5 Reasons You're Picturing Nazis Wrong

5 Hitler Wasn't Swept into Power by a Brainwashed Germany

The worst thing you can say about our favorite form of government (democracy) is that it brought a cockburglar like Hitler into power. It's a sobering lesson in human gullibility and the madness of crowd psychology, one so obvious, even George Lucas picked up on it:

It's a message clear enough that a Star Wars prequel couldn't fuck it up: Charismatic dictators are great at popularity contests, and what is an election but one big-ass popularity contest for control of the police and the best houses? You may not know much about Hitler's rise to power, but you know he body-surfed into the Reichstag over a sea of enthusiastic, brown-shirted German voters.

But guess what? That's not how it went down. The Nazi party never took more than 38 percent of the vote in a free election. Hitler didn't win so much as a presidential election, and even George W. Bush won one of those. Liberty "died" in Germany exactly the way you'd expect it to die: in a series of underhanded backroom deals that saw Hitler appointed chancellor.

Now here's where it gets kind of sad: Hitler assumed power in 1932, and the very next year Germany held nationwide elections. That's the sort of thing dictators everywhere do; there's nothing like a show vote to prove the legitimacy of your reign! He went about "winning" this election with every trick in the toolbox of oppression: violent thugs at the polls, waves of propaganda, ballots that looked like this:

So what did the Nazis win, 99 percent of the popular vote?

98.2 percent?

Try 42 percent. That's the best the Nazis ever managed, and that's with the repressive might of a burgeoning evil empire behind them. Not even one in two Germans thought this whole "fascism" thing sounded like a good idea. Saddam Hussein held more-competent sham elections, and he's widely considered the Pauly Shore of violent dictators.

Sure, Hitler got way more popular after conquering France and Poland, but the whole idea that he was swept into power by a mass of fanatic brainwashed Germans has no basis in fact. Most Germans were too sane to want to march around like the Demon Boy Scouts and worship racist Charlie Chaplin. The problem was, they were also too sane to start a fight with a bunch of crazy people.

And that's why World War II happened!

4 They Weren't Masters of Propaganda

The Nazis raised propaganda to a level of art never seen before. Chances are you've all watched clips from the blockbuster 1935 propaganda film Triumph of the Will. Here's a hint: It's the movie that looks like this:

Nazi propaganda gets all kinds of credit for being groundbreaking and evilly effective, but even at its height, the Third Reich never came close to Hollywood. The best Nazi propagandists couldn't even make a movie that would rivet their own brainwashed subjects. When Triumph launched in 1935, it wasn't even one of the 10 most popular films of the year in Germany.

Nine of the films that beat it at the box office were made in America. In fact, you could argue that Triumph wasn't even the most successful piece of Nazi propaganda that year. That title rightly belongs to this lovely piece:

The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, despite starring an American and being based on a British military unit in India, was filled to the brim with the kind of themes fascists love. It had the stoic leader (read: fuhrer) with unshakeable conviction, rivers of martial virtue, buckets of manly honor, and a good deal about the importance of shooting brown people. Joseph Goebbels considered The Lives of a Bengal Lancer the model of an ideal propaganda film.

So yes, Paramount beat the King of Propaganda at his own game. And that wasn't a fluke; Hollywood films were wildly popular in Nazi Germany right up until that whole war thing happened. Whether you're a mindless lapdog of fascism or not, films with a sense of goddamn pacing always win out over endless loops of marching assholes and angry speeches.

3 Hitler Didn't Found the Nazi Party

Somewhere, lost to history, is the German intelligence officer who made what might be the official Worst Decision Ever. He needed to pick a man to infiltrate a group of political radicals calling themselves the German Workers' Party and figure out if they meant to overthrow the government. He sized up the men available to him and decided that a young Adolph Hitler would be the best man for the job.

Yes, Hitler started his Nazi career as a spy and then moved on to "guy who gives speeches" when he realized it had much better odds of putting him in a castle. Anton Drexler, founder of the German Workers' Party, was the 1920s equivalent of an angry nerd arguing about politics on Facebook. He created a group to talk about his wacky ideas, and one day this little German soldier came in and started a violent argument.

Hitler was a douche, but he was a douche who could give a rousing speech, and Drexler was pretty hard up for party members at this point. So he invited Hitler to join the German Workers' Party. The future Fuhrer gradually gained power and eventually changed the name to the National Socialist German Workers' Party. In the interest of not prolonging World War II movies, everyone agreed to abbreviate that as "Nazi," and the rest is ... well, the bloodiest pages of human history ever written.

Drexler's tragic life should be a warning to people who start shit: don't. It never ends well.

2 They Weren't All White Dudes

You're a savvy reader of Cracked, so you already know the German army wasn't just one big sea of broad, blond-haired Nordic faces. Hitler himself looked about as Nordic as Cheech Marin. But you probably assumed they were all white, because the Nazis sorta had a thing about cultural diversity. And it was a thing they held to strictly, except for the one time a bunch of Indians joined up to fight for Hitler:

Well, OK -- actually, they joined up to liberate India from British control. But in those heady days, Germany seemed like the best shot at making that happen, so around 5,000 Hindi and Muslim patriots found themselves fighting under the swastika. And kind of sucking at it, to be entirely honest.

The Indische Legion fought briefly at Normandy until they realized what utter bullshit that whole battle was and opted to fuck off for Switzerland. They were lightly shot at by French Moroccans, captured, and then shipped back to India and jail, because no one should get away with helping Nazis and not serve a little time.

1 The Nazi Leaders Were All Huge Nerds

Ever wonder what it'd be like if a bunch of socially stunted Internet nerds found themselves running a nation? That bizarre fantasy was once reality. Adolph Hitler, history's most despicable warlord, was obsessed with a children's book series all of his life. The author was a dude named Karl May, who wrote novels like this:

May's books were a series of young-adult adventure novels written about thrilling conflicts in a distant and exotic land: the Old West. For Hitler, they might as well have been the works of R.A. Salvatore or J.K. Rowling. It was the kind of books young kids read to distract themselves from the fact that the real world is way less interesting than gallivanting around a fantastic land with weapons and awesome hats. Harry Potter, Katniss Everdeen, whatever ridiculous name it happened to be, we all had at least one heroic character we obsessed over as kids.

Hitler's obsession never ended. Once he wound up in command of the world's most powerful military, his obsession went well beyond simple fandom and into true nerdy obsession. For his entire life, the Fuhrer was utterly convinced that May was an unrivaled genius. He considered this pacifist young-adult fiction author with no military experience to be a strategic mastermind. Hitler's attitudes toward the Blitzkrieg and even the invasion of Russia were based in part on this fucking guy:

See? It's not just my crazy ass drawing these conclusions. When that whole "invading Russia during the winter" thing turned out to be exactly as bad an idea as it's been for everyone but the Mongols, Hitler doubled down on his ridiculous fantasy novels, demanding that his generals read more of these children's books so they could finally grasp the tactical genius of a man whose actual fighting experience didn't extend beyond the common cold.

Heinrich Himmler, meanwhile, was obsessed with knights and magic. He turned Hitler's bodyguard and fearsome instrument of genocide, the SS, into a mock knightly order, complete with their own castle and round table. Inside his (admittedly kind of cool) medieval fortress, Himmler would hold bizarre magical rituals and presumably scream "LIGHTNING BOLT" while throwing Koosh balls at his trusted adjutants. Yes, at the heart of the Third Reich was a goddamn LARP.

Joseph Goebbels, on the third horrible mutant hand, was an A/V geek. You might have guessed that from the whole "He was the Nazi propaganda minister" thing, but his love of film went a little beyond normal interest. As Russian soldiers drank Berlin down like a big, shrapnely glass of vodka, Goebbels urged his employees to die horribly because in a hundred years, it'd make a sweet-ass movie. His last words to them were, in essence, "If you die well, they'll pick Ryan Gosling to play you in the movie version of this. If you die poorly, I dunno ... Nicolas Cage, probably."

Hermann Goring is the only Nazi high official who doesn't fit cleanly into a nerdy stereotype. And he was fat, so I'd say we're at least halfway there.

Robert Evans runs Cracked's personal experience article team, and does a bunch of other stuff too. Here are more of his Internet writings.