{"id":4922,"date":"2026-04-15T09:55:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T09:55:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/4922\/"},"modified":"2026-04-15T09:55:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T09:55:11","slug":"how-could-it-have-happened-the-fundamental-question-about-nazism-that-continues-to-haunt-germany-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/4922\/","title":{"rendered":"How could it have happened? The fundamental question about Nazism that continues to haunt Germany | Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

How could it have happened? That is the question. German historians, like Captain Ahab with the white whale, continue to obsessively pursue it. More than 80 years after the end of Nazism<\/a>, they still haven\u2019t found a definitive or complete answer.<\/p>\n

\u201cAny answer to the question of why things happened this way is subject to scrutiny of the sources,\u201d responds Heinrich August Winkler, patriarch of German historiography, with scientific rigor. \u201cIf new sources and knowledge emerge that lead to new conclusions, then the answer must be supplemented and, if necessary, corrected.\u201d<\/p>\n

Winkler has recently published a memoir entitled, precisely, Warum es so gekommen ist (How did it come to this?), in which he addresses his trajectory as an intellectual, and also the fundamental question, \u201cthe question of all questions since my student days.\u201d \u201cIt is the question,\u201d he clarifies, \u201cabout the avoidability of the greatest catastrophe in German history, the dictatorship of National Socialism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another veteran historian, G\u00f6tz Aly, has published a similarly titled volume, Wie konnte das geschehen (How could it have happened?). Both new publications coincide in bookstores with another extensive study by Peter Longerich, biographer of Himmler, Goebbels, and Hitler<\/a>, titled Unwillige Volksgenossen (Reluctant Compatriots). Longerich poses the same question but finds a contrasting answer: Germans were largely skeptical of the Hitler regime and its ideology, and only repression, propaganda, and opportunism can explain the massive adherence.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout democracy, there would have been no Hitler,\u201d Aly remarks in his Berlin office, a statement that initially throws his interlocutor off balance. A large window overlooks the fascist-style building that once housed Joseph Goebbels\u2019s Ministry of Propaganda<\/a>; today it is the headquarters of the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. In the imperial era, before the Weimar Republic<\/a>, or in an authoritarian system, according to this argument, a political entrepreneur like Hitler, who rose from humble beginnings and had no connections, could hardly have successfully founded a movement like the National Socialist German Workers\u2019 Party (NSDAP). He would hardly have been able to seize power. \u201cWith the Kaiser, there would have been no Hitler,\u201d Aly says. \u201cDemocracy was the prerequisite.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Adolf Hitler in Munich addressing an NSDAP meeting in 1925.UniversalImagesGroup (Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Aly mentions other \u201cpreconditions\u201d that explain the rise of Nazism. One is the baby boom between 1900 and 1915, \u201cthe largest population growth in German history,\u201d thanks to advances in hygiene and medicine. In 1933, when the Nazis came to power, Goebbels was 35; Reinhard Heydrich, 28; Albert Speer<\/a>, 27; Adolf Eichmann, 26; and Heinrich Himmler, 32. \u201cIt was a young party and a young dictatorship,\u201d he summarizes.<\/p>\n

Because of their youth, the generation born between 1900 and 1915 emerged relatively unscathed from the Great War, while their parents were killed or left wounded and traumatized. \u201cMany felt that the NSDAP had educated them,\u201d the book states. \u201cMost young people, on both the left and the right, wanted utopia instead of pragmatism, decisive and unreserved action instead of convoluted and complicated compromises through democratic procedures.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another \u201cprerequisite,\u201d according to Aly, is the democratization of education. \u201cEveryone wanted to get ahead,\u201d he explains, referring to this overabundance of young people, better educated than ever before, who migrated from the countryside to the city and rose socially. But the economic crash of 1929 halted this upward mobility, and envy arose toward their Jewish fellow citizens, whom the Nazis identified as competitors.<\/p>\n

The historian adds that museums, films, and memorials have tended to focus on the direct perpetrators, such as a criminal gang at the top of the regime, or on the victims, identifying with them. But the rest are usually overlooked: \u201cThe millions of active and passive sympathizers, the indifferent, the interchangeable followers, and the hundreds of thousands of active executors at the drawing boards, in logistics, in the administration, and at the sites of mass extermination.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Adolf Hitler on the grounds of his estate in Obersalzberg; further back, the leader of the Reich Youth, Baldur von Schirach (left) and (almost hidden) Hermann Esser, member of the Bavarian State Government and head of the State Chancellery.ullstein bild Dtl. (Getty Images)<\/p>\n

German society is the subject of study in Peter Longerich\u2019s Unwillige Volksgenossen, where he analyzes thousands of documents in which the NSDAP and government administrations gauged public opinion. The reports record complaints on a wide range of issues, from working conditions to fear of war.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe regime\u2019s racist extermination policy met with mostly negative reactions from the population,\u201d Longerich writes. In his memoirs, Winkler recalls his childhood in a conservative but non-Nazi family, and remembers that after the war his grandmother told him: \u201cWe noticed fewer and fewer people in the street wearing the Jewish star, and we suspected something terrible had happened to them.\u201d According to Longerich, \u201cone cannot speak of a generalized Nazification of German society.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aly believes it\u2019s a mistake to conclude from the reports that disaffection was widespread, arguing that they served the regime\u2019s purpose of reacting preemptively to potential pockets of discontent. He cites the example of the 15% pension increase in 1941, a pivotal year in World War II<\/a>. \u201cThe measure,\u201d he points out, \u201cwasn\u2019t financed by the working population, but by slave laborers.\u201d The aim was to quell the unrest among pensioners, who had lived through the previous war and didn\u2019t want another one. The message was: Hitler was taking care of them. And it worked.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe truth is that the NSDAP had more than eight million members, with an average age of 34, and 18 million German soldiers served in the Wehrmacht,\u201d says Aly. \u201cThis means that among those of us who were born in 1947, 95% of us had a parent who was in Russia or elsewhere and witnessed war crimes, at the very least, if not participated in them or did nothing to stop them.\u201d The Nazis \u201cfound their base at the heart of society.\u201d<\/p>\n

Any German can check using the search tool that the weekly newspaper Die Zeit has been offering on its website for the past few days. It allows users to find out if an ancestor was a member of the Nazi party<\/a>, and for many, it has come as an unpleasant surprise. \u201cI feel betrayed by my father. When he spoke about the Nazi years, it always seemed as if he had been a victim,\u201d says Margrit Braig-Kienzle in one of the testimonies that Die Zeit has collected from those who have discovered, thanks to the search tool, that their parents or grandparents were members of the NSDAP.<\/p>\n

In addition to the books by Aly, Longerich, and Winkler, there is another new release: Schreiben in finsteren Zeiten (Writing in dark times), by Helmuth Kiesel, a history of German literature during Hitler\u2019s years in power.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe twelve years following 1933, under the shadow of the swastika, placed such a heavy burden of political demands, pressures, and hardships on authors that the preservation of literary qualities and the development of narrative, dramatic, and lyrical forms were considerably hampered,\u201d writes Kiesel, professor emeritus at Heidelberg. The great literature of the period was that of the exiles, along with that of Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht<\/a>. \u201cA dictatorship does not produce good literature. It stifles and prevents it,\u201d comments editor and essayist Thomas Sparr, who reviewed Kiesel\u2019s book in the journal Volltext, in an email.<\/p>\n

Kiesel describes, at the end of over 1,000 pages, how Nazism is a recurring theme in the postwar period and even today. \u201cIt was impossible to escape the sphere of influence of what Thomas Mann called \u2018the brief and somber historical episode that bears the name of Hitler,\u2019\u201d he states. \u201cIf it truly was an episode, it was one of cultural, social, and historical convulsions of such profound force that historical, political, and ethical reflection necessarily returns time and again to this rupture of civilization and the conditions that made it possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is the past that never truly passes, and the question remains unanswered. Even as those who lived through it die, the far right continues to echo, and an impossible oblivion seems imminent. \u201cTo draw a line under the catastrophe of the years 1933 to 1945 would mean trying to suppress the darkest chapter in German history. The consequences would be catastrophic,\u201d warns Winkler in an email. \u201cThe willingness to engage critically with German history is part of our identity. For the Federal Republic of Germany, that this remains the case is a categorical imperative.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sign up for our weekly newsletter<\/a> to get more English-language news coverage from EL PA\u00cdS USA Edition<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How could it have happened? That is the question. German historians, like Captain Ahab with the white whale,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4923,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4984,1923,18,4988,5,4985,4986,4987],"class_list":{"0":"post-4922","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-adolf-hitler","9":"tag-albert-speer","10":"tag-berlin","11":"tag-bertolt-brecht","12":"tag-germany","13":"tag-heinrich-himmler","14":"tag-joseph-goebbels","15":"tag-thomas-mann"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4922\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}