Germans into Nazis

Rating:
Summary: The metamorphosis of Germans
Review: The books title, GERMANS INTO NAZIS implies an unasked question - how did this happen? The answer, according to Peter Fritzsche, is quite straightforward. First of all, it had nothing to do with any of the following:

> Bitterness over the Versailles Treaty

> The inadequacy of the Republic and the ineffectiveness of Hindenburg as President

> Economic despair associated with the Inflationszeit or hyperinflation crisis

> The Great Depression

> Anti-Semitism

No, none of these. Fritzsche says "it should be stated clearly that Germans became Nazis because they wanted to become Nazis and because the Nazis spoke so well to their interests and inclinations." The removal of anti-semitism as a motivator would seem to contradict Daniel Goldhagen's thesis in HITLERS WILLING EXECUTIONERS, where it is argued that persecuting Jews was the raison d'etre for Nazis. Also, Ian Kershaw in HUBRIS, in studying the motivating factors in the life stories of 581 Nazi party members, found that less than 75 were driven by anti-semitism. If Fritzsche is correct and the interests and inclinations that caused Germans to metamorphose into Nazis do not include social and economic factors, then what else is there? Answer - politics.

The political organization, the devotion to the cause, the energy, and the message of the Nazis; all are shown to have had significant appeal to the populous. The Nazis were organized if nothing else. They held 2,370 public meetings throughout Germany in 1925 and by 1929 they had 3,400 party branches across the country. Their ideological appeal was based on their portrayal of themselves as "a party that was constructive, that would move forward and bring Germans together in a militant Volksgemeinschaft" (community of people).

Fritzsche is fairly dry and prosaic in the manner in which he goes about making the case that it was the political aspirations of the people that the Nazis most appealed to. Yet he marshals sufficient evidence to be convincing.

What role did Hitler play in all of this? You'll have to read about that elsewhere as Fritzsche has very little to say about him in the entire book. This seemed strange at first but it's in keeping with a truism that the great Hitler biographers have recognized. To understand Hitler you have also to look at German society. Fritzsche does not say as much, but his books emphasis on the power of politics in German society is testimony enough to that fact.

Rating:
Summary: Part truths beget total errors
Review: This book reminds me of the adage about "part-truths that beget total errors." What it has to say about the political process that turned Germans into Nazis is, for the most part, valid and valuable. It's what it leaves out that troubles me and troubles me greatly. Historian Peter Fritzsche maintains that the Nazis prevailed in 1933 not because the German people embraced authoritarianism, militarism, and nationalism (as other right-wing parties did) but because they offered them something the other political parties did not: a "refreshingly moral vision of the nation", and "a political movement that was unabashedly nationalist, forward-looking, and socially inclusive, that recognized the populist claims of constituents without redividing them on the basis of occupation." World War I, says Fritzsche, accelerated the populist yearnings of the German public for political enfranchisement and national solidarity as exemplified, for example, in America's July 4th celebrations. That this yearning was ultimately satisfied by a Hitler rather than a German version of Jefferson requires quite a bit more explaining, however, than we get from this book. Weimar politics, like Tennyson's depiction of Nature, was "red in tooth and claw", full of the rhetoric of ressentiment, humiliation, militancy, spite, and political paranoia-- but don't expect to find any of that here. In this sanitized rendering of events, we learn nothing about the pre-1933 collaboration of the right-wing police and army with the Nazis, how this collaboration intimidated the public, and finally, utterly desensitized them to brutal conduct and brutal speech. Or how the Social Democratic leadership's own decency and naive faith in the German public led them to discourage youthful supporters from standing up to Nazi intimidation in the streets. As for the social reform and political participation that Germans hungered after, nowhere does Fritzsche acknowledge that it was the liberal Germans, disproportionately Jewish, and not the right-wing, who were actually doing something-- a great deal, in fact-- to transform German society in this direction. As early as the 1860s, a German complained in the press, "Why is it necessary that a Jewish woman [Lina Morgenstern] has to manage the soup kitchens: why can't Germans do that; does everything have to be left to the Jews?" But, in fact, reformist causes remained the preserve of liberal Germans in the Weimar period as well. Liberals drafted labor legislation and implemented reforms in the realms of law, social welfare and education. If the right wing, and most of the German public, felt themselves unmoved, and uninterested in participating in these developments, we must ask why. Fritzsche, who I hasten to add is no apologist for the Nazis, fails to explain why Germans condoned and even supported the vile expressions of Nazi antipathy toward Jews and liberals; nor does he offer a convincing explanation of why they were drawn to Nazi "idealism"; his portrait of Nazis as savvy local politicos and grass-roots organizers is short on substance and ultimately unpersuasive. Until 1933, the Nazi's concrete-- as opposed to rhetorical-- accomplishments amounted to little more than organized hooliganism and grandiose spectacle.