Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T07:19:36.923Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Gauleiter and the Social Origins of Fascism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Ronald Rogowski
Ronald Rogowski
Affiliation:
Duke University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Who supported National Socialism in Germany, and why? The conventional answers are well-supported and satisfying. The Nazis, we know, gained their decisive electoral support from those “middle” groups of German society that belonged neither to the elite nor to the proletariat and that lay outside the two great “camps”-Socialist and Catholic-of German political life. That means, to name the most significant categories, Protestant (or at least secularized) peasants, artisans, shopkeepers, and white-collar workers, and even some nonunionized manual workers, most of them probably skilled.

Type
Social Structure and Politics in Two Modern Societies
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , October 1977 , pp. 399 - 430
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1977

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

For helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper I wish to thank, without implicating them in my conclusions, Thomas Childers, Josef Joffe, Stanley Kelley, Jr., Charles Sabel, and Henry A. Turner.

1 American Political Science Review (APSR) 53 (1959): 676–677.Google Scholar

2 The existence of a significant proportion of manual workers among Nazi voters and members now seems incontrovertibly established. Alexander Weber, for example, points to the electoral district of Chemnitz-Zwickau, which the census showed in 1933 to be 61.7 percent working-class, but which voted 47 percent Nazi in the first Reichstag election of 1932. (A further demographic breakdown of the district allows the speculation that the low degree of organization of the workers—e.g., low membership of working-class parties in the area—played a significant part in this result.) Weber, , Soziale Merkmale der NSDAP Wähler (Ph. D. thesis, University of Freiburg, 1969), pp. 101–102.Google Scholar Alfred Milatz estimates that, in the Landtag elections of April 24, 1932, which involved some 80 percent of the German electorate, between 500,000 and 1 million former Socialist and Communist voters must have gone over to the NSDAP, and that this trend continued in the subsequent Reichstag elections of that year: “Das Ende per Parteien im Spiegel der Wahlen 1930 bis 1933,” in Matthias, Erich and Morsey, Rudolf, eds., Das Ende der Parteien 1933 (Diisseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1960), pp. 743–793, at pp. 769–770 and 780.Google Scholar With regard to membership, the Nazis' own Parteistatistik of 1935Google Scholar claims that of those current (1935) members who had joined before the election victory of 1930, 26.3 percent were workers; of those who had joined since that time, about 31 percent were workers. Reichsorganisationsleiter der NSDAP, ed., Partei-Statistik: Stand 1. Januar 1935 (ohne Saargebiet) (n.p.: “als Manuskript gedruckt,” 1935), 1:70Google Scholar. Albrecht Tyrell attacks these figures as exaggerated, but his arguments seem to me weak and self-contradictory. On other evidence, he estimates the proportion of workers in the pre-1930 membership at 8.5 percent: Tyrell, ed., ührer befiehl …: Selbstzeugnisse aus der “Kampfzeit” der NSDAP (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1969, p. 379.Google Scholar Gordon makes a strong impressionistic case for significant working-class support of the early NSDAP in Bavaria; and this is supported by Michael Kater's detailed study of the Nazi membership rolls from 1923, which indicates that roughly 18 percent of the members were workers. Gordon, Harold J. Jr., Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 74–77.Google ScholarKater, , “Zur Soziographie der frühen NSDAP,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 19 (1971): 139.Google Scholar

3 The evidence on this point is familiar. See especially Mellen, Sydney L. W., “The German People and the Postwar World: A Study Based on Election Statistics, 1871–1933,” APSR 37 (1943): 601–625CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Heberle, Rudolf, From Democracy to Nazism: A Regional Case Study on Political Parties in Germany (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1945)Google Scholar revised and expanded in translation under the title Landbevolkerung und Nationalsozialismus: Eine soziologische Untersuchung der politischen Willensbildung in Schleswig-Holstein 1918 bis 1932 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1963)Google Scholar, esp. chaps. 1 and 3; Samuel Pratt, A., The Social Basis of Nazism and Communism in Urban Germany (M.A. thesis, Michigan State University, 1943)Google Scholar; and Lipset, Seymour Martin, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1960), pp. 140–152.Google Scholar

A dissenting view, which ascribes a considerable part of at least the early Nazi gains to the migration of former Rightists and non-voters, is represented by Milatz, “Ende der Parteien,” e.g. p. 756; by the early Bendix, Reinhard, “Social Stratification and Political Power,” in Bendix, and Lipset, Seymour Martin, eds., Class, Status, and Power; A Reader in Social Stratification (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1956), pp. 596–609, esp. pp. 604–07Google Scholar; and by O'Lessker, Karl, “Who Voted for Hitler? A New Look at the Class Basis of Nazism,” American Journal of Sociology (AJS) 74 (1968): 63–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The mobilization of the former non-voters appears on closer statistical analysis, however, to have benefited the Leftist and Catholic parties in about their traditional proportions, and thus not to have been an important source of Nazi growth: Schnaiberg, Allan, “A Critique of Karl O'Lessker's ‘Who Voted for Hitler?’” AJS 74 (1968): 732–35.Google Scholar And the former “Rightists” were probably not, in many cases, traditional Conservatives, but Liberals who had adhered to the DNVP as early as 1920 or 1924: see the cogent arguments of McKibbin, R. I., “The Myth of the Unemployed: Who Did Vote for the Nazis?” Australian Journal of Politics and History 15 (1969): 25–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. pp. 36-37n, and of Winkler, H. A., below, n. 4.Google Scholar

4 For the evidence that this, and not the sudden migration of Liberals to the Nazis, was the actual process, see the valuable corrective to Lipset's work in Winkler, Heinrich August, “Extremismus der Mitte? Sozialgeschichtliche Aspekte der nationalsozialistischen Machtergreifung,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 20 (1972): 175–91.Google Scholar

5 The authoritative statementof this argument is Winkler, Heinrich August, Mittelstand, Demokratie und Nationalsozialismus: Die politische Entwicklung von Handwerk und Kleinhandelin der Weimarer Republik (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1972).Google Scholar Cf. Gerth's, Hans influential description of the Nazi followers as composed of “‘unsuccessful’ persons … in every stratum of German society,” whose “common element… was their despair and lack of social and economic security …” “The Nazi Party: Its Leadership and Composition,” AJS 45 (1940): 517–541, at pp. 526–28.Google Scholar

6 Cf. Weber, , Soziale Merkmale, pp. 109–110Google Scholar, who was able to break down electoral data to the level of the Gemeinde only in Baden, Hesse, Hamburg, and Bremen. For a more promising analysis, see Childers, Thomas, “The Social Bases of the National Socialist Vote,” Journal of Contemporary History 11 (1976): 17–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Of such studies, see in Gerth, particular, “Nazi Party;” Weber, Soziale MerkmaleGoogle Scholar; Kater, , “Zur Soziographie”; Ernest E. Doblin and Claire Pohly, “The Social Composition of the Nazi Leadership,” AJS 51 (1945): 42–49Google Scholar; Lerner, Daniel, with Ithielde Sola Pool and Schueller, George K., The Nazi Elite, Hoover Institute Studies, Series B: Elite Studies, No. 3 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951)Google Scholar; Schafer, Wolfgang, NSDAP: Entwicklung und Struktur der Staatspartei des Dritten Reiches (Marburg/Lahn: Schriftenreihe des Instituts für wissenschaftliche Politik, 1957)Google Scholar; Hüttenberger, Peter, Die Gauleiter: Studie zur Wandel des Machtgefuges in der NSDAP (Stuttgart; Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Anlage 1; and Tyrell, , ed., Führer Befiel, pp. 355–380.Google Scholar

8 claim, McKibbin's, “Myth of the Unemployed,” p. 32n, that “the [Nazi] party's leadership … tended to be most things that its voters were not” is both incorrect and irrelevant. The assertion is based on the finding of Doblin and Pohly, “Social Composition of the Nazi Leadership,” pp. 44–45, that members of the 1938 Reichstag “were predominantly of Catholic background and from south western Germany and Austria.” A comparison between a 1938, largely ornamental leadership and the pre-1933 electorate may seem biased to begin with; it is doubly so when one considers that the 1938 Reichstag followed the Anschluss, which might reasonably be expected to have augmented the proportion of South German and Catholic members. Of the 63 pre-1933 Gauleiter studied here, 32 were Protestant and 18 Catholic; the religious backgrounds of the remaining 13 could not be ascertained. To the extent, moreover, that the Nazi leaders' characteristics do diverge from those of the average follower, the problem of motivation, and of possible representation of a particularly active minority of adherents, remains.Google Scholar

9 One of the most ambitious prosopographical attempts to date, which would cover ‘367 people … including all the members of the Reichstage up to the VHIth session, the most important Gauleiter, and the most important members of the Reichsleitung,“ seems to me to run directly into this difficulty, as well as being plagued by rather quirky and allegedly Marxist occupational categories. Kalusche, Bernd, “Some Social Data on Leading Members of the NSDAP,”paper presented to the Bergen Conference on Comparative European Nazism and Fascism,June 19–21, 1974.Google Scholar

10 For the best brief sketch of the position of the Gauleiter in this period, see Tyrell, Albrecht, “Führergedanke und Gauleiterwechsel: Die Teilung des Gaues Rheinland der NSDAP 1931,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 23 (1975): 342–74, 343–56. As he notes, “subordinate leaders—concretely, Gauleiter, Ortsgruppenleiter, even the SA leaders of various ranks—could (and should!) acquire by their own accomplishments a position that, as against the members and the lower functionaries of their domain, gave them ‘unconditional authority downwards’ in the sense of the Führerprinzip … Only with the increasing leadership tie of the members toward Hitler did the authority that he granted begin to overshadow ever more strongly that which the Gauleiter had acquired themselves.” pp. 347–48.Google Scholar

11 On Streicher's position in this period, see Hüttenberger, , Die Gauleiter, p. 13Google Scholar, and Pridham, Geoffrey, Hitler's Rise to Power: The Nazi Movement in Bavaria, 1923–1933 (New York: Harper & Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1973), p. 45.Google Scholar

12 Cf. Schoenbaum, David, Hitler's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany 1933–1939 (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., Anchor Books, 1967), pp. 256–57.Google Scholar

13 An obvious case in point is Franz Maierhofer. Weighed at the gates of the Third Reich and found wanting, he was shifted around in a series of less and less imposing sinecures in the Nazi “educational” apparatus, until his letters demanding something better took on a kind of pathetic comedy. The Second War must have come as a dispensation to him; he died in it with rank of major in 1943. Maierhofer personality file, U.S. Army Document Center, Berlin.

14 For a discussion of this period and its results, see among others Orlow, Dietrich, The History of the Nazi Party, vol. 1, 1919–1933 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969), pp. 71–86.Google Scholar

15 Tyrell, , “Fiihrergedanke und Gauleiterwechsel,” p. 343.Google Scholar

16 Krebs, Albert, Tendenzen und Gestalten der NSDAP: Erinnerungen an die FrühzeH der Partei (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1959), p. 42.Google Scholar

17 The basic list is taken from Hüttenberger, Die Gauleiter, Anlagen 1 and 2, modified after comparison with the listing in Tyrell, , ed., Führer befiel, pp. 373–78. I follow Hiittenberger in omitting the three pre-1933 Gauleiter from the Saarland.Google Scholar

18 His sizeable early contributions to the Party were mentioned discreetly but unmistakably in an article in his honor that appeared in the Völkischer Beobachter on the occasion of his 60th birthday, March 9, 1939.Google Scholar

19 It should, however, be mentioned that one of these teachers, Hinkler, Paul, suffered from recurrent psychological problems stemming from the war; as a result of these, he was first given compulsory leave and then retired early against his will (in 1925). (Relevant correspondence, including particularly a summarizing letter of Daluege of January 31, 1934Google Scholar, is in the Hinkler, file of Parteikanzlei records, U.S. Document Center Berlin.)Google Scholar

20 Kocka, Jürgen, Klassengesellschaft im Krieg: Deutsche Sozialgeschichte 1914–1918 (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973). A similar, and in my view likely more compelling, objection can be raised against classifying privately supported students as “secure” in this period. See below, pp. 419–20.Google Scholar

21 Doblin, and Pohly, , “Nazi Leadership,” p. 48. This conclusion cannot of course be drawn for the rank-and-file Nazis: Peter Merkl's re-analysis of the Abel essays reveals that at least 40 percent of those respondents had suffered serious economic disruption between 1914 and 1933Google Scholar; 25 percent had experienced unemployment, bankruptcy, or interruption of career in the years 1928–1933 alone. Merkl, Peter H., Political Violence Under the Swastika: 581 Early Nazis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 66.Google Scholar Incidentally the rather high rate of unemployment among the Abel respondents–15.9 percent had been without jobs at least once between 1928 and 1933–calls into question the rather global conclusions of McKibbin,‘Myth of the Unemployed,” and of Roloff, Ernst-August, ”Wer wählte Hitler? Thesen zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Weimarer Republik,” Politische Studien, 15 (1964): 293–300.Google Scholar Cf. Broszat's estimate that 120,000 to 150,000 of the 270,000 workers who joined the party before 1933 were unemployed; this would have amounted to 12 to 15 percent of the total membership of the period. Broszat, Martin, Der Staat Hitlers: Grundlegung und Entwicklung seiner inneren Verfassung (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag: 1969), p. 52.Google Scholar

22 Social Revolution, p. 19.Google Scholar Cf. Doblin, and Pohly, , “Nazi Leadership,” p. 49; of 70 persons in their sample who had been university students in 1923, only some had been “absorbed … in positions which generally presupposed college education …. some of them were in jobs definitely below this level ….”Google Scholar

23 For purposes of this and the subsequent discussion, I shall distinguish four levels of education and five of occupation. The educational categories are: (1) simple Volksschule, whether completed or not; (2) Volksschule with concluding vocational training, usually an apprenticeship or Handelsschule; (3) completed teacher training or military school, or exposure to the “humanistic” education of the Realschule or Gymnasium, whether completed or not; (4) University or similar Hochschule, whether completed or not.

The occupational levels are: (1) unskilled and rural workers; (2) independent peasants, skilled workers, artisans, supervisors in factories, plus the lower non-manual categories-shop clerks, secretarial and clerical workers, and the lowest-ranking Beamten; (3) higher non-manual categories and middle-ranking Beamte, including ordinary officials of banks and similar firms, Volksschullehrer, non-commissioned officers and administrative officials of the armed forces; (4) higher Beamte (army officers, teachers in Gymnasien and Realschulen), large landowners, professionals, and leading officers of firms of modest size; (5) policy-making Beamte at the highest levels, major industrialists, general staff officers, and professors.

I take the “normal” meshing of education and occupation in early twentieth-century Germany to have been as follows: persons from educational category (1) were assumed to end up in occupational category (1), and those from educational category (2) in occupational category (2). For occupational category (3) the more prestigious training of educational category (3) was almost always required. And for occupational categories (4) and (5), at least the Abitur and preferably a University education or its equivalent were basic requirements.

24 Exactly comparable data of complete reliability are, of course, not available; but the survey work of Hansjiirgen Daheim and his colleagues is suggestive. They asked a sample of some 2500 West Germans in 1959 for data on both the education and occupation of themselves and of their fathers, and for occupational data on their grandfathers. By extrapolation from the ages of the respondents, Daheim then constructed categories of information on persons “who began their professional careers roughly before the First World War,” and on those “who began roughly in the ‘Twenties.” Some simple recomputations suggest that those whose occupations “fell” (in the sense used here) from educational expectations comprised about 15 percent of the prewar generation, and about 12 percent of the generation of the 1920s. (In the prewar generation, 7 of 53 persons whose educations ended in Mittelschule or in uncompleted Reahchule or Gymnasium ended up as farmers or skilled workers, and 6 of 35 Abiturienten or university graduates became clerks, low-ranking Beamte, or small independent businessmen. In the postwar generation, 5 of 43 Mittelschuler and 6 of 47 graduates of the higher schools moved down.) Daheim, , “Soziale Herkunft, Schule, and Rekrutierungder Berufe,” Kölner Zeitschift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Sonderheft 5 (1961): 200–217, esp. Table la and n. 5.Google Scholar

25 Lerner, et al. , Nazi Elite, pp. 96–97, p. 19.Google Scholar

26 Ibid., p. 17.

27 Wolfgang Zapf's comparative study of German elites finds that in 1925 the national political elite (defined as consisting of all Reich ministers, all prime ministers of the Lander, the presidium, committee chairmen, and party leaders of the Reichstag, and all national party leaders) counted among its 64 members no son of a worker, 1 son of a peasant, and 3 sons of artisans: 6 percent of the total, or 10 percent of the 39 on whom data were available. Figures for the administrative and economic elites in the same period are even lower: roughly 3 percent of the former, none of the latter, were of “plebeian” origins. Wandlungen der deutschen Elite: Ein Zirkulationsmodell deutscher Führungsgruppen 1919–1961 (Munich: R. PiperA Co., 1965), p. 181. Similarly, Daheim finds that of the 16 persons in his constructed sample who (a) began their careers before World War I, (b) went beyond Volksschule in any formal way, and for whom (c) sufficient data are available, precisely 1 came from a peasant, worker, or skilled worker family. “Soziale Herkunft,” p. 206.Google Scholar

28 Four of the Gauleiter refused to answer questions about paternal occupation in one or both of these forms, but the necessary information was later found in other sources. The occupations were, respectively, railway engineer, worker, shoemaker, and “shoe manufacturer,” apparently on a small and artisanal scale.

29 By an education or occupation “higher” or “lower” than that of the father, I mean one which falls into a different category of those listed above in note 23. As should be obvious, both sets of categories are presented there in increasing order of status.

30 Probably an extreme example of what some of the Gauleiter may have had to hide is revealed in an open printed letter against one of them, DrKarpenstein, Wilhelm. Dated May 19,1933, addressed to Bormann and signed by von Müffling, it alleges among many other things that “it is generally known in this area that [Karpenstein's] mother was the illegitimate child of an itinerant peddler and a feeble-minded woman, and that his paternal grandmother was a Jewess.” Karpenstein was in fact dumped as Gauleiter after a secret trial in 1936, but for homosexuality (also alleged in the letter of 1933) and not for his parentage. Karpenstein file, Parteikanzlei records, U.S. Document Center Berlin.Google Scholar

31 Landesamt, Bayerisches Statistisches, Sozialer Auf- und Abstiegim Deutschen Volk, compiled by Nothaas, J.; Beiträge zur Statistik Bayerns, vol. 117 (Munich: J. Lindauersche Universitäts-Buchhandlung, 1930).Google Scholar Several detailed studies are involved. First, an examination of a contemporary work of the “Who's Who” type (“Unsere Zeitgenossen”), most of whose subjects had begun their careers “before or during the War,” revealed that 19.7 percent of the economic figures listed, and 21.2 percent of the “intellectuals and Beamten,” had fathers in the “middle and lower classes of the people.” The overall figure for such origins among persons listed in the work was 26.9 percent, but this was raised considerably by the listings for politics and related professions (71.1 percent middle and lower-class origins), which of course included many Social Democrats and peasant and artisan representatives (pp. 56–57). Zapf's 1925 figures show that, of 38 members of the administrative elite for whom data were available, 5 were sons of peasants, white-collar workers, teachers, or small businessmen; of 30 similarly documented members of the economic elite, 4 were children of teachers or white-collar workers. (None in either group was the son of a worker or artisan, and only one member of the administrative elite was the son of a peasant.) Deutsche Elite, p. 181.Google Scholar With regard to the “middle” groups, Nothaas points to two studies of technical white-collar employees (belonging to my occupational category 2) from 1907 and 1910. These found that lOpercent in the first case and lspercent in the second were of working-class origins. A 1908 study of sales clerks (again category 2) showed 19 percent to have working-class fathers. (For the rather striking postwar contrast, see below, pp. 420-21.) A somewhat higher result emerges when we move into occupational category 3: a 1914 study of bank officials found that roughly 30 percent were sons of workers, peasants, innkeepers, or artisans. Auf- und Abstieg, pp. 78–79.Google Scholar

32 The data are drawn exclusively from Bavarian universities in the winter semester of 1913-14. Nothaas counts 41 percent of the students as belonging to the group of “nonacademic and less-well-to-do” fathers (Auf- und Abstieg, p. 35), but some of those he places in this category I would exclude, most notably those whose fathers were middlelevel officials (8.2 percent) or large landowners (apparently covered in the general category of “independent farmers and gardeners,” which totals 9.4 percent) (p. 39). It appears from Daheim's work (“Soziale Herkunft,” p. 202) that about one-fifth of the middle-level Beamten of this period had attended university; and certainly many of the large landowners had delighted in being Korpsstudenten. On the other hand, at least some of the “independent merchants” (16 percent of the fathers) were poorly educated; yet Nothaas does not count them among the “non-academic” group. When all these corrections are allowed for, an estimate of between 30 and 40 percent seems about the best that one can do.Google Scholar

33 Hitler's Rise to Power, p. 98.Google Scholar On the significance of the 1928 reforms generally, which were carried out by Gregor Strasser as Reichsorganisationsleiter and which culminated in a major re-drawing of Gau boundaries and a reassignment of Gauleiter, see Tyrell, , “Führergedanke und Gauleiterwechsel,” pp. 351–56Google Scholar, and Orlow, , Nazi Party, 1: 113–25.Google Scholar For the effects of the reforms on the Gauleiter, see Orlow, , Nazi Party, 1: 121–24.Google Scholar Orlow generalizes too hastily, however, about the class background of the “new” Gauleiter: 1: 119.Google Scholar

34 Results were originally published in Theodore Abel, Why Hitler Came Into Power: An Answer Based on the Original Life Stories of Six Hundred of his Followers (New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1938). For Merkl's new analysis, see his Political Violence Under the Swastika.Google Scholar

35 Merkl, , Political Violence Under the Swastika, pp. 11–19.Google Scholar

36 Ibid., pp. 63 and 68. I have recalculated Merkl's entry for “middle class, old and new” in Table 1-6 according to Table 1-7 on p. 64 to remove the Handwerker.

37 Parteistatistik, 1: 164.Google Scholar

38 Merkl, , Political Violence Under the Swastika, p. 71. I have eliminated as question able under the present criteria Merkl's category of out-mobility from the status of unskilled worker.Google Scholar

39 Ibid., pp. 74–75.

40 Demeter, Karl, The German Officer-Corps in Society and State, 1650–1945, Malcolm, Angus, trans. (New York and Washington: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), p. 47.Google Scholar

41 Ibid., p. 48. See also the previously mentioned example of the Gauleiter Robert Wagner.

42 Nothaas, , Sozialer Auf- und Abstieg, p. 65, p. 68.Google Scholar

43 In 1913, 30 percent of the Prussian officer corps was noble; among the officers of the Reichswehr in 1920, the proportion of nobles was 22 percent, and of new lieutenants commissioned in 1922, 22 percent were also noble. But of the new lieutenants commissioned in 1931-32, 36 percent were noble. Of the cadets at military schools in 1867, 33 percent were the sons of officers; in 1912, the figure was 25 percent; in 1927, 49 percent. Between 1912 and 1927, the share of cadets who were sons of businessmen or factory owners fell from 15 percent to 7 percent. Demeter, German Officer-Corps, pp. 28, 268, 55, 22, 54.Google Scholar

44 This appears to have been the first generation in Germany in which higher education—the Abitur or the University degree or its equivalent—became practically a prerequisite for attainment of the highest positions (high civil service, professions, management). Of the holders of such positions who had begun their careers before the war, only about 42 percent had had such an education; of those who began their careers in the 1920s, it was 90percent. Daheim, , “Soziale Herkunft,” p. 202. N in the first case is only 14; in the second, 19. The difference is large enough, however, to be significant at the. 90 level.Google Scholar

45 Ibid., p. 206. N in the first case is only 16; in the second, 44. Again, however, the difference is so large as to allow a confidence of. 90 that a real population difference is being reflected.

46 Nothaas, , Sozialer Auf- und Abstieg, p. 35, p. 39.Google ScholarSchoenbaum, Social Revolution, p.10.Google Scholar

47 Nothaas, , Sozialer Auf-und Abstieg, pp.35,39. It should be recalled that these figures apply only to Bavarian universities; adequately comparable prewar figures do not exist for German universities as a whole.Google Scholar

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid., p. 84.

50 Ibid., pp. 81–83; Schoenbaum, Social Revolution, p. 7.Google Scholar

51 See above, n. 32. For further evidence on the trend, see Speier, Hans, Social Order and the Risks of War (New York: George W. Stewart, 1952), pp. 75–77.Google Scholar

52 Lerner, , Nazi Elite, p. 14.Google ScholarHillger, Herman, ed., Kürschners Volkshandbuch: Deutscher Reichstag 1933 (Berlin: Hermann Hillger Verlag, 1933), p. 23.Google ScholarGerth, , “Nazi Party,” pp. 530–531.Google ScholarParteistatistik, 1:232, 2:252. Abel, , Why Hitler, p. 313.Google Scholar

53 Nazi Elite, p. 14. A typographical error makes this figure appear in the original as 66 percent.Google Scholar

54 Hillger, , ed., Kö;rschners Volkshandbuch: Deutscher Reichstag 1930, p. 22. Similar data for the 1933 Reichstag delegation are not given.Google Scholar

55 Lerner, , Nazi Elite, p. 16.Google Scholar

56 Gordon, , Beer Hall Putsch, p. 83.Google Scholar

57 Recalculated from data in Nazi Elite, p. 14.Google Scholar

58 Gordon, , Beer Hall Putsch, pp. 83–84.Google Scholar

59 Maser, Werner, Die Sturm aufdie Republik: Friihgeschichte der NSDAP (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1973), p. 255Google Scholar, from the oldest surviving membership list, containing 675 names. Similar figures for the Munich membership in 1923 are obtained by Kater, , “Zur Soziographie,” p. 139.Google Scholar

60 Gordon, , Beer Hall Putsch, pp. 442–45, p. 562.Google Scholar

61 Bleuel, Hans Peter and Klinnert, Ernst, Deutsche Studenten aufdem Weg ins Dritte Reich: Idologien—Programme—Aktionen 1918–1935 (Gutersloh: Sigbert Mohn Verlag, 1967), pp. 213–214.Google Scholar

62 Kocka, , Klassengesellschaft, pp. 76–82.Google Scholar

63 For the pre-war and wartime figures, see ibid., p. 81. For the postwar development, see Hamel, Iris, Völksischer Verbandundnationale Gewerkschaft: Der Deutschnationale Handlungsgehilfen-Verband 1893–1933 Frankfurt a.M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1967), p. 174.Google Scholar

64 Ibid., p. 244.

65 Krebs, , Tendenzen und GestaltenGoogle Scholar, is a penetrating study by one of the architects of the co-operation, himself both a Gauleiter (before his expulsion in 1933) and a high functionary of the DHV. See also Hamel, , Volkischer Verband, pp. 238-66.Google Scholar

66 Speier, , Social Order, p. 77, and calculations based on his figures.Google Scholar

67 Table 9 relies heavily on the Parteistatistik of 1935 and on Schäfer's NSDAP, which is itself largely confined to re-analysis of the 1935 data. It should therefore be mentioned here that all data from the Parteistatistik suffer from its retrospective nature: e.g., in speaking of “pre-1930 Kreisleiter” one is really describing, not all Kreisleiter of the period before 1930, but rather only the survivors of that period, those who were still active members of the Party at the time of the 1935 census. Given the factional fights of the early 1930s and the expulsion of the whole Strasser wing (not to mention the Blood Purge of 1934), this is bound to lead to some distortions.

68 What follows is a greatly condensed version of an argument presented at length in my book Rational Legitimacy: A Theory of Political Support (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), chaps. 4 and 5.Google Scholar

69 Lipset, Seymour Martin and Bendix, Reinhard, Social Mobility in Industrial Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 66–67.Google Scholar

70 One well-known example is the “deferential” orientation that prevails among a substantial portion of working-class Conservatives in England: i.e., the conviction that only “the better sort” can govern competently, and that “our sort” should stay out of active politics. See, among others, Nordlinger, Eric A., The Working-Class Tories: Authority, Deference, and Stable Democracy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967)Google Scholar, chap. 2; McKenzie, Robert and Silver, Allan, Angels in Marble: Working-Class Conservatives in England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1968)Google Scholar, chap. 5; Runciman, W. G., Relative Deprivation and Social Justice: A Study of Attitudes to Social Inequality in Twentieth-Century England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), esp. pp. 180–181Google Scholar; and Newby, Howard, “The Deferential Dialectic,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 17 (1975): 137–164, whose discussion of “organic” deference (e.g., p. 145) is especially useful.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

71 The opposite reaction, in which the upwardly mobile person identifies strongly with his new class and becomes plus royaliste que le roi, is also well known; the Oxford Movement of the nineteenth century, as well as American right-wing extremism of the twentieth, contained many examples. Immigrants to a new class, like immigrants to a new country, often vacillate between superpatriotic assimilation and attacks on the privileges and prejudices of native elite. In general, the latter course is likelier the higher the real barriers to assimilation are; and, in Germany in the 1920s, they were formidable.

72 It should be recalled here that this kind of political behavior is to be expected only of upward mobiles in “old” societies as defined earlier in the argument. In societies long accustomed to greater mobility, and hence to less rigid lines of class or caste, upward mobility is likely to have quite different consequences: America, and to a lesser extent Britain, will illustrate the point.

73 On a narrower but related point, Harry Eckstein has noted that'' before many internal wars [including revolutions], one finds both economic improvement and immiseration; more precisely, many internal wars are preceded by long-term improvements followed by Serious short-term setbacks.” “On the Etiology of Internal Wars,” History and Theory 4 (1965): 133–163, at p. 142.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

74 Zimmermann, Friedrich [Ferdinand Fried], Das Endedes Kapitalismus (Jena: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1931), pp. 110, 124.Google Scholar For a substantiation of the accusation, see Hunt, Richard N., German Social Democracy 1918–1933. (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), esp. chaps. 3 and 4.Google Scholar

75 Cf. Schiiddekopf, Otto Ernst, Linke Leute von Rechts: Die nationalrevolutionaren Minderheiten und der Kommunismus in der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 1960).Google Scholar

76 Wolfgang Sauer attempted in 1967 to draw renewed attention to Hitler's “frequent invectives against [the old oligarchy[ and to the evidence that his ”prestige with the masses … appears to have been supported by the fact that Hitler succeeded again and again in defeating and humiliating members of the old oligarchy.” “National Socialism: Totalitarianism or Fascism?” American Historical Review 73 (1967): 404–24, at p. 424.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Cf. Krebs, , Tendenzen und Gestalten, p. 47: “Throughout the years of struggle, every attack on capitalists and plutocrats found the strongest kind of response among this layer of functionaries, whose origins were in the petite bourgeoisie …”Google Scholar

77 E.g., Gordon's observations on the personnel practices of the early SA, Beer Hall Putsch, pp. 84–87, and his general remarks at p. 12.Google Scholar

78 Sauer, , “National Socialism,” p. 424.Google Scholar

79 Mittelstand, p. 165.Google Scholar

80 The total German work force in 1932, employed and unemployed, was 18.5 million; of these 18 percent, or 3.33 million, were white-collar employees. The maximal share of these workers who can have been of working-class origins is 35 percent (see above, p. 421), or under 1.2 million. In the same period, there was a total of 840,000 university graduates in the population; at most, 40 percent of these can have been upwardly mobile (see above, p. 420), for a total under this heading of under 340,000 persons. Finally, there are the roughly 270,000 World War I officers (see above, p. 419). Even if we assume (absurdly) that all the officers were upwardly mobile, the total from the three groups taken together comes to a little over 1.8 million. Figures for the Party come from pre-1933 columns of the Parteistatistik and include all occupational categories that might conceivably contain upwardly mobile university graduates or white-collar workers: officials (including teachers), nonartisanal self-employed, students, and white-collar workers. Taken together, these categories comprise about 38 percent of the membership of that period. See, among others: Landes, David S., The Unbound Prometheus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 411Google Scholar: Schoenbaum, , Social Revolution. pp. 4 and 10Google Scholar; and Schafer, , NSDAP, pp. 17 and 19.Google Scholar

81 Orlow, among others, contends that the Nazis executed a radical change of course in 1928, abandoning their attempts to attract urban workers (and to maintain an uncompromisingly “radical” ideology) in favor of appeals to the peasantry and to small business that required a substantial watering-down of Party doctrine. History of the Nazi Party, vol. 1Google Scholar, chap. 5. Cf. Roloff, , “Wer wahlte Hitler?” pp. 299–300Google Scholar. For a regional example of the shift, see Noakes, Jeremy, The Nazi Party in Lower Saxony 1921–1933 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 105–07 and chaps. 6 and 7.Google Scholar

82 In 1924, one MittelstandGoogle Scholar newspaper described National Socialism as nothing but “Bolshevik poison in a black-white-red wrapping.” This is only the most striking evidence in a general description of the Nazis' difficulties in attracting conservative support, in Winkler, , Mittelstand, pp. 134–139 and 157–170.Google Scholar

83 Parteistatistik, 1: 70 and 1: 56–57.Google Scholar

84 Sauer, , “National Socialism,” p. 419.Google Scholar

85 Payne, Stanley G., “Social and Sectoral Compositional of the Spanish Falange- Movimiento,” paper presented to the Bergen Conference on Comparative European Nazism and Fascism, June 19–21, 1974, pp. 7–8, 12–13Google Scholar; idem, Falange: A History of Spanish Fascism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), pp. 81–82.Google Scholar

86 See, among others, Turner, Henry A. Jr., “Fascism and Modernization,” World Politics 24 (1972): 547–564CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gregor, A. James, “On Understanding Fascism: A Review of Some Contemporary Literature,” APSR 67 (1973): 1332–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gregor's reply to Turner, , “Fascismand Modernization: Some Addenda,” World Politics 26 (1974): 370–84.Google Scholar