Soldaten

As things got worse and worse for some, the others felt better and better. The National Socialist project did not just promise a gloriously envisioned future. It also offered concrete advantages in the present such as better career opportunities in all areas, including the Wehrmacht. The elites at the head of the Nazi Party were extremely young, and a good many younger members of the Volk saw their own heady personal hopes as connected with the triumph of the “Aryan race.”⁴² This backdrop helps us understand the enormous individual and collective energy that was released in Nazi society. “The National Socialist German Workers Party was founded on a doctrine of inequality between races, but it also promised Germans greater equality among themselves,” writes historian Götz Aly.

Nazi ideology conceived of racial conflict as an antidote to class conflict. By framing its program in this way, the party was propagating two age-old dreams of the German people: national and class unity. That was key to the Nazis’ popularity, from which they derived the power they needed to pursue their criminal aims…. In one of his central pronouncements, Hitler promised “the creation of a socially just state,” a model society that would “continue to eradicate all [social] barriers.”⁴³

If Hitler’s ideology had been pure propaganda, the Third Reich would never have undergone the extremely rapid social change it did. The central characteristic of the National Socialist project consisted of the immediate practical realization of its ideological postulates. The world indeed changed. Propagandistic newspaper articles notwithstanding, the feeling of better days dawning, of living in a “great age” and “permanently extraordinary situation” established a new frame of reference. Interviews with people who experienced the Third Reich reveal even today how psychologically attractive and emotionally integrative the Nazi initiatives of exclusion and integration were. It is no accident that Germans of that generation tend to describe the Third Reich, up until Germany’s military defeat at Stalingrad, as a “great time.”⁴⁴ Such people were categorically incapable of experiencing the exclusion, persecution, and dispossession of others for what they were. By definition, the others no longer belonged to the community, and thus their inhumane treatment did not conflict with the ethics and social values of the Volk community.

In terms of social psychology, the reasons behind support for and trust in the Nazi system are no great mystery. The economic upswing commencing in 1934 may have been financed by state debt and larceny, but as interviews with those who lived at the time reveal, it created a mood of optimism and confidence.⁴⁵ In addition, the period saw a number of social innovations with profound implications for individuals’ happiness. In 1938, for instance, a third of all German workers enjoyed the benefits of the Nazis’ state-subsidized “Strength Through Joy” vacation program—and that at a time when traveling abroad was still considered an exclusive privilege of the wealthy. “It has long been overlooked,” writes Hans-Dieter Schäfer, “that upward social mobility during the Third Reich was by no means solely symbolic…. People were twice as likely to move up in society in the six peace-time years under Hitler as they had been in the final six years of the Weimar Republic. Nazi state organizations and quasi-private associations absorbed one million people from the working classes.”⁴⁶ By 1938, Germany no longer suffered from the mass unemployment of the Depression. In 1939, 200,000 foreign workers had to be brought in to cover a shortage of labor.⁴⁷ In other words: things were palpably better for members of the Volk under National Socialism, and the Nazis’ demonstrable success in keeping their social promises engendered a deep faith in the system, especially as it came after the profound economic disappointments of the Weimar Republic.