How Did People React To Nazism?

1. Why is it difficult to really know how popular Hitler and the Nazis were among the German People?

Briefing 6, “How Did People React to Nazism”, clearly highlights the discrepancies between German people’s interpretations of Nazism and Hitler in the 1930s and after 1945, which demonstrates the uncertainty of Hitler’s true popularity. Initially in the 1930s, German citizens were unable to “express decent” and were coerced into passive acceptance of the Nazi ideology. This pressure to conform to Hitler’s homogenous Volksgemeinschaft, and the uniform propaganda of the mass media, presented Germany as a homogenous society whom admired Hitler. The photograph, “A Nuremburg rally” exemplifies an expression of Hitler’s popularity through the “massive Nazi Party rallies”. Furthermore, briefing 6 articulates that individuals’ opinions of Hitler were unable to be substantiated as the totalitarian regime prevented elections after the Enabling Act of 1933, while plebiscites could be easily manipulated to reflect Nazi ideology. Conversely, after World War II in 1945, when the true extend of Hitler’s horror and genocide was revealed, citizens rejected “that they had been fervent Nazi supporters”. Thus, background briefing 6 fundamentally emphasises the difficulty of asserting Hitler’s popularity among German citizens.

2. Why might people outside Germany have admired Hitler greatly?

Background briefing 6’s use of Lloyd George’s praise of Hitler exhibited the external admiration for Hitler’s regime, as it epitomised a miracle transformation. Predominantly, after the ruinous end to WW1 and the great depression, Nazism’s Gleichschaltung appeared to have rebuilt the German economy, restored its national power and met the material aspirations of...

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...ellow Spots’ expository analysis of “the persecution of Jewish people in Germany” demonstrated the anti-Jewish violence as a larger, systematic campaign to annihilate Jews in the process of creating the Volksgemeinschaft. This clearly emphasises that people in Britain from 1936 were aware of the barbarism and cruelty of the Nazi regime, which was subsequently validated through the Holocaust. Furthermore, the book’s challenge for a “vocal and insistent protest of the civilised conscience against the Nazis” evidently suggests that particular Britain’s grasped the extensive horror of the Nazi totalitarian regime and implored that the population opposed the Nazis. Thus, the publication of ‘The Yellow Spot’ suggest that people in Britain had a significant insight into the maltreatment and prosecution of the Jews which was permeated to the core by Nazi’s racist ideology.