Understanding the Nazis, Part 2

(... continued from Part 1)
In September of 1923, the bank's interest rate reaches 90%.
In November of 1923, at the height of hyperinflation, Hitler attempts a coup. He fails, and gets put in jail, and shortly thereafter, the deutch mark is partly stabilized.

However, part of the success of stabilization lie in the Dawes Plan, which helped Germany by easing the burden of reparations and getting some help from the U.S. government. Initially, this was a blessing, unemployment went down, inflation was under control and Germany seemed on a path to recovery. However, this couldn't go on without continual support from the U.S., and unfortunately in 1929 shit hit the fan yet again with the infamous U.S. market crash. German unemployment went thru the roof, reaching to 30% in 1932, the German government once again found itself with a bigger mess on its hands than it could handle.

The tired and beaten Germans have reached a breaking point. They couldn't take it any more. The resentment of the impotent government, the foreign powers and the Jews, has spilled over into radicalization of the country. Where was the glory of Prussia / Germany once respected and feared all over the world? The Germans who could once pride themselves as a nation with prominent political and military power have seen their dreams shattered, and everything they know turn to rubble. To recap, in the years between 1918, they've been crushed by war, starved, witnessed lawlessness on the streets, their savings completely wiped out, their jobs gone. And just as things seemed to improve, and they could see the light at the end of the tunnel, the rug was pulled out from underneath them once more by the Great Depression.

The people of the generation growing up in Germany in the 1910s-1920s must have witnessed death, crime, and injustice from all directions, either as victims or as perpetrators, or both. They were significantly desensitized to horrors of war (and peace) throughout the decades. Their concept of right and wrong was quite different from what we're used to. There would certainly not have been a shortage of bastards who have slid down the slippery moral slope in times of pre-war chaos. Many people were used to looting, mugging, extortion, gang violence, and other activities that characterize lawlessness and civil unrest. Some of the German kids growing up as teenagers in those times may even have known no other life but the life of looting, theft, and intimidation of the neighbors. And these were the people who would go on to become Gestapo police, Nazi soldiers and wardens at concentration camps.

These are the conditions under which Hitler got elected into power. Far from everyone was on that page, far from everyone was down with Hitler, in fact it took a few rounds and heavy manipulation by the National Socialists. But they had up to 30% of the vote, and combined with political trickery, this was enough support to put him in power. After 1933, he was already in the position to dismantle democracy, squash the opposition, and quickly build up the most horrifying regime of death and destruction known to man. As they say, the rest is history.

[Disclaimer: I understand a lot of the details of this narrative do not come with any direct sources or citations, instead based on cursory knowledge of German history, and other periods of history, or which I know more. At the moment I'm also inspired by the events of the riots in London and other places England (2011), and extrapolating the intensity of these events to a situation much more dire, leads my imagination to the horrors or peace-time that preceded World War II and the Holocaust. My interest in the subject of societal collapse is drawing me to further reading on the matter, but for now I conclude this post]

Understanding the Nazis : part 1

I'm in Berlin on my 3rd trip, enjoying my time, but also trying to understand the Nazis and Hitler. Not in the way Lars von Trier does, but for real, in depth. I set out on a journey to get in the head of the Nazis, who were directly responsible for the death of my grandmother's family, to really dig down into what they were about and what drove them to this madness.

We all know the story. Hitler was democratically elected in 1933. He hated the Jews. He was an evil evil man, arguably the most evil man in history. Fair enough, he probably was. But he was not alone in his evil ways. He did not single-handedly invent and carry out the holocaust. He was surrounded by like-minded people. Behind him, and his minions, was a whole nation of those who even before being brainwashed were willing to give his ideas a chance. How could this happen? How could so many monsterous masterminds (Goebels, Himmel, Heydrich, etc.) Coexist in this one place in history. How could so many people in the general public be on the same page even before the infamous propaganda machine kicked in and the opponents put away in concentration camps?

For answers to that, we gotta look back at the environment the Germans were in after World War One, and how they were shaped by their experience up until 1933