I’ve been wrestling with the class basis of German fascism. It’s a huge literature, I’ve hardly scratched the surface, but—in typical blogging ethos—here’s my summary.
I divide it into three parts: first, Nazi voters as primarily lower-middle-class Germans; second, Nazi voters as a broad cross-class coalition; and third, Nazi voters as assembled by economic incentive. This trichotomy is neither complete nor precise, and I ignore religion in favor of focusing on class.
If this synthesis achieves anything, it is to show just how difficult it is to perform inference under profound data scarcity. There were no opinion surveys in Weimar. Nor were there individual voting records. Everyone therefore uses electoral results by place to make inferences about individuals. Let’s say neighborhoods with more wealthy people voted disproportionately for Nazis; perhaps more wealthy people were Nazis. But perhaps not—maybe there’s something distinct about non-wealthy people who lived near wealthy people. Even employing modern statistical techniques, it’s hard to infer individual characteristics of Nazi voters.
First wave: The middle-class thesis
Rudolf Heberle’s work is unusual: it’s contemporaneous. He was the first to quantitatively study Nazi electoral patterns, and the only to do it starting in 1932, as Nazis marched the streets.
Heberle combined three types of data. He had official election returns from 1919 to 1932, mostly at the county level. For 18 rural counties, he obtained records of the share of agricultural workers employed on family farms, large farms, and estates, as well as occupational statistics.
Nazi support was strongest where small family farms were predominant and weakest where wage laborers were predominant. Socialist support exhibited the reverse pattern. Similarly, Nazi support was stronger where there were more proprietors and fewer wage earners, and socialist support went the other way.
Why were small proprietors particularly susceptible to fascism? Wage laborers “held firmly” to socialist ideas. Unions cultivated a relatively stable social view. Family farmers, meanwhile, felt threatened from above—by banks and big business—and from below, by unions and socialists. Nazis promised protection against both. “The main mass support came,” the Heberle concludes, “from the middle layers of society.”
Seymour Lipset echoed the same ideas in Political Man, arguing fascism was a distinct expression of the lower middle class—“extremism of the center.”
Second Wave: From middle-class to cross-class
Richard Hamilton set Lipset as his foil. German fascism, he believed, was not primarily a lower-middle-class phenomenon. Analyzing 14 cities, Hamilton found that areas with lower-middle-class folks were not conspicuously more fascistic; more affluent neighborhoods exhibited higher fascist support. “The ‘best districts,’” Hamilton concludes, “gave Hitler and his party the strongest support.”
Thomas Childers was unconvinced by Hamilton’s critique. Childers found that areas with shopkeepers, artisans, and small farmers were the most consistent bases of Nazi support, as Lipset had predicted. The Nazi coalition, however, was a lot broader than small proprietors alone. Nazis pulled significant support from civil servants, pensioners, and workers in small workshops. The nucleus of Nazi support was made up by small proprietors, Childers concludes, but the Nazi party had also become the “catchall party of protest.”
Jürgen Falter, in 1991, completed this second wave. He assembled a comprehensive national election dataset supplemented with statistics on occupation, class, religion, industry, and other variables. Falter finds that the Protestant old middle class—the artisans and proprietors emphasized by Lipset and Childers—were overrepresented among fascist voters. Nazis primarily pulled support from former liberals, conservatives, and nonvoters, with fewer socialists switching to the fascist side. Yet, because the Nazi coalition was far broader than just the old middle class, Falter agrees with Childers: the Nazis were a catchall protest party with broad cross-class support.
Third Wave: Economic incentives
Several decades later, Gary King, along with three coauthors, were unsatisfied with Falter’s conclusion. The catchall theory “applies to most groups and almost all big or growing parties in almost all countries.” Every large party, in other words, is a catchall party. (Falter responded that, to the contrary, most Weimar parties were socially homogeneous.) The coauthors asked which groups moved disproportionately towards Nazis from 1928 to 1932. They found that the “working poor—self-employed shopkeepers and professionals, domestic workers, and helping family members”—disproportionately moved towards Nazis. Self-employed voters, the authors proffer, were incentivized by Nazis’ promise to protect property and extend cheap credit; agricultural workers were incentivized by protective tariffs and debt relief. The unemployed, by contrast, moved disproportionately towards communists, whose policies appealed to them more directly.
In 2024, Björn Brey and Giovanni Facchini found that areas particularly affected by declining exports shifted less towards Nazis, counter a simple economic-pain-to-fascism pipeline. The effect was mediated by the type of worker. Counties with blue-collar workers experienced a larger swing towards Nazis; counties with white-collar workers saw a smaller swing. Brey and Facchini argue that Nazi public-works policies were advantageous to blue-collar workers but benefits-cutting policies threatened white-collar workers. An economic shock, the authors conclude, does not secure a political outcome on its own; “rather, the proposed policy response to deal with the aftermath of the shock plays a keys role.”
Closing Thoughts
When Heberle wrote in the 1930s and 1940s, he personally collected or tabulated all of his data and principally relied on small-N correlations. Thanks largely to Jürgen Falter and his collaborators, we now have relatively comprehensive national election, occupational, and demographic data. We also have more sophisticated statistics.
Better data and statistics have not produced a wholly different Nazi voter. Small proprietors remain central to the Nazi coalition and effectively everyone agrees that Nazis assembled a broad coalition. The questions that remain are those on the margin: who moved towards Nazis more, who moved towards Nazis less, and why.
Nearly a century after Heberle began studying Nazi voters, the field remains defined by the absence of individual data.