IB History Popular Support Notes

Popular Support: Genuine Consent Behind the Terror

Foreign Policy as the Engine of Popular Support

1. Hitler's foreign policy moves before 1939 let Germany re-emerge as a European great power barely two decades after the humiliation of Versailles.
2. Britain and France's policy of appeasement, making repeated concessions to avoid war, allowed each Nazi foreign policy success to go unchallenged, reinforcing Hitler's image of unstoppable competence at home.
3. Historian Ian Kershaw has described this run of achievements as triumphs without bloodshed, since Hitler secured major gains without having to fight a war for any of them before 1939.
4. These successes generated support in all sections of German society, giving Hitler what Kershaw called unparalleled popularity, prestige, and acclaim by the late 1930s.

Remilitarising the Rhineland, 1936

1. In March 1936 Germany remilitarised the Rhineland in direct defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, a bold and legally unauthorised move that risked confrontation with France.
2. A contemporary underground SOPADE report described the domestic response as universally impressive, noting widespread conviction that Germany's foreign policy demands were justified and could not simply be ignored.
3. No serious international response followed this breach of Versailles, and the apparent success emboldened both Hitler and the German public who had watched the gamble pay off.
4. This episode shows how a single unopposed foreign policy risk could generate durable domestic political capital far beyond its immediate military significance.

The Anschluss With Austria, 1938

1. In March 1938 Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss, formally uniting the two countries in violation of the Versailles settlement.
2. A SOPADE report described the union as producing enormous personal gains in credibility and prestige for Hitler among ordinary Germans.
3. Any remaining doubts among the majority of Germans about the wisdom of challenging the Versailles settlement had, according to this contemporary evidence, largely evaporated by this point.
4. The relatively peaceful nature of the annexation, without triggering wider war, reinforced the growing sense that Hitler's judgement on foreign affairs could be trusted.

Building Toward a Greater Germany

1. By 1938 Hitler had also presided over the restoration of the industrial Saarland to Germany, the recovery of military sovereignty, and the incorporation of the Sudetenland into the Reich.
2. The Saarland's return was technically the result of a League of Nations supervised plebiscite consistent with the Versailles Treaty's own terms, giving it a particularly strong veneer of legitimacy.
3. These successive gains fulfilled, at least in part, the long-standing nationalist goal of building a Greater Germany uniting ethnic Germans within a single enlarged state.
4. Historian Edgar Feuchtwanger, who lived in Germany before going into exile, stressed that Hitler's sensationally effective foreign policy coups were fundamental to his hold on the German people.

Economic Recovery and Full Employment

1. Alongside foreign policy success, domestic economic recovery gave the regime a further, more immediately felt source of popular legitimacy.
2. Public works programmes and, from the mid-1930s, rearmament spending dramatically reduced the mass unemployment that had reached around 6 million in early 1933.
3. For millions of Germans who had suffered through the Depression's worst years, visible economic recovery mattered more directly to daily life than any foreign policy achievement.
4. This combination of economic recovery and diplomatic success in righting the wrongs of 1919 meant most Germans not targeted as enemies of the state gave the regime their genuine support.

Support Without Belief in Racial Ideology

1. Crucially, most ordinary Germans appear to have supported Hitler not because they shared his racist or antisemitic beliefs in full, but because he had restored a sense of German national pride.
2. This distinction matters for understanding popular support accurately, since it separates genuine enthusiasm for economic recovery and foreign policy success from active endorsement of the regime's most extreme ideological aims.
3. Many Germans were willing to overlook or ignore the regime's persecution of Jews, communists, and other targeted groups so long as their own material and national circumstances appeared to be improving.
4. This pattern of selective, conditional support helps explain how a regime with genuinely monstrous aims could still command wide popular loyalty among people not directly its victims.

The SOPADE Reports as Historical Evidence

1. The underground SOPADE reports, compiled by exiled Social Democrats using informants inside Germany, provide unusually candid contemporary evidence of genuine public opinion under the Nazi regime.
2. Unlike official Nazi propaganda, these reports had no incentive to exaggerate the regime's popularity, making their consistent record of genuine public enthusiasm for foreign policy successes especially significant historical evidence.
3. Historians rely heavily on these reports precisely because they offer a rare source of candid opinion from a period when open criticism of the regime was extremely dangerous.

The Turning Point: War From 1939

1. Edgar Feuchtwanger observed that Hitler, as what he called a high-risk gambler with no real interest in outside advice, was likely to falter eventually, becoming a prisoner of his own myth and imagined infallibility.
2. Errors in foreign policy from March 1939 onward, beginning with the occupation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia, ultimately broke this unbroken chain of apparently costless success.
3. It was not until the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 that National Socialist fortunes began to decline decisively, as Hitler had badly underestimated Soviet capacity to absorb and repel German attacks.
4. This shift shows that the same source of genuine popular support, spectacular foreign policy success, could just as easily reverse into a source of disillusionment once success turned into evident failure.

Historiography: Consent or Coercion?

Comparing Popular Support Across Case Studies

1. Hitler's combination of economic recovery and foreign policy success as sources of genuine popular support recurs, in different forms, across this unit's case studies.
2. Nasser's popularity likewise rested heavily on real, if partial, achievements: land reform, expanded education, and the symbolic triumph of the 1956 Suez Crisis.
3. Castro's early popular support drew similarly on genuine achievements, the 1961 Literacy Campaign and land reform, alongside the charismatic appeal of the revolution itself.
4. For a Section B(b) essay on popular support, pairing Hitler's foreign policy triumphs with Nasser's Suez Crisis shows two authoritarian leaders converting a specific, dramatic international success into lasting domestic popularity.

The Hitler Myth: A Good Leader Surrounded by Bad Officials

1. Historian Ian Kershaw has described a phenomenon he calls the Hitler Myth, in which many ordinary Germans criticised local Party officials or specific unpopular policies while continuing to view Hitler himself favourably.
2. Some Germans wrote letters directly to Hitler about local injustices, apparently believing he was personally unaware of problems caused by corrupt or incompetent subordinates.
3. This pattern echoes a much older political phenomenon sometimes called the good tsar, bad boyars effect, where a ruler is shielded from blame that instead falls on those beneath them.
4. The Hitler Myth proved one of the regime's most durable sources of support, since it let genuine grievances about specific policies coexist with continued personal loyalty to Hitler himself.

Strength Through Joy and Everyday Material Benefits

1. The Kraft durch Freude, or Strength Through Joy, organisation provided ordinary German workers with affordable holidays, concerts, and cultural events previously available mainly to the wealthy.
2. The Volkswagen savings scheme let workers pay in weekly instalments toward a promised people's car, though most subscribers never actually received a vehicle before the outbreak of war diverted production.
3. These tangible material benefits, even where promises like the Volkswagen ultimately went unfulfilled, built genuine loyalty among ordinary workers independent of ideological conviction.
4. This shows that popular support rested partly on concrete, everyday improvements to leisure and consumption, not solely on abstract nationalist or racial appeals.

Winter Relief and Manufactured Solidarity

1. The annual Winterhilfswerk, or Winter Relief charity drive, collected donations to support Germans in need during the winter months.
2. Although officially voluntary, social pressure made participation feel effectively compulsory for many, blurring the line between genuine solidarity and enforced conformity.
3. The visible, collective nature of these campaigns reinforced the sense of belonging to a unified Volksgemeinschaft that Nazi ideology promised.

Support Among Women

1. Despite Nazi ideology formally restricting women's role to children, kitchen, and church, many German women nonetheless supported the regime.
2. For some, this support reflected genuine relief at what they saw as a restoration of social order and family stability after the perceived chaos and moral uncertainty of the Weimar years.
3. Nazi women's organisations, while excluding women from formal political power, still gave many a structured sense of purpose and community within the regime's broader project.

Regional Variation in Genuine Support

1. Popular support for the regime was never uniform across Germany, varying significantly by region and social background.
2. Catholic regions and areas with strong pre-1933 labour movement traditions tended to show more reservation and lower levels of enthusiastic support.
3. Protestant rural Germany and areas that had suffered most severely during the Depression tended to show the strongest early enthusiasm for the regime's promises of recovery and order.

Youth and the Genuine Appeal of Belonging

1. Before Hitler Youth membership became compulsory in 1936, many young Germans joined voluntarily and enthusiastically, drawn by camping, sport, and a sense of shared national mission.
2. This genuine early appeal, camaraderie, structured activity, and purpose, mattered as much to many recruits as any specific ideological content.
3. For young people who had grown up amid Weimar's economic chaos and political violence, this sense of order and belonging carried real, independent appeal.

Support Reinforced by Comparison to Weimar's Chaos

1. Many Germans judged Hitler's Germany favourably by direct comparison with the visible disorder, unemployment, and street violence of Weimar's final years.
2. This comparative framing meant even relatively modest improvements in daily life could feel like a dramatic, transformative change to people who remembered the chaos that had preceded it.
3. This helps explain why genuine popular support could remain strong even among Germans who might otherwise have had reservations about specific Nazi policies.