I will be writing a short paper on the mechanisms of Nazi propaganda, due in two weeks. I have read sections of Mazower's Dark Continent and Bessel's Germany After the First World War, and am getting a sense of the despondency felt by a few demographics affected by the war. The texts are telling me clearly and directly that the Nazi party appealed to those demographics more effectively than other minority parties. I'm sure I will be reading about scientific racism in upcoming texts, and I also have selections from Spielvogel's Hitler and Nazi Germany assigned before writing this paper. I think I'm getting a lot of information on the mechanisms that the Nazi party used, but I want to be able to at least touch on how the interwar depression made Germans more vulnerable than, say, veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, with our own economic recession and Islamophobia at play. I definitely would be especially aided by some information on political ideologies and national identity going back further into the nineteenth century in Germany, because the foundational elements of the "German character" that went through this are going to be found farther back than defeat in the first world war. I am gaining insight into how Germany's infancy played a part there, but beyond my readings and lectures, I'd like to engage in conversation here about that.
Also, as I always mention in this sub, IF I AM ASKING THE WRONG QUESTIONS, PLEASE LET ME KNOW! I am a history undergrad and I do very good work academically, but because I did not receive a standardized high school education, there are overwhelming gaps in my knowledge of the facts. I am taking this class, The Third Reich, not because of the content, but because of the craft. I probably know the least, in my class, about fringe extremist parties and even the holocaust itself. But I will not let that negatively affect the quality of my work.
Thank you!
The key to a deeper understanding of the appeal of extreme politics to groups such as veterans et.al. in inter-war Germany lies in the impact the First World War and especially its prolongation into the years of 1917-1923. Robert Gerwarth in his book The Vanquished describes that it is necessary to understand these years as one unit during which the changes in terms of political radicalization took place.
The whole experience of the end of WWI represents in Central and Eastern Europe, the complete collapse and change of pretty much everything that was assumed as stable and defining. The political revolutions, changing the system of government from a monarchy to a democracy; the attempts or successful social revolutions, such as the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the Sparakists in Germany and the Munich Soviet Republic; and the often violent conflicts over the shapes and borders of the new states, such as in Eastern Prussia, Carinthia etc.. They all form a matrix, which demonstrated to those who experienced all these things that in essence, what had been seen as the "natural" order of things before now didn't apply anymore.
In one of his articles, Gerwarth exemplifies this with the recollections of Hanns Albin Rauter, Austrian and later Higher SS and Police Leader in the German-occupied Netherlands. In his papers Rauter relates an episode of him returning home to Graz at the end of WWI. He describes that he finds a city where both communist revolutionaries as well as starving former troops of the Austrian monarchy seeking passage to their homelands in Croatia are roaming the streets, plundering, and exacting violence. Rauter, who was an officer and was still wearing his uniform is stopped by a bunch of communist non-officer soldiers, who take his weapon away and arrest him. He describes this as a formative experience: The idea that non-officer soldiers arrest an officer and take his weapon away represents to him the complete breakdown of order and of everything that he had regarded as true, possible, and valuable before. To him, this episode signifies the complete breakdown of a system in which he had been socialized and of the rules he had regarded as valid.
Rauter is not alone in this experience. The significance of these years and its violent conflicts over social and political revolution, over borders and over what society was going to emerge from the perceived catastrophe of the loss of the war lies in the thousands of similar experiences for many people.The previous social order, which had been regarded as stable, had failed and in its place, there was – to veterans as well as to a middle class which had lost a lot in the economic depression and hyper-inflation that ensued – chaos and the feeling and experience of existential threat – through Bolsheviks, other countries etc.
It can not be overemphasized what a complete shock and breakdown the experience of the years of 1917 to 1923 meant for many people in Germany and Central and Eastern Europe as a whole. From this experience arose the sentiments, which the Nazis and many other extreme-right wing and völkisch groups were able to tap and instrumentalize.
In his book An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office Michael Wildt describes the world-view that arose from these experiences as one which emphasized conflict. Veterans as well as other groups, especially those who only experienced the war as teenagers and thus had a greater disconnect to its realities while soaking up the propaganda, began to understand history as a whole but especially political conflict per se as a life and death matter. In their eyes liberal democracy had failed its promise to make it possible to navigate political disagreements through its channels while communism represented a truly life-endangering existential threat. Therefor, only the uncompromising fight during which the political can not be distinguished from concrete violence, was able to save them, the nation, and the German "race".
Nazi propaganda was heavily influenced by these discourses and painted a rather apocalyptic picture of what the future would look like if the necessary steps were not taken: The experiences of 1917-1923 served as the negative foil that was played up as a potential future if the fight was not taken to the various political and racial enemies they constructed. Those, who already had concrete experiences with seeing themselves fight against the changing times, whether they were the Veterans of the German occupation in Ukraine and thus participants in the Russian Civil War against Bolshevism or part of the Freikorps fighting the border fight against political and national enemies, saw themselves and their acts and world-view vindicated and validated in this type of propaganda for imagining one-self as the last line of defense against the apocalypse tends to open one up for rather radical solutions and views.
Again, the experience of the complete breakdown of the system of political, social, and moral values and behaviors that the years of 1917 to 1923 represented for many, can not be overemphasized. Without wanting to go into detail too much on the modern comparison for that would violate the 20-year-rule, American veterans of more recent wars had a very different experience for they came home to a country in which the order they are used to, political, social, moral, is still en large intact and the same one. They were not caught up in what Wolfgang Schievelbusch has described for the Germans in WWI as a "culture of defeat", which in turn lead to the view that it was only radical politics on every front to vindicate themselves and prevent a similar or even great catastrophe.
The years of 1917 to 1923 had provided many with the experience that what the Nazis and other painted as the apocalypse was indeed possible and real. The violence seen in in the war, in the following Civil Wars and revolutions in Berlin, Munich, Budapest, the overturning of so many things regarded as natural, combined with the idea of a dangerous internal enemy, who had caused defeat were the factors that the Nazis and other similar groups build their appeal on and that distinguishes this historical episode from more recent ones.
Sources:
Robert Gerwarth: The Vanquished
Robert Gerwarth: Vectors of Violence: Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War, 1917–1923. In: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 83, No. 3 (September 2011), pp. 489-512.
Michael Wildt: An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office.
Richard Bessel: Germany after the First World War.
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