In attempting to understand the causes of the Nazi seizure of power, historians must inevitably confront how this party was able to achieve the mass appeal and electoral support that rocketed them into office. As with most other subjects related to the Nazis, contentious debates abound over which social groups or classes were the critical votes for the Nazis in 1933 and why. Early disputes were, as one may expect, between Marxists and liberals and were rooted in the political tensions of the Cold War [Stachura, 15-8]; it was not until the 1970s that historians managed to move into less ideologically charged (yet no less contentious) discussions of the subject. The primary debate surfacing in the early 1980’s was whether the lower-middle class was the key social group in the Nazi success. In response to this debate came Thomas Childers’ 1983 The Nazi Voter which has emerged during the decade and a half since as the primary synthesis of thought on the subject. Other historians, however, have continued to conduct research in this area and, although, as this paper will argue, Childers has answered satisfactorily the question of who voted for Hitler, any new synthesis in this area will have to significantly refine his methodology and conclusions on the question of why people voted for Hitler. This paper will proceed by first situating The Nazi Voter within the context of early 1980’s historiography, then describing the book’s methodology and results, and finally discussing how a new synthesis might refine Childers’ work in light of new research.
In his historiographical summary, Peter Stachura supports the traditional stance that the lower-middle class was the key social group in the Nazi success, a view flawed for two reasons. First, Stachura consistently looks at Nazi members to determine what classes the Nazis drew upon the most; while this is certainly generally important, the Nazi membership was not a microcosm of the Nazi voters, so we cannot draw any conclusions about the Nazi voter from evidence concerning Nazi members. Second, Stachura suffers from the same analytical problems that William Allen noticed most historians who argue his stance face. Namely, definitions of different classes are based on the false premise that class in Germany was defined solely by income level and not by more subjective standards. Allen instead posits that Germans only defined class more on cultural ideological grounds such that, for example, a civil servant earning a lower-middle class income views himself in the upper-middle class by the sophisticated nature of his work and associations with elites. Thus, we see that the three leaders of the ‘”‘lower-class’”‘ Socialist movement in Northeim were all from the middle class. Allen also argues that Germans found other groupings besides class by which they organized themselves, such as religion, a fact attested to by the fact that Catholics by and large stayed away from voting for Nazis, no matter what their class [Allen, 57].
Although Allen attributes the initial questioning of the lower-middle class thesis to Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler? has its own flaws. Hamilton’s main argument is that the upper-middle class was the key vote in the Nazi elections, which obviously does not break down class analysis any more than Stachura and his supporters do [Allen, 56-9]. An explanation for Hamilton’s weaknesses may lie in his methodological approach, which Childers criticizes extensively without actually invoking Hamilton’s name in the main text. Childers accuses past historians of limiting their electoral analyses to the 1930-2 elections and looking only at a few local election results [Childers, 6-7] disabling historians like Hamilton from appreciating the shifting Nazi support within the ‘upper-middle class’ over time and achieving a broad empirical foundation for their findings.
Childers not only deals with these analytical and methodological issues surrounding who voted for Hitler, but also expands his approach to meticulously seek out the reasons for voting Nazi. He deals with methodological limitations by looking at elections starting with 1924 from nearly half of the Weimar Republic’s communities. He also partially addresses Allen’s call for more subjective social divisions by splitting up the electorate into more occupationally defined groupings as opposed to a strictly wealth-based class organization. To advance his work into the realm of motivations he goes beyond analysis of electoral results and census data by examining campaign literature, print media, the ‘Abel collection’ of Nazis’ essays, and interest group publications in an attempt to describe why the various aforementioned groups may or may not have voted for the Nazis. As one might expect, Childers’ thorough and expansive approach led him to considerably refined conclusions.
The first set of such conclusions, arising from his electoral and census data, concern the trends of different occupational classes’ voting patterns. In particular, he finds that the ‘Old Middle Class,’ which included artisans, shopkeepers, and agrarians, consistently voted for the Nazi party. The support of the ‘New Middle Class,’ which included people in occupations unique to modern economies, was divided between white collar workers who voted for the Nazis in far proportionately much less than the more elitist civil servants. Civil servants, however, were at first reluctant to vote for the Nazi party and did not show their support until the very final elections, a detail that Hamilton misses with his limited time scope of analysis. Although they established a not insignificant part in the Nazi electorate, the working class was definitely underrepresented at the polls. Finally, the ‘Rennermittelstand,’ which included pensioners, rentiers, widows, and veterans, comprised a critical swing vote for the Nazis, supporting them mostly in times of economic worry as their lives depended upon financial support from the state.
Childers’ second set of conclusions arose from his marked attempt to determine the motivations of Nazi voters going to the polls. He noted that, although propaganda was increasingly attuned to local trends, it garnered a sense of national unity in that it confronted people everywhere and in that the national party maintained strict control over propaganda production such that local polities could not diverge from the unified presentation too much. More importantly, the Nazis conducted a critical shift in their propaganda strategy, turning their attention away from their previously held ‘urban strategy,’ which focused on winning workers away from the left, to trying to gain support from the middle classes. Of extreme importance, according to Childers, is that this shift never abandoned the idea of maintaining a substantial base of worker support, making the Nazi party the first to attempt to transcend class divisions. Suave political maneuvering, such as Hitler’s decision to campaign for President, augmented this propaganda, in that it increased his visibility and credibility and gave the propaganda machine a chance to practice its operation [Childers, 195-201]. Thus Childers leaves us with a strong impression of the potency of Nazi party actions in winning over voters.
Yet Childers is careful to not give too much credit to the Nazi propaganda machine for the party’s electoral success; perhaps most favorable to Childers conclusions is not his own extensive work, but rather how he situates his findings in the greater context of the Weimar Republic’s social structure and political economy. Indeed, the Nazi vote was garnered in a period when current economic policy, under the auspices of the Bruning cabinet, were pushing Germany deeper into depression [Berghahn, 115-8]. The political arena was going through problems of its own, as the typically strong parties faltered and splinter parties proliferated without end, creating a situation unconducive to political bargaining or coalition building. Potential alternatives to the Nazis failed to perform, opening a space in the political spectrum for the expansion of the Nazi party. Under these conditions, the dynamic power of the Nazi propaganda and its ability to muster a cross-class coalition of support in the name of radical (though largely rhetorical) solutions became very appealing. Childers concludes that ‘”‘the NSDAP’s heightened focus on the middle-class voter coincided with the onset of the depression, and as economic conditions deteriorated, the Nazis achieved significant breakthroughs into each of the major elements of the Mittelstand’”‘ [Childers, 262].
The absence of a new synthesis about the Nazi voter since Childers’ 1983 book does not mean that we cannot look critically at his work. The main weakness of The Nazi Voter is its overreliance on campaign literature, which causes two specific problems. First, though he departs from previous oversimplified divisions between the upper and lower middle classes, Childers still suffers from a somewhat artificial division of voters into occupational groups. Although Childers’ rightly argues that campaign literature ‘”‘from the Nazis to the Communists’”‘ was written largely in a language that divided people by occupation [Childers, 10], the campaign literature does not necessarily reflect how people actually think of themselves. Even if it can proclaim some accuracy in this regard, that accuracy is limited to those who are generally assimilated to a modern way of life; in other words, those people who would actually read and pay attention to such media. Thus, those who sought more personalized reasons for voting Nazi may not actually see themselves in occupational terms. This analysis leads us to our second problem with Childers’ overreliance on campaign literature: it indicates the populace’s mentality only through the eyes of political leaders, thus limiting our ability to truly understand the motivations of the Nazi voter.
Fortunately, other research has dealt with these issues and should be incorporated thoughtfully into any new synthesis concerning Nazi support. To start with, although Childers’ occupational divisions are useful, they are limited. He himself suggests as much: ‘”‘Each new category contains some anomalous elements that cannot be isolated and removed’”‘ [274]. Moreover, other divisions that Childers ignores have proven important in research on this subject. Heberle’s regional study on Schleswig-Holstein suggests looking at geographic variations within occupations. He points out that farmer politics, all grouped under the Old Middle Class in Childers’ work, were considerably different in each of three different geographic sectors of Germany [39]. We must be careful not to expect too much from a reorganization of electoral data. Although new research has begun to look at divisions even smaller than occupations, such as Koshar’s examinations of local social groups, or Stammtisch, determining the electoral behavior of such groups based upon poll data would lead to only limited results. In many cases already, the statistical significance of Childers’ findings is limited enough; adding even more subdivisions to his local profiles would likely eliminate the significance of his results altogether.
Further research has also expanded our understanding of why people supported the Nazis; I provide three examples. First, Berghahn argues that violence was crucial in cowing people into supporting the Nazi cause [Berghahn, 128-32]. Other historians have pointed out that some people may have actually been attracted to violence and militarized activity which ‘”‘interplayed with local conflicts and neighborhood tensions that had little to do with ideological pronouncements of party agitators’”‘ [Koshar 1987, 19]. Second, Kosher has addressed individual motives for turning to the Nazis. His comments on Nazi joiner (and presumably voter) provide some insight into the very personal nature of such as decision:
“Like so many Nazi Party activists, Krawielitzki fell ‘between the classes’ of Weimar Germany … He was attracted to National Socialism because it offered him an outlet for his talents and leadership ambitions, but above all because it gave political meaning to the uncertainty of his social existence” [Koshar 1986, 26].
Third, much of Koshar’s research points to the importance of word-of-mouth in getting people to vote for the Nazis. According to Koshar, many early Nazi party members were also members of multiple local social organizations like hunting clubs and drinking franchises, giving them vast access to a large number of people. This observation cannot be made using campaign literature because Nazis did not actively practice ‘”‘conspiratorial … infiltration’”‘ into these groups. Rather, their professed apoliticism happened to attract those who, generally uninterested in political sociability, found their public ties to others through extensive networks of other non-political organizations [Koshar 1987, 21].
As a final broad criticism, Childers’ statistical methods also impose a serious limitation on our understanding of the rise of the Nazis. Using linear regressions between both support for the Nazis and economic conditions, the ultimate implication of Childers’ findings is that more propaganda alongside more societal turmoil would have led to greater electoral breakthroughs for the Nazis among the middle classes. However, increasingly traumatic circumstances do not necessarily lead inexorably to support for the illusions and rhetoric of fascism. Paxton points out that only the middle class’s fears of disorder and turmoil, ungrounded in conditions that actually force them to transform their daily lifestyles, lead to an acceptance of fascism. Were the effects of chaos truly felt by all, then real alterations in society through an active transformation of daily life would be sought. Such was the case in Hamburg, where productivity actually increased after being ravaged by US bombers. Koshar agrees: ‘”‘the economic difficulties of Weimar were so harsh that they hindered the building of bourgeois loyalty to the new state, but they were not serious enough to undercut anti-system opposition’”‘ [Koshar 1986, 19]. Thus, we see that had societal turmoil actually been any greater in Germany, the Nazis might not have been as successful as they were. Childers’ regressions should be redesigned to test this hypothesis by allowing for the possibility of non-linear relationships between variables.
In conclusion, Childers’ The Nazi Voter resolves with finality issues about whether the lower- or upper-middle classes were the key to the Nazi electoral success and the methodological limitations of previous studies through an extensive look at a variety of sources and a reorganization of societal groupings along occupational as opposed to strictly class lines. However, a new synthesis could go farther in its refining definitions of social groups, look deeper into the real and illusory motivations of the Nazi Voter by examining more than just campaign literature, and examine the possibility of reworking Childers’ regressions with an eye for the possibility of a slight drop-off in Nazi support under extreme economic conditions.
Notes
1 My criticisms are not necessarily of Stachura. His writing in The Nazi Machtergreifung to some extent can be seen merely as a summary of the work that preceded him, notably not including Hamilton’s book which questioned many of his conclusions. His harsh assessments of many others’ work, however, indicate that his writing is slighly more than a ’summary’ and does make him open to some criticism.
2 In particular, as Childers points out, Nazi members were younger. Civil servants were also banned from joining the Nazi party, explaining why historians could have overlooked their importance in aiding the Nazi seizure of power.
3 Indeed, Allen’s exceedingly frequent references to Hamilton’s footnotes seems to imply that Allen’s arguments are inspired more by these side thoughts than by Hamilton’s overall approach
4 He mentions him in the footnotes on pages 261-2. My esteemed Professor Judson has suggested that the subtlety of these criticisms directed at Hamilton are due to the fact that upon The Nazi Voter’s publishing, Hamilton and Childers were in competition with each other, and it was unclear whose work would attain historical primacy.
5 Childers argues that a vote for the DSP (German Democratic Party), which held many of the same ideological stances as the Nazis but still clung to the ideal of parliamentary government, was ‘worth nothing.’ The DVP (German People’s Party), espousing a volkisch rhetoric similar to the Nazis, ended up dividing themselves as they tried to snag membership from both the SDP (Socialists) and the DNVP (conservative right) [204-6].
6 This would obviously exclude illiterate people.
7 Interestingly, Childers does refer to Heberle’s work, criticizing it for not subdividing social groups enough, but does not pay attention to Heberle’s own inter-regional comparisons [273].
8 Not only would more subdivisions decrease the average data available for each subdivision thus diminishing the overall testability of correlations, but many subdivisions also would not exist across many communities limiting the potential of a regionally-oriented statistical study with this level of complexity.
9 Childers’ summarizes the foundations of his statistical in Appendix I, explaining the use of the R2 [271-2].
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Chris Flood
Spring 1999
Fascist Europe
