OK y'know what, this got under my skin a little (primarily because I hate liberals who don't know what they're on about).

Gather round y'all, we're gonna talk about the rise of the Nazis. https://twitter.com/koaleszenz/status/1244445272463355905

So this thread is gonna be LONG. We have a boatload of ground to cover.

We have to start with a brief bit of German history pre-20th century. What we might call Germans have been around since Rome, but Germany, a geopolitical thing, a country, is relatively new.

The phrase "Deutschland uber alles", though now associated with the Nazis, was originally a nationalist rallying cry for the formation of a country of Germanic peoples. This is the earliest form of what is called "pan-Germanism".

The actual formation of Germany itself is a long story, and I'm going to sideline it. If you'd like to know more, check out this video here:

The short version of this formation was a nation of a bunch of loosely connected peoples who had never really had a nation-state before. This bit here, is very important. Although fascism & nationalism both operate on myth, for the Germans and unlike the Italians, (cont.)

(cont.) national mythology was a lot more explicitly bullshit. Italy had the rich traditions of Rome to harken back to. Germany didn't really have this, and coupled with the attitudes of the time, the Nazis could create the Aryan myth, or, "Herrenvolk" (master race).

Now we have to quickly sideline German history and mention Europe more broadly. It's often that the Germans were uniquely extreme in their antisemitism pre-Hitler, and this wasn't really the case. All of Europe was(/is) a hellhole of Jew hatred, and Germany was no exception.

But, because German national myth was particularly weird, it found it's way into German nationalism quite comfortably. It's here we find the earliest German proto-fascists, the Volkische movement.

The Volkische movement was a weird collection of far-right racists. Probably most famous among them was Elizabeth Nietzsche, the sister and literary estate manager of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Here we're gonna take a brief detour to talk Nazi ideology and it's philosophy.

(Friedrich) Nietzsche died in 1900, before the Nazis formed. But he absolutely *hated* the Volkische movement and antisemitism, and his "ubermensch" had nothing to do with weird racist nonsense. The connection between his philosophy and Nazism comes from his sister.

See, she was a hardline Volkische member (and later member of the Nazi Party). So when she came to be the manager of his literary estate, she revised his work to fit her racist, nationalist beliefs.

Couple this with Nietzsche's *actual* elitism, criticism of democracy, and misogyny, and you can find philosophical basis for Nazism. But the man himself was about as far from a Nazi as one got.

Anyhow, the Volkische movement only grew with time. Eventually the movement got involved in politics more broadly. It's members formed various far-right parties and organizations. One of which, important for our purposes, was the Thule Society.

The Thule Society was a strange German pagan organization. Basically, think a collection of D&D nerds, only they take the lore to be real, and they're all extremely racist. Among it's membership was core members of the future Nazi party, including ideologue Alfred Rosenberg.

The Thule Society itself wasn't a political party, but it did fund one - The Deutsch Arbeiterpartei (German Worker's Party). Despite the center-left sounding name, it was a reactionary ultraconservative party. It was also the earliest form of the Nazi Party.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Let's jump into post-WW1 Germany a sec. See, large sections of the German population genuinely thought the war was winnable, but that the military was "stabbed in the back" by Jews & communists. This is a fucking myth, JSYK.

A lot of bitter, cynical vets of the war joined the Freikorps. What were the Freikorps? Well, basically a group of far-right mercenaries who attacked trade unions, socialists, and communists. Think of them like the earliest form of the SS.

And the Freikorps? They believed this myth. HARD.
As did many German nationalists. And because Germany was a very young country who's birth was forged in war, German nationalism was pretty common. So antisemitism starts to spread like wildfire.

At the same time, Germany was experiencing a revolution. The Spartacist League (later to become the KPD or Communist Party of Germany) had risen up and seized huge swaths of the country. And guess who doesn't like it? The centrist German government.

In 1918, the German government lead by Friedrich Ebert sent the Freikorps in to help quash the communist revolt. This crippled the German left, and it also helped further legitimize anti-communism in the country.

Also around this time emerged a super weird thing called the "Conservative Revolutionary movement". This was probably the first instance of German fascism ever to pop-up, and it provided much of the Nazi intelligentsia who would join the party.

This included men like Anton Drexler, who headed that German Workers Party I mentioned a while back. Drexler's speeches against Jews, communists, and "capitalism" (read: liberalism) inspired many a German reactionary. Among them? Adolf Hitler.

Hitler had originally been sent by the government to spy on the party, but Drexler's reactionary ideas enchanted him and he wound up joining it, and eventually controlling it. Now here's where the party begins to come to form.

It's already a weird cocktail of mercenaries, pagans, and weirdoes, but it's also a raging failure at the voting booth. It needs an edge, and it needs something to defeat the German left, which is slowly coming back. The solution? Steal things from the left.

Hitler renamed the party the Nazionalsozialismus Deutsch Arbeiter Partei - National Socialist German Worker's Party. The name, to the confession of everyone including Hitler, was a deliberate ruse. But the word "socialist" was popular, and Hitler seized on it.

In the early 1920s, Hitler attempted to imitate Mussolini's rise to power by marching on the capital. This became known as the Beer Hall Putsch, and it was a resounding failure. Many prominent Nazis were jailed, and the party was banned.

Not that this meant anything because it reformed under the name "National Socialist Freedom Movement".

Anyhow, knowing all this, the Nazis rise seems even weirder. The party was, by all accounts, a failed collective of thugs and weirdoes. How does this gain traction?

Well, German nationalism continued to be on the rise. The Treaty of Versailles humiliated Germany and completely obliterated the economy. The Weimar government failed at every turn to help remedy the problem, and everyone descended into a state of horrid emptiness.

No one's really offering an alternative for what's happening, and no one seems to have a plan. The Social Democratic Party & the conservatives are floundering, the Communist Party is fringe, the anarchists are pretty small, overall no one has any idea what to do.

It's in the background of this that the Nazis find their niche. German nationalism became a kind of existential drug for the average citizen when used by the party. The nihilism of the Great Depression could be remedied by appealing to a mythological past.

"Hey there, buddy. You don't need to take this. You're descended from the Aryan race! You matter! Your life has value!"

The Nazis, meanwhile, had slowly grown in popularity, thanks in no small part to the ridiculous sales numbers of Mein Kampf.

So it's not simply that the Nazis took advantage of a situation of extreme misery, it's that their competition was running around like a chicken with it's head chopped off. Put simply, the Nazis had a program, no one else did. What was the average German to do?

Well... not vote the Nazi Party into power. [RECORD SCRATCH]

Yeah, the Nazis "electoral victory" saw them share the Reichstag with the Social Democrats and the Communists. They'd surged in popularity, but not enough to take power quite yet.

But, they also had a street presence in the SA, or Sturmabteilung (the predecessor to the SS). This band of Freikorps vets went around terrorizing Jews, trade unions, communists, and so on. And they wreaked absolute HAVOC.

In an attempt to keep Germany calm, and to appease the violent reactionaries in the street, President Paul Von Hindenberg gave Hitler the chancellorship of Germany. But, as it was later demonstrated, give the Nazis an inch, and they take a football field.

Hitler would use this position to consolidate his power, climaxing in 1933 when the Reichstag was burned. Hitler blamed this on the popular scapegoat of the Communist Party, and used this to ban them, as well as get the Enabling Act pushed through.

What was this act? Well, imagine that everyone decided Congress was too slow, so they enabled POTUS to just do whatever he wanted whenever. That same year, President Hindenburg died, and Hitler officially crowned himself Furher.

All other parties were banned, trade unions were banned and replaced by the German Labour Front, and Hitler had finally come to power.

The German people had been suckered, hook, line, and sinker.

But our story doesn't quite end there.

Because now we have to ask - Since Hitler was so horrible, how did his regime even survive as long as it did? The answer isn't simply that his totalitarianism was too great to oppose. German resistance to him had *been* a thing.

See, the Nazis had managed to appease the German upper & middle classes. Here they'd found comfortable support. They managed to buy off the German working class with large work programs, a drop in inflation, and >10% rise of wages.

The truth is, if you weren't in the regimes crosshairs, your life was probably decent. And this was enough to quell the general population until the war effort went to hell.

Though it should also be noted that the idea that Hitler "improved" the economy is a huge myth.

See, the Nazis had no real economic program, they were mainly focused on being weird racists. So, between sanctions, the cost of war, the usual problems of capitalism, the cost of the Holocaust, war profiteering, and Nazi officials abusing their power, the economy was shaky.

Here's where we actually get into something really neat:

Despite early improvements, the actual wages of Germans more or less froze later on. So while employment shot way up, spending power didn't keep up. The economy basically needed adrenaline pumps on a frequent basis.

Remember this, by the way, when people say "Employment's gone up!" as though it means anything in the face of shit-tier wages.

And that's it.

/thread