Q: Who voted for the Nazis?

Otto Kretschmer

Banned
In terms of education and social status what kind of people voted Hitler to power?

Was it the same lower classes that usually vote for populist countries worldwide?

I could have googled this but I create the topic so that there is room for discussion and other people can see it.
 
Last edited:

Veiovis

Otto Kretschmer said:
Was it the same lower classes that usually vote for populist countries worldwide?
Click to expand...
You are already starting from a wrong premise. "Populist" parties are rarely confined to lower class people, in fact they usually enjoy fairly broad middle class support, especially if they are radical.

The Nazis were no exceptions. Here you find their voter breakdown according to occupation : https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1138901/umfrage/nsdap-waehler-nach-berufsgruppen/

"Workers" were actually underepresented, schopowners strongly overrepresented. So were the unemployed, but in the conditions of the early 30s, being unemployed was hardly restricted to the lower classes. Especially as in the case of the Nazis, most of those unemplyoed workers were pensioneers.
 

David T

Mostly Protestants (on the whole Catholics stuck with the Zentrum and the BVP--the NSDAP's biggest stronghold in Bavaria was in Protestant Franconia). Largely rural. They became especially strong in areas bordering Poland, Denmark, etc. The Nazis took some votes from the right-wing DNVP (especially in the border areas) but many Nazi voters had formerly voted for middle-class "liberal" parties (the DVP and the DDP) or for localist or "economic" interest parties. On the whole, organized labor stuck with the SPD, and the unemployed in 1932 were more likely to have voted Communist. The stereotype of the NSDAP as lower middle class is oversimplified--they got votes from wealthy people and from working-class people (especially those who were not unionized, as many outside the big cities were not).

A good summary by Michael Mann at https://books.google.com/books?id=eTE7ytbtp_cC&pg=PA189:


Clipboard01.jpg
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top
Top