ent sections of the German people: the small
farmers, who suffered from the agricultural
depression and, later, inflation; the middle class,
whose status was threatened and whose savings
had been wiped out; unemployed workers; those
industrialists at the other end of the scale who
were the declared enemies of socialism even in its
mildest form; theologians, mainly Protestant, who
saw in Nazism a spiritual revival against Weimar
materialism. The extreme nationalism of the
Nazis made a strong appeal.
Few of those who were early supporters
accepted all the disparate objectives that Nazism
purported to stand for, but every group of sup-
porters was prepared to discount, overlook or
accept as the ‘lesser evil’ those things it inwardly
disapproved of. They saw in Hitler and his move-
ment what they wished to see. This same attitude
also accounts for the view that there was a ‘good
Hitler’ who cured unemployment and unified
Germany, and a ‘bad Hitler’ who persecuted the
Jews, made war and ignored justice when dealing
with individuals and minority groups. That atti-
tude assumes that one does not have to judge the
‘whole’ but can accept the evils for the sake of
the benefits.
Nazism exploited the backward-looking con-
servatism that flourished in Germany after the dis-
illusionment of defeat in 1918. Paradoxically
Hitler imposed a revolution of values and atti-
tudes that plunged German society into acceler-
ating change after 1933. But what some of those
Germans who supported him saw in Hitler in the
1920s was a return to an old virtuous Germany,
a simpler Germany that had never existed. Hitler’s
emphasis on the need for a healthy people to
live close to the land has a history dating back
to well before 1914. It was erroneously argued
that modern Germany lacked land and space for
a ‘healthy’ expansion of the people. Hence the
obsession with gaining Lebensraum, and Hitler’s
plans for satisfying these ‘needs’ in the east.
Hitler, too, dwelt obsessively on the medieval
image of the Jew as an alien, a parasite, who pro-
duced nothing but lived off the work of others.
‘Work’ was ploughing the land, the sweat of the
brow, not sitting in banks and lending money.
Yet, he also had sound instincts which led him to
accept some modern economic concepts as a way
out of the miseries of the last Weimar years. The
discredited race doctrines of the nineteenth
century were reinforced and amplified in the
study of a new race biology. The ideology of race
lent a spurious cohesion to Nazi policies.
This was a turning back on the age of reason.
Numerous organisations from the large veteran
association, the Stahlhelm, to small so-called
völkischgroups embraced strident nationalism and
a mystical Teutonic secular faith. None saw in
Weimar’s parliamentary democracy anything but
a shameful subordination of the German nation
to alien foreign domination. It was identified also
with the Jews, who played a small but distin-
guished role in its constitutional, administrative,
economic and artistic life, although they formed
only 1 per cent of the nation’s population. They
were besmirched by Nazi calumnies that they
were war profiteers and corrupters. More signifi-
cant than the slanders themselves is the wide cre-
dence that these lies won in Germany.
The counterpart to this support for right-wing
extremism in its various forms was the lack of
positive support and understanding by the major-
ity of Germans for the spirit of parliamentary
democracy. In the 1920s anti-democratic ideas
were not only propagated by the communists and
by the ignorant and ill-educated, but found
strong support among the better-off, middle-class
youth, especially within the student unions and
universities. Stresemann’s success in dismantling
the punitive aspects of Versailles won no acclaim
because his methods were peaceful and concilia-
tory, as they had to be if they were to succeed in
the years immediately after the war. The notion
that a democracy tolerates different ideas and dif-
ferent approaches to solving problems was,
instead, condemned as disunity, as the strife and
chaos of parties. The parties themselves – apart
from the totalitarian-oriented Nazi and Com-
munist Parties – rarely understood that they had
to place the well-being of the whole nation before
narrow party interests, that even while they
attacked each other they had to acknowledge a
common framework and defend above all parlia-
mentary democracy itself. Democracy was
regarded as representing the lowest common
1
THE FAILURE OF DEMOCRACY AND RISE OF HITLER, 1920–34 185
