Discussion Main / NaziNobleman

I agree. After the revelations of the holocaust most people wanted nothing to do with the Nazis and so everyone said "it wasn't us it was... them!". For example, the claim that Nazism was a "grassroots" movement from beginning to end isn't true. Hitler actually eliminated most of the Party's overtly "proletarian" leadership in the Night of the Long Knives partly to cement his own power but largely because, with the party's rise in popularity, he was trying to woo the German bourgeoisie and parts of the establishment who disliked the "thuggish" character of the SA (the SA, who were a paramilitary from the party's early streetfighting days and largely made-up of working-class nationalists, were effectively eliminated in the Not LK).

However, it's important to differentiate "nazi supporter" and "nazi ideologue". George Orwell argued that much of the European "establishment" were probably pro-nazi but only because they were generally a bit stupid and politically illiterate and didn't understand fascism or Hitler, seeing it as just as a strong-armed response to Communist and Socialist thuggery and as sincere patriots trying to rebuild broken countries with a bit of good-old military discipline. The British newspaper the Daily Mail infamously described the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley (whom they supported for a period) as having a "commonsense Conservative doctrine". Once the extent of fascist atrocity (and the more demented aspects of nazi racial ideology) were made more explicit after the war the appalled response from many on the European right was doubtless genuine. Even during the war there was some friction between Hitler and his continental conservative and other "old establishment" allies (see Admiral Horthy of Hungary's uneasiness about his alliance with Hitler and the possible threat to his own power, for example). Of course, it's easier, especially with the passing of years, for people to say "it was nothing to do with us!" rather than "we went along with someone and discovered that he was a nutter rather too late".

"Second, both depend on an absolute and unwavering devotion to the person of their ruler."

I'd dispute that. Whilst fascist ideas of superiority and authority (not to mention militarism) doubtless did hold appeal for European aristocrats these were not necessarily people who liked being made to have anything but nominal loyalty to a single person - European courts were often awash with intrigue and if a monarch was brought-down it was likely as not the aristocracy who were involved. This was even more the case in Britain where the country had not really been ruled by a single figure since James II and where the monarch had held little real power since the 18th century (I once saw 19th century Britain described, accurately in my opinion, as "a republican oligarchy with a monarchical façade") and where the aristocracy and industrialists had long been used to ruling in their own right through Parliament.

A little more research throws more water over this trope. There were quite a few German aristocrats who were fully paid-up members of the Nazi Party and in at least one case (Ribbentrop) a Nazi "commoner" created a fake aristocratic name for himself ("von Ribbentrop").

In short, Nazi noblemen were real. What is untrue is that Nazism itself was an aristocratic ideology or that Nazi = monocled German nobleman. Hitler was middle-class and, like most of that class, seems to have resented the upper-classes who he felt had sold Germany out at Versailles. Similarly, the Nazi leadership itself was all over the place class-wise and some of the early Nazis, as I may have mentioned before, were very proletarian.

The resentment for the Versailles Treaty and for losing World War 1 was largely directed at the left wing and democratic parties. The former were accused of "stabbing the front in the back" through the revolution of November 1918 (which allowed nationalists in general and the Nazis in particular to pretend that Germany could have won the war otherwise), the Social Democrats and the bourgois parties of the Weimar Coalition (the Catholic Centre party and the liberal German Democratic Party) for accepting the Versailles terms in parliament and/or signing the treaty. The old elites of the German empire (aristocrats and bourgois) were largely excepted from criticism and some indeed soon cooperated with Hitler, e. g. Erich Ludendorff, Hindenburg's ex-Quartermaster-General (and his real brains during the war), in the beer-hall putsch of 1923.

A lot of the old elites, including aristocrats, thought they could use the Nazis - who unlike the largely artistocratic and bourgeois Deutschnationale Volkspartei had a mass appeal - for their own purposes, but the degree to which aristocrats despised the Nazis was somewhat exaggerated after 1945 for very obvious reasons. And a lot of the reasons of why noblemen somehow could not but disassociate from Nazism and that any noblemen who became Nazis were atypical of their class does rather smack of the No True Scotsman fallacy. There probably was a degree of social prejudice against the more "proletarian" S.A. (although at least one member of the Kaiser's family was an S.A. officer), but here one should also not forget the effect of homophobia, as Ernst Roehm, the head of the S.A., was an unabashed homosexual and this led not only aristocratic officers, but also devout Catholics to oppose a party that would tolerate someone like him as one of their most prominent leaders. (Even some communists displayed homophobic sentiments re. Roehm at the time). When Hitler had Roehm and his associates butchered in the Night of the Long Knives, many aristocratic officers felt their reservations about him were now removed. And, given e. g. the high percentage of noblemen among the S.S. officer corps, there must have been a significant number of noblemen who were attracted by the ideology of the S.S., which defined itself as a more modern form of nobility of blood (invoking the form of the chivalric orders of the middle ages).