Pic Of The Moment: The Results Of The GOP's 3-Year-Long Minority Outreach Effort Are Finally Here!

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40. So i asked myself: Demographically, who voted for the Nazis?

After reading this I had to ask myself if there are any parallels between demographics of who votes Republican and who voted for the Nazis. I immediately ran across this link and although hard to understand in places I found it fascinating overall. Rural German farmers were for the Nazis while the unemployed in the cities were against them, Protestants generally were for the Nazis too while Catholics were against them. The entire article is recommendable, here are a few snippets:

from: http://www.johndclare.net/Weimar6_Geary.htm

"This story of electoral success certainly forms the background to Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in 1933. However, even at the peak of the NSDAP's popularity before this moment, almost 63 per cent of the German electorate did not vote for the Nazis. What is more, in November 1932, the Nazi Party actually lost 2 million votes. This means that Hitler was not directly voted in to power; for in the Weimar system of absolute proportional representation, 37 per cent of the vote in July 1932 gave the Nazis nothing like a majority in the Reichstag."


"It has often been assumed that the rise of Nazism was inextricably intertwined with unemployment. As unemployment rose dramatically after 1928, peaked in the spring of 1932 and then declined, so did the National Socialist vote. However, Nazi party members were usually in employment; and unemployment was concentrated in those places where the Nazi vote was relatively low, such as Germany's large cities. There was a negative correlation between unemployment and NSDAP electoral support, for example in the towns of Bochum and Herne (another mining centre), and the Nazis polled worst in the pit colonies with very high levels of unemployment, where the Communists benefited from the votes of the jobless. Only 13 per cent of the unemployed supported the NSDAP, and those without jobs were over twice as likely to support the KPD."


"Until 1930 women remained unlikely to vote for the Nazi Party. Moreover, in the presidential election of 1932 a clear majority of women preferred Hindenburg to Hitler. However, the early 1930s did see a narrowing of the gap between male and female voting patterns, especially in Protestant areas. Indeed, in some of these by July 1932 the NSDAP was winning a higher percentage of the female to male vote. In that month some 6.5 million women voted Nazi, many of them probably with few or no previous political ties. Where they came from the working class, they were likely to be non-unionised textile operatives or domestic workers."

(the summary)
"The Nazi Party was therefore without doubt a Volkspartei: recruiting its members and its voters across a broad range of social groups, from both sexes and from the older as well as the younger generation. However, this support was never able to deliver enough votes for a parliamentary majority, nor was it distributed randomly across German society. Being a Catholic, unemployed or living in a large town significantly reduced the likelihood of voters to opt for Hitler, as did the existence of strong ideological and political traditions. Conversely, being a Protestant in rural Germany greatly increased such a propensity, as did the absence of strong loyalties. The structure of Nazi support therefore requires that explanations of the rise of Hitler are not simply reduced to the experiences and sentiments common to all Germans, but must take into account both the timing of Nazi success and the specific grievances of those who did choose the NSDAP to speak for them."