A nation of enthusiastic Nazis? Historian Peter Longerich disagrees: The Nazi regime never had the support of the majority of Germans.

It was previously widely accepted that the vast majority of Germans were more or less enthusiastic supporters of Adolf Hitler from 1933 until almost the end of Nazi rule. This is not the case, according to the central thesis of a recently published study by historian Peter Longerich. Rather, the Germans were "unwilling comrades."

Longerich's method is as demanding as it is daring. He does not rely on diaries, field post letters, family histories, records of various authors, or analyses by contemporaries. To determine the opinions and moods of the Germans, he evaluates almost exclusively sources from the regime itself: reports from the Political Police, the administration, the judiciary, the NSDAP, the SS Security Service, and various other agencies and authorities. The only source outside the regime is the Germany reports of the Sopade, the Social Democratic Party in exile.

It is obvious that extreme caution is required when handling these sources. The authors of these sentiment reports had internalized the need to provide answers acceptable to the regime. At the same time, however, they had to include critical voices in a well-balanced manner. After all, the party and state leadership only conducted this type of opinion research to peer behind the facade of publicly displayed approval.

None of the documents consulted contain "the" truth, and the moods are highly fluid. Peter Longerich, author of several important works on National Socialism and the Holocaust, handles this source material with extraordinary care. He filters the statements, superimposes them, questions them, and places them within the general fabrication of lies. He, in a sense, skeletonizes them.

The regime constantly boasted that it enjoyed the unconditional support of the vast majority of the population. And the photographs and, above all, the staged film footage, which are our most important sensory source of that time, seem to confirm this finding.

Longerich, however, comes to a completely different conclusion. While the majority did behave in a conforming manner, "this conforming attitude was not the result of inner conviction and consent." These did not exist at any point during the Nazi regime: "There can be no talk of a complete 'Nazification' of German society," he asserts.

This calmly presented finding is, of course, a provocation, especially in times when National Socialism is being trivialized more than ever by the extreme right. Longerich's well-founded thesis blatantly contradicts the firmly established image that liberal society has of German behavior during the Nazi era.

Several reviewers of Longerich's study promptly went to some lengths to accuse the author of historical distortion, even trivialization. He confuses inner reserve with rejection, for example. And he nonchalantly ignores the fact that the alleged "unwillingness" of the Germans, which gives the book its title, did not lead to any open protest against the persecution of Jews. In short, the accusation is more or less subtly raised that Longerich is exonerating the people responsible for the Holocaust and has taken a historical revisionist path.

That's nonsense. Longerich isn't participating in a moral-political debate; he's gathering facts. Regardless of whether the distance from the regime is rooted in ethical and political values ​​and expressed in criticism of the state's anti-Semitic, anti-church, and anti-citizen policies. Or whether it follows self-interest and intimidation against certain social classes and is directed against the notorious food shortages, the constant hardship of farmers, or the luxurious lifestyle and sexual libertinage of the party leadership.

Longerich demonstrates, with an overwhelming wealth of material, that the confusing and often chaotic reality of the Nazi years made unanimous popular support for the regime simply impossible. However, it also becomes clear that complaints about material hardship and envy of the "better-off" (especially women) were far more intense and massive than the horror at the persecution of Jews and oppositionists.

Longerich documents almost endlessly the complaints of workers about wages that were too low and prices that were too high, about the excessive pace of work, and about their discrimination in the leisure activities offered by the "Strength Through Joy" organization. Only once, however, does he mention that the workers, who had certainly voted mostly left-wing during the Weimar Republic, were outraged by the abolition of co-determination in workplaces. This fundamental disenfranchisement is apparently hardly perceived as a scandal.

On the day Hitler became Chancellor, Joseph Goebbels noted: "The German people are united. Now we can face the world. The German miracle. One remains silent in humility." This unity was never in evidence during the regime's existence. The core of Nazi ideology, the "Volksgemeinschaft" (people's community) that reconciled all class differences, was a complete bluff.

Even without party diversity, freedom of organization, and a public discourse, the squabbles of class society, or more precisely, of a modern society characterized by a diversity of interests, continued. Urban versus rural. Workers versus farmers. Privileged versus poor. Party officials versus civil servants. Complaints from the working class about the allegedly dissolute lives of officials' wives were countered by complaints from retailers that department stores, considered a Jewish domain, still existed and were stealing their customers. As the Düsseldorf Stapo noted with concern in October 1934, the population was engaged in a "quiet conversation" about all this.

Essentially, Longerich's book proves that National Socialism regularly achieved the opposite of what it intended. It wanted to unite the people—but it divided them. In church policy, for example, Hitler aimed to create a Protestant and then a non-denominational unified church as a first step toward de-Christianizing society.

He failed in this endeavor, and unintentionally gave a strong boost to the resistance within the church, such as the Confessing Church and the Catholic clergy, who protested – sometimes successfully – against "euthanasia" and fought – often successfully – against the removal of crucifixes from schools. Propaganda also proved to be a boomerang. The Nazis wanted to use radio to capture people's souls. In the end, however, they had no choice but to publicly admit their military failure, step by step, via radio, despite all their calls for perseverance.

Longerich's study doesn't amount to a heroic tale. The majority feared war early on. When it came, people were cautiously optimistic about the Wehrmacht's successes. When defeats occurred, especially after Stalingrad, pessimism, indifference, resignation, and a dull silence prevailed. People consistently hoped for a quick end or—this sounds almost contemporary—believed that a "compromise peace was better than the destruction of Bolshevism at any price."

And they were willing to make remarkable concessions. Some government pollsters found that those surveyed could have easily come to terms with a division of Germany and the ceding of eastern territories! Overall, the population was far more realistic and forward-looking than the leadership. The majority weren't resistant, but they were rather cautious. And they looked ahead to what would happen next.

The astonishing thing about Longerich's book is, not least, that the analysis of the multitude of reports paints a sketchy picture of a kind of German collective personality—a personality quite similar to that of today. Goebbels responded to the not infrequent reports of expressions of sympathy for the Jews condemned to wear the "Yellow Star" as follows: "The German educated bourgeois is truly a filthy piece of shit." And: "The German Michel cannot be eradicated from him."

This truly demonstrates how futile the Nazi system's efforts to turn Germans into one hundred percent followers of its madness were. The average German defied National Socialism and survived it, to this day. Looking at the reports of that time, we recognize ourselves.

Longerich's meritorious study is far from trivializing the situation. It offers a new and surprising perspective on the state of mind of Germans during the 1930s and 1940s. It is not exonerating. The majority of Germans evidently viewed National Socialism with caution, distance, doubt, confusion, criticism, and, not infrequently, rejection. Nevertheless, they endured it – oscillating between patience, apathy, and indifference. This mystery, which has been declared solved in many accounts of the Nazi era, now looms even more oppressively.

Peter Longerich: Unwilling Comrades. How the Germans Viewed the Nazi Regime. Siedler-Verlag, Munich 2025. 637 pp., Fr. 34.90.