Great book reviews on regular everyday people who became Nazis:

[applegrove]

It Can Happen Here by Cass R. Sunstein

N.Y. Review of Books

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/06/28/hitlers-rise-it-can-happen-here/


JUNE 28, 2018 ISSUE

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45

by Milton Mayer, with a new afterword by Richard J. Evans

University of Chicago Press, 378 pp., $20.00 (paper)



Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the Twentieth Century

by Konrad H. Jarausch

Princeton University Press, 446 pp., $35.00

"SNIP......

Jarausch offers a fact-filled account of the lives of “Nazi adolescents” a few years younger than Haffner, and of the immense social pressures that led to the rapid growth of the Nazi movement among young people. One of the Nazis’ clever strategies, which they adopted immediately after assuming power, was to increase those pressures by enforcing “an appearance of unanimous support for the Third Reich.” Many Germans were not so much pro-Hitler as anti-anti-Hitler—and their opposition to Hitler’s adversaries aided his rise. Decades afterward, memoirists referred to their “happy times” in the Hitler Youth, focusing not on ideology but on hiking trips, camaraderie, and summer camps.

........SNIP"

[RandomAccess]

1. They Thought They Were Free -- excerpt

http://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html


It's very compelling reading, and not overly long.

[applegrove]

2. Yes. You think it can't happen in the US. Then you read up on how common

Last edited Tue Jul 17, 2018, 12:37 AM - Edit history (7)

the experiences of Nazis followers were and you realize it can happen anywhere and anyone can be turned into a scapegoater. I learnt that the hard way years ago. A mob will develop around a cult leader and they need an enemy to protect him and grow. That was me the scapegoat. And because I'm not perfect I was targeted. 60 minutes did a story on people who were afraid to come forward with the locations of killing fields of Jews killed by Nazis in eastern Europe. All over the place they were, mostly rural farming communities. So complicit were the locals in the killing that it was not until they had passed away 70 years later that their children started to talk about it. The point is that, given the right mix of narratives and fear, you can make anyone do anything. All humanity is capable in this regard. Just look at history.