when the war went well for Germany; only when defeat became a certainty did they try to save what could be saved of German power by overthrowing the Nazi regime.

In analyzing the sources of support for Nazism among the German people, the most important lesson is not which particular social group proved itself most vulnerable to the Nazi virus—although this is an important lesson and has broad political implications outside Germany as well. A phenomenon of even more general consequence is demonstrated by the success of Nazism before coming to power and its popularity among the German people: an antidemocratic, totalitarian movement can be based on mass support.

From the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century, the conventional wisdom of enlightened and liberal political thought automatically assumed that political oppression was due solely to the malevolence of a small minority of political oligarchs lording it over the mass of the “good” people. The assumption, which was hardly ever challenged, was that the mass of the people naturally desired freedom above everything else; once the obstacles to this natural desire—kings, aristocrats, men of privilege—were removed, a reign of liberty and democracy would inevitably follow. The experience of Nazism, both before and after 1933, demolished this illusion once and for all. The main reason why conventional political analysis failed to come to grips with the paradoxical phenomenon of the mass basis of modern totalitarianism lay in its exclusive concern with totalitarian leaders rather than totalitarian followers, the latter being seen merely as innocent victims of their evil leaders. In the light of the knowledge gained by modern psychology and psychoanalysis, Erich Fromm (1941) has shown the psychodynamic and sociological factors that underlie the “totalitarian flight from freedom” and that have made modern man feel isolated, powerless, and irrational. These forces are potentially operative everywhere, but in Germany their potential was most fully and most disastrously realized.

Many interpretations of the nature of Nazism have either gone back too far into ancient history or have confined themselves too much to the immediate past. Whatever characteristics the Germanic peoples may have possessed in the days of Tacitus, there have been too many historical changes since then to deduce Nazism from German antiquity. Similarly, a movement of such farreaching impact on the whole world can hardly be adequately explained by such specific recent events as the Versailles Treaty of 1919 or the economic depression of 1929-1932. Defeat in war does not necessarily end in a totalitarian nihilism of the Nazi type, as is evidenced by Germany’s own defeat in World War n, which did not again produce Nazism. Similarly, the impact of the depression has been exaggerated, if it is to serve as the main cause of explaining the rise and triumph of Nazism. There is no doubt that the inflation of the early 1920s and the depression that began in 1929 had a deleterious effect on German democratic institutions. But economic depression is, in itself, no necessary general cause of fascist totalitarianism. There is a relation between economic depression and accelerated social change, but it is of a different kind: like war, economic depressions do not create new major social and political trends, but tend to accelerate the rate of development of existing trends. In fundamentally democratic nations (like the United States, Australia, New Zealand, or the countries of northwestern Europe), the depression of 1929 produced neither fascism nor communism but advanced the cause of democracy on the economic, social, political, and cultural fronts. Conversely, where the roots of democracy are frail and where the dominant social attitude is strongly suffused with authoritarian elements, a depression may easily accelerate such authoritarian trends, as happened not only in Germany in the 1930s but also in Japan, Brazil, Poland, and other nations.

Closely related to the depression theory as the major cause of Nazism is the essentially Marxian interpretation of Nazism as the logical outgrowth of monopoly capitalism. While it cannot be denied that monopolistic capitalism was a major force in German life from the time of the establishment of the Second Reich in 1870 and that on the whole its political influence was harmful to the development of a liberal society and a democratic government, this theory cannot explain why monopoly capitalism produced Nazism in Germany and not in Britain and the United States. In purely economic terms, the depression in these major citadels of world capitalism in the early 1930s was not substantially different from that in Germany. The differentiating factor was not the relative degree of the severity of economic crisis but the difference in political ideas and institutions that circumscribed the behavior of political decision makers.

If Nazism was more than a reaction to the German defeat in World War I or to the depression, it can be explained only by the persistence of a powerful antiliberal tradition—perhaps the dominant German tradition—in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hegel, Adam Müller, Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, Heinrich von Treitschke, and Moeller van den Bruck are but a few of the more important figures in the development of a social philosophy that opposed the concepts of power, authoritarianism, nationalism, racism, and imperialism to the ideas of natural law, liberty, universalism, equality, and peace. Romanticism was, from the beginning of the nineteenth century onward, perhaps the single strongest movement in German thought. Whereas in other countries (like France and England) romanticism was largely confined to the literary imagination as a protest against the limiting tradition of the measure and orderliness of classicism, in Germany it became a systematic philosophy with elaborate and coherent views on man, society, law, and the state.

The German Romantics, in their theory of the state, put forward an organistic conception based on blood and community, in which the individual occupied a relatively minor role; and they rejected the Western liberal theory of the state based on a social contract, in which the individual had natural rights preceding the state. In economics, the German Romantics assailed the free-market economy of capitalism as “soulless egotism” and urged the revival of the medieval closed economy regulated in every detail by the community. The most typical German Romantics, like Adam Müller, did not attack this or that particular point of the Western tradition in ethics, politics, and economics. They fought, instead, against the humanistic and rational Western tradition as a whole.

There is not a single element in the Nazi doctrine as developed by its leaders and apologists that does not have a long—and frequently dominant—tradition in the century and a half preceding the rise of Nazism. It is true that such ideas were not expressed only in Germany. Count de Gobineau expressed racist theories in France, around the middle of the nineteenth century, and Carlyle expressed antiliberal and racist doctrines in England in the second half of the same century. Yet the important thing is that such prophets of authoritarianism and racialism did not obtain significant followings in their native countries, whereas their writings became enormously popular in Germany. The case of Houston Stewart Chamberlain is even more indicative of this phenomenon. Born an Englishman, he settled in Germany and became a German citizen. His Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) became one of the most popular books in pre-Nazi Germany, yet made no impact on his native country. From anti-Semitism to imperialism, there is little in the Nazi doctrine that cannot be found in Chamberlain’s writings.

Conversely, there was also, before the rise of Nazism, a liberal and humanistic tradition in Germany, characterized by such lofty figures as Lessing, Kant, Humboldt, and Goethe. Yet this tradition never became dominant and was more influential in the academy than in the councils of policy makers. In 1848 and in 1918, the liberal elements of German society started a new orientation toward Western ideals in government and society, but in both cases the authoritarian and militaristic elements in German life squelched such attempts through violence and terror.

Nazi doctrine and policy were, however, more than a mere revival of traditional antiliberal ideas and institutions in German life. In Nazism, these antiliberal attitudes and institutions were carried to their extreme. Whereas philosophical and political romantic thought in Germany had reacted against the excesses of rationalism, Nazi ideologists, like Alfred Rosenberg, rejected the principle of Western rationalism itself, charging, for example, that Socrates was the first “Social Democrat” in Europe and the originator of the disease of rationalism, because he established the principle of trying to settle vital issues through argument and debate. Similarly, whereas in the pre-Nazi German intellectual tradition particular points of Christianity were criticized or assailed, official Nazi ideology rejected Christianity in toto as a devilish Jewish plot to weaken Germanic vigor and military manliness. In addition, Nazism had the dynamic of a popular mass movement, whereas antidemocratic and antiliberal ideas and policies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries still recognized some restraints of traditional religion and morality. The tragedy of pre-Nazi German politics lay in the fact that the masses were sufficiently drawn into politics to become highly conscious of political programs and movements, but not sufficiently involved to build up a sustained democratic experience. In this sense, Nazism was the response of a politically “semiliterate” people: not illiterate enough to stay out of politics and not literate enough to have learned the important lessons of politics through self-government.

The potentially dangerous tendencies in pre-Nazi German ideas and policies were carried forward to the most extreme point of nihilism, rejecting all traditional Western moral and religious concepts about the nature of man and his inalienable dignity as a human personality. This nihilism came out most clearly in the use of terror and murder as an official state policy of extreme totalitarianism. Nazi concentration camps and gas chambers were more than incidental phenomena in the total process of Nazism. They were of its very essence, for it was in those camps that man was destroyed as a moral being and reduced to a mere number, tattooed on his body. Such camps were not set up primarily to punish ordinary or political criminals. Most of its victims, such as the Jews, were not even accused of having done anything wrong. The purpose of the concentration and extermination camps was to show to the entire population under Nazi control that every person was potentially an inmate, since personal guilt had little or nothing to do with such a punishment. The ultimate purpose of such camps was to demonstrate that man’s soul, his dignity, and his self-respect can be reduced to dirt and ashes, and that no one was exempt from such fate if it so pleased the Nazi rulers. If killing had been the main objective of the camps, such killing could have been accomplished with more efficiency and without the suffering and the degradation that accompanied it. In the scheme of Nazi totalitarian nihilism, the degradation of man was not the incidental by-product of murder, but murder was the by-product of the systematic process of degradation. The aim of Nazi nihilism was to transform a human into a nonhuman and to restrict the quality of being human to those who were acceptable to the Nazi rulers.

This policy was also carried out in foreign affairs. Thus, when Czechoslovakia was taken over in 1939, Nazi legislation referred to its population as Germans and “other inhabitants.” In the eyes of the Nazis, the Czechs were not merely defeated by superior German arms but had ceased to exist as a nation, just as the inmate of a concentration or extermination camp was nothing more than a number in the files, without any human personality or individuality. Nazi plans for the Poles and Russians were the same: not only to conquer them militarily but to transform both nations into “nonnations,” slaves of the higher German Kultur. Eventually, a similar fate was also foreseen for the other nations to be subdued and then destroyed as national entities.

Historically, Nazism may have left two important legacies. First, it is conceivable that the experience of Nazism has irretrievably destroyed the authoritarian, antidemocratic, antiliberal, and militaristic tradition in German society, because Nazism demonstrated to what extent the potential of that tradition could be realized in destroying the very foundations of civilization. Second, Nazism has left a broader legacy for all mankind. Whatever psychological malformation of behavior occurs in one human being may potentially occur in any other. The same applies to whole nations. The lesson of Nazism is not only how low Germans could fall, but how far any nation can fall once critical rationalism, moral restraints, and constitutional government have been substantially weakened or destroyed.

William Ebenstein

[Directly related are the entriesAnti-Semitism; Dictatorship; Fascism; Totalitarianism. Other relevant material may be found inMilitarism; Nationalism; Personality, Political; Radicalism; and in the biographies ofSchmittandTreitschke.]

Baumont, Maurice (editor) 1955 The Third Reich. A study published under the auspices of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies, with the assistance of UNESCO. New York: Praeger. → Written by 28 European and American scholars, this massive volume of 900 pages is characterized by a broad variety of viewpoints and a wealth of material on the background and record of Nazism.

Butler, Rohan D’olier (1941) 1942 The Roots of National Socialism (1783-1933). New York: Dutton.

Chamberlain, Houston Stewart (1899) 1910 Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. New York and London: John Lane. → First published in German.

Cohen, Elie A. (1952) 1954 Human Behaviour in the Concentration Camp. London: Cape. → First published in Dutch with a summary in English.

Dicks, Henry V. 1950 Personality Traits and National Socialist Ideology. Human Relations 3:111-154.

Ebenstein, William 1943 The Nazi State. New York: Farrar.

Fromm, Erich (1941) 1960 Escape From Freedom. New York: Holt.

Gerth, Hans 1940 The Nazi Party: Its Leadership and Composition. American Journal of Sociology 45:517-541.

Hilberg, Raul 1961 The Destruction of the European Jews. Chicago: Quadrangle Books; London: W. H. Allen.

Mosse, George L. 1964 The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich. New York: Grosset.

Neumann, Franz Leopold (1942) 1963 Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944. 2d ed. New York: Octagon Books.

Rauschning, Hermann (1938) 1940 The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West. New York: Alliance Book Corporation; London: Heinemann. → First published in German at Zurich. The London edition was published as Germany’s Revolution of Destruction.

Shirer, William L. 1960 The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Taylor, Telford 1952 Sword and Swastika: Generals and Nazis in the Third Reich. New York: Simon & Schuster.