The Nazi Party attracted members from across German society, but it was not a random cross-section. Understanding who joined, what drew them, and who rose to lead matters for understanding both the social breadth of the genocide and the specific character of those who conceived and ordered it. The answer is less comfortable than the idea of a discrete criminal gang: the Nazi movement was a mass political party that found support across class lines and across generations, and its leadership was not composed of obvious monsters.
The membership
At its electoral peak in July 1932 the Nazi Party received 37.4 per cent of the German vote. By 1939 party membership had reached approximately 8.5 million, around 10 per cent of the German adult population. The membership was disproportionately Protestant, male, and drawn from the lower middle class: small business owners, artisans, farmers, and white-collar workers who had suffered most from the economic disruptions of the Weimar years. But the party also recruited from the professions, the universities, and the officer class. By 1933 it was drawing members from every occupational group in Germany.
Younger Germans were substantially over-represented. The average age of party members was considerably lower than the population average. The Nazi movement appealed to a generation that had grown up during the First World War and the humiliation of the Versailles settlement, had come of age during the hyperinflation of the early 1920s, and faced unemployment and insecurity in the Depression years. For them, the party offered not just ideology but community, purpose, and the prospect of a restored national greatness.
The leadership
The inner leadership defied any simple social profile. Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born failed artist who had spent years as a homeless vagrant in Vienna before the war. Heinrich Himmler was a former chicken farmer with a degree in agronomy. Reinhard Heydrich had been dismissed from the navy for conduct unbecoming. Adolf Eichmann was a travelling salesman for an oil company. Rudolf Höss was a convicted murderer who had served five years in prison before joining the SS. Josef Mengele had a doctorate in medicine and a second doctorate in anthropology.
What they shared was not background but a particular combination of ideological conviction, bureaucratic competence, and a willingness to carry ideology to its logical conclusion without flinching. Himmler built the SS from a personal bodyguard of 290 men into a state within a state of nearly a million. Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference at the age of thirty-seven and had already supervised the Einsatzgruppen operations in the east. Eichmann ran the logistics of the deportations to the death camps with the attention to detail of a capable middle manager. The genocide was planned and administered by people who could also file reports and chair meetings.
The ordinary perpetrators
Below the leadership level the perpetrators were more ordinary still. The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, studied by Christopher Browning in Ordinary Men, were middle-aged Hamburg policemen, not SS ideologues, who killed approximately 38,000 Jews in Poland in 1942 and 1943. The staff of the Auschwitz complex numbered several thousand at its peak, drawn from across the SS and from local auxiliaries. The deportation machinery across occupied Europe involved railway workers, local police, civil servants, and government officials in every country under German control.
This breadth matters. The Holocaust was not the work of a small, self-selecting group of fanatics. It required the active participation of tens of thousands and the passive acquiescence of millions. The social base of the Nazi movement was wide enough to encompass people who voted for it, people who joined it, and people who carried out its murderous orders because they had been told to, because their colleagues were doing it, and because the machinery of the state made refusal difficult and compliance normal.
See also
- Reinhard Heydrich
- Ordinary People Who Became Killers, Reserve Police Battalion 101
- Adolf Eichmann
- Heinrich Himmler
- The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution
- Adolf Hitler
Sources
- Richard Evans, The Third Reich in Power, Allen Lane, 2005
- Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, HarperCollins, 1992
- Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, Oxford University Press, 2001
- Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Knopf, 1996
- Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, Oxford University Press, 2012