Christopher Clark writes:

An interest in the relationship between the traditional elites of German society and the National Socialist movement developed only quite recently. There are various reasons for this: the celebration of German military resistance as the moral foundation stone of the new Federal Republic created an implicit linkage between high birth and principled opposition to Nazi criminality; many of the relevant archival sources are still in the hands of the families and some are less willing than others to support research; and for a long time it was widely believed that Nazism was in essence a movement of the downwardly mobile petite bourgeoisie – shopkeepers, clerks, tradesmen and minor officials who saw in the movement’s authoritarian racist politics a promise of rescue from déclassement and proletarianisation. Nobles were too small a social group, of course, to make a significant contribution to Nazi electoral success, but d’Almeida is surely right to suggest that the closeness between parts of the Nazi leadership and parts of the upper social stratum helps to explain why a coterie of senior German politicians of mainly noble descent were prepared to entrust the Nazi leader with high office in January 1933.

(LRB 9 April 2009)

Polity | paperback 294 pp. |ISBN: 9780745643120