The Coming of the Third Reich

A common historical narrative about the Weimar Republic is that it was culturally “decadent.” This has been exaggerated to a great extent, especially given that many rural areas and regions like Bavaria remained relatively conservative culturally, at least compared to the capital and major urban center of Berlin. Nonetheless, the Nazis did exploit anxieties about cultural change and social movements in women’s rights, gay rights, and socialist and Communist activism. This is in addition to uncertainty and anger generated by economic crises as well as World War I and the transition from the authoritarian German Empire to the democratic Weimar Republic. Evans argues such anxieties did weaken the Weimar Republic and gave fuel to extreme political parties like the Nazis. When the Nazis carried off their greatest electoral success in 1930, many voters “may have been registering their alienation from the cultural and political modernity for which the Republic stood” (265). In fact, as Evans notes, opposition to sexual freedoms and abortions also came from some leftists and “feminists…alarmed by the new atmosphere of sexual liberation” (129). This demonstrates that anxieties about cultural shifts were not confined to the far right; they cut across ideological lines, reinforcing instability in Weimar society.

Much of Hitler’s strategy was providing a simple explanation and scapegoat for myriad political, social, economic, and cultural problems and fears: the Jews. “Hitler’s speeches reduced Germany’s complex social, political and economic problems to a simple common denominator: the evil machinations of the Jews” (172). In the Nazi view, antisemitism was mixed with hatred of Communism and modern cultural movements, a combination expressed in terms used by Nazis such as “cultural Bolshevism” (120) and “‘Jewish’ Bolshevism” (397). Everything that seemed to diminish Germany in Nazi eyes such as Germany’s defeat in World War II, the financial scandals and economic crises of the Weimar Republic, the rise of the German Communist Party, and controversial modernist art and literature were ultimately blamed on the Jews. By collapsing multiple grievances into a single, overarching conspiracy, Hitler was able to unite disparate groups under a common enemy, strengthening the Nazi movement’s broad appeal.

Along with antisemitism, the Nazi Party also benefited from the fear of socialism and Communism from businesses and German citizens. At the same time as they excited fears of leftist movements, they adopted characteristics from socialism. Evans argues, “Nazism was in some ways an extreme counter-ideology to socialism, borrowing much of its rhetoric in the process, from its self-image as a movement rather than a party, to its much-vaunted contempt for bourgeois convention and conservative timidity” (173). In sum, by exploiting hatred of Germany’s small Jewish minority and anxieties fueled by the rise of the Soviet Union and characterizing socialists and Jews as fundamentally un-German, the Nazis presented themselves to the electorate as the only ones who “had an inner knowledge and understanding of the German soul” (397). This manipulation of socialist rhetoric allowed the Nazis to position themselves as the only movement capable of addressing working-class concerns while simultaneously aligning with the interests of German industrialists and conservatives.