William A. Galston‘s recent essay “The Bitter Heartland”begins, “We are living in an age of resentment . . . [that] shapes today’s politics.” The more I read of it (and more about it later), the more the great resentments of Hitler’s followers came to mind. They resented rich Jews, the victorious Allies who in 1919 had imposed the “unfair” postwar Versailles Treaty upon them, civilian German politicians who had signed the treaty, communists, who had taken over in Russia and were a rising force in Germany, and the “decadent” godless ways of Berlin, as hinted at in the play and film Cabaret.
The Versailles Treaty forced Germany to give up land to their west and east and also their overseas empire. It also imposed strict limits on its armed forces and weapons. But perhaps most bothersome of all to the average German was the imposition of war reparations, which many Germans believed contributed to their great financial agonies. This was especially true during the great inflation of 1923 – by then a loaf of bread could cost billions of Reichsmarks – and the Great Depression. Historian Peter Fritzsche notesthat “between 1929 and 1932, one in three Germans lost their livelihoods. At the same time, young people had no prospect of entering the labor force . . . German farmers suffered terribly as commodity prices slumped.”
Fritzsche also relates some of Hitler’s early tactics like boycotts that “relied on entrenched resentments against allegedly wealthy, rapacious, or tricky Jews,” and he writes that “the Nazi leader appealed to popular fears and resentments and transformed them into final judgments and the promise of direct remedial action.” Moreover, Hitler used a we-versus-they approach, “pitting patriotic Germans against subversive Communists, Aryans against Jews, the healthy against the sick, the Third Reich against the rest of the world.” Continue reading.