Hitler's Followers (RLE Nazi Germany & Holocaust)

Studies in the Sociology of the Nazi Movement

Detlef Muhlberger

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138804326
• eBook ISBN: 9781317619987
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

When originally published in 1991, this book was the first systematic, detailed evaluation of the social structure of the Nazi Party in several regions of Germany during its so-called Kampfzeit phase.

Based on extensive archival material, much of it left untouched since the end of the war until Detlef Mühlberger uncovered it, the book demonstrates that the Nazi Party and its major auxiliaries, the SA and the SS mobilized support which was remarkably heterogeneous in social terms. The author reveals that in addition to followers from the middle and upper social classes the Nazi Party enjoyed strong support among the lower class and it was indeed, as it claimed to be a people's party, or Volkspartei.

1

HISTORIOGRAPHICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL ASPECTS

To set the current debate on the social basis of Nazism in context, a brief historiographical review of the main conclusions reached on the subject suggests itself.¹ Virtually all the main theories attempting to explain the social characteristics of Nazism emerged in the late 1920s and early 1930s.² The early efforts made by political scientists, historians and political commentators to answer the question of which social types were being attracted to Nazism were based largely on impressionistic assertions not substantiated by any meaningful empirical evidence. Before 1933 the usual route taken by most analysts grappling with the problem of the social make-up of the supporters of Nazism concentrated on identifying the Nazi electorate.³ On the basis of this approach the conclusion was reached in the early 1930s, strongly reinforced by Theodor Geiger’s seminal work on the structure of German society published in 1932,⁴ that the NSDAP was a middle-class party (Mittelstandspartei) or class party (Klassenpartei), or more often specifically a lower-middle-class movement. The ‘middle-class image’ of Nazism became strongly entrenched in the literature on the NSDAP long before the collapse of the Nazi regime, and the view was further strengthened in the post-1945 period,⁵ and has continued to dominate the debate on the nature of Nazism until the early 1980s. The counter-argument, which suggested that the Nazi Party was a mass movement, a Volkspartei or people’s party based on support drawn from all social groupings, a hypothesis also first developed in the 1930s⁶ and one which also basically rested only on observations relating to the electoral performance of the NSDAP in the end-phase of the Weimar period, found few supporters at the time and has remained very much a minority view in the debate on the social structure of Nazism.⁷ Various attempts to develop other theories on the nature of Nazism have also been made from time to time. One such is the ‘Marginal Man’ theory, based on the idea that the Nazi members were essentially ‘failures’ or ‘marginal’ types, an idea first suggested by Konrad Heiden,⁸ which was pushed to an absurd level by Daniel Lerner⁹ in the post-war period, and one which still surfaces from time to time.¹⁰ An alternative to the usual ‘class’ approach which dominates the theoretical works on the nature of the membership of the Nazi Party is the ‘Generational Revolt’ hypothesis, the view that youth played the most critical role in mobilizing support for Nazism, a thesis most persuasively argued by Peter Loewenberg and Peter Merkl.¹¹ The notion that the Nazi Party represented a sort of ‘green revolt’, that it was essentially a smalltown and rural affair, has also been advocated over the years by a number of historians.¹² All these efforts have had little fundamental impact on the dominance of the ‘middle-class theory’, the orthodox interpretational line to be found in the major studies on Nazism.¹³

I

Given the almost universal acceptance of the thesis that the Nazi Party was essentially a middle-class movement, the main thrust of research from the 1930s onwards was centred on explaining why the Mittelstand was so attracted to Nazism,¹⁴ rather than on providing a firm empirical base on which to base the theory. Admittedly not all the theoretical works postulating the ‘middle- class theory’ of Nazism were based entirely on educated guesswork, for some statistical evidence originated in the 1930s, which was used to underpin the theory. The first set of data was contained in Theodore Abel’s interesting study¹⁵ compiled in the early 1930s with the co-operation of the Nazi Party, which was based on an essay competition advertised in the Nazi press in 1933 on the theme of ‘Why I became a Nazi’, to which 687 Nazi members responded. The other source was the census of Nazi Party members undertaken by the Nazis themselves in 1934, the Partei-Statistik, published in three volumes in 1935.¹⁶ This latter source was first used in an abbreviated form by Volz¹⁷ in his account of the development of the Nazi Party which appeared in 1938. The Partei-Statistik data, as filtered through the Berliner Tageblatt of 1 April 1937 and Der Schulungsbrief of 1938, was also the basis of an analysis of the Nazi Party membership and leadership produced by Hans Gerth¹⁸ in 1940. Given the absence of any other material on the structure of the NSDAP for a considerable time-span in the post-war years, the Partei-Statistik has been used, though almost invariably with reservation and often with considerable misgivings, by numerous scholars attempting to grapple with the sociology of Nazism at the national¹⁹ or regional level.²⁰

For long attacked by many scholars²¹ as an unreliable guide to the social structure of the Nazi Party, the utility of the Partei-Statistik, if used carefully in view of its undoubted limitations, is now being pointed to by a number of historians.²² It cannot simply be dismissed as a piece of propaganda or the reflection of wishful thinking on the part of the Nazi leadership, given that the collated data was only to be used for internal party purposes and was also designed to provide a guide to future recruitment policy.²³ The Nazis were well aware of the fact that the party membership mirrored the social structure of German society imperfectly, and that workers and farmers were underrepresented in the party and were thus to be encouraged to join it, whereas occupational groups such as civil servants and the self-employed, already over-represented in the movement, were not to be given easy access to the party. If the Partei-Statistik does indeed – as more than one critic has suggested – represent an attempt by the party hierarchy to project the NSDAP as a Volkspartei by inflating the size of the working-class membership within its ranks, it does a very inadequate job. The real problem with the Partei-Statistik is that it can only show the make-up of the membership as on 1 January 1935. It cannot be used to give an accurate picture of the social characteristics of the party’s membership in the three time-spans for which breakdowns are provided, namely the period from 1925 to 14 September 1930, that from 15 September 1930 to 30 January 1933, and that from 30 January 1933 onwards, because it records only those members who had joined the Nazi Party in 1925 or thereafter and who had never left it until the census was taken (some time in 1934 presumably). Given that we know that the party experienced very significant membership fluctuations before January 1933, involving a membership loss of probably 40 to 50 per cent between 1925 and 1933²⁴ (it is unlikely that members left the party in any great number immediately after the Nazi seizure of power), it is clear that the Partei-Statistik cannot provide any clue to the social profile of a sizeable element of the membership which had joined the party at some stage and left it subsequently. Despite its limitations, however, it can be used to illustrate the often marked regional variations in the social profile of the party at the Gau level,²⁵ and the data can be used to compare the sociology of the Nazi membership with that of the working population of Germany, given that the occupational categories used in the Partei-Statistik are similar to those employed in the censuses of 1925 and 1933, and are not as vague as some authorities were still suggesting in the 1980s.²⁶

The move away from using Abel’s limited data or the material provided in the Partei-Statistik and to get to grips with the problem of who joined the NSDAP by analysing new empirical evidence came in the early 1960s, when first Georg Franz-Willing and then Werner Maser made rather unsatisfactory attempts to throw some light on the social background of Nazi members in the pre-1923 period by evaluating fragments of Nazi membership lists.²⁷ Both authors concluded that the Nazi Party was essentially a Mittelstandsbewegung in its formative stage of development. The first modern study on the social characteristics of the NSDAP’s membership came in 1971 with the publication of Michael Kater’s article on the sociography of the pre-1923 Nazi Party.²⁸ Based on sophisticated quantitative techniques involving computer data analysis, this essay heralded the beginning of a series of important studies by the same author which broke new ground in several directions, with essays which underlined the massive potential of the use of the material in the Berlin Document Center, which explored the methodological problems surrounding work on the social structure of the Nazi Movement, and which pointed to the need to include the more important auxiliary organizations in the study of the sociology of Nazism as a whole.²⁹ In all of his work on the sociology of Nazism since the early 1970s, Michael Kater has consistently argued that Nazism was a Mittelstand phenomenon, irrespective of whether one is looking at the party itself, or the SA, or the SS. Not even a very significant change in the late 1970s in the classification model employed by him, when he abandoned his narrow concept of the occupational groups which composed the German working class and started to include skilled workers and apprentices in the lower class,³⁰ has led Michael Kater to change his views on the sociology of Nazism, despite the marked increase in the working-class presence in the Nazi Party which the adoption of his more realistic class model has resulted in. In his recent study summarizing the results of his extensive research on the social basis of Nazism, Michael Kater concludes that ‘judged from the point of view of party membership (both rank and file and leadership corps), the National Socialist movement was indeed a preeminently lower-middle-class phenomenon’.³¹

The pioneering work on the social basis of Nazism by Michael Kater in the 1970s has undoubtedly stimulated research on the subject in the last decade or so. The social characteristics of the early NSDAP membership have been subjected to further analysis by Donald Douglas and Paul Madden.³² A few studies on the sociology of the NSDAP beyond its Bavarian context, and dealing with the later phases of its development, have also begun to appear.³³ In the late 1970s and early 1980s significant work on the social make-up of the SA’s rank and file and leadership was also published.³⁴ The results of the research on the social characteristics of the followers of Nazism was summarized in my contribution to The Social Basis of European Fascist Movements which appeared in 1987, in which additional new material was also presented on the NSDAP, the HJ and the SA.³⁵

The growing volume of literature on the sociology of Nazism based on empirical evidence which has appeared since the 1970s has been accompanied by challenges to the deeply entrenched middle-class thesis of Nazism. Leaving aside the data in the Partei-Statistik, which contained statistical material suggesting that the party had succeeded in extending its social base well beyond the l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of maps
• List of tables
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Historiographical and Methodological Aspects
• 2 The Western Ruhr 1925–6
• 3 Gau Württemberg 1928–30
• 4 Gau Hesse-Nassau-South 1929–1931
• 5 Gau South-Hanover-Brunswick 1925–33
• 6 The SA
• 7 The SS
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index