i dont think you can divorce communism or treaty of versailles from antisemitism
in the minds of nazis communism is foreign jews trying to destroy german economy and treaty of versailles came about bc jews betrayed the nation during ww1
they’re different motivations but its not at all discrete
Germans who voted from 1930-1933 were not being told the Nazis planned to kill all the Jews. Some heavily bought into the anti-semitic idea of "removing Jewish influence", others wanted to get out of the Treaty of Versailles. Some were horrified by the threat of Bolshevism.
I don't have it in front of me but in Evans's "Coming of the Third Reich" he is scathing against this much-cited view of 'normies who didnt realize what the nazis were,' and notes that germans interviewed by an American after WWII may not be the most trustworthy source
anticommunism/anti-semitism/"we're gonna do a big war" was the basic platform of the nazis 28-33. and Evans has reams of diary entries and letters from "normal Germans" around 1933 saying "we're really fucked, theyre gonna kill all the jews and start a big war"
Those were Germans opposed to the Nazis, who saw them as what they truly were? By the time the Holocaust was underway, Europe was under martial law. I'm sure a lot of people knew something awful was happening & didn't see anything they could do about it. Easy to lie to yourself about not knowing.
we tell ourselves stories about the moral depravity of the average person vs. 'everyday heroes', but really the average person is almost by definition average.
(another way to think about is that you'd have to be dopey and not paying attention to not fully grok what the Nazis were even before 1933 - but we know there are lots and lots of people like that in 2024, much less 1934.)
It's easy to say that with hindsight. Some Germans saw it clearly at the time. A lot just saw a party promising to put the shame of WW1 defeat behind them & build a society around the "German People". People not paying attention was a huge problem then & now.
The entire "I didn't think the leopards would eat my face" meme is built around this reality. Give any group absolute authority to "go after a few bad eggs" & they will keep finding bad eggs. It doesn't occur to people that they might be a bad egg.
