The first group of factors that led to the Nazis being so popular and successful were the social factors. Propaganda was one of the most influential things that the Nazis had on their side. Propaganda made people believe things about the Nazis which were not necessarily true. People must have accepted all of the Nazi propaganda, and it must have been successful, otherwise the Nazis would have stopped producing it. Also, there is a lot of evidence suggesting that people did accept the propaganda, and people started to support the Nazis because of it, and no evidence whatsoever that people did not accept it. Source B is a piece of propaganda that was trying to encourage the working class to follow the Nazis. This particular piece of propaganda would have meant something to them just because the man who is helping Hitler to dig the autobahn is a working class man. The working class were usually Communists because they promised to share the country’s wealth equally. This is why Hitler felt that the working class were the area of people who he had to get through the most. The other social factor that led to the Nazis popularity was the fact that they were a very strong dictatorship rather than a democratically run, which the previous government (the Weimar Government) had been. They had failed, and this was why people liked Hitler and the Nazis so much, because they were completely different to the Weimar government. Because of the Weimar government, the people of Germany welcomed dictatorship, which rapidly improved their popularity. An example of the Nazis strong leadership was when they passed the Enabling act. They did this without consulting the Reichstag at all, and nobody complained or had anything to say about it at all The second group of factors, which led to the Nazis being so popular, were the social factors. Firstly, the fact that the Nazis were encouraging women to stay at home and look after their children and husbands. An example of this is source C – the poem trying to encourage women to stay at home. Another example was that the Nazis offered women special loans for if they accepted to give up their jobs – 800,000 women accepted these loans, which shows that the Nazis were very successful in convincing these women to do exactly what they wanted. Also, medals were given to women who had a certain amount of children, there were three different levels that could be gained – bronze, silver and gold. The Nazi’s attitudes towards women would have meant that they became increasingly more popular with all of the German citizens that agreed with these ideas.
Another social factor was that of race. The Nazi attitudes and policy towards the Jews and disabled etc. We do not know if this was actually accepted by the Germans, or if it was popular with them. But, yet again, there is no evidence that the Germans did not like the policies or did not accept them, because there were never any strikes about the prejudice against the non – ayrian race. No one of any importance tried to stand up to Hitler ever. Another example was the night of long knives. This was the night when all of the Nazis and German citizens that supported the Nazis got together and smashed all of windows in all of the Jewish shops that they could find, and they went and also smashed the windows of the Jew’s places of worship. This was never taken to court, and nobody was ever prosecuted.
