Ernst Hanfstaengl, nicknamed ‘Putzi’, was born in Munich, the son of a rich German art publisher named Edgar Hanfstaengl, and an American mother. Putzi spent most of his early years in Germany and later moved to the United States. While there he attended Harvard University. A gifted pianist, Putzi composed several songs for Harvard’s football team and was a member of the famous Harvard ‘Hasty Puddings Theatrical Club’. Putzi graduated from Harvard in 1909.
Moving to New York, he took over the management of the American branch of his father’s fine-arts publishing business. He knew Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt, the newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst and actor Charlie Chaplin. In 1920, Putzi married Helene Elise Adelheid Niemeyer from Long Island. Their only son, Egon Ludwig, would eventually serve in the US Army Air Corps. Sadly, their daughter Herta died at the age of five. In 1922, Putzi returned to Munich, Germany.
Putzi was fairly intelligent, sophisticated and well connected. He had benefited from US democracy and the open culture of a free society. So why did he become one of the members of Hitler’s close circle in the 1920s? Not only that but he took part in the failed Munich Putsch and it was to Putzi’s house that Hitler fled after the collapse of the Putsch. Legend has it that it was Putzi’s wife, Helene, who persuaded Hitler not to commit suicide at that point. The Hanfstaengls’ support for Hitler reveals how he was seen to represent many of the values that such a wealthy German family held dear: the rise of a new and powerful Germany, the overthrow of the despised Weimar Republic and the thrill of access to power. After all, it was Putzi who had played on the piano whilst Hitler gave vent to his political frustration in the 1920s and these experiences clearly made the former believe he had some significant influence on the latter. But Hitler was not dependent on Putzi, nor on the wide range of disparate people who gave him their allegiance. This was a reality that only time would reveal.
After Hitler came to power, Putzi fell foul of Joseph Goebbels in the in-fighting that characterized the ‘jungle’ of competing interests at the heart of Nazi government. As a result, by the end of 1933, he was removed from Hitler’s staff and three years later he was divorced from Helene. After questioning the courage of German troops fighting in the Spanish Civil War, he became the victim of an elaborate hoax in which he was placed on a German aircraft bound for Spain, only to discover during this flight that he was to be dropped into enemy territory on a dangerous secret mission. His terror mounted as the flight drew closer to the destination. In fact, the plane had merely been circling Germany all the time. The whole charade had been masterminded by Goebbels but Putzi did not see the joke. In 1937, he fled Germany and eventually arranged for his son to join him in exile. Imprisoned by the British on the outbreak of the Second World War, Putzi (from 1942) worked for the US government, giving it insights into the organization of Hitler’s inner circle. Returning to Germany after the war, he died in 1975.
Who was expecting what from the newly installed Nazi government in 1933? And would all these groups of supporters be satisfied by their experience of the Third Reich? Clearly, the Nazi support base was wide and varied.1 In fact, some historians have claimed that the Nazi Party was the first modern ‘protest party’, in that it had no single clear base, or ideology, but attracted the support of a wide number of different groups because they were angry with the current system and situation. But how far is this true? And were there sufficient common features that might be said to characterize a Nazi voter?
In the Reichstag election of July 1932, the Nazi share of the vote was twice as high in Protestant areas as in Catholic ones. The Catholic Centre Party regularly gained 11–12 per cent of the vote and did not really lose a great deal of support to the Nazis. This is not to say that no Catholics voted Nazi. In special circumstances this could occur, such as in Silesia, where there was strong nationalist resentment against neighbouring Poland, which had gained parts of Silesia after the First World War. Here, many Catholics did vote Nazi but this was the exception to the rule that the average Nazi voter was likely to be a Protestant. This characteristic was assisted by a strong tradition amongst German Protestants of patriotism and loyalty to the state. This had its roots in the Kaiser’s Germany and some historians have argued that it had even deeper roots in the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century German Reformation, which created Protestant churches that stressed the importance of matters of religion being decided in line with the wishes of those in control of government. On the other hand, German Catholics, even the highly patriotic ones as most were, looked outside Germany to the supreme leader of the Roman Catholic Church – the pope in Rome. This tended to compete with the German-centred demands of extreme nationalists. As a result, for many reasons, Nazis had greater appeal in Protestant areas.
The Nazis had considerable success attracting young, first-time voters.2 These were people who had not developed a traditional voting pattern, whose formative years had been under Weimar and whose job prospects were deeply affected by the 1929 Wall Street Crash. In January 1931, over 42 per cent of Nazi Party members were under 30 years old and 70 per cent were under 40 years old. This made the Nazis a very ‘young’ party. This contrasts with similar figures for the Social Democrats, who had only 18 per cent of their members under 30 and only 44.6 per cent under 40 years old. Furthermore, the way to the top in the Social Democratic Party was to work one’s way upward through a hierarchy of committees. It was a process that, frankly, was boring to most young people raised on a 1920s diet of Hollywood films, consumerism and dancehalls.3
As early as 1922, the Nazis had set up a youth wing catering for those aged 14–18 years. At first called the Youth League of the NSDAP, it changed its name in 1926 to the catchier title of the ‘Hitler Youth’. Its main aim was to act as a recruiting ground for the SA. At first though, the Hitler Youth had only limited success. In January 1932, it still only had a thousand members in a city as large as Berlin. Alongside the Hitler Youth there was the National Socialist School Pupils’ League, founded in 1929, and the League of German Maidens, formed in 1930. These organizations had limited success compared with the National Socialist German Students’ League working in universities: founded in 1926, this gained an energetic leader in the young Baldur von Schirach in 1928. By July 1931, under his leadership, it had taken over control of the national organization representing German university students. As a result of this success, von Schirach was appointed leader of the Hitler Youth in October 1931. Under his leadership, Nazi youth organizations would grow in importance after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in January 1933 and during the 1930s considerable pressure would be put on young people to join one of the Nazi youth groups, since all other youth groups were soon banned in the Third Reich.
The importance of the youth activity before this date though lies in its effect of mobilizing support for the Nazi Party among young people, even if they did not actually join a Nazi youth organization. The energy of the Nazi Party and its promise to revitalize and restore Germany had great appeal to many German young people. And the Nazis were more active, more eye-catching than the traditional and very conservative groups who, until this time, had sought to organize and attract right-wing young Germans.
As early as 1923, the Nazi newspaper the Völkischer Beobachter (Racial Observer) praised the German peasantry as examples of what the Nazis considered to be good traditional Germans squeezed by the communists seeking to take their land and wealthy capitalists demanding high interests on loans. This was part of a complex Nazi approach to those who worked on the land. It involved ideas ranging from reducing the debts of farmers to fantasies of German industrial workers returning to work on the land – a completely unlikely situation. In 1921, the Nazi writer Hermann Esser wrote that: ‘The fellow countrymen toiling in the factories, workshops and offices must be brought into contact again with the soil.’ Even as late as the 1940s this racist fantasy continued as Nazi plans for the occupation of the USSR included settlements of heavily armed SS farming communities exploiting the land with the assistance of Slav agricultural workers reduced to slavery. It was a fantasy that mixed images of simple medieval peasants with the military ambitions of twentieth-century German nationalists.
Despite this, the Nazi attempt to win the support of German farmers was slow in developing. For much of the middle years of the 1920s, it was overshadowed by propaganda campaigns aimed at the middle classes and workers. This was not helped, from the Nazi point of view, by the fact that the rural communities of the original Nazi heartland in Bavaria were Catholic and not easily won over to allegiance to the Nazi Party, which, as we shall see, harboured an antagonism towards the Catholic Church.
It was after 1927 that the Nazis began to put their energies into capturing rural votes, and the target group then was Protestant farmers in northern Germany. The Nazis hoped that here it would be more successful than in its recent attempts to break into industrial areas and win them from the Social Democrats and the Communist Party. The Nazis were encouraged in this hope by peasant unrest in many rural areas of northern Germany. Here, poorer farmers were in deep trouble. They were hit harder by agricultural downturns than wealthier landowners who were able to buy farm machinery on hire purchase and modernize their farms relatively cheaply. Poorer peasant farmers, on the other hand, had tended to save their money and it had become worthless as a result of the inflation of 1923. After the end of the inflation, the government had attempted to encourage a revival of agriculture with low interest rates on loans made to farmers. As a result, peasant farmers borrowed heavily, assuming that further inflation would reduce the value of their borrowing. This was not the case and they soon found themselves heavily in debt and unable to repay these large loans. By the late 1920s, many peasant farmers found they were forced out of their farms because they had failed to repay debts. Even wealthier farmers were angry as they resented paying the higher taxes needed to support the Weimar Republic’s welfare state. Then the crisis in world trade in the late 1920s and early 1930s caused further severe problems for German farmers. Unable to sell their produce and further affected by the drop in demand at home (due to the rise in unemployment), many were unable to pay back loans and mortgages on their farms. As a result, there was widespread unhappiness across farming communities.
As farmers faced these problems they began to demand high tariffs on foreign farming goods imported into Germany, in the hope that this would protect their produce from competition from cheap overseas imports. Since the Nazis were in favour of ‘autarky’ (or self-sufficiency) and the banning of foreign food imports, the farmers’ desperation and the Nazis’ ideas began to converge.
In order to win farming votes in northern Germany, the Nazis played down any socialist-type features of their programme for fear that these would frighten off farmers. For example, where Point 17 of the Party Programme demanded ‘expropriation of land for communal purposes without compensation’, Hitler was quick to assure farmers that this only referred to taking land from Jewish companies who had bought it in the hope of selling it on at a high profit. This was not what this point of the Party Programme had really meant but the Nazis realized it needed reinterpreting.
Nazi successes in rural areas in the Reichstag election of May 1928 convinced them that rural votes could be won easily and cheaply. As a result, the Nazis promised farmers that they would have a special position within the promised Third Reich. The state would protect farming interests and provide a ‘corporation’ in which farmers of all types could work together and in which their voices would be heard. To prove their rural credentials, the Nazis were careful to pair any upper-class speakers in country areas with a farmer.4 Furthermore, the Nazis promised that any farm labourers, who were often Social Democrat voters, would be brought under control and forced to give up their demands for higher wages. Across Schleswig-Holstein large numbers of middling and small landowners rushed to join the Nazis and many younger men joined the SA and were dispatched to fight for the Nazi message in nearby cities. Throughout 1928 and 1929, the support for the Nazis increased in rural areas.
While support for the Nazis increased amongst smaller farmers it was slower to grow amongst farm labourers. This changed in the early 1930s when the Nazi trade union – the NSBO – established groups (cells) amongst farm workers. The striking success of the Nazis in Schleswig-Holstein in the July 1932 Reichstag elections revealed how successful these strategies were. It was the only state in which the Nazis gained over 50 per cent of the votes cast.
Under Weimar, many German women experienced a greater degree of personal freedom than before 1918. So what appeal would Nazism have for them, with its emphasis on a return to traditional female roles and its opposition to a female presence in the workplace? The Nazi programme, published in 1920, stated that it disapproved of women working. Hitler claimed that the emancipation of women was a slogan invented by Jewish intellectuals. He argued that for the German woman her ‘world is her husband, her family, her children, and her home’.5
The view that women should remain at home was reinforced when a third of male workers became unemployed during the depression after 1929. Nazis argued that men were being replaced by female workers who, on average, only received 66 per cent of men’s wages. Therefore, the Nazis concluded, a reduction in the number of women workers would help bring down male unemployment.
During the election campaign in 1932, Hitler promised that, if he gained power, he would take 800,000 women out of employment within four years. This was accompanied by an emphasis on the value of starting families in order to boost the German birth rate. When the Nazis came to power, they followed through in this intention to promote women rearing families at the expense of those who did not have children. In August 1933, a law was passed that enabled married couples to obtain loans to set up homes and start families. To pay for this, single men and childless couples were taxed more heavily. Incidentally, the decline in unemployment after the Nazis gained power meant that it was not necessary to force women out of manual work. However, action was taken to reduce the number of women working in the professions.
With all this emphasis on traditional female roles it might be thought that the Nazis would have only limited appeal to German women. But this was not the case. In fact, in the early 1930s, German women were more likely to vote for the Nazis than for the parties of the left.6 The Communist Party, for example, seems to have had very little appeal to women. Most of its voters were men. Why was this? Clearly, religious, class and local issues motivated women as much as they motivated men, but German women were more likely to turn to right-wing groups and, as the Nazi Party grew in size, it became the most obvious of these groups. This right-wing tendency may be explained by the fact that many German women still held traditional roles within their families. In this case, the beliefs of the Nazis would have been more appealing than might be assumed. Furthermore, the Nazi emphasis on racial purity afforded women a vital role in the making of a new German community. In addition to this, the fact that many German women already played a key role in the raising of children and in the maintenance of homes may have made them particularly open to the message that only the Nazis could restore economic prosperity and social order. This promised protection for homes and families from the disruption caused by unemployment. And the left-wing parties’ male-orientated structures often overshadowed their more unisex theories.7
There is also some evidence to suggest that the Nazis played upon female fears of crime and disorder that would occur if communists took power. The idea of marauding communist thugs out to destroy German society might today sound like a bizarre fantasy but, set against the violence and atrocities of the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War and Stalin’s collectivization campaigns in the 1920s and early 1930s, the fear of violence that might accompany social disintegration seems to have had a particularly large impact on German women, even more than on German men.
Even in the early 1930s, people realized that the Nazis had been highly successful in recruiting support amongst lower-middle class Protestants. Many middle-class Germans were bitter at losing their savings during the hyperinflation of 1923 and were gripped by a fear of being forced down into the working class. Along with this, having more to lose than their poorer neighbours, they feared social unrest, and those with small businesses feared the spread of left-wing influence in their workshops. Instead, they hoped for a new-found national unity to replace class conflict. On top of this, many civil servants resented Weimar job cuts in the early 1930s.8 It was a cocktail of emotions that propelled many towards the Nazi Party. This cocktail was stirred by witnessing escalating street violence, which seemed to threaten the stability prized by middle-class German citizens. As Albert Speer was later to remark, it was the sight of disciplined marching SA units that persuaded his mother that only the Nazis could restore order in Germany. This, of course, was true in large measure, since they were causing a great deal of the disorder.
Amongst wealthier businesspeople, the attraction of the Nazis lay principally in their promises to control workers and end trade-union activities. The Nazis promised the end of the Social Democrats and the Communist Party. Furthermore, Nazi plans for military expansion promised increased profits for industry, and the pursuit of Lebensraum (living space) in Eastern Europe offered opportunities to gain cheap resources and increase profits even further. As a result, it was leading industrialists who, in November 1932, put pressure on Hindenburg to pull the Nazis into a broad-based nationalist authoritarian regime.9 Nevertheless, it was only after Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933 that big donations flowed in from this quarter. Prior to this event, many German capitalists were content to watch and see whether or not the Nazis had a political future. For most of the period 1930–3, it was ordinary Nazi Party members who dug deep into their meagre pockets to fund the party’s election expenses.10
However, the appeal to industrialists should not obscure the fact that the Nazis were also successful in pulling in working-class support. This was obscured at the time by the fact that middle-class people tended to ‘go Nazi’ as part of large recognizable communities and groups, whereas workers tended to join individually. In contrast, the non-Nazi trade unions (for example, those run by the Social Democrats) continued in existence until destroyed by the Nazis in May 1933 and this gave the impression that most workers had not gone over to the Nazis. This was despite the fact that high unemployment levels had already reduced the numbers in non-Nazi trade unions and made these groups even less representative of the working class than they appeared. The historian Conan Fischer has suggested why it was the middle-class nature of Nazism that most people were aware of, despite large numbers of workers voting Nazi:
The pattern of the Nazi advance probably provides the most convincing explanation, for whilst entire middle-class organisations had been penetrated by, or even switched to the National Socialists, the workers usually joined as individuals or sometimes as members of communities which lacked any pronounced class profile or awareness.11
Furthermore, the Social Democrats in particular were unwilling to admit to the fact that large numbers of workers would support the Nazis. This phenomenon was less of a problem for centre and right-wing groups to admit to when they lost middle-class support – but they were still powerless to actually stop the loss of their supporters to the Nazis. Interestingly, the Communist Party did recognize that it was losing workers to the Nazis. In 1932, one communist report noted: ‘SA members have no bank account and no salary; most have no job.’ They were ‘without work or hope’ and, as such, were drawn into the SA by promises of work and bread. But most of these frank concerns were restricted to internal party documents and reports and so few people outside the Communist Party leadership were aware of the conclusions.
But the question remains: why did some workers vote Nazi? The answer involves a range of factors. There was a tradition of anti-capitalism from the early years of the Nazi Party and this lingered in a number of areas even after Hitler reined it in. In addition, Hitler’s language of resentment towards the wealthy struck a chord amongst the unemployed and the desperate, who were also impressed by his lowly social origins.12 This was enhanced by the socialist-type slogans and symbols that the Nazis sometimes used in working-class areas. And in such areas it was noted that the SA contained many unemployed workers, who had found purpose in their new-found Nazi membership.
Nazi trade-union activists promoted strike activity in early 1930 to destabilize Weimar. That gave the Nazi Party an illusory appearance of radicalism, which had significant appeal as the numbers of the jobless mounted after 1930. As one worker remarked to a US historian in 1934, Hitler offered more concrete objectives than the revolutionary theories of the communists: ‘Instead of prophecies and far-off visions, in National Socialism he gave us a good working scheme of things we could get busy on right away.’13 And finally, the German working class was not a united group. Only about 30 per cent worked in large unionized industries and had a strong tie to the Communist Party or the Social Democrats. About 60 per cent of workers were not even members of a trade union and were far from predictable in their voting patterns. The parties of the left certainly could not take their support for granted. Some were Protestants, others Catholics – and this too affected voting traditions.14
Even so, it seems to have been the fear of unemployment that motivated Nazi voters. The actual unemployed themselves were twice as likely to vote for the Communist Party as for the Nazis. In the middle of 1932, only 13 per cent of the unemployed supported the Nazis, compared with 37.3 per cent of the nation as a whole. This reminds us that the role of unemployment was complicated.
Research in the 1970s emphasized the Nazis’ ability to unite middle-class groups but more recent work, in the 1990s and early twenty-first century, has shown that they were in fact highly successful in forging links across class boundaries. This was combined with the Nazis’ skill at talking the different ‘languages’ of particular groups at the same time, but in different places, whilst also uniting these groups with the common language of race and national identity. That some of these groups would be disappointed by the Nazis’ inability to deliver to everyone is hardly a surprise, but all this lay beyond 1933. In the run up to gaining power, it was the ability of the Nazis to appeal to widely different groups and offer the promise of national unity that caused a surge in their popularity. In this appeal – even if contradictory and unlikely to work in practice – no other political party could compete with them. And the mere hope that such a national community could be created was enough to persuade vast numbers of Germans to vote Nazi in the context of national instability and unrest in the early 1930s. In order to appeal to less racist members of the electorate, the Nazis were even prepared to play down their anti-Semitism, as William Sheridan Allen found in his detailed study of support for the Nazis in the small town of Northeim.15
This attempt to create ‘a German party for all Germans’ was greatly assisted by the wide range of Nazi Party special-interest groups set up before 1933. These ranged from youth groups to factory cells, groups for civil servants and groups for wounded veterans of the First World War, groups for women and groups for farmers; the list is long. Even though many of these groups had only small memberships, they were important in creating the image of a party that could appeal to virtually all Germans. In the short term, this meant that the Nazi message was adapted and targeted at many different sections of German society and, in this way, had a political influence on groups that, before this, had considered themselves non-political. In the longer term, the existence of such a wide range of different groups gave the party a structure that could rapidly expand to absorb new members and, after Hitler came to power, would contribute to the Nazi aim of a society in which all the institutions were dominated by the beliefs of the Nazi Party under its Führer.
The personal appeal of Hitler was also a major part in swinging support behind the Nazis. This is not to downplay the role of wider social trends and the part played by Strasser’s party machine. It is simply to make the point that the role of Hitler as Führer was crucial in both holding together such a complex and mutually contradictory group as the Nazis and in providing a focal point for national unity at a time of crisis and apparent disintegration. To a nation in which democracy was a relatively new experience, tainted with defeat and national humiliation, and in which the authoritarian regime of the Kaiser was very much within living memory, the idea of a person claiming to embody national unity had great appeal. Hitler’s conscious presentation of himself as the hope of Germany and the Nazis’ relentless propaganda, which centred on his role and authority, had a great impact on many disillusioned Germans.
His whole style of speaking and presenting his message in a highly staged and theatrical style now seems contrived and deeply unappealing, but at the time many Germans recorded how it deeply moved them and created an almost religious atmosphere of worship and hope. For such people, Nazism had become a kind of secular religion, in which Hitler was presented as a German messiah. And this was not just a phenomenon seen among the young and inexperienced. Many older Germans also wrote of the impact on their minds of Nazi discipline, unity and apparent hope of national revival in the middle of a time of turmoil, despair and uncertainty. In all of this, Hitler himself played a key role – though not of course the only one.
So, what did the ‘typical Nazi voter’ look like? People were more likely to vote Nazi if they were Protestants from rural areas and small towns; this was especially so if they were middle class, female and young. Workers, Catholics, those from the big cities and the unemployed did also sometimes support the Nazis, but, overall, were not a major source of their votes. Research in Saxony has shown that the Nazis tended to win working-class support only in areas where the Social Democrats and Communist Party had not established a traditional influence. Overall, the Nazis, despite being under-represented among some groups in society, won support from across the community. They attracted some support from every group, from both men and women and from the old as well as the young. They were, indeed, the first real ‘protest party’. As one Hamburg schoolteacher confided in her diary in 1932, it was Hitler who ‘rescues the Prussian prince, the scholar, the clergyman, the farmer, the worker, the unemployed, who rescues them from the parties back into the nation’.16
The historian Richard Evans summed up this ability to attract widespread support in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash: ‘The Nazi Party had established itself with startling suddenness in September 1930 as a catch-all party of social protest, appealing to a greater or lesser degree to virtually every social group in the land.’17 The unpredictable nature of such a disparate combination of voters helps explain Hitler’s actions after he came to power: to try to ensure that his dictatorship was not dependent on such a shifting and complex support base. Once he was free from relying on the unpredictable nature of democracy, his dictatorship was secure. However, how he would satisfy the contradictory expectations of so many different groups remained the greatest challenge facing the Nazis after they came to power. They had promised something to almost everyone. Somebody was going to be disappointed.
1. For different interpretations of why so many groups of people voted Nazi, see Brustein, William, The Logic of Evil: The Social Origins of the Nazi Party, 1925–1933, Yale University Press, 1998; Fischer, Conan, The Rise of the Nazis, Manchester University Press, 2002; Mühlberger, Detlef, The Social Bases of Nazism, 1919–1933, Economic History Society and Cambridge University Press, 2003.
2. Kershaw, Ian, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris, Penguin Books, 1999, pp. 407–8.
3. Burleigh, Michael, The Third Reich, a New History, Pan Books, 2001, pp. 68–69.
4. Ibid., p. 105; Noakes, J. and Pridham, G., Nazism 1919–1945, vol. I, The Rise to Power 1919–1934, University of Exeter Press, 2nd edition, 1998, p. 80.
5. Kagan, Donald, Ozment, Steven E., Turner, Frank, The Western Heritage: Since 1789, Pearson Education, 2001, p. 1,037.
6. See Kershaw, Ian, op. cit., pp. 408–9.
7. Burleigh, Michael, op. cit., p. 68.
8. See Kershaw, op. cit., p. 407.
9. A key area explored in Jenkins, Jane and Feuchtwanger, Edgar, Hitler’s Germany, Hodder Murray, 2000.
10. For an overview of the mixed support provided by German capitalists, see Kershaw, Ian, op. cit., p. 358.
11. Fischer, Conan, The Rise of the Nazis, Manchester University Press, 2002, p. 130.
12. Kershaw, Ian, The ‘Hitler Myth’, Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 30.
13. Quoted in Rothnie, Niall, National Socialism in Germany, Palgrave Macmillan, 1987, p. 13.
14. Burleigh, Michael, op. cit., p. 67.
15. Explored in Evans, Richard, Rereading German History, 1800–1996, Routledge, 1997.
16. Noakes, J. and Pridham, G., Nazism 1919–1945, vol. I, The Rise to Power 1919–1934, University of Exeter Press, 2nd edition, 1998, p. 54.
17. Evans, Richard, The Coming of the Third Reich, Penguin Books, 2003, p. 264.