Who was mad enough to vote for Hitler?

Hindsight has bedevilled studies of inter-war Germany, because historians have had the benefit of being able to see what people at the time could not: how things turned out. 

So it was perhaps unfair, but natural, for historians to ask why the Germans acted as they did. 

Neither is it surprising that their first suggestions put it down to irrationality – Hitler’s voters, they concluded, were the “outcast and apathetic” … and people who hadn’t voted before (and so were easily fooled). 

The German political scientist Sigmund Neumann (1932) blamed the “uprooted unemployed”, and general disaffection:

"Protest against the November Revolution and parliamentarism, protest against the defeat and Versailles, protest against the economic system, and protest against the dominance of rationalism and materialism."

If you did the exercise on the parent webpage inviting you to see a correlation between the growth of unemployment and the size of the Nazi vote, you could yourself have been forgiven for assuming that there was a causal link between the two. 

A different approach, but with not much better an outcome, was adopted by the American political scientist Harold Lasswell (1933).  Lasswell saw that a strong body of support for the NSDAP came from the lower middle classes – the Kleinbürger and the Kleinbauern (the small-scale self-employed and peasant farmers).  And in 1960 the American sociologist Seymour Lipset ventured why: because they had “a low level of sophistication [stemming from] little education and isolation from varied experiences [along with] a high degree of insecurity” … i.e., they were stupid and scared. 

Richard Hamilton (1982) downplayed the role of the Kleinbürger altogether – whilst they clearly were important, he argued, they were not numerous enough to explain the Nazis’ success – and instead he found evidence of significant support in some areas of Germany from the Grossbürgertum (upper middle class). 

Thomas Childers (1984) did not agree – did not the Nazis spend much of their time attacking the upper middle classes? – and he noted that German political parties did not generally appeal horizontally to social classes, but vertically to ‘interests’ – farmers, women, youth, the elderly, Protestants etc. 

"Although the hard core of the party's constituency was, indeed, overwhelmingly lower-middle-class, this nucleus of support was augmented in periods of severe economic and political distress – briefly during the inflation of 1923-24 and massively after 1928 – by crisis-related protest voters from a wide range of social groups."

The Nazis, he concluded, were “a highly volatile catch-all party of protest”, who benefited from the Panik im Mittelstand during the Great Depression. 

I don’t know about you, but have we moved on here from Neumann and Lipset? 

Neither do I see much progress in the work of Manfred Keuchler (1992), who interpreted the German voting scene as inchoate – that the electorate had not yet formed strong attachments to established parties.  Where this had happened (e.g. Catholics for Zentrum, and industrial workers for the SDP and KPD) the Nazis failed to make significant inroads.  Where they DID pick up votes was from those electors who did not have fixed allegiances:

"A largely unattached and disoriented electorate set the stage, economic doom provided the trigger, for the rise of the NSDAP." 

(So still not crediting the electorate with much rational objectivity, then?) 

During the 1990s, however, some of the old sureties began to crumble. 

Dick Geary (1993) noted that – while the Nazi vote “made only a relatively small dent in the size of support of the SPD and KPD vote taken together” – the working class were not as immune to Nazism as previously assumed: around 40% of Party members were of working-class origins; similarly 40% per cent of the Nazi vote came from workers and one worker in every four voted for Hitler in July 1932. 

Similarly, he knocked on the head the idea that unemployment fuelled the Nazi advances in 1929-32: only 13% of the unemployed supported the National Socialists. 

Noting that the NSDAP was “much more attractive to female voters than the German Left in general, and the KPD in particular”, he concluded:

"The Nazi Party was therefore without doubt a Volkspartei: recruiting its members and its voters across a broad range of social groups, from both sexes and from the older as well as the younger generation." 

Writing two years later, David Welch reiterated the appeal of the Party both to “the 'old middle class' of' small retailers, self-employed artisans, peasant farmers, pensioners and those on fixed incomes [and] to the 'new middle class' of white-collar, non-manual employees”, but he also acknowledged a broad appeal across the electorate:

“the NSDAP could justifiably claim to represent a wider range of economic and social groups than any other political party”. 

In 1991 Jürgen Falter found left-wing voters in 1932 were abandoning the SDP in significant numbers to vote Nazi.  Why?  Falter put it down to Nazi campaigning and propaganda. and to an insufficient SDP offer.  Ascribing to German voters the agency of actually being able to understand the issues and make political decisions on the basis of policies, he concluded that:

"In the minds of millions of voters, the Nazis figured as a movement that promised to introduce radical reforms benefiting all non-Jewish Germans.  As a result, National Socialism was not a political choice that necessarily revoked the progressive social and economic aspirations that workers had long cherished." 

… i.e.  German voters looked at Nazi policies, and liked what they saw. 

Richard Bessel (2004) points out that even the youngest voter in 1932 would be old enough to remember the Great War.  In those ensuing 14 years (which is the blink of an eye) they had lived through the 1918 Revolution; the humiliation of Versailles; the attempted coups, general strikes, soviet republics and civil wars of the early 1920s; the hyperinflation; and seen the Dawes dream of American-style materialism shattered by the Weltwirtschaftskrise.  Perhaps they could be forgiven for going to the polling booths in 1932 and 1933 thinking: 'If this is democracy, you can have it!'  Many Germans, in the years that followed 1933, explicitly preferred Hitler's stable – even repressive/racist – dictatorship to the unsettling, never-ending chaos of Germany's brief experiment with democracy.

So, who then voted for Hitler?  I will leave you with the ‘Commentary’ in Jenkins and Feuchtwanger’s 2000 A-Level sourcebook:

"The Nazi Party succeeded in attracting:

• Sections of the working class, in smaller towns or rural areas, that had not previously been effectively organised by the parties of the Left.  This group included the rural workers of East Prussia, old-fashioned craft workers (makers of toys and clocks) and state employees who had probably previously voted for the German Democratic Party (DDP) rather than the Socialists (SPD). 

• The peasantry, a third of whom lived on small uneconomic farms and who were attracted to the promise of a system which protected their interests against a modern age of industry and trade unions.  Half of Hitler's vote came from the villages.  Small businessmen were also attracted by the hope that their interests would be protected and their- working conditions improved.  They had found that demand for their products had fallen between 1929 and 1933, and like so many others in society, they had become disillusioned with democracy. 

• A disproportionately high following among the old middle class.  This was made up of small merchants, craftsmen and farmers who were being over-taken by the modern industrial state, and by the new middle class of small investors and pensioners, who had been hit by the various economic crises, particularly that of 1929-33, which had affected Weimar Germany.  These middle-class voters deserted the traditional democratic parties. 

• The upper middle class and elites — academics and aristocrats. 

• The young, who responded to the Nazi propaganda appeal of friendship and were attracted to the idea of belonging to a movement which stressed the importance of their independence. 

• Women, who were won over in large numbers by an appeal to support the family and provide Arbeit und Brot ('Work and Bread').

On the other hand, in answer to the question Who did not vote Nazi?', the following people have been identified:

• Catholics who remained loyal to the Centre Party or its Bavarian counterpart, the BVP.  Catholics formed about 35 per cent of the German population.  Support for the two Catholic parties had settled at around 15 per cent in the Weimar years.  The Catholic clergy preached from the pulpit that support for- National Socialism was sinful, largely because of its racial doctrines.  Thus Nazi electoral performance in predominantly Catholic areas like the Rhineland and Lower and Upper Bavaria remained below the national average. 

• The industrial working class traditionally mobilised by the left-wing parties and the trade union movement.  Workers were under-represented in the Nazi movement in relation to their proportion of the population as a whole (around 45 per cent)."