Read Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris for Free Online

blamed on Jewish creditors) and eke out a living thereafter as a pedlar, were exact fits for the abstract sociological model of a typical Nazi supporter. 3 But their short accounts offer a glimpse of the type of psychology and motivation that were beginning to drive thousands – predominantly male, and for the most part young – to join the Hitler Movement as the storm-clouds gathered over Germany in 1930. In each case the personal bitterness and loss of self-esteem found a simple explanation in policies of the ‘Red’ government and a ready scapegoat in the Jews. The sense of betrayal and exploitation was acute. And it was not just a feeling that a change of government was needed. Among those drawn in increasing numbers from a wide variety of motives to the NSDAP in 1930 there was a common feeling of elemental, visceral hatred for the Weimar state itself, for the ‘system’ as it was so often called. Hatred, as Hitler had recognized, was among the most powerful of emotions. That was what he consciously appealed to. That is what drove so many of his followers. But there was idealism, too – misplaced, certainly, but idealism none the less: hopes of a new society, of a ‘national community’ that would transcend all existing social divides. There would, recruits to the Nazi Party believed, be no return to the class-ridden, hierarchical society of the past, resting on status, privilege, and the wealth of the few at the expense of the many. The new society would be fair without destroying talent, flair, ability, initiative, creativity in the way they saw threatened by the social egalitarianism preached by the Marxists. It would be one in which achievement, not status, would gain recognition, where the high-and-mighty would be deprived of their seeming God-given rights to lord it over the humble and lowly, where sweeping social reform would ensure that those who deserved it would gain their just rewards, where the ‘little man’ would no longer be exploited by big capital or threatened by organized labour, where Marxist internationalism would be crushed and replaced by loyal devotion to the German people. Discriminatory feelings were built into the idealism. Those who did not belong in the ‘national community’ – ‘shirkers’, ‘spongers’, ‘parasites’, and, of course, those deemed not to be German at all, notably Jews – would be ruthlessly suppressed. But for true ‘comrades of the people’
(Volksgenossen) –
the term the Nazis invented to replace ‘citizen’ (
Bürger)
for those who
did
belong – the new society would be a genuine ‘community’, where the rights of the individual were subordinated to the common good of the whole, and where duty preceded any rights. Only on this basis could the German nation become strong again, recover its pride, cast aside the shackles unfairly imposed on it by its enemies in the Versailles Treaty. But only through complete destruction of the hated, divisive democratic system could the ‘national community’ be accomplished at all.
    In this crude but powerful imagery that attracted many who found their way to the NSDAP, nationalism and socialism were not seen as opposites; they went together, were part of the same Utopian dream of a reborn nation, strong and united. Many who, as the crisis set in during 1930, came to vote for the NSDAP or even to join the party had never encountered Hitler personally and were often becoming interested in him for the first time. Usually, they were already predisposed to the Nazi message. Its ideology did not in itself distinguish the Nazi Party from its rivals on the Right. Nationalism and anti-Marxism were, in different shadings, common currency in all but the parties of the Left. Antisemitism was far from the preserve of the NSDAP. What set Hitler’s movement apart was above all its image of activism, dynamism, élan, youthfulness, vigour. To many, it marked the future, ‘the new Germany’, born out of a complete break