The 1930 Trap

National Socialism made a lot of promises that would appeal to most people.

That statement will make a lot of people angry because the words National Socialism have become inseparable from Adolf Hitler, the Holocaust, the concentration camps, racial persecution, dictatorship, and the Second World War. That reaction is understandable, but it also prevents us from asking some difficult historical questions.

Why was National Socialism attractive to millions of people before the full consequences of Nazi rule were known? Why did intelligent people outside Germany sometimes admire what appeared to be happening there? Why did Nazi organizations exist in the United States? Why did this authoritarian political movement gain strength throughout a supposedly modern Western world? Most importantly, are the things people demanded from government then really as different from the things people demand from government now as we would like to believe?

I am not condoning Hitler. His racial ideology was abhorrent, and his government became one of history’s most murderous regimes. His obsession with racial enemies and territorial conquest helped destroy Germany along with much of Europe. However, simply establishing that Hitler was evil tells us almost nothing about why National Socialism attracted followers. If our entire understanding of Nazi Germany begins at Auschwitz, we have skipped the part of the story that might actually teach us something about ourselves.

Germans voting in 1930 did not possess photographs from liberated concentration camps. They didn’t know how the war would end because the war hadn’t begun. They were living in their own present and responding to the conditions surrounding them at the moment. Many of them believed that the political and economic system under which they were living had failed.

The First World War devastated Germany, and its aftermath humiliated the nation. The Treaty of Versailles stripped territory from Germany, restricted its military, and imposed enormous obligations on a country already struggling with defeat. What followed was political instability and the hyperinflation crisis of the early 1920s.

Then, after a period of relative stabilization, the worldwide economic collapse in 1929. By the beginning of 1933, roughly six million Germans were registered as unemployed.

Businesses failed, families lost their livelihoods, and parliamentary government appeared increasingly incapable of producing answers. Political violence was common as Communists and Nazis fought one another, sometimes taking it to the streets, and the government struggled to govern. Telling an unemployed man that liberal democracy was morally superior to authoritarianism was less persuasive when, from his perspective, liberal democracy wasn’t putting food on his table.

This is the Germany Hitler entered with a remarkably attractive collection of promises: employment, economic revival, political stability, national unity, restoration of German military strength, rejection of the humiliation associated with Versailles and protection from communism. He promised Germans that their country could matter again.

Does this sound familiar with America?

None of those promises requires a person to desire genocide. A frightened and unemployed citizen doesn’t have to dream about conquering Europe to find employment and stability appealing. He merely has to conclude that the existing government isn’t working, and that somebody appears to have an answer.

This doesn’t mean Hitler’s antisemitism was secret. It wasn’t. He had well-established racial ideas before he became chancellor. The mistake lies at the opposite extreme: imagining that the prospect of exterminating Jews attracted every supporter of Hitler. Political movements build coalitions from people with different motivations.

There is no doubt that some Germans embraced Nazi antisemitism enthusiastically. However, there were others who feared communism, needed employment, and wanted German nationalism restored. Industrialists had their own reasons. Veterans and young people had theirs. Most Germans probably did what people have always done politically: tolerated things they disliked because they wanted other things badly enough.

It’s important to remember that Hitler never received a majority of the vote in a free national parliamentary election. The Nazi Party received about 18 percent in September 1930. Their numbers climbed to approximately 37 percent in July 1932, but by November, fell to around 33 percent. He was not voted in by the people in a fair election, but rather Hitler became chancellor in January 1933 through constitutional appointment and political maneuvering.

The conservative elites who controlled the political machine used Hitler’s perceived popularity with the idea that his movement could be harnessed and directed toward their goals, confident the people would not oppose it. They believed they could keep Hitler under control and were catastrophically wrong.

Once in office, Hitler exploited emergency powers, used intimidation and political violence to eliminate opposition and dismantle democratic institutions. The lesson isn’t that all Germans simultaneously chose dictatorship, but more disturbing, an authoritarian movement doesn’t need everybody. It only needs enough enthusiastic supporters, frightened citizens, divided opponents, and powerful people who believe they can benefit from it.

Fear of communism was an enormous part of that equation, and modern discussions frequently oversimplify this. Communism wasn’t an imaginary enemy invented entirely by Nazi propagandists. The Bolsheviks had seized Russia in 1917, and Communist revolutionary movements had appeared in Germany after World War I.

By the early 1930s, the German Communist Party represented a substantial political force, while Stalin controlled the Soviet Union to Germany’s east. German businessmen, conservatives, middle-class families and property owners had legitimate reasons to fear the possibility of communist revolution. Hitler exploited that fear ruthlessly, but propaganda is often most effective when it attaches itself to something that genuinely exists.

This creates one of the most interesting contradictions in National Socialism. It was neither Marxist socialism nor free-market capitalism, but its own authoritarian, state-directed system. Hitler hated Marxism and communism. Communists were among the first people his government imprisoned, and independent labor unions were destroyed shortly after he came to power.

Private property remained legal, and private companies continued operating for profit. Nazi economics functioned as a form of state corporatism, or “command economy with private ownership.” The state would direct investments, labor, wages, and production toward its national goals while still leaving private ownership intact, which did not fit the Marxist model.

Marxism demanded collective ownership with no free market rights. Under National Socialism, it wasn’t about who possessed the deed to the factory, but who ultimately decided what the factory existed to accomplish. Rearmament became central to the economy. Private ownership existed, but ownership did not guarantee that an industrialist possessed anything approaching unrestricted control over what his company did.

The contradiction becomes less confusing when we stop trying to force National Socialism into the modern American argument over whether Nazis belong to the political left or right. The Nazis rejected Marxist class warfare because they rejected the idea that class should be the fundamental basis of society.

Their ideal was instead a national community in which worker, businessman, farmer, and soldier were supposed to subordinate their separate interests to the interests of the German nation. The state would determine what those national interests were.

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