Upper-middle-class complicity in the National Socialist phenomenon in Germany

Abstract

The original research element of this thesis consists of the study of an emerging· professional association of senior managerial employees in business and industry in Weimar Germany. This association which went by the name of VELA, Vereinigung der leitenden Angestellten, or the Organisation of Leading Salaried Employees, was founded in December 1918, and continued in existence until December 1934. Utilising a complete collection of VELA's bi-monthly members' periodical, the development of a coherent ideology of elitism is traced from 1919 to 1933, with the emphasis upon the crystallisation of a world-view compatible and congruent with that of National Socialism by 1924/25. Political convergence with, and support for, the Nazi Party then followed some time after the onset of the Great Depression. A detailed study of the process of Gleichschaltung, or co-ordination, in the spring and summer of 1933 is used to illustrate how easily, readily and enthusiastically VELA embraced the coining of a New Order in the Third Reich.

The thesis of complicity in the rise of National Socialism is extended to the wider upper middle classes by enlisting the support of recent research into the professions, the nexus of bourgeois Vereine (clubs and societies) which covered Weimar Germany, and electoral analysis, especially that relating to the Reichstag election of July 1932. This material, combined with evidence of the huge overrepresentation of the upper middle classes at every level of leadership within the Nazi Party, is used to challenge the long-held view that National Socialism was a petit-bourgeois phenomenon. The resultant interpretation contends that it was the well-educated and well-off upper middle classes who were not only the socioeconomic sector of Germany which was most likely to support the Nazi Party, but were also the NSDAP's prime movers and shakers, its most important leadership component and, perhaps most significantly of aiJ, forgers of its very ideology. It is further argued that National Socialist thought did not just emerge from within the Nazi Party itself, but also grew up autonomously and contemporaneously within the various milieux of Weimar Germany's upper middle classes. An analysis of the nature of National Socialist ideology contends that the NSDAP's elitist, undemocratic world-view, based on the Social Darwinist principle of the survival and prospering of the best and fittest, was not guided by an atavistic Blut-und-Boden (blood-and-soil) outlook, but was in fact a forward-looking and modern doctrine which embraced technology and industry in order to fulfill one of its most basic goals - the fighting of modern wars to gain Lebensraum, or living space, for the superior Aryan German race. The upper middle classes in general, and senjor managers in particular, were very much part of the modern world and their elitist thinking was informed by a technocratic, meritocratic and achievement-oriented vision. The latter two elements of that vision indicate that their thinking was also infused with liberal beliefs, and it is the final contention of this thesis that liberalism has a dark side to it, so dark that it can be attributed as one of the feeder streams which informed the congruent ideologies of the NSDAP and large swathes of Weimar Germany's upper middle classes.