The widespread enthusiasm in Germany for the Nazi regime, which sustained the government of Adolf Hitler in peacetime and into the last year of a war that was turning against the country, has long interested observers. Gellately, the author of several prior books that engaged Nazi Germany, presents in this one an analysis that takes the nationalist, socialist, and antisemitic views of the Nazi movement seriously, showing how they fit with many concepts and policy preferences already held by many Germans.
Disappointment and rage about the loss of World War I and the peace treaty of 1919, combined with the convulsions of the Great Depression, made the appeal of Hitler and his political party ever-stronger in the early 1930s. Gellately both carefully and cleverly utilizes a variety of local examples to illustrate the way in which more and more Germans turned to voting for the Nazi Party until it became...