That’s funny, I was fascinated with the Holocaust for years for that reason. Like how does an entire country turn a blind eye to rampant genocide in their own backyard?

Then the Orange Man ran for President and we laughed.

Then the Orange Man was actually elected and I thought “Holy fuck! I completely underestimated the level of stupid humanity is capable of.”

Don’t forget the culpability of people who may not be fervent supporters, but who don’t want to get involved or inform themselves of what’s going on with their government:

One way or another, any government which remains in power is a representative government. If your city government is a crooked machine, then it is because you and your neighbors prefer it that way - prefer it to the effort of running your own affairs.

Hitler’s government was a popular government; the vast majority of Germans preferred the rule of gangsters to the effort of thinking and doing for themselves. They abdicated their franchise.

…and…

The former Berlin businessman I referred to earlier told me that he blamed his own group, people with the time and the money and the opportunity to know better, for what happened to Germany. “We ignored Hitler,” he said. “We considered him an unimportant fellow, not quite a gentleman, not of our own class. We considered it just a little bit vulgar to bother with him, to bother with politics at all.”

They thought of the government as “They.” The only possible route to a clear conscience in politics is to accept political responsibility, either as an active member of the party in power or as an equally active member of the loyal opposition.

—Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government

The NSDAP would’ve been successful without him, the only thing that maybe could have prevented it is a fair peace treaty after WW1. But with WW1’s peace treaty a nationalistic movement combined with extreme racism was predetermined, just like WW2. Basically they had to give the people reasons why they lost as much as they did (“the evil French and Brits, the Jews plotted this treaty to weaken us, …”) while giving people hope again.

When I’m talking to people who’ve experienced this time they usually don’t mention the holocaust or some other atrocity first. The most common first thing they mention is that everyone had a job again, everyone could finally afford food, child mortality was rapidly decreasing. Obviously that’s also partly because the kind of people who would mention the holocaust first (the ones who experienced it) are a small minority since most of them died in the concentration camps or survived but still died younger, years of inhumanely hard work and not enough food leave their mark.

They financed building highways (a good military needs good infrastructure, the Romans already knew that) and heavily invested into the army to create jobs, but obviously that’s not sustainable. An army only is sustainable when you’re using it to steal money. The first thing after the Anschluss was that they transferred the Austrian gold reserves to Germany. Same thing after they invaded Poland and for every other country. Another factor was that they could give Jewish companies to “Aryans” instead.

So one of the main reasons why they became so popular was that people had no money, no hope (and reparation payments). And they gave them money (jobs) and hope, and promised to reclaim the land that was “stolen from them” (which again was inevitable considering that the peace treaty after WW1 took some core regions from them, the wide mass wasn’t willing to simply accept that - the UK for example was willing to accept that Germany annexed parts of Poland because “it was to be expected anyway” - Germany could simply have stopped there and made peace without anyone caring too much).

And humanity learnt from it and made WW2’s peace treaty much different, for example actually giving them money to restore their economy (of course the Marshall plan was also good for the USA since 90% of the money had to be spent on American products but it still made a huge difference for restoring a stable economy after WW2). A fairer peace treaty also made the different countries much more willing to work together, leading to the European Coal and Steel Community which eventually became the EU, the most successful peace-keeping project of all time in Europe.

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Please, US-Americans: Learn from our history. Hitler’s core promise also was to make Germany great again. Look where it led, and don’t knowingly vote for someone who made it clear that he is willing to overthrow democracy, to abolish basic human rights.

In Germany and Austria we have a commonly used political appeal (you’ll often see it on signs during protests):

Nie wieder ist jetzt.

(Never again is now.)

It means that it’s our responsibility to never let something like national socialism or any other form of fascism or autocratism happen again. And it’s not our responsibility to do this in 10 years, but now. Even if you’re a republican, please think about this when you’ll be voting this year. Sometimes you have to vote for someone you don’t agree with in order to prevent worse.