I have spent the last four weeks teaching WWII at a Jewish nursing home, a question that came up multiple times from both my "students" and quite a few people I mentioned the class to was "how could the nazis be so evil?" I didn't have a concise answer, this is a question historians are still trying to answer in entire books on the subject. But I feel like I need an answer if I teach a course like this again. I'm not an expert on German history or WWII but I have taken courses on the Third Reich and read a great deal of secondary scholarship on the subject. So much so that I really felt saturated on everything about WWII before this class and did not want to do it. I was scared to death the first day (having a cold didn't help) but now that it is over I'm actually craving the rush of being in front of a classroom (it feels a little like the rush of riding a rollercoaster. However, I need a straight answer to the question of why the nazis did what they did that will get the ideas out there without dominating the discussion.
My first thought is that National Socialism in Germany was a perfect storm of events, however many of the factors leading to the machtergreifung (seizure of power) are present in most of the West even today. The racial ideology of Hitler and like-minded nazis was created out of ancient myths, Nineteenth Century psuedo-science, and social/behavioral engineering movements that proceeded the First World War. Admittedly, the nazis took all of these to a depraved, but not entirely illogical conclusion. Myths about Jewish secret practices (blood libel, etc.) are very old and the desire of Christians to "purge" their society of anything different goes back at least to the People's Crusade of Peter the Hermit in 1099.
Superstitious nonsense aside, there was just enough doubt in antisemitic minds that Jews had secretive plots to take over the world through control of banking and the press, indeed that the whole war was engineered for this purpose. Then there was Hitler's fantasy that Jews were also behind the bolshevik revolution in Russia, even more pertinent was the story that Jews stabbed Germany in the back and caused the surrender. In reality, Jews were a powerless minority that could be made to seem to have conspiratorial and malicious intentions by skillful manipulators.
Then there was the "science" of phrenology, largely a reflection of European Imperialism that assigned a racial hierarchy for why much of the world came under the control of whites, and assigned Jews, Roma, and Slavs to a pretty low place. The social engineering movements of Eugenics and Social Darwinism were more complicated. SD came first, this was an interpretation of Charles Darwin's theories of natural selection and survival of the fittest species applied to humans. Social Darwinists felt that certain people did not deserve life but that letting nature dispose of them would benefit society, what it meant in practice was that charity and any kind of social assistance were sucking resources from the fittest and allowing the unfit to survive, reproduce and drag down the human race. Eugenics was a "Progressive" response to SD in some ways, though it had a negative and positive side, the former is more applicable here. Negative Eugenics tried to incorporate SD ideas of unfitness and intervene through sterilization instead of waiting for nature. Degenerates bred too much, while the superior humans declined. While SD applied to anyone who was poor, eugenics had a racial component from the beginning but was primarily concerned with "improving" the white race by weeding out the degenerates. For a determined, energetic group of true believers is it really such a stretch to apply eugenics... to the living?
At their core, the nazis were a collection of criminals and the mentally ill (schitzophrenics, sociopaths, psychopaths, etc.), while psychoanalyzing hitler and the top nazis is dubious at best, further down in the party structure these types predominated. William Shirer generalized that deranged people were naturally attracted to the megalomanical but charismatic hitler and also many hypernationalist veterans of the Great War were attracted as well out of a desire to make Germany strong again and punish the "traitors" to the Reich such as communists and socialists. This collection of angry, violent people found a vehicle to participate in the nazi party, they were largely unwelcome in the more traditional parties. It is quite difficult to really understand Germany after WWI, everything was turned upside down, defeat and the very harsh peace treaty after years of privation and rationing made for many desperate people. This combined with inexperience with democracy and republican government, anything was possible but misery was the most likely. There were revolutionary uprisings, inflation, foreign military occupation, and routine but violent street fighting between right wing freikorps gangs and communists.
Amazingly, things were actually improving under the Weimar goverment until the stock market crash and onset of the Great Depression hit Germany hard. The economy was always fragile but international collapse caused widespread misery and unemployment in Germany, but opened the door for extremist political factions. Enter the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), whose intense organizing, demonstrations, rallies, and propaganda campaigns made them attractive to many lower-middle class Germans who did not support the more leftist parties but felt the mainstream parties had failed. These family farmers, small shopkeepers, and clerical professionals often discounted nazi antisemitism as overblown rhetoric. However, the nazis never won an outright majority or gained a popular mandate for world war and exterminating entire races.
Stay tuned for part 2, this is getting involved.
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