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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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Before his rise to power, Hitler was definitely backed by German industrialists.

This is true, but Marxists overstate its importance for obvious reasons, and this rubs off on normies who read textbooks written by people who read academic papers by Marxist historians. Germany was not a bourgeoisie-ruled society before WW1 - the Kaiserreich had a functional warrior-aristocracy of men who had von in their names, lived off inherited landed wealth, spent their youths as army officers, and if successful would move into the General Staff, politics or both. The pro-regime middle-class was what we would now call the PMC of civil servants, teachers, lawyers, doctors, Lutheran priests* etc. This PMC group plus rural voters were the base of the DNVP, which was the main right-wing party in the early Weimar Republic.

Hitler's key useful idiots were mostly aristocrats. von Papen had a classic aristocratic career of army followed by politics. von Schleicher and von Hindenberg were career generals. The others were PMC - Ludwig Kass (the Centre Party leader who convinced his party to vote for the Enabling Act) was a Catholic priest. You can argue about whether Hugenberg was PMC or an industrialist, but his background looks more PMC on balance - his father was a civil servant, he did a PhD in economics, worked as a civil servant for 17 years, worked as a salaried manager at Krupp's for 10 years (being made de facto CEO based on a personal intervention by the Kaiser), spent the money he made at Krupp's buying newspapers, and was a press baron by the time he became DNVP leader.

Before Hitler became chancellor, communists were strictly anti-Nazi.

This is false. By 1928 the KPD reliably followed orders from Moscow, and whether Moscow wanted them to actually oppose the Nazis or not depended on the twists and turns of Stalin's foreign policy. During the critical period in 1932-3, Stalin was more worried about the democratic parties restoring a functional western-oriented Germany than he was about a Nazi takeover, so the KPD focussed on trying to take left-wing votes off the SPD and weakening the Weimar government by direct action (occasionally co-operating with Nazi SA or DNVP-aligned Stahlhelm to do so).

and both knew that the other side winning would result in their side getting purged and losing.

The KPD leadership had plans to flee to Moscow if it looked like they were losing. Most of them successfully got out, although party leader Ernst Thalmanm didn't.

  • The role of Catholics in pre-WW2 Germany was complicated and I don't think I understand it. They were the majority in Bavaria, a substantial minority elsewhere, and appear to have participated fully in society, but you also see a huge amount of elite anti-Catholicism going on. The Nazis seem to be more pro-Catholic than other right-wing factions in Germany.