"Germany was the most cultured and educated country in Europe and they still let the Nazis take over"

In My Humble Opinion
81

It seems to me that the only really puzzling aspect to the rise of the Nazis is the Shoah. Looking at it today we see the Shoah as the defining characteristic of Nazism, but in 1933 Fascism was more about a vision for the future, and restoring order and prosperity

In the 1930s European democracy was young, capitalism appeared to have failed, the nation states were mostly fairly recent constructions, with disputed borders which didn’t really reflect ethnic and cultural boundaries, populations were growing at a speed never seen before, new technologies, instant communication, faster travel etc etc

Rapid industrialization had created a new and massive working class. The old order was clearly gone, and there was a deep divide between radical leftists and radical rightists about what the future order should be. Rural vs Industrial, religious vs lay, nationalist vs internationalist etc. Italy and Spain went Fascist, France was also highly unstable, with communists in a power sharing government from 1936 on, constant strikes and fascist rioting etc etc. The Spanish civil war supplied a stark illustration of where the polarization could lead, and the emergence of the Soviet Union was terrifying for the old order, the middle classes, the church…

So in the midst of this powder keg, the Nazis emerge, promising stability, prosperity, and even the empire that Germany had missed out on while all its neighbors were indulging only a generation earlier.

In the context, there’s nothing obviously unreasonable about twentieth century Fascism. Authoritarian rule, nationalism, military expansion, all apparently looked better than the ostensible alternatives, communism or chaos.

The real puzzle is how the iconically “rational” and “cultured” Germans could pursue a completely irrational policy of persecution and then annihilation against populations which ostensibly posed no threat.

A few weakish ideas :

The notion of human dignity is more of an axiomatic stance than a rational one, so if you don’t espouse the axiom…

Capital C Culture is often more sentimental than truly humanistic, rather than contributing to uplifting humanity it substitutes for it.

Is there anything specific about Germany that predisposed the Shoah - maybe… Germany was possibly more of an ethno-state than its neighbors, less of an ideological national story ? Less clearly geographically defined ? More fragile sense of national belonging, so more to prove ? Greater working class anomie due to greater industrialization ? Something religious maybe ? Italy, Spain and France were Catholic, and it was/is somewhat baked into their national identities.

TLDR, fascism is in no way incompatible with culture and reason, genocide is a way tougher knot to untie.

82

Hitler and other Nazis were on about Jews long before 1933. However, there was also plenty of anti-semitism in Russia, Romania, Poland, you name it, so I disagree that killing Jews was a super original German invention. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

83

I think Hitler needed a scapegoat: to make Germans feel better about themselves; to have a place to put all the anger and fear and resentment and bewilderment they had as a result of WWI and “missing out” on being a real Empire; and to get them working together towards a common goal.

Jews were the default target because anti-semitism has been a huge part of European and their exported cultures for centuries, and he was an anti-semite to being with. There’s a huge streak of fear in humans about “the other”, and Jews (and the Roma, and the physically or mentally challenged) were very visibly other.

84

Christianity

For a disaster like the Shoah you need the necessary conditions and a proximal event. The necessary conditions were two fold: the education system was controlled by Catholics and Lutherans; Communists were identified as Jewish Bolshevists. The proximal event was Hitler imposing antisemitism as a government policy. A driving force and a compliant population = Shoah.

85

There is irony, if such a term even applies, in the fact that soldiers of a nation that supposedly revered art and culture were responsible for destroying a key part of the cultural heritage of Belgium in WWI, an act that helped turned world public opinion against Germany.

“On August 25 (1914), although they had encountered no resistance from the population, German troops began a massacre (in Louvain). The massacre likely began when a group of German soldiers, panicked by a false report of a major Allied offensive in the area, fired on some fellow German troops. Civilians were shot or bayoneted, homes were set on fire, and some bodies showed signs of torture. Many of those killed were randomly dumped in ditches and construction trenches.”

“At around 11:30 p.m., German soldiers broke unto the university’s library (located in the 14th-century cloth hall, which held significant special collections, including medieval manuscripts and books, and set it on fire. Within ten hours, the library and its collection was virtually destroyed. The fire continued to burn for several days. Brand Whitlock, the U.S. ambassador recorded the rector’s account of “the murder, the lust, the loot, the fires, the pillage, the evacuation and the destruction of the city” as well as the deliberate incineration of the library’s incunabula. The burning of the University of Louvain’s library caused the destruction of more than 230,000 books, including 750 medieval manuscripts. Personal libraries and the papers of notaries, solicitors, judges, professors, and physicians were also destroyed.”

The civilian toll got even worse.

86

It doesn’t matter how enlightened and genteel one’s upbringing. Send young people to war and they will descend into savages unless and only unless their conduct is restrained and guided from above.

Outside of the heat of battle/fog of war, and on to the methodical killing of civilians and POWs; Ordinary Men covered that. Or put the question to yourself, if you’ve worked in the corporate world: those people who have no problem eliminating entire departments or throwing colleagues under the bus - given the right situation do you doubt they’d balk at killing instead of firing?

87

We don’t “eliminate entire departments” by sending them to the gas chamber. There is a big difference between reallocating resources in the economy and genocide.

88

I’m glad that’s a big difference to you. But for much of history and for many ordinary people, it was only a similar bit of paperwork that didn’t really affect them personally.

To the OP: how can civilization so quickly be dropped, as if it were an affectation?

89

I dunno, layoffs by corporations are exactly like the Holocaust. :man_facepalming:

90

Don’t forget that the extermination programme started with the war itself . Yes, Kristallnacht had been a confirmation of what the Nazis were really like, if it wasn’t already obvious.

But there had been years of totalitarian command of the media, hence public discourse, By 1941/2, that was coupled with all the distracting pressures of war and persistent euphemisms and cover stories (“resettled”, “evacuated to work”) applied to people you didn’t know well (if at all) and who were just not there one day, just as so many people had gone to war.

“Out of sight, out of mind” can be pretty powerful when most of your time is spent working and/or trying to find rations and make them stretch and/or you’re being bombed a lot of the time. Especially if you know nothing good happens to people who speak out of turn and challenge the official story in front of the wrong people (who might be anyone).

91

I think you underestimate the extent to which “conduct… guided from above” tends to go the other way: against restraint, in favor of savagery. Never mind “how enlightened and genteel” the ruling class might be. Consider that if soldier weren’t being ordered to invade someone else’s country to begin with, there would be no such opportunity for savagery.