I mean, you see those old newsreels and propaganda films, and there seems to be lots of marching involved. And not just walking along, but stuff that required practice and rehearsal. And holding up all those flags and torches for hours on end … I mean, it’s one thing to do this as part of your job and get paid for it, but I imagine these people paid some kind of membership fee for the “privilege”. Then of course there were the beat downs of the religious, ethnic and racial minorities. Some might look at it as good exercise, but me? I see it kinda like a mandatory calisthenics program in the workplace – it’s really just not me, you know?
This was/is not exclusive to the Nazis…
Well there needs to be a certain amount of training and discipline, you can’t just jump straight to the persecuting and invading part.
I don’t know, you just don’t get the same calibre of vicious ideologically driven ubermensch oppressors these days.
North Korea is doing ok with that…
Canada needs to up their game - highest paid military in the world and they don’t go anywhere or do anything. They could at least try to look busy.
Like the Mafia, it was a corrupt organization with huge perks for the big-shots, but the soldiery had it awful.
Swag: you couldn’t filch the victim’s confiscated goodies for yourself. That was strictly property of the Reich.
Sex: The Joy Division brothels were to reward capos, not SS. While the Jewish women were off limits for reason of racial purity, there were plenty of non-Jewish prisoners for sex slavery. but either way it wasn’t a safe itch to scratch. (Goebells did avail himself of UFA starlets, but Hitler didn’t approve and it could have eventually gotten him in deep shit). The Lebenstraum stud farm idea never got off the ground, so Naziism wasn’t especially frolicsome for the rank & file.
Workload: the hours could be brutal, such as when Himmler decreed that the Greek and Hungarian Jews would be gassed in huge job-lots toward the end of the war.
Working conditions: of course, there was the smell.
If I were a Nazi, I’d finagle a nice posting to an embassy in sunny South America.
No more so than similar political roles in any other country, provided you could fake the necessary enthusiasm.
That fakeness is key to all established parties > but you had to put in a lot more effort in communist societies because of a/ the religious element — everyone must believe in the scriptures and the saints and prophets ( until Koba knocks them off ) and b/ bad things would happen if you were against the party.
Most Germans didn’t believe in naziism, and even of those who were members it was mostly a career move — which they didn’t mind junking when it was superseded by either of the two imposed ideologies which won the war. The young, who were brought up under the new regime whilst their minds were childish, would be more enthusiastic, temporarily; but that applies to any other revolutionary situation ( such as, say, separately, the Grande Revolution and it’s successor, the Napoleonic dictatorship ).
Plus the reasonable appeal of the nazi party, which was not a doctrinal party but merely a movement with a political platform, shifting and adapting to circumstance, varies according to the period: in the early '20s it was not particularly obnoxious — all 1920s parties were obnoxious — but this is the time where the nazi had to work hard to establish the party: by the late '30s, when it was more hateful, he could coast along. Whereas his soviet counterpart didn’t dare coast unless he wanted to be in a hole in the ground.
As for the marching/parades, why would this be any harder than those in the USSR or either straw-hat party political conventions in America or those weird town parades American TV shows ? There was one in this week’s Parks & Rec; and I doubt if people meet up in the morning and say ‘Let’s put on a show.’: it requires plenty of organization and hard work. Fortunately, whether nazis or soccer moms the sort of people who do that work are the sort of people who want to do that work.
Any more extracurricular duties – such as boycotting jewish shops — if not particularly welcome even to the perpetrators ( although especially welcome to the psycho element of such ) would be handled as something that needed to be done and then forgotten once at home. It’s not as if the nazis, let alone the Germans, had invented severe bullying to murder as political techniques ( and up to the war they killed very few people indeed comparatively to later and to other countries ). Apart from, say, the French Terror and the usage of party paramilitaries in the USA during the 19th century, Francia in Paraguay was rather worse than the nazis in peacetime whilst his successor managed to kill off around 70 - 90% of his own entire population in the War that followed, beating Hitler hollow.
Now that was hard work.
Yeah. I mean, St. Pierre and Miquelon are, like, right there.
I figure the soldiers and SS guys were paid staff who did what they did as part of their job. That’s why I didn’t include invading and conquering among the hard work for Nazis, though I’m sure it was no picnic in the park.
On the plus side, if I ran a business, all the conquering might earn me some cheap labor or even slaves from the pool of foreign workers, and of course that would reduce my work.
I dunno, made there was a Golden Age of Nazism, though it would have been pretty short lived. The early days were filled with street battles against other parties and police, with a pretty high risk of jail time to boot. And later, well, there was the whole round the clock bombing thing by the Allies. Getting a good night’s sleep would have been an absolute bitch, and clearing rubble sounds like back breaking labor.
Maybe it was good to be a Nazi in, say, '36 to '40 or even '41.
Interesting thread. First, you have to remember that there were SEVERAL Nazi organizations, as well as the Nazi Party. You could belong to the party, and not have to wear a uniform…by about 1938, you had to be a NP member if you wanted to keep your job (as a school teacher, petty bureaucrat, etc.). The first Nazi organization was the SA (headed by Ernst Roehm-the so-called “Brownshirts”). These were the guys who intimidated other parties, beat up Jews and pacifists, etc. The SA got too powerful, so Hitler had the leadership arrested and later murdered-the remnants of the SA got absorbed into the SS…which was actually two organizations-the “Waffen” (armed SS)-which was Hitler’s private army, and the regular SS (sort of a national police service). If you were part of the non-armed SS, you were part of a political organization that was able to profit immensely from the crimes committed against the Jews and other “enemies of the state”…Himmler got rich from the estates looted from Jews; and many of his friends became rich the same way. You had to go to party rallies, torchlight parades, etc., but the stealing was good!
Those films aren’t like today’s live broadcasts from a political convention, tea party rally, or PETA protest. They were meticulously choreographed and edited pageants using wardrobe experts, makeup artists, and even professional actors under the direction of brilliant directors like Leni Riefenstahl. And none of that footage saw the light of day until it was personally approved by Joseph Goebbels.
I’ll venture that the typical Nazi gathering was a lot more casual and less exacting when it came to marching, attire, and getting all those “Sieg Heils!” synchronized.
These times already started in 1933. the street battles were before that and they mostly happened in big cities. No need for fighting if you were a former bourgeois conservative gone Nazi in a middle-sized town. Then you could hope for a better job, or the chance to buy cheap the business of an emigrating Jew.