For some background in the election before the Nazi seizure of power Hitler won 33.1% of votes compared to the Social Democratic Party's 20.43% and the Communist Party's 16.86%. Obviously after years in power and the use of propaganda the Nazi party's popularity probably grew but the majority of Germans in 1932 (and in the 1933 elections when the Nazis were in power) didn't support Nazism.

Many Germans in power in East Germany had been Communists during this period, and many fled during Hitler's time in power. When war broke out between Germany and the Soviet Union Communist Gemran officials Walter Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck tracked down pro-communist Germans within the Soviet Union to train into agents for the post-war period. Those arrested or in the Gulags were allowed to leave "no questions asked"

Wolfgang Leonhard recounted the training:

‘Often one of us was required to expound in front of the group various doctrines of Nazi ideology, while others had the task of attacking and refuting the Nazi arguments. The student who had to expound the Nazi arguments was told to set them out as well and clearly and convincingly as he could, and his performance was actually assessed more favourably the better he represented the Nazi point of view.’

For many inside Germany during its collapse at the end of the war the Russians were perceived positively from afar. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich stated:

During the last months under the Nazis nearly all of us were pro-Russian. We waited for the light from the East. East. But it has burned too many. Too much has happened that cannot be understood. The dark streets still resonate every night with the piercing screams of women in distress.

For some younger Germans being defeated and then actually encountering Russians radically changed their views:

For young Nazis, the experience of failure was even more apocalyptic, since they had been taught not just patriotism, but a belief in German physical and mental superiority. Hans Modrow – later a leading East German communist – was about the same age as Konwicki in 1946, and equally disoriented. A loyal member of the Hitler Youth, he had joined the Volkssturm, the ‘people’s militia’, which put up the final resistance to the Red Army in the last days of the war. At the time he was filled with intense hatred of the Bolsheviks, whom he thought of as subhumans, physically and morally inferior to Germans. But he was captured by the Red Army in May 1945, and immediately experienced a moment of profound disillusion. He and another group of German prisoners of war were put on a truck and transported to a farm to work:

‘I was a young man, and I wanted to help. I stood on the truck and handed down the others’ backpacks, and then gave my pack to somebody else, so that I could jump off the truck myself. By the time I landed on the ground, it was stolen. I never got it back. And it was not a Soviet soldier who had done it but one of us, the Germans. Not until the next day did the Red Army turn us all into equals: they collected all of our backpacks – nobody was left with one – and we were given a spoon and cup to eat with. Because of this episode I started thinking about the Germans’ so-called camaraderie in a different way.’

A few days later, he was appointed driver to a Soviet captain, who asked him about the German poet Heinrich Heine. Modrow had never heard of Heine, and felt embarrassed that the people he had thought of as ‘subhuman’ seemed to know more about German culture than he. Eventually Modrow was transported to a POW camp near Moscow, where he was selected to attend an ‘antifascist’ school, and to receive training in Marxism-Leninism – training which, by that point, he was more than eager to absorb. So profound was his experience of Germany’s failure that he very quickly came to embrace an ideology which he had been taught to hate throughout his childhood. Over time, he also came to feel something like gratitude. The communist party offered him the chance to make up for the mistakes of the past – Germany’s mistakes, as well as his own. The shame he felt at having been an ardent Nazi could at last be erased.

Elsewhere feelings of guilt and responsibility for the war seem to have been powerful. At a public debate held in 1948 about the mass-rape of German women by Soviet troops the debate ended after the intervention of a Soviet Officer:

‘no one has suffered as much as we: 7 million people dead, 25 million lost their homes’: ‘What kind of soldier came to Berlin in 1945? Was he a tourist? Did he come on an invitation? No, that was a soldier who had thousands of kilometres of scorched Soviet territory behind him … perhaps he found his kidnapped bride here, who had been taken as a slave labourer …’ After this intervention, the public discussion was effectively over

For many minorities, Communism seemed appealing. Jews were liberated from concentration camps and given food and hot water. Polish people living in Germany were allowed once again to use their native language which had been forbidden under the Nazis. But Communism wasn't publically pushed on Germans at first. An example of this was East German radio:

Both Klein and Mahle had been working for some years in tandem with political propaganda officers of the Red Army, from whose ranks many of the first Soviet cultural officers in Germany would later be drawn. As early as 1941 German-speaking Soviet officers and German communists jointly compiled leaflets which they dropped from aeroplanes over German lines. In November of that year, they also began to publish several newspapers aimed directly at German POWs. After the battle of Stalingrad, in July 1943, the German communists in Moscow founded the National Committee for a Free Germany. They were joined by several POWs who had converted to the Soviet cause. Together, the two groups published a newspaper – edited by Rudolf Herrnstadt, later a prominent East German editor – which they delivered to German territories conquered by the Red Army, as well as POW camps.

[...]

Klein and Mahle had met many of the POWs, and they knew most Germans would be allergic to anything that seemed too radical or too Soviet. Superficially, they maintained much that was familiar about German radio, including its somewhat ponderous style and its heavy diet of serious culture and classical music. They retained the Nazi-era production staff and even many of the broadcasters, eliminating only those associated with the fiercest Nazi propaganda. As Wolf wrote to his parents in June, ‘there are six of our men and one officer, and 600 of “them”

[...]

Mahle understood that his job was to provide a ‘mirror’ for the masses in an interim period, while they were developing a ‘democratic self-understanding’. During this process, there would be ‘divergent voices’ and open debates, and of course the media must express them: ‘by publicly carrying out this dispute, the consciousness of the masses will be formed and their democratic self-consciousness will be strengthened’.

Perhaps the best-known attempt to soft-sell communism to the listening masses was Markus Wolf’s signature programme, ‘You Ask, We Answer’. For several months, starting in 1945, Wolf provided on-air answers to letters sent in by German listeners. Although the questions he received covered a huge range of subjects, and although they often required factual answers (‘What is to become of the Berlin Zoo?’), he almost always supplied an ideological twist as well, just as he had learned to do in the Comintern school in Ufa.

During the 7 June broadcast, for example, he responded enthusiastically to a listener who wrote in to say how impressed he was by the energy and spirit of the Red Army, particularly as ‘we’ve always been taught that in Russia, those who achieve are not valued’. Wolf declared that ‘all of those who believe the fairy tale about levelling down in the USSR have fallen victim to Goebbels’ propaganda’, and praised the Soviet system, which welcomed the ‘creativity of the worker’. Another listener wanted to know what, other than rationed food, would soon be available to eat in Germany. Wolf first reminded her that ‘we are not going hungry’ – the Germans should on that point feel themselves lucky – then noted that ‘difficulties are being overcome with the help of the Red Army’, and finally assured her that the ‘nutrition department of the city council is doing its utmost to import vegetables, salad and so on, to Berlin’. He even used the question about the zoo to remind listeners of how much things had deteriorated during Hitler’s final days, before promising them that better days were coming: the zoo still had 92 animals, including ‘an elephant, 18 monkeys, 2 hyenas, 2 young lions, a rhino, 4 exotic bulls and 7 raccoons’.

Wolf’s answers rarely praised communism outright, and he didn’t use Marxist language. But almost all of them praised the Red Army or the Soviet system, both of which were favourably compared to their German counterparts. And all of them explicitly contained the promise that life, which had become unbearable under the Nazis and during the final days of the war, would now quickly improve.

Other programmes took a similar tack. Late in 1945, one broadcaster visited Saxony to investigate the status of ‘youth’ in that region, and found many heartening developments. Several former Hitler Youth members told him they were ‘delighted not to have to salute their leaders’. All professed to be thankful that the war had ended. Schools had not yet reopened and there were many hardships, but the reporter predicted ‘a free and beautiful future for our youth’. The word ‘communism’ was not mentioned. Yet another reporter visited Sachsenhausen, and produced a genuinely harrowing account of the final days at the camp. Though the Red Army was thanked profusely at the end, there was nothing especially ideological about that broadcast either.