In a TED-Ed video circulating on Facebook, they claim that, "Businessmen and intellectuals, wanting to be on the right side of public opinion, endorsed Hitler. They assured themselves, and each other, that his more extreme rhetoric was only for show." Is this claim accurate?

by Ytiradilos

Were there prominent members of the business class and intellectuals that felt Hitler's claims about Jews were just empty rhetoric? Any specific writings or scholarship that can be pointed to that support this claim? I had never heard this before.

Edit: The video in question

The_Alaskan

Yes, to a significant degree.

One of the popular misconceptions about the rise of the Nazi Party is that it was solely a populist movement driven from below. That's true to a large degree, but the Nazis enjoyed a great deal of support from "high society," wealthy industrialists, princes and princesses, as well as culturally significant figures. /u/commiespaceinvader is unfortunately ill, but he recommends High Society in the Third Reich by Fabrice d’Almeida if you're interested in learning more. I'd also recommend Henry Ashby Turner's German Big Business and the rise of Hitler, even though Turner's thesis is that business did not in general fund Hitler's rise.

I personally don't have a copy of either, but I do have Ian Kershaw's Hitler as well as Richard Evans' three-volume Reich trilogy and Weber's Hitler's First War which is less helpful for this question. Evans' The Coming of the Third Reich has a significant amount of information about your question.

During the 1920s and early 1930s, many of Germany's big firms (I.G. Farben and Krupp were just two examples) became disillusioned with the Weimar system. As Evans writes, "The influence it had enjoyed before 1914, still more during the war and the postwar era of inflation, now seemed to be drastically diminished. Moreover, its public standing, once so high, had suffered badly as a result of financial and other scandals that had surfaced during the inflation. People who lost their fortunes in dubious investments searched for someone to blame."

In many cases, they began to blame big business and industry. As the parties of the left grew in influence, these large corporations sought ways to protect themselves. They turned to groups like the Nationalist Party (with whom they had a long association) and the Nazi Party, which in 1930 had undergone a split that purged the left-wing "socialist" portion of the National Socialists.

In 1932, Hitler spoke to the Industry Club in Dusseldorf, appealing to the audience by denouncing Marxism and offering general industrial views. This 2.5-hour presentation didn't make much of an effect at the time, Evans writes, but it laid the groundwork for future contributions by big business. Fritz Thyssen, a wealthy industrialist, was already on board by this time, and as the Depression deepened, other industrialists began to climb onboard the bandwagon.

By the 1933 elections, Evans writes, "Hitler was backed in his election campaign by a fresh, indeed unprecedented flow of funds from industry."

The industrialists tended to disdain Hitler, but Hitler had allies who were more friendly, people like Goering, von Papen and Schacht. In February, Hitler delivered another address, this time to a private audience, and declared that democracy was incompatible with business interests, that Marxism had to be crushed, and that the forthcoming election was crucial to that effort.

After that address, they paid up even though some wanted their contributions to be split between the Nazis and other conservative coalition partners. The Nazi Party wasn't alone in the 1933 election; it was part of a right-wing coalition government, and the industrialists believed that these other coalition partners would be able to moderate and control the Nazis to some degree.

With the industrialists' money, however, the Nazis were able to spread their message and champion the idea of Hitler rebuilding Germany during the Depression and restoring order in the streets from the Marxist menace. Hitler in return promised a huge program of road-building and infrastructure, coupled with tax breaks for auto manufacturers.

After the 1933 elections, leading businessmen and corporations founded the "Adolf Hitler Donation of the German Economy," a program that steered 30 million Reichsmarks into Nazi coffers over the following year. This was intended to stave off the "forced contributions" and de facto extortion that the SA and local party members exerted from time to time. It didn't work very well, but Hitler helped the industrialists anyway with his program. As Evans writes, "With the trade unions smashed, socialism off the agenda in any form, and new arms and munitions contracts already looming over the horizon, big business could feel satisfied that the concessions it had made to the new regime had largely been worth it."

Overall, Germany's biggest industrialists and corporations supported the Nazi rise as part of their general support for conservative, right-wing government in Germany. They hoped that the other conservative parties would dilute and moderate the Nazis' influence, but the Nazis had their own plan, using this funding to push an aggressive and populist agenda that made them the leading figures in the coalition government and ultimately to one-party rule.

KosherNazi

There's a great book which discusses the banal and unsuspicious way that Hitler rose to power, written by a German in 1939, called Defying Hitler. The author was a regular German, not a Jew or other persecuted minority, yet he writes clearly about the threat of fascism and how Hitler was often misjudged during his rise, in many cases due to the turbulent nature of recent German history. Germans who had lived through the 1870-1932 period were used to enormous political changes, and when Hitler began agitating for power, they often took a cynical view of his true threat. Discounting his rhetoric as empty demagoguery was very common.

The book is really chilling and is very effective at illustrating just how easy it is to delude oneself into hoping for the best and ignoring all the warning signs. Here's an interesting passage I just flipped to, in which the author discusses the implications of Hitler's election to Reichschancellor in 1933 with his father on the night of the election:

That evening I discussed the prospects of the new government with my father. We agreed that it had a good chance of doing a lot of damage, but not much chance of surviving very long: a deeply reactionary government, with Hitler as its mouthpiece [the author had previously discussed how many intellectuals viewed Hitler as a clown]. Apart from this, it did not really differ much from the two governments that had succeeded Bruning's. Even with the Nazis it would not have a majority in the Reichstag. Of course that could always be dissolved, but the government had a clear majority of the population against it, in particular the working class which would probably go Communist, now that the Social Democrats had completely discredited themselves. One could prohibit the Communists, but that would only make them more dangerous. In the meantime the government would be likely to implement reactionary social and cultural measures, with some anti-Semitic additions to please Hitler. That would not attract any of its opponents to its side. Foreign policy would probably be a matter of banging the table. There might be an attempt to rearm. That would automatically add the outside world to the 60 percent of the home population who were against the government. Besides, who were the people who had suddenly started voting Nazi in the last three years? Misguided ignoramuses for the most part, victims of propaganda, a fluctuating mass that would fall apart at the first disappointment. No, all things considered, this government was not cause for alarm.