Hitler’s True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis

Abstract

The widespread enthusiasm in Germany for the Nazi regime, which sustained the government of Adolf Hitler in peacetime and into the last year of a war that was turning against the country, has long interested observers. Gellately, the author of several prior books that engaged Nazi Germany, presents in this one an analysis that takes the nationalist, socialist, and antisemitic views of the Nazi movement seriously, showing how they fit with many concepts and policy preferences already held by many Germans.Disappointment and rage about the loss of World War I and the peace treaty of 1919, combined with the convulsions of the Great Depression, made the appeal of Hitler and his political party ever-stronger in the early 1930s. Gellately both carefully and cleverly utilizes a variety of local examples to illustrate the way in which more and more Germans turned to voting for the Nazi Party until it became the country’s largest in free elections.As Gellately shows, by the time German President Paul von Hindenburg had designated him as chancellor, Hitler had already recruited a substantial number of those who would hold leading positions in the regime. A slow but real economic recovery, stimulated by re-armament and public works, consolidated domestic support while publicity about the establishment of concentration camps discouraged the voicing of dissent. Throughout the account, Gellately interjects local examples from a wide variety of contemporary and later sources that illuminate the realities of the time.The regime introduced its euthanasia program so carefully that practically no one among the mass of people was aware that by the fall of 1944, the crippled veterans of World War I had all been killed and that the regime was starting to kill the disabled veterans of World War II. Yet Gellately makes clear that the systematic killing of Jews was not the secret that some people pretended it to be afterward but had proceeded with wide knowledge and wide participation.The years of peace brought the regime a cohesion that the victories in the first years of World War II further consolidated. Gellately might have accorded more attention to the large number of slave laborers Germany imported during the conflict, since many of them worked alongside and under Germans. Benjamin Carter Hett, Burning the Reichstag (New York, 2014), showed that the burning of the Reichstag in 1933 could not have justified the decree abolishing civil liberties and the list of arrests that followed it, as the Germans claimed, because both the decree and the list predated it. Gellately could also have mentioned that Hitler always considered his reluctance to start the war in 1938 his worst mistake; he made sure that no one could cheat him of war in 1939. In view of Gellately’s noted use of local examples from all over Germany, a folded map of the country would have offered the reader a helpful guide.These minor points aside, this work is worthy of serious attention. The way in which the nationalist, socialist, and antisemitic view of Hitler and his political party fit with the preferences of so many Germans surely deserves the exposure that this book affords them. Furthermore, they reveal a level of dedication to Hitler’s regime that is truly extraordinary.