Problems with Nazi Support

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Using your own knowledge and the evidence of the sources identify the problems we face when looking to identify Nazi support in the period up to 1933.

        In the 1932 Reichstag elections, the NSDAP became Germany’s largest political party with approximately 37% of the total electoral vote. In contrast to the relatively small party of 1928, this was a dramatic rise in party popularity. What is even more interesting is how Hitler and the NSDAP did not usurp power in a military sense. Instead, Hitler was voted into power by millions of unsuspecting citizens from a range of sociological, economical and ideological backgrounds. However, due to this new consensus among modern historians (post -1980), the stress on the individual as oppose to the class has led to a more complex understanding of who essentially favoured the Nazi party; deeming it even harder to identify empirical evidence from sources.

        Initially, before 1928, the NSDAP had failed to make a significant impact in German politics and they were merely a group with little popular support. However, due to the collapse of the Wall Street Crash and the subsequent recall of loans back to the USA, unemployment had risen dramatically in Germany and latent discontent with the Weimar government was rife. The socio-economic dislocation caused by the Wall Street Crash began to deepen, which acted as the catalyst for the marked rise in those changing their political allegiance to the more radical political groups. These people included self employed businessmen, artisans, retailers, peasant farmers and industrial workers, who had previously voted for the other parties but had now turned to the Nazi regime who offered what the then current Weimar system could not.

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        Therefore, traditionalist interpretations of the support held by historians such as Childers and Noakes assert that it was a combination of the petty bourgeoisie and Protestants who overwhelmingly represented the support for Nazis. As Childers states in his book entitled “The Nazi Voter”, “being a Protestant in rural Germany greatly increased such a propensity”, essentially stating that there was a specific trend of rural Protestants who fuelled the support for Hitler. However, Childer does acknowledge that the Nazi Party was a Volkspartei (People’s Party) whose levels of support were actually from a “broad range of social groups”. In addition, Childer argues ...

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