For ordinary folks to fall for fascism, you need discontent, an ideology and an overlord

In 1934, Theodore Abel, a sociologist from Columbia University, visited Germany just as National Socialism began to dominate the country’s political landscape.

His record offers invaluable insight into the psyche of the masses who followed their supreme leader into the abyss that was to become World War 2.

In August that year, after the death of President Paul von Hindenburg, the German people overwhelmingly (89.93%) voted for Adolf Hitler as Reich chancellor and Führer.

My father, Georg Albert Thamm, was 10 years old and lived with his sister and my grandparents in Charlottenburg, Berlin. Hitler was not some distant malevolent historical figure in my life. His shadow followed my father to South Africa, where we settled in 1963 when I was two.

Until my father’s death in 2011 at the age of 87, I quizzed, prodded and obsessed about the “why”. So much so that it formed the fulcrum of a memoir I penned in 2016, Hitler, Verwoerd, Mandela and Me.

Prime conditions

While the Rwandan genocide was being televised live in 1994, my father and I sat in his lounge, watching the horror.

“Look how savage,” he commented to me.

Should I speak my mind? I wondered. So I did.

“Just because they don’t read Schiller and listen to Beethoven after killing, they are savages?”

Abel’s research was drawn from essays, written by ordinary Germans about why they supported Hitler’s National Socialist Party, which became known as The Abel Papers.

In 1938, Abel published Why Hitler Came to Power, an international bestseller which set out exactly the conditions that enabled Hitler’s brand of populist National Socialism to take root and thrive.

When my father tried to explain the ruinous effects of the Treaty of Versailles on the Germans who were forced to pay reparations for World War 1 (a war my grandfather miraculously survived), my young self did not pay enough attention. I was looking for a moral flaw.

Abel, with the permission of Nazi bigwigs, sold the project as an attempt to explain to Americans the political nature of Germany and National Socialism in 1934. A prize of 400 Deutschmarks was offered to individuals who became members of the Nazi Party before January 1933 for the most honest account of their attitudes towards Hitler and why they supported him.

Full details of their lives needed to be provided. Their family connections, associations, memberships and their participation in the Hitler Youth movement. My father was too young to have been a member of the Nazi Party, but like every other German boy his age, was groomed in the Hitler Youth movement.

Four responses

Abel found four threads that pulled together and later thickened into the national hangman’s noose that became Hitler and the National Socialists’ grandiose Third Reich.

These were the prevalence of discontent with the existing social order, the particular ideology and programmes for social transformation adopted by the National Socialist organisational and promotional technique and, most importantly, the presence of charismatic leadership.

Hitler was clearly as charismatic to some as US President Donald Trump is to those who follow him.

My probing of my father as to whether he did not find Hitler’s stage persona with the ridiculous moustache and the shrieking speeches “odd” resulted in retrospective silence. Like those who will one day be asked whether they didn’t notice that a “billionaire” who painted his face orange quite obviously had a few loose screws.

One worker in Abel’s book stated proudly that “faith was the one thing that always led us on, faith in Germany, faith in the purity of our nation and faith in our leader… Some day the world will recognise that the Reich we established with blood and sacrifice is destined to bring peace and blessing to the world.”

The ruthless spreading of “Jewish conspiracy” propaganda led one German to recount to Abel how, after listening to an antiSemitic speech, the crowd had shouted “Out with the Jew”.

Mar-a-Lago in Gaza.

Mass media, Abel found, had contributed to “every honest German artisan” who was “of the firm conviction that everything printed in a newspaper was true”.

Abel writes “that given an enemy, a purpose, an ideology and a charismatic leader, the ordinary German found a route to glory and prosperity for the... race”.

History repeats itself. The Middle East. Ukraine. And now the US.

I am the first member of my line of ancestors on both sides to experience freedom. I didn’t while growing up, but I do now, as do my children. Freedom is fragile; history shrieks from the sidelines.

That is why, as Chris Hedges says, “I fight fascists because they are fascists”. DM

If you wish to comment on this issue, please send an email to letters@dailymaverick.co.za

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.