Originally posted by Dowding:
It sounds like you are trying to make the Nazis out to be a powerful minority exercising their will over a dissenting population. This really flies in the face of the election results in the thirties; the National Socialist Workers' Party increased its votes vote by over 800 per cent (nearly 6.5 million), going from the ninth largest party in the Reichstag to second.
People were desperate to join the party in the thirties, but were desperate to dis-associate themselves from it in the late forties.
It is not that simple though. Yes, National Socialism was very popular in the thirties - while the rest of the world was in the depths of the depression, Germany prospered (by and large through military re-organization and equipping). Hitler was providing a sense of national pride and power that had been stripped from Germany after the first world war. All of these things and more steeled the country in purpose, and to the average citizen was, of course, pretty appealing. It made some of the obvious things easier to excuse, and some of the less obvious things easier to overlook. We can't demonize the entire German population and make them "Nazis" in the sense of the word that is being discussed here - violently anti-semetic, power hungry megalomaniacs. The point being, the average person is found in any country, and is pretty similar to the average person found in any other country, and dedication to their country should not be construed as support of mass genocide.
