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