American sociologist and writer Theodore Abel organized a fake competition in 1934 to trick hundreds of people into describing why they loved the Nazi Party so much.
Did you know that it turns out that today their words again become relevant, which cannot but cause alarm.
In a letter to Abel, written in 1934, Helen Radtke explained why she joined the National Socialist Party of Germany. She wrote that she was a politically active person, attended debates in the local parliament to listen to the debates that took place there, and also attended as many political rallies as possible in search of a party that was “nationalist, but at the same time showed concern for the poor. . In the end, she found what she was looking for, and it was Hitler and his movement.
Radtke's letter was just one of 683 personal letters sent to Abel in the years following Hitler's election in 1933. Last January, the Hoover Institution, a think tank at Stanford University in California that specializes in public policy research, published 584 of these letters online.
These personal testimonies are not only helpful in understanding why Nazi ideology was attractive to so many people in the 1930s, but it also provides insight into the sentiments of millions of Germans today who support and vote for far-right political parties such as Alternative for Germany.
About a year after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, Theodor Abel wanted to know what prompted so many German voters to support him. After failing to persuade any of the 850,000 members of the National Socialist Party to agree to an interview, he came up with the idea of a fake competition, offering a cash prize to anyone who could write the most beautiful and detailed explanation of the reasons that prompted him to join the Nazi Party. …
At the time, the prize amounted to more than half of the average monthly salary in Germany, and even Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, publicly supported the competition. The submissions ranged from short handwritten declarations of love for Nazism to 12-page testimonies, while the contestants represented a broad cross-section of German society, from SS soldiers and officers to ordinary employees, housewives, children and miners.
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Many of the letter writers were pleased with the collapse of the Weimar Republic, founded in 1919 after Germany's defeat in World War I, which they blamed for the deplorable state of the country's economy after the end of the war, as well as the Great Depression. The writers were delighted with Hitler's promises to impose a strict political order. Bernard Horstmann, a miner from the town of Bottrop in West Germany, wrote that, in his opinion, the previous government pursued a policy of "betrayal of the people and the fatherland."
Horstmann called the professor, who considered the First World War unjustified, "the poisoner of the minds of the people." Before joining the Nazis, Horstmann was a member of the anti-Semitic nationalist group of the German People's Freedom Party, but soon the group's ideology, in his own words, began to seem too passive and toothless to him.
Ernst Seyfardt's letter from Duisburg was titled: "Biography of a Nazi German." He wrote that he joined the Nazi Party because he wanted to contribute to "restoring peace and order in our homeland."
At that time, left-wing political forces tried in every possible way to resist the surge of popular support for National Socialism. There were frequent skirmishes between members of the Communist Party and thugs from the Nazi paramilitary wing of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the so-called stormtroopers, and some of the more liberal-minded groups called on their fellow countrymen to boycott stores owned by members of the Nazi Party. But this only showed that Hitler and the Nazis were attractive to wide sections of German society. “Precisely because Adolf Hitler and his party were subjected to such criticism and faced fierce press opposition, I was particularly eager to join their movement,” wrote a member of the NSDLP named Friedrich Jorns.
The letters Abel received showed that the right-wing information bubble prior to 1933 mainly came from the weekly Der Stürmer, as well as Hitler's Mein Kampf and National Socialist rallies.
A member of this party named Schwartz explained how reading Mein Kampf not only caused him to distrust most of the major newspapers, but also to hate Jews and Poles, whose "catastrophic actions like espionage were destroying the world." Although Schwartz admitted in his letter that he never had personal contact with any of the Jews, and that he could not prove that the Poles were "disloyal to Germany", he wrote that he still "trusts his instincts in this matter." … Nurse Lizzie Paupey strongly agreed with him. “The Jews are our misfortune, it is quite obvious,” she wrote in her letter to Abel.
On the German television show Panorama recently, three actors read out several letters. This was done in part to show that the rhetoric used by the Nazis - the "old parties," the "hideous press," "poisoners of the minds," and "traitors to the people and fatherland" - were similar to those used today by the Alternative for Germany ".
Igor Abramov
