Understanding the Rise of Fascism
Popular accounts of Nazism often claim that Hitler rose to power democratically. But, historian Richard J. Evans argues, German fascism relied on armed militias, made up of disaffected veterans inspired by antisemitism, to crush communists and socialists.
Not only right-wing veterans from World War I but also men from right-wing backgrounds who were too young to have fought in the war joined the Nazis in order, as they saw it, to restore Germany to its former glory and destroy its enemies, within and without. (Bettmann / Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Aaron J. Leonard
Historian Richard J. Evans is the author of eighteen books including his three-volume Third Reich trilogy — The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War — which cover the rise and fall of fascism in Germany. His most recent book, Hitler’s People: Faces of the Third Reich, focuses on Adolf Hitler’s inner circle and attempts to understand the psychology and lives of the cast of figures that would lead the Nazi party to power and Germany to disaster. He spoke to Jacobin about the political forces that enabled fascism’s rise in Germany, as well as the role of antisemitism and anti-communism in the Nazi worldview.
In your introduction, you lay out why you took the tack you did with this volume: “Only by examining individual personalities and their stories can we reach an understanding of the perverted morality that made and sustained the Nazi regime, and by doing so, perhaps learn some lessons for the troubled era in which we live.” What led you to this approach?
In 2003–2008, I published a major three-volume narrative history of Nazi Germany. The more I have thought about it in the years since then, however, the more I began to realize I didn’t really know these people in depth. And I was struck by the extent to which new material — diaries, letters, biographies, and autobiographies — was pouring off the presses that filled in the gaps and gave us a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of Nazism even seventy and eighty years later.
At the same time, the rise of authoritarian politicians, populists, and strongmen, actual or would-be, was raising disturbing new questions about democracy and what seemed — and seems — to me to be the growing threat to democratic politics around the world. So I began to read around in the subject and found so much new material that a new book about Nazism from this angle was justified. The biographical chapters in the book are also linked by a set of common questions, about commitment and its roots, about behavior and attitudes, and perhaps above all by the fact that these people, even Adolf Hitler himself, were not monsters or demons, but human beings like us.
I was struck — though perhaps I should not have been—by the degree to which antisemitism appears as a major ideological cornerstone of nearly all of those who fully put in with this regime. What role did you find that it played in cohering the German fascist movement through its years of ascent, then rule?
The catalyst for the creation of Nazism was Germany’s unexpected and catastrophic defeat in World War I, which a significant minority on the extreme right of German politics explained by the paranoid conspiracy theory that blamed Jewish “subversives,” even though Jews formed less than 1 percent of the German population and were mostly patriotic. Hitler’s own personal, visceral, and extreme antisemitism led some of his followers to adopt it themselves, while others who joined his movement were already rabid Jew haters.
Removing Jews from German society became a kind of bogus solution to the deep problems the country was experiencing in the 1920s and early ’30s. It wasn’t necessarily a popular one — indeed, the Nazis played it down in their propaganda until they came to power. But it formed a central part of their practice from 1933 onward.
Relatedly, anti-communism was a major element of the regime — though I think it too often gets limited attention, especially given the role it played in going to war with the USSR and the consequences of that. I am curious about how you see the role of anti-communism, and anti–social democracy, as a driver of Nazism in this historic epoch.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 brought Vladimir Lenin and, later, Joseph Stalin to power in Russia, and for a while, they tried to export it to other countries in Europe. The Nazis believed it was part of a Jewish world conspiracy to overthrow civilization and linked it, bizarrely, to international capitalism and plutocracy. (If you objected that capitalists and communists were at war with one another, antisemitic conspiracy theorists would reply that this just showed how the Jews were dividing society against itself!)
In 1933, the Bolshevik Revolution was still very recent and inspired widespread fears in the German middle classes, who knew that their counterparts in Russia had been expropriated and subjected to a violent “Red Terror.” In Germany, while the Nazis lost some two million votes in the last free election of the Weimar Republic, in November 1932, the Communists continued to gain support, almost exclusively from a working-class reeling from the disaster of the Depression, which brought more than 35 percent unemployment. And we have to remember that the middle-of-the-road Social Democrats were lumped together with the Communists in Nazi propaganda. After all, together the two parties had more popular support than the Nazis in the November 1932 elections. No wonder that the Nazis focused their violence and repression above all on these two parties when they came to power in 1933.
It is usually said Hitler came to power through elections. In reading your book, though, it seemed to me things are otherwise. What jumped out was that the rise of the regime coincided with the actions of hundreds of thousands of armed men, many of them disaffected veterans, who would be incorporated into the Nazi paramilitaries. In other words, there was a considerable amount of violence — including legions of men ready to fight and die for Hitler — that paved the way for his ascent and subsequent adoption of dictatorial powers. How do you see this?
It’s quite wrong, in my view, to claim as many historians do that, after the failure of his attempt to seize power by force in the “Beer Hall Putsch” in 1923, Hitler decided to take the legal route to power. Alongside his focus on winning electoral support, he continued to create massive violence on the streets in order to intimidate his opponents.
Literally hundreds of Communists and Social Democrats were killed by Nazi stormtroopers in the election campaigns of 1932, and after he took over, Hitler had nearly two hundred thousand of them thrown into concentration camps until the state police, the courts, and the state prisons, and penitentiaries took over the task of repression from the second half of 1933 onward. Not only right-wing veterans from World War I but also men from right-wing backgrounds who were just a bit too young to have fought in the war joined the Nazis in order, as they saw it, to restore Germany to its former glory and destroy its enemies, both within and without. The biographies I present in the book underline the centrality of violence to the Nazi project emphatically.