The Nazi Seizure of Power

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This is a fascinating and insightful book. The author, William Sheridan Allen, provides a survey of the political history of single small town in Protestant northern Germany, Northeim in Hanover, from the early 1920s to the end of World War II. The book was written originally in the early 1970s, but was subsequently revised and re-issued, mostly to end the use of pseudonyms after the town had been identified.

In many ways, Northeim was like a lot of Protestant Germany. There was a strong Socialist, aka Social Democrat (“SPD”) party that represented the working class while the middle and upper classes were represented by a number of Nationalist and conservative parties. Nazism came to Northeim through a handful of young idealists, some of whom were very respectable. Over the course of the 1920s and particularly in the early 1930s, the Nazi party drew votes away from the Nationalist parties until it had a majority of the votes, at which time, with the assumption of power by Hitler, it simply put an end to opposition.

It seems that Nazism prevailed because it was much better at organizing than its opponents. The local party was able to gauge what messages worked best among voters by seeing whether certain topics drew attention. The local party was then able to book speakers to follow up on the material that attracted attention. The Nazis were also running a perpetual campaign which allowed them to get more experience at mobilizing voters.

Antisemitism did not play a substantial role in Nazi popularity. Antisemitic policy was not implemented until after the seizure of power in 1933. Rather, Nazis ran a positive campaign based on what they proposed to do for Germany by emphasizing national and class unity.

Political violence did play a role in Northeim during the last five years. The Nazi SA was not the only player in that game. The SPD had its Reichsbanner forces who were willing to mix it up with the SA on the streets. The Reichsbanner was in a position to defend the German republic at the time of Hitler's take-over, except that its leadership had a failure of will or imagination and never pulled the trigger on a counter-coup. The result was that leading SPD and Reichsbanner members were picked off as individuals and sent to concentration camps or beaten into submission.

A salient point about the Nazi take-over was that once the individual members of the SPD were not protected by their party, they lost the will to fight. The mighty SPD was destroyed within the space of months not by direct action but because their members were isolated, stigmatized and persecuted by other Germans who were not Nazis. SPD members often found themselves unable to find work or housing because of their previous party membership. The actors weren't Nazis so much as people who were afraid that they might become the subject of Nazi reprisals or who wished to curry favor with Nazis or who were simply going along with the “arc of history.”

The Nazis were assisted by the polarization of politics during the last years of the republic. Germans were subjected to repeated political campaigns which kept the political parties out in the streets at all times making claims on individual Germans.

I read this book while I was preparing a case where a MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) hat wearing author was stigmatized and retaliated against because of his politics. At the time that I write this, I read story after story about how people wearing hats expressing the political support for the current president have been physically attacked. It was not too long ago that an executive at a Silicon Valley firm was fired because he had donated to the campaign against homosexual marriage.

I found the parallels between this time in America and the end of the Weimar Republic in German history to be a bit too “on the nose” for comfort.