Reddit reviews Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany
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Oxford University Press, USA
This is a tough, but important question. Not to critique other comments on this thread, but the Nazis actually did develop a methodology of public polling to measure public opinion, a matter which was very important to the regime, strange as that might seem. The founding myth of the Nazi Party was that internal dissent and betrayal on the German homefront caused Germany's loss in World War I, "stabbing in the back" the nation's long-suffering soldiers on the front. We often think this ["stab in the back" myth] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_legend) as a cynical means to shift blame and responsibility, but the Nazis really believed it. To ensure this event wouldn't occur a second time, Nazi authorities throughout the history of the regime gauged public opinion to ensure the homefront wouldn't collapse a second time. These surveys aren't the best historical sources for methodological reasons outlined [here] (http://books.google.com/books?id=kjo__n_uEcAC&pg=PA326&dq=nazi+public+survey&hl=en&sa=X&ei=L1CNT62jBMbZ0QHw-_TFDw&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=nazi%20public%20survey&f=false), but they do exist.
What do these surveys tell us? Robert Gellately's [Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany] (http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0192802917/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-link) provides some [very good empirical use of these surveys] (http://books.google.com/books?id=WFYwVsYc9GEC&q=opinion+poll#v=onepage&q=opinion%20survey&f=false) to assess German support of the Nazi regime. His assessment, and increasingly the assessment of others historians, is to classify Nazi Germany's history as a "consensus dictatorship." For most of the war the German people supported the regime, for a variety of reasons - German victories early in the war, support for the "socialist" part of National Socialism, anti-semitism, fear of Communism, and many other rationales. Public support for the war began faltering after Stalingrad, but nonetheless remained remarkably robust until literally Allied armies where reducing German cities into rubble. Totalitarian suppression of dissent accounts for part of the answer why the regime hung on as long as it did, but it seems increasingly clear that a significant cross-section of the German people tacitly or explicitly supported National Socialism.
I enjoyed your conversation, but just wanted to address this:
> Some source for nazi industrialists? Some, like Henry Ford, were utter bastards, but I don't think any were outspoken nazis, and definitely not fascists. I don't think nazi Germany would have welcomed them either.
Outspoken nazis? Well, I guess it depends how outspoken one does have to be - Henry Ford definitely passes the test in my mind with flying colors. Besides Ford, easy arguments could be made/googled for William Randolph Hearst (although he changed his mind before the war) and Graeme K. Howard, the head of GM, who wrote a book urging the US to co-operate with the Nazis at the time. Charles Lindbergh wasn't really a businessman, but a very vocal supporter of the Nazis. Thomas Watson, of IBM, left behind plenty of very sympathetic material although one could easily make the argument that he was just doing business.
Of course, you might disagree with me on all of these but I think the point guyanonymous was trying to make was that at the very least, a lot of very important and powerful people in the US profited from Nazi Germany and thus wanted to stay out of the war - eg. stay friendly with the nazis - which wasn't very moral. It makes business sense, though, as trading with the people doing the actual warring is always good for business. Just ask Sweden..
If you haven't read it, Antony Sutton's Wall Street and the rise of Hitler is a classic on the subject.
On another theme that you mentioned, Backing Hitler by Robert Gellately is also really good and dives into what the Germans themselves knew about the extent of the death camps which is probably at least what the Allied intelligence services knew.
How many people actually voted for the Nazis initially doesn't change how many of them knew about the murder of Jews, the disabled, and others. What you're typing up is the narrative that was propagated right after the war. As wikipedia nicely summarizes Wachsmann's work from KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, "the German people often claimed that the crimes occurred behind their backs and were perpetrated by Nazi fanatics, or that they frequently dodged responsibility by equating their suffering with that of the prisoners, avowing they too had been victimized by the National Socialist regime." But that doesn't change the fact that the knowledge was readily available at the time. And evidence that is still available suggests that 1/3 of the population knew what was going on, and that's based mostly on reviews of the press and interviews with survivors in the 80's and 90's, long after the war had ended. Lots of historians argue that, in fact, many more knew, but we'll never have an exact number. That doesn't change the fact that they knew, and asking a few questions was likely all that was needed to find out. And asking a few questions wouldn't land you any sort of prison. I recommend Gellately's work as a starting point.
And excuse me, but calling Austria "oppressed" is laughable. That's a result of the 1943 the Allied Moscow Declaration, which described Austria as "the first free nation to fall victim to Hitlerite aggression." That was a deliberate attempt by the Allies to lay the groundwork for a separate Austrian identity that could be sheared off from the German one. Anti-semitism was rampant there, and it has been estimated that 500,000 Austrians directly participated in Nazi activities (in a country of 6 million, and that doesn't even cover how many of the population actually supported Hitler and his policies).
> We’re a constitutional republic, not a democracy.
We're a Democratic Constitutional Republic which makes us a representative democracy. Stop splitting hairs to sound smart.
>There are quite a lot of people muslims in the US who would happily start a genocide against Muslims American born citizens right now
Do you even know any Muslims personally? I've never met one that thinks this way, and I've met plenty.
>The German citizens were terrified to learn the scale of atrocities committed of the holocaust, that’s not the Hitler they voted for.
Incorrect. According to the only systematic study on WWII German news available in English, German newspapers wrote about and celebrated concentration camps and the extermination of "subhumans."
After years of propaganda, they enthusiastically supported it.
There is a book by Robert Gellately called "Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany" that studies the subject in some depth.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Backing-Hitler-Consent-Coercion-Germany/dp/0192802917/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1368139469&sr=8-1&keywords=backing+hitler
Gellately's claim is a pretty uncomfortable one... It is that Germany, in which knowledge of Nazi crimes was widespread, gave its support to Hitler.
History is always a muddy process, and the Holocaust has its own special difficulties - for example, German witnesses aren't exactly jumping at the chance to explain how they knew all about what was happening, and it's hard to prove knowledge or understanding even if you do get an oral admission from some people.
A historian named Robert Gellately did an analysis using newspaper records to determine what information was being disseminated to who, and his research indicates that newspapers were indeed a sufficient source to piece together atrocities as early as 1933, and he found that newspapers were openly publishing articles about the camps. However, his research (which I personally find pretty damning) is relatively new (2001), and runs against the widely accepted consensus prior to that point, which was that most Germans did not know what was happening, or that they had been fed a modified version of the truth. Many historians still dispute his conclusions.
His book, Backing Hitler, is very good, but it will make you sad for humanity, so read at your own risk.
Nice calculation you did there, but I don't get why being a follower, an opportunist or a beneficiary of National Socialism requires membership in the NSDAP? Even less so since the NSDAP didn't play an important role from 1933 onwards. It was an agitation machinery that was rendered more or less useless when there were no elections any more. So you dug out a pretty meaningless stat there.
The widespread approval of National Socialism or specific policy fields is not only documented by contemporaries emigrants like Thomas Mann or Ralph Giordano, it is also dealt with in numerous historical studies, like
I suggest to have a thorough read before defending "honest German people" and "honest German soldiers".