Hitler's followers. Studies in the sociology of the Nazi movement

✍ Scribed by Ian Kershaw

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 356 KB
• Volume: 32
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5061
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1520-6696(199607)32:3<312::aid-jhbs31>3.0.co;2-r

✦ Synopsis

Theories about the social characteristics of Nazism's mass following were in circulation from the years of the NSDAP's dramatic rise to power in the early 1930s. Most rested upon somewhat impressionistic evaluations of voter support. But almost all took for granted that the Nazi Party was a "class party," which owed its electoral success to its ability to mobilize the middle class (and, particularly, the lower middle class). The view that Nazism was a "middle-class movement" (Mittelstandsbewegung) was so dominant that it became axiomatic in almost all the literature to describe the Nazi Party in this way. Initially, the dominance of the "middle-class theory" owed much to the influence of Theodor Geiger's analysis of German social structure, published in 1932.' After the war, the interpretation continued largely unchallenged and found its classic formulation in Seymour Lipset's depiction of the typical Nazi voter as "a middle-class self-employed Protestant who lived either on a farm or in a small community".' Not least, the "middle-class theory" fitted marxist class analysis, and matched sometimes uncritical images of working-class political behavior entertained especially by historians and social scientists of the Left. Finally, the "middle-class theory" lived on because no one subjected it to sustained criticism based upon detailed analysis of empirical data.

Over the past decade or so, however, this type of criticism has been taking shape-so much so, in fact, that there is now a massive, and refined, literature on the social structure of the Nazi M~vement.~ This has developed at two levels: the electoral support for Nazism; and the sociology of the Party membership. The key figures in reshaping interpretations of the voter support have been Richard Hamilton, Thomas Childers, and Jiirgen Falter! On the Party membership, the most important works have been produced by Michael Kater5 and Detlef Miihlberger, from Oxford Brookes University, whose book is under review here. The decisive revision, from which only Kater demurs, is that the Nazi Party can no longer be regarded as a "middle-class party," but has to be seen as a modem Volkspartei-a party whose support did not, of course, exactly mirror the different strata of German society, but which was nonetheless far more successful than any other party of its day in drawing support from across the social spectrum.

The revision in no sense ignores the importance of the mobilisation of lower-middleclass support for the NSDAP. Nor does it play down the middle-class dominance of leadership positions in the Party (as in practically all parties), and emphasizes, too, that the NSDAP in the years of power after 1933 became more middle-class in its membership. But the revision, as regards both electorate and membership, stresses the disproportionate (relative to the size of the group in society) appeal of the NSDAP among the "upper classes" or social elite, and, above all, acknowledges that working-class support was far more extensive than the long-standing "middle-class theory" allowed. The analysis of who supported Nazism does not, of course, in itself explain why people did so. But it is an important step towards reassessing the social appeal of Nazism and recognizing the complexity of motives which led to support for a Party whose attractiveness can no longer be seen in a narrowly class-based fashion. This has evident implications for interpretations of the reactionary or revolutionary character of Nazism's social appeal.

Detlef Muhlberger has placed himself at the forefront of this revision, in demonstrating