Hitler came into office through democratic processes and, after being appointed Chancellor on January 30, 1933, he was able to rely on a large majority.
In 1940 the journalist and exile Sebastian Haffner wrote that the system was supported above all by the “loyal population”: in other words, those “40 percent” who “serve the Nazi regime loyally without being Nazis”.
What had gotten into the Germans?
They could have recognized the impending disaster, because the "Fuhrer" had revealed his hatred of Jews and his plans for war and extermination at an early stage.
Nevertheless, there was hardly any active resistance, most became followers and accomplices during the twelve years of National Socialist barbarism, many followed Hitler until his downfall.
Why a nationalist frenzy gripped the Germans in the 1930s and why they became accomplices of the criminal regime has occupied generations of researchers.
The new issue of SPIEGEL HISTORY turns the pages of the darkest epoch in German history: In an essay competition, a US sociologist asked early Nazis what prompted them to join Hitler well before 1933.
History editor Martin Pfaffenzeller visited a former torture camp in Berlin-Tempelhof and describes how the SA tortured members of the opposition there with massive violence.
Our author Hauke Friedrichs describes the aggressive anti-Semitism from which the Jewish teacher Willy Cohn and his family in Breslau also suffered - Cohn wrote in a diary until his assassination in 1941.
However, National Socialism was not based solely on state terror and repression.
The brown rulers were also successful in ensnaring the people by fighting unemployment and offering vacation, sports and leisure programs at low prices, including cruises organized by the Kraft durch Freude organization.
At the same time, many who were allowed to call themselves part of the »Volksgemeinschaft« sought their personal financial advantage, for example by profiting from »Aryanization« or from the mass robbery of Europe’s Jews, for example when the property of Jewish families was peddled to bargain hunters via »Furniture Campaign«.
As historian Michael Wildt explains in an interview, the National Socialists purposefully relied on the power of emotions and propaganda staging: on hatred and deeply rooted racism on the one hand, on the "cult of the Führer" and the hope for a better future on the other.
"Most people came to mass events with the hope that there would be someone there who knew the way, who was actually something like a leader, a redeemer in the religious sense," says Wildt, "they went home feeling part of a big future project.«
You can now get the magazine about "Hitler's faithful people" digitally here wherever there are good magazines.
The sports arena as a world stage
While the round of 16 of the World Cup is approaching, FIFA's award to Qatar continues to be the subject of criticism, giving rise to numerous protest signals.
"The story of apolitical sport, which powerful officials like to legitimize their cooperation with autocratic states, is pure fiction," writes our author Florian Kinast about the tradition of political gestures in sport: from the black power salute of American sprinters at the Olympics 1968 in Mexico to the kneeling of football star Colin Kaepernick to the hand-over-mouth photo of the German team.
In another article, Florian talks about the World Cup, which was the most controversial before Qatar: in 1978, the football world met in Argentina.
During those years, the generals of the military junta had around 30,000 people murdered, in prisons and on death flights, when political prisoners were thrown alive from planes into the sea.
The sports world didn't care much, the German officials, coaches and players put on blinders.
And received in the World Cup quarters an old Nazi, the Wehrmacht fighter pilot Hans-Ulrich Rudel.
The humiliation when dictators want to polish their image through major sporting events is the subject of the text: Buenos Días, torturers.
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