• “The Nazis said they were the only true
volkspartei [people’s party], drawing support
from all social classes.” How well does this
describe the growth of the Nazi Party before
30th January 1933?
Getting to grips with the question
• The aim of this essay is to enable the
candidate to review and discuss the appeal of
Nazism across a wide social base, from its
foundation in 1919 until the assumption of
power. Many essays might focus on the later
years of the period, from 1928 when the Nazis
began to make inroads into the farming areas
of North Germany. Candidates ought to review
the intense debate that has long existed on
who voted Nazi.
Issues to consider
• I’d firstly look at various stages of the Nazi era
1. 1919-24
2. 1924-28
3. 1928-33
• The Nazi appeal- Who votes Nazi? (numbers,
social class etc)
• Membership of the Nazi Party (numbers,
social class, jobs etc)
A people’s party?
• Make sure your findings keep relating to the
idea of a people’s party. This gets good
analysis marks.
This article will help
• Who voted Nazi
• youtube who voted nazi
Refer to the following
•
Social class – the Mittelstand (petty bourgeoisie) were well represented. Likewise farmers, especially peasant
farmers.
•
• Economic status of members, supporters and voters. Above all (cf their political rivals) NSDAP was a ‘catch-all’
party, but certain groups (eg teachers) were well represented.
•
• Age – over a third of NSDAP members in 1933 were under age of 30, but the Nazi vote was higher the more
older or retired people lived in the electoral district.
•
• Gender: irony − women excluded from leadership status within Nazi movement but by the Depression years in
some constituencies the recorded female vote for NSDAP was higher than the male vote.
•
• Geography – northern and eastern Germany (in their agricultural constituencies) solid for NSDAP by 1933.
•
• Denomination – many Protestants voted Nazi.
•
• ‘Mentalities’ – Nazis key into rejection of Republic and republican values by millions of voters; beneficiaries of
the surge towards authoritarianism.
•
• Role of propaganda.
The ‘only’ people’s party?
• • SPD – in particular spoke for the skilled working class. Working class
loyalties and values were deeply embedded in its million members.
• • KPD – attracted many of the unemployed and young.
• • Centre – origins in Bismarck’s kulturkampf, attracting solid support from
millions of Catholics.
• • DDP won votes from many among the better educated and more
affluent layers.
• • DVP of the bürgertum (the middle and upper classes).
• • DNVP – conservative nationalists.
Historiography
• The traditional Marxist view of Nazism was that it was
‘petty bourgeois’, its core support was the middle class, but
especially the lower middle class. Such a view is now
superannuated. But the Hungarian Marxist Mihaly Vajda
(1976) has provided a thoughtful analysis on Nazism. He
argues that the unemployed who supported the NSDAP
were ‘new’, “proletarianised out of a petty bourgeois,
mostly peasant milieu.” Noting the steady rise in right
wing voters, Vajda argues that the years of Nazism’s surge
in growth, “As soon as they saw a strong and influential
party promising both the improvement of their social
position and the ‘rise’ of the German nation, they
immediately joined it.”
• Many years ago Richard Brady (1937) argued
that “there was a plank in the Nazi platform
to meet the prejudices of nearly every group
to be appealed to.”
• More recently, Ian Kershaw (1998) writes
“the NSDAP were no mere middle-class party,
as used to be thought. Though not in equal
proportions, the Hitler Movement could
reasonably claim to have won support from
all sections of society. No other party
throughout the Weimar Republic could claim
the same.”
• Richard J Evans (2005): cautions against the argument
that unemployment drove people to support the
Nazis: “The unemployed flocked above all to the
Communists.” He emphasises the collapse of “the
conventional political right.” Fear drove masses of
such people towards Hitler and the Nazis. By 1932 the
Nazis were “a catch all party of social protest with
particularly strong middle class support and relatively
weak working class backing at the polls.” The Nazis
successfully projected an image of dynamism and
salvation of the national community.
• Dick Geary (1993): ably encapsulated research
findings to that date. He reminds us that most
Germans did not support Nazism. So who did? “Nazi
electoral support was much stronger in Protestant
than Catholic Germany, a feature of both urban and
rural areas.” The Nazis did better in small towns than
in the cities. Working class Nazis tended to be from
small towns, working in artisan or cottage industry.
The manual unemployed supported the KPD rather
than the NSDAP.
• Historians such as Evans, Geary and Kershaw have
relied heavily on the painstaking research of Germanborn historians such as Jürgen Falter and Detlef
Mühlberger. The former has described the Nazis as “A
People’s Party with a middle class belly.” The latter’s
research “points overwhelmingly in one direction:
that the Nazi movement effectively transcended the
class divide.” Though in unequal proportions, ‘the
ability of the Nazis to generate support from all social
classes gave the Nazi movement its potency.”
• Tim Kirk (2006): “Above all, the Nazi
movement was a young movement… The
average age of a party member in 1930 was
31.” “By July 1932 the NSDAP represented a
greater range of social and economic groups
than any of its competitors.”