The Cult of Hitler: The Molding of Popular Opinion in Nazi Germany

The word ‘Nazi’ remains among names instantly associated with the concept of evil. After their defeat in the Second World War, the Nazi party, the government it established, and the military it controlled have been remembered in history for numerous atrocities and brutal methods of warfare, and in fiction, they have practically become stock villains. Perhaps the greatest gift these foremost among fascists have bequeathed to the world is their enduring memory as the group that everyone loves to hate.

In Nazi Germany, however, the public opinion of the party was markedly different. The country had been in economic dire straits since its defeat in the First World War. The Great Depression shook the already weak German economy further. Beyond this, the threat of the Communist revolution was very real to the German people who had recently witnessed the old order of Russia fall to the Marxists. The very nature of Communism was terrifying; it was seen as an atheistic force that would gut all that was right in the heart of the German people if it was not repelled. The Nazi party was born of and capitalized on all of these fears, synthesizing them into a single fascist ideology. Before the German people ever believed Nazism would elevate them to the master race of the Earth, they believed it would save them from the debris of a world crumbling around them.

Adolf Hitler, for all his political genius, attained such earthshaking power ultimately because he was the right man in the right place at the right time. Perhaps Allen puts this most effectively with the following words: “When a community is secure, political agitators find themselves ranting in near-empty halls. It takes a haunting fear, a sudden awareness of hitherto unsuspected dangers, to fill the halls with audiences who see the agitator as their deliverer” (Allen 24). It is important to understand the social climate of the time. Cold War paranoia had a powerful predecessor in pre-World War II Germany, as “[t]he 1917 revolution in St. Petersburg had taken place only 2,000 miles from Berlin, and Lenin’s Communist Party had a minuscule following compared with every 6 million (or 17 percent) of the German electorate that had supported the Communist Party in November 1932” (Koonz 35). The idea of universal communal ownership was terrifying to the German people, but even more so was the appeal it might have to the margins of societies most slighted by a capitalistic economy. In 1930, this fear only deepened, “for the world depression was spreading and cascading quotations on the New York Stock Exchange affected even this remote valley in central Germany. It was the depression, or more accurately, the fear of its continued effects, that contributed most heavily to the radicalization” of the German people. (Allen, 24). The depression, even in areas where it had little economic effect, bred terror for livelihoods. Faith in the economic system crumbled as “[b]usinessmen whose own enterprises were doing well worried about the general situation in Germany. Banks that had no difficulty collecting on loans began to reduce all credit allotments. Only the workers were directly hurt, but the rest of the townspeople, haunted by the tense faces of the unemployed, asked themselves, ‘Am I next?’ ‘When will it end?’”(Allen 25). As the Great Depression advanced, the people grew desperate, and the people more and more came to fear a Communist uprising by a marginalized working class.

Another stressor was the failure of the German War effort in the Great War. All over Germany in the years of the postwar government, “there were people who could not accept Germany’s defeat, revolution, and the resultant democracy. Often they opposed modernity altogether: liberalism, cosmopolitan culture, an open society, a competitive industrialized economy, a powerful labor move” (Allen 25). The German people had quite recent memories of how “[i]n 1914 millions of men across Europe rallied to the colours. They were maimed or killed in unimaginable numbers, the quick commingled with the dead in muddy hellholes, in the service of either furthering or frustrating Germany’s first bid for domination in the twentieth century” (Burleigh 28). After defeat in a hellish industrial war, the German people were stuck in a cycle of debt under unfair terms of peace, and a spirit of national humiliation haunted the people.

Political tensions were straining throughout the nation as multiple parties resorted to extremism. In the decades following World War I, “the extreme Left, led by the Communists, fostered a series of uprisings that proved abortive but also terrifying to the middle classes. Formerly moderate workers also grew frantic as they watched the gains of their 1918 revolution peter out and saw the leaders of their republic murdered by right-wing thugs” (Allen 26). However, the true signs of horrors to come came from the other end of the aisle when “the formerly respectable Right also applauded the series of political assassinations of Republican leaders carried out by underground Freikorps terrorists. The conservatives were becoming identified with the fanatics” (Allen 26). As political violence fueled by both communist uprisings and the simple fear of communism escalated, the people of Germany began to look for a way out.

For all the horrors wrought on the Jewish people and other peoples during the reign of the Nazis, “[f]rom 1928 to mid-1932, when electoral support for Nazi candidates leaped from 2.6 percent to 37.4 percent, anti-Semitism played little role in attracting voters to Nazism” (Koonz 10). The people of Germany as a whole were not expressly interested in ethnic cleansing, but rather simply sought some form of order after so many years of social chaos. The German people, “disillusioned with a foundering democracy and terrified of communism in a time of economic catastrophe, were drawn to the Nazis’ promise of a radically new order under Hitler’s control” (Koonz 10). Such violent and widespread anti-Semitism was not a social norm before Hitler’s rise. In fact, “[a]rchival research, as well as memoirs and oral histories, make it abundantly clear that Germans’ attitudes toward ‘the Jewish question’ began to depart from Western European and North American norms only after the Nazi takeover. Germans did not become Nazis because they were anti-Semites; they became anti-Semites because they were Nazis” (Koonz 10). As Nazi power solidified in Germany, so did an Aryan German identity, and it became easier and easier to identify those seen as “other.”

Nazi ideology could hardly have been called anything new unto itself, but it applied recent scientific developments to notions of civic duty. Long before the Nazis’ rise in the 1930s, “doctors, psychiatrists, scientists and pundits in many countries thought that industrial, urban society was engendering biological degeneration. Nations were being undermined by ever-increasing cohorts of unfit individuals, whose alcoholism, anti-social behavior, criminality, or mental deficiency were multiplied by inheritance” (Burleigh 346). As people looked around and saw the social degeneration around them, it could have been easy for them to infer in those early days of modernization that newer methods of survival were rotting humanity from within. Criminals and undesirables parasitically drained society because “[t]heir defective ‘germ plasm’, the term the cell biologist August Weissmann used for what we call genes, rather than the environment or poverty, was held to be at fault. Modern medicine and welfare were counter-selectively perpetuating these problems, with each beneficial scientific advance representing a Pyrrhic victory” (Burleigh 346). With this association of medical and technological advancement with a weakened gene pool, “[s]ocial Darwinism fused with a pseudo-Nietzschean contempt for humanitarian succor of the weak. In line with may advocates of eugenic sterilization and euthanasia at the time, Hitler believed that anyone unfit for life should perish and that the state could give nature a helping hand” (Burleigh 99). Even in such desperate times, the average citizen would find the idea of violent enforcement of eugenics as at least extremely harsh. In order to rally the people to the banner of a total social cleansing, the message of eugenics “was coated in the language of duty and of sacrifice, which individuals must render the community: ‘there is only one disgrace: despite one’s own sickness and deficiencies, to bring children into the world, and one highest honour: to renounce doing so’. As we shall see, this was unexceptional in international eugenic circles at the time” (Burleigh 99). Thusly, the path to one of the most horrific modern programs of genocide hid in a clever disguise as an ideal of human sacrifice.

In the interest of good eugenics, certain moral sanctions against violence were liberally reinterpreted. Rather than being the ultimate form of social destruction, “[w]ar was considered a positive force for racial regeneration: ‘the bloodiest civil wars have often given rise to a steeled and healthy people, while artificially cultivated states of peace have more than once produced a rottenness that stank to high Heaven’. Hitler was hardly alone in believing that” (Burleigh 99). As their faith solidified in such stalwart leadership, the German people joyfully marched closer and closer to initiating a grand celebration of industrialized natural selection by the blitzkrieg and gas chamber.

That Hitler knew how to work a crowd can hardly be denied. The man’s ability to speak is rightly respected to this day. He was able to exude an intelligence, an authority, a class when “[a]ttired in a white shirt, tie, and black suit with a discreet swastika lapel pin, Chancellor Hitler fulminated about hostile foreign powers, the Bolshevik menace, cultural decline, and spineless liberals. Exuding ethnic fundamentalism, he said barely a word about Jewry.” (Koonz, 31). Perhaps the most marvelous thing was his argumentative skill. He clearly had the ability to shut down even the most logical arguments. In fact, while campaigning for election, “Hitler made a virtue of having no concrete policy proposals at all. In his first speech as chancellor, on 10 February 1933, relayed live from Berlin’s Sportspalast, he turned his opponents’ demands to reveal his policies against them, by chronicling fourteen years of failure and asking, ‘What was your programme?’” (Burleigh 152). Within the Nazi worldview, there is a clear abandonment of rational thinking, such as making plans to improve conditions in society, supplanting that with the pursuit of a virtue of national purity. Hitler made it clear that until “‘a thorough moral purging of the German Volkskorper is complete,’ he would not concern himself with the economy. What did ‘health’ mean? Hitler rambled on about his aesthetic vision of a pure ethnic culture. The humble foot soldier of the putsch trial now mounted the podium as the Fuehrer of his Volk” (Koonz 33). To a German people frightened about the place of their nation in the modern world, such a strong leader willing to pursue ideals to an extreme appeared to be the only acceptable instrument of economic salvation. Koonz writes, “That Hitler could have been seen as a moral authority seems preposterous, especially at a time when Nazi militias beat up, tortured, and murdered so-called enemies with impunity. Amidst the widespread fear of chaos, Hitler’s rhetoric worked its magic” (Koonz 33).

The fear of Communism continued to be a motivating factor in Germany’s march to Nazism. On the night of February 27-28, 1933, terrorists “set the Reichstag ablaze. Headlines called it the first stage of a Communist revolution. Acting on Hitler’s ‘advice’ and with cabinet approval, President Hindenburg suspended civil rights. Nazi newspapers called for ‘hard hammer blows’ against ‘the criminal Communist hand’ that caused the fire” (Koonz 33). The Nazi power structure exploited the public fear of Communist revolution, as it had become so adept at doing. Hitler referred to the act of arson a “‘dastardly attack’ and praised the ‘self-sacrificing firemen’ who saved the Reichstag from total destruction. Using the emergency powers vested in him by President Hindenburg Hitler authorized Hermann Goring (cabinet minister without portfolio and acting Prussian interior minister) to deputize 10,000 heavily armed SA troops as police auxiliaries” (Koonz 33-34). This brought about a great witch-hunt in the streets. One Nazi officer ordered the auxiliaries “to shoot ‘enemies’ at the slightest provocation. Behind them stood nearly a million fellow Stormtroopers, joined by other veterans’ organizations, spoiling for a fight. When prisoners’ lawyers demanded their release, Hitler declared that traitors had no rights” (Koonz 34-35). Hitler was simply a wunderkind at exploiting an ancient political tactic that has served well as a social control for countless millennia: it is easy to unite if there is something to unite against. The Jews and the Communists were functionally convenient scapegoats. When compared to photographs of the Communist-perpetrated “Reichstag blaze on the front page of every major newspaper, Nazi rule became the lesser of two evil extremes. Hitler was well on the way to fulfilling a promise he had made a few weeks earlier: ‘In ten years there will be no more Marxists in Germany’” (Koonz 35). Thus, through fear and displays of violence engineered to make the state seem strong and secure, Hitler attained his psychological stranglehold of the German people.

When the Nazis seized power, “[t]he lively cultural diversity that epitomized the Weimar era vanished in 1933. While victims and critics of the Third Reich decried the barren political landscape, throngs of old fighter and new converts viewed the Nazi takeover as a thrilling experience. What anti-Nazis called a steamroller, Nazis called a bandwagon” (Koonz 69). Under the new regime, the blood in the veins of the German people was sacred. Hitler’s presence engendered some incredible sense of national pride. Under Nazi rule, “[t]he peasant responsible for racial renewal received due praise, but so did the worker, who would be reintegrated from his alienated condition into the German ‘national community’. In other words, the main emphasis was on what we nowadays call inclusivity. Decency, self-respect and a ‘genuinely German culture’ were to prevail” (Burleigh 153). The average man felt like the state was actually concerned with his well-being. Hitler discussed his vision of society, summing it up as “‘this programme will be a programme of national resurrection in all areas of life, intolerant of anyone who sins against the nation, but a brother and friend to anyone who has the will to fight with us for the resurrection of his Volk, of our nation’. Anyone who opposed the Nazis was a traitor” (Burleigh 153). Ultimately, at the heart of the Nazi message was that, in the middle of a world in cataclysmic transition and rapid technological advancement, the only way to assure survival was an ironclad sense of national unity.

A singularly disturbing effort on the part of the Nazi party involved the assimilation and appropriation of the Christian religion to suit their own ends. The distinct Catholic and Protestant groups of Germany were clearly anathema to the Nazi ideal of a unified German nation. Evans writes, “The Nazis abhorred the confessional division of Germany, and, in an obvious parallel to their policy of co-ordination in secular areas of politics, culture, and society, many of them wanted a single national religion with a single national Church” (Evans 220). Out of this came a concept that the Nazis called “Positive Christianity, articulated officially in point 24 of the party’s program” (Hastings 78). This new state interpretation of Christianity was “explicitly interconfessional and a central component of the overarching goal of forging a true Volksgemeinschaft that would overcome political, class, and confessional divisions” (Hastings 78). The phrase “Positive Christianity” was formulated to adapt easily to interpretations of the Christian religion popular at the time of Nazi rule, and “The vagueness of this formulation has been interpreted most frequently as evidence of the Nazi art of cynical obfuscation, appealing to Christianity publicly while in reality pursuing from the very beginning goals that were deliberately inimical to the Christian faith” (Hastings 46). The Nazis were far from above exploiting religious rhetoric. Positive Christianity came to be regarded “as the official Nazi antidote to the ‘Jewish-materialistic spirit’” (Hastings 46-47).

Long before the Nazis began mandating a campaign of national cleansing, nationalistic rhetoric sparked violence as “Germany’s Protestant clergy had presented the First World War as a religious crusade against the Catholic French and Belgians and the Orthodox Russians, and it was clear that, for many, nationalism and Protestantism had become two sides of the same ideological coin” (Evans 220).

The social inertia of such movements allowed the Nazi message to catch on with many clergymen, and political coalitions with nationalistic, predominantly Protestant political parties gave the Nazis an electoral leg-up on the opposition. Beyond this, the Nazi party’s unrelenting and brutal opposition to atheistic Marxism won it many supporters among the faithful. Upon Hitler’s ascension into power, his political allies “imagined that they had finally achieved a viable conservative coalition, with the National Socialists alongside the German National People’s Party and the Stahlhelm, together with a scattering of expert ministers” (Burleigh 151). In pursuit of ideals involving further Christianization and stopping the advance of atheistic Communism, Christian clergymen across Germany abandoned the words of their God.

Nazi rhetoric was apt to pervert elements of the Christian religion to its own ends. With a cadence that almost exactly mirrors the Lord’s prayer, Hitler professed his love of his race, saying, “I cannot divest myself of my faith in my Volk, cannot disassociate myself from the conviction that this nation will one day rise again, cannot divorce myself from my love for this, my Volk, and I cherish the firm conviction that the hour will come at last in which the millions who despise us today will stand by us and with us hail the new, hard-won and painfully acquired German Reich we have created together, the new German kingdom of greatness and power and glory and justice. Amen” (Burleigh 153). Joseph Goebbels similarly corrupted Christ’s Last Commandment in “his booklet The Little ABC’s of National Socialism, a catechism for Nazi speakers published in the early 1930s. In response to the question: ‘What is the first Commandment of every National Socialist?’ loyal Nazis answered, ‘Love Germany above all else and your ethnic comrade [Volksgennosse] as yourself!’” (Koonz 7). In the interest of Social Darwinism, religious rhetoric and nationalism combined into some form of racial egotism that “meant boundless contempt for other societies and cultures; he viewed attempts to civilize or educate other peoples such as ‘the Hottentots and Zulu Kaffirs’ as tantamount to racial treason” (Burleigh 99). Exploitation of the Christian religion was a necessary factor in the Nazis gaining the political power they did.

In some sad manner, the Nazi message was a message of hope wrapped in a message of fear. The idea was simple: If the Germans were to inherit the Earth, then no other nation could be allowed to stand and challenge them. The final belief was that German national survival meant all other nation’s subjugation. In the presentation of this false dilemma and effective and efficient exploitation of common national fears, from the crumbling economy to the threat of Communist revolution, the Nazi party won its way into the confidence of the German people. The Holocaust arose out of simple desperation. 

Works Cited

Allen, William Sheridan. The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922-1945. New York: F. Watts, 1984.

Burleigh, Michael. The Third Reich: A New History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000.

Evans, Richard J. The Third Reich in Power. New York: The Penguin Press, 2005.

Hastings, Derek. Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Koonz, Claudia. The Nazi Conscience. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003.