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BERNTSON, MARIT A.; AULT, BRIAN
doi: 10.1177/0002764298041009003pmid: N/A
Women have always been part of the national project, yet research on political participation is just beginning to theorize about women's involvement in extremist politics. This project examines women's participation in the pre-1933 Nazi Party (NSDAP) by using (a) an interest-based theoretical model of participation that stresses the importance of material interests and incentives and (b) an expanded interest-based model that incorporates social-psychological incentives and those embedded in social ties to the NSDAP. Quantitative and qualitative analyses on three sources of historical data show support for both models but greater support for the expanded interest-based model. Social-psychological incentives and those embedded in women's social ties to the NSDAP strongly affected women's decisions to join the party. Further research on contemporary cases of women's participation in far Right politics would provide a better test of the models, as well as models that examine how identities shape interests and political behavior.
ANHEIER, HELMUT K.; NEIDHARDT, FRIEDHELM
doi: 10.1177/0002764298041009004pmid: N/A
This article examines the membership profile of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) in Munich, the party's birthplace and political, administrative, and financial center of power. On the basis of an analysis of more than 4,000 members listed in the local NSDAP Membership Register between 1925 and 1930, the authors arrive at four major findings: (a) Party membership expanded slowly but more or less continuously; (b) membership was dispersed fairly evenly across city districts, with no major concentrations of Nazi members; (c) membership was distributed widely and relatively evenly across occupational groups and social statuses, although some occupations showed a higher percentage of Nazi memberships; (d) the proportion of female members in 1925 was relatively high but falls to much lower levels by 1930. These findings are discussed in the context of current scholarship of the changing class, age, and gender composition of the Nazi Party before 1933.
doi: 10.1177/0002764298041009005pmid: N/A
In studies of the social origins of the German Nazi Party, the new middle class of white-collar employees and civil servants has received scant attention. This inattention is surprising given that the German new middle class was the fastest growing segment of the German population during Weimar. This article applies an interest-based model of political behavior to the German new middle class between 1925 and 1933 to assess the model's ability to explain the appeal of the German Nazi Party to joiners from the new middle class. The data for this study come from the Brustein-Falter sample drawn from the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) master file of 42,004 individuals who joined the Nazi Party between 1925 and 1933.
ANHEIER, HELMUT K.; NEIDHARDT, FRIEDHELM; VORTKAMP, WOLFGANG
doi: 10.1177/0002764298041009006pmid: N/A
Following insights of social movement theory, this article looks at movement cycles in the initial development of the Nazi Party. Specifically, it explores the framing strategies the party employed in trying to make efficient use of opportunity structures in the political discourse of the late 1920s. On the basis of a content analysis of the official party newspaper, the authors analyze the topics of political events and speeches the Nazi Party organized in Munich between 1925 and 1930. The results show that after 1928, the Nazi Party managed to achieve a coherent set of themes around economic and political issues that may have facilitated its rise to power.
doi: 10.1177/0002764298041009007pmid: N/A
Using a social constructivist view of space, the agency of both the Nazi Party and the electorate created spatial contexts that, in turn, mediated future political activity. Spatial statistical analysis of aggregate voting data models the diffusion of Nazi Party electoral support across space as well as the construction of regionally specific electorates. The statistical concept of spatial dependence captures the creation of new spaces of power by the Nazi Party. The concept of spatial heterogeneity captures how the Nazi Party's electorate was composed of different socioeconomic groups in different regional settings. The growth of the Nazi party vote in Baden between May 1924 and July 1932 is used to exemplify the social theoretical view of space and the application of spatial statistics.
AULT, BRIAN; BRUSTEIN, WILLIAM
doi: 10.1177/0002764298041009008pmid: N/A
The relative strength of competing explanations of Nazism is examined by using a sample of Nationalist Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) members joining from 1925 to 1933, culled from the Berlin Document Center. Results of a national multivariate model, regressing NSDAP membership rate at the Kreise (county) level on key indicators of competing theories, lends support to what recent analysts have concluded about the Nazi electorate. The NSDAP is best characterized as a catchall party with strongest membership support found in Bavaria and Northwest Germany. Tests for spatial autocorrelation reveal spatial clustering. A spatial-effects model is estimated and results support the political-confessionalism thesis, with mass-society and lower-middle-class explanations invalidated. The spatial lag term is significant, which may represent the importance of preexisting networks to Nazi mobilization and the likelihood that the joining process was one of hierarchical diffusion. Finally, results from regional models emphasize the varied political geography of Nazi membership.
doi: 10.1177/0002764298041009009pmid: N/A
Erich Fromm's The Working Class in Weimar Germany relates political party affiliation to attitudes; some findings imply that many German workers circa 1929-1930 were not anti-Semitic. Contrariwise, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners Posits uniformly high levels of eliminationist, racially based anti-Semitism among the Germans who perpetrated the mass killings of Jews circa 1941 and thereafter. Because these killers were ordinary Germans, Goldhagen believes that almost any German would have willingly conducted the genocide. By explicating the process of Nazification of Germans, this article aims to reconcile these seemingly contradictory observations. The Germans' anti-Semitism increased over time because of the Nazis' threat of coercion, the public's perceptions of the regime's economic and international achievements, and anti-Semitic propaganda. By 1941, many Germans had internalized the Nazi worldview, which included eliminationist anti-Semitism as an intrinsic component. Had such Nazified Germans been called upon to serve in the killing units, many would have—some with enthusiasm and some with reluctance. Their anti-Semitism and the cohesion of their killing units would have directed them to kill Jews.
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