Hitler Coerces Support from Reluctant Social Classes

The German aristocrats, capitalists, and artists found Adolf Hitler to be boorish and oafish. Yet Hitler knew that he needed them, and that he would somehow have to bully them into supporting his political ambitions.

Historians have long pondered the mystery of how, and why, members of various German social classes eventually allowed Hitler to build his National Socialist government.

Getting industrialists to support a socialist like Hitler was indeed quite a challenge. As historian Jonah Goldberg writes,

While there’s a big debate about how much of the working and lower classes supported the Nazis, it is now largely settled that very significant chunks of both constituted the Nazi base. Nazism and Fascism were both popular movements.

The masses marching in the streets, carrying torches, starting fistfights, and throwing rocks weren’t from royal families or the nobility. They were the populist base of the Nazi Party.

The word ‘Nazi’ is an abbreviation for ‘National Socialism.’ The upper classes were opposed to both nationalism and socialism. The aristocracy had historically opposed nationalism, both because it placed the people’s allegiance to the nation above their allegiance to dynastic families, and because ‘nationalizing’ industries and economic sectors was a sure route to poverty.

The upper classes opposed both of Hitler’s ideological foundations, nationalism and socialism, and they opposed his tactics of intimidation, as Jonah Goldberg notes:

In Germany the aristocratic and business elite were generally repulsed by Hitler and the Nazis.

From 1919 to 1933, when Hitler and the Nazis finally seized power, it was largely a working-class mob who supported them. The ‘Brownshirts’ were not from elite classes.

After 1933, the underground opposition, which sought to hinder the Nazis and even to assassinate Hitler, had a disproportionately large number of members from the aristocracy.

Colonel von Stauffenberg, a key figure in the April 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler, came from a historic noble family.

Hitler was, simply, a populist:

The Nazis rose to power exploiting anticapitalist rhetoric they indisputably believed. Even if Hitler was the nihilistic cipher many portray him as, it is impossible to deny the sincerity of the Nazi rank and file who saw themselves as mounting a revolutionary assault on the forces of capitalism.

The Nazis exploited feelings of class envy. They had no desire to allow any type of free market. They intended to burden the people with crushing taxes.

Because Hitler wanted to crush freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and the freedom of thought, it was a logical and necessary extension of the Nazi program that he would also crush economic freedom.

The Nazis had no respect for the centuries-old heritage of the aristocratic families, and in fact, the Nazis harbored bitter resentment toward such families. That resentment would have, for many of the nobles, a murderous outcome.

Deciding the Future of Poland and Yugoslavia: the Teheran Conference

In November and December of 1943, the three leaders of the Allies - Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Franklin Roosevelt - met at Teheran in Iran to discuss both the next phase of the war as well as how they would organize large parts of the world after the war was over.

(Teheran is also sometimes spelled ‘Tehran.’)

World War II didn’t end until late 1945, but it was already clear in late 1943 that the Allies would win, so they began to make plans for a postwar world.

Eastern Europe was a topic at this meeting. Instead of wanting to liberate these countries from Nazi oppression, the Soviet Union wanted to keep them under socialist dictatorships. In the end, these countries would not enjoy freedom at war’s end. They would simply be ruled by a different regime.

Two cases were especially important at Teheran: Poland and Yugoslavia. In order to dominate these countries, Stalin had to trick Churchill into thinking that the USSR enslaving millions of Poles and Yugoslavs was a good idea.

Churchill was typically anti-Communist and pro-liberty. But in this case, the Soviet espionage agencies had managed to plant ‘moles’ inside the government of the UK.

These Soviet agents controlled and shaped the reports about Yugoslavia: reports which went to the key policy-makers inside England.

Inside Yugoslavia during WW2, the resistance effort against the Nazis was led by General Draza Mihailovich. His men used guerilla tactics against the occupying Nazi troops.

Toward the war’s end, a second would-be resistance leader emerged: Josip Broz Tito, a communist. Tito’s forces competed with Mihailovic’s, but Mihailovic’s troops did far more damage to the Nazis than Tito’s.

Tito wanted to be the unchallenged dictator of Yugoslavia at war’s end, while Mihailovic wanted a republic with freely-elected representatives. To ensure his chances at power, Tito started spending more time fighting against Mihailovic than against the Nazis.

Stalin gave Tito some help: Stalin’s spies inside the British government began falsifying reports about the Yugoslav situation and about the Polish situation. As historian Stan Evans writes,

In both states, fierce internal conflicts were developing between Communist and non-Communist factions for supremacy when the war was over, identical in key respects to the struggle shaping up in China. At the era of Teheran, the Yugoslav battle was the more advanced, though Poland wasn’t far behind it. Making the Yugoslav contest still more distinctive, the case for Communist victory there would be not merely accepted by the Western powers, but promoted by them, with Churchill incongruously in the forefront. The way this was accomplished provides a classic study in disinformation tactics and the vulnerability of the Western allies to such deceptions.

Churchill, who normally favored liberty over communism, had been fed misinformation by the Soviets. The communist spies inside the British government told Churchill that Tito was a more effective fighter, and would establish a free nation after the war. They told him, too, that Mihailovic was actually sympathetic to the Nazis, and would establish a dictatorship after the war.

Churchill was being played.

Eventually, the misled Churchill would consent to Tito’s rise to power. Yugoslavia would not be freed, but would suffer under communism as it had suffered under the Nazis.

Stalin’s network of intelligence operatives had done their job: Stalin had tricked Churchill into giving Yugoslavia to a murderous socialist dictator, and casting aside Mihailovic, the leader who could have achieved political liberty in that nation.

This is the type of fateful dealing which happened at Teheran in late 1943.