Why MAGA Is a Bad Thing

[Shadow Wolf]

The support was not by the majority, though. The NSdAP never got near 50% as long as there was competition. Hitler only rose to Chancellor through alliances with other parties.

Hitler had academic support. He was support of the working class. He even had support outside of Germany and even on other continents (Including here in the USA). He didn't have 100% support, but he had much of Germany behind him.
How Adolf Hitler Rose to Power and Seduced Germany | Live Science

But in the chaos of post-World War I Germany, it was Hitler's group that would gain dominance — and that was not a matter of luck, Schleunes told Live Science.

"What makes the German Workers' Party different from the other 69 groups is that they don't have a Hitler, whose speaker talent and tactics are really quite effective," Schleunes said. [Understanding the 10 Most Destructive Human Behaviors]

And once he achieved fame, Hitler was able to cover up his rather off-putting personality with media images of a cultured gentleman beloved by children and animals.

The Führer Myth: How Hitler Won Over the German People - DER SPIEGEL - International

Much suggests, in fact, that between the death of Hindenburg in August 1934 and the expansion into Austria and the Sudetenland four years later Hitler was indeed successful in gaining the backing of the vast majority of the German people, something of immeasurable importance for the disastrous course of German policy ahead. Apart perhaps from the immediate aftermath of the astonishing victory in France in summer 1940, Hitler's popularity was never higher than at the height of his foreign-policy successes in 1938.

Sebastian Haffner plausibly reckoned that Hitler had succeeded by 1938 in winning the support of "the great majority of that majority who had voted against him in 1933." Indeed Haffner thought that by then Hitler had united almost the entire German people behind him, that more than 90 percent of Germans were.
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At the same time, it seems hard to deny that the regime had won much support since 1933, and that this owed much to the perceived personal "achievements" of Hitler. The personalized focus of the regime's "successes" reflected the ceaseless efforts of propaganda, which had been consciously directed to creating and building up the "heroic" image of Hitler as a towering genius, to the extent that Joseph Goebbels could in 1941 with some justification claim the creation of the Führer Myth to have been his greatest propaganda achievement.

Learn How Adolf Hitler Rose to Power, Who Supported Him and Why

The key reason to support Hitler and the Nazi regime was Hitler himself. Aided greatly by propaganda genius Goebbels, Hitler was able to present an image of himself as a superhuman, even god-like figure. He wasn’t portrayed as a politician, as Germany had had enough of them. Instead, he was seen as above politics. He was all things to a lot of people – although a set of minorities soon found that Hitler, beyond not caring about their support, wanted to persecute, even exterminate them instead – and by changing his message to suit different audiences, but stressing himself as the leader at the top, he began to bind the support of disparate groups together, building enough to rule, modify, and then doom Germany. Hitler wasn’t seen as a socialist, a monarchist, a Democrat, like many rivals. Instead, he was portrayed and accepted as being Germany itself, the one man who’d cut across the many sources of anger and discontent in Germany and cure them all.


He wasn’t widely seen as a power-hungry racist, but someone putting Germany and ‘Germans’ first. Indeed, Hitler managed to look like someone who would unite Germany rather than push it to extremes: he was praised for stopping a left-wing revolution by crushing the socialists and communists (first in street fights and elections, then by putting them in camps), and praised again after the Night of the Long Knives for stopping his own right (and still some left) wingers from starting their own revolution. Hitler was the unifier, the one who halted chaos and brought everyone together.