The […] finding that a considerable share of [Fascist] leaders had an upper class background is remarkable in itself because, as Mühlberger noted, “the social background of the higher party functionaries […] did not bear much resemblance to the social structure of the party’s ordinary membership.”²⁷

In an attempt to explain the strong representation of the élites and the upper classes among [Fascist] leaders, Kater has forwarded a rather functionalist argumentation based on the assumption that all political movements need skilled representatives in order to perform administrative tasks requiring higher degrees of education. According to Kater, “the NSDAP […] appears to have been ruled by the same laws of rationality that governed other institutions, corporations, and even other political parties in the Weimar Republic.”²⁸

In this sense, both Mühlberger and Kater simply assumed that the [NSDAP] did not substantially differ from other movements with respect to the social background of its leaders although comparative data did not exist at the time.

In contrast to these results, a true paradigm shift in the debate on [Fascist] leaders was triggered by Ulrich Herbert’s biography of Werner Best and Michael Wildt’s Generation of the Unbound, which opened new perspectives on leading officials within the SS and the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) in particular.²⁹ Herbert has shown that of the 300 men of the RSHA, the “core group of the [Fascist] policy of persecution and genocide,” two thirds were academically educated and most of these even held doctoral titles in law or the humanities.³⁰

Similarly, quantitative sociological analyses by Jens Banach about the SD and the SIPO produced reliable statistics suggesting that SS‐officers were surprisingly well‐educated and recruited from the bourgeois middle and upper classes.³¹ Consistent evidence can also be found in Gunnar Boehnert’s and Herbert Ziegler’s studies about the SS leadership³² and in Yaacov Lozowick’s book Hitler’s Bureaucrats³³ as well as Mathilde Jamin’s study about SA leaders.³⁴ Furthermore, Christian Ingrao has dedicated a theoretical book to intellectuals in the SS and the SD.³⁵

Thus, a historiographical narrative has emerged presenting the organizers of the holocaust not as narrow‐minded civil servants — as Hannah Arendt had suggested — but rather as highly motivated, dynamic and ideologically committed young men with a high degree of education. Together, they were meant to form a “new aristocracy”³⁶ in Himmler’s “fighting bureaucracy” that was not to be constituted by civil servants, but by committed ideologues with an “unconditional will to act.”³⁷

The picture that has emerged is highly distressing both on a moral and an intellectual level, suggesting as it does that some of “Germany’s best and brightest” had organized and planned the Holocaust.³⁸

[…]

Contrary to the earlier findings on Reichstag deputies, the NDB sample shows that bourgeois and intellectual members of the upper classes were in no way under‐represented among the élites of the [Fascist] movement. Outside the parliament, the sample confirms the existence of large groups of well‐educated [Fascist] supporters in German media, universities, the industry, and banking sector.

While historians have already provided a plethora of qualitative studies on each of these groups, the data extracted from the NDB is the first to provide numbers in proportion to other political parties and movements.⁵⁹

Table 4 shows the shares of professional groups among political élites in the NDB sample. The professional categories used in this table were not mutually exclusive. For instance, a civil servant could also be a writer or a large landowner. The average shares of professional in the NDB sample as a whole are shown in the right column.

It is notable that the social composition of [Fascist] and democratic élites in the NDB sample often resembled one another. The finding that the [Fascists] were able to integrate the bourgeois upper middle and upper classes alters our understanding of [Fascist] leaders that were stereotypically described as members of the lower middleclass or the peasantry.

Instead, [Fascist] élites in the NDB sample were typically engaged in classically bourgeois professions. It has been found that a large number of [Fascists] in the sample had been civil servants, industrialists, professors, Protestant pastors, and writers.

In this context, however, it should be noted that civil servants and active members of the armed forces were not allowed to join the [NSDAP] in most states of the Weimar Republic. The NDB sample nonetheless includes a number of [Fascist] sympathizers in the German civil service, who did not formally join the party until 1933, but maintained close ties to the [Fascist] movement. In addition, the sample includes figures, such as the legal theorist Helmut Nicolai, who were forced to leave the civil service or the army due to their activities in the [NSDAP].

(Emphasis added.)

Now, I should mention that this research does have some problems. For example, it notes a significant percentage of unemployed citizens in the NSDAP without taking into account the probability that these members likely had military or petty bourgeois backgrounds before succumbing to unemployment. There are also some classic anticommunist fallacies, such as these:

the anti‐democratic left includes communists, socialists and anarchists

the […] KPD exhibited a similar trend as the [NSDAP] (with about 80 per cent of the communists in the sample being KPD or KPÖ members). This is remarkable insofar as it shows that extremist parties were highly successful in integrating social élites and relied on a proportionally larger share of supporters among the political élites than democratic parties. Obviously, this finding very much contradicts both [Fascist] and communist propaganda, which always stressed their revolutionary character of a protest movements “from below” against the establishment.

‘Political élites’ in this context apparently refers to those employed as politicians: representatives, parliamentarians, and what have you. In which case, it seems that the author missed the point — perhaps deliberately — of party members participating in the status quo as a struggle to win over some concessions for their classes. I say ‘perhaps deliberately’ because forcing in a false equivalence in order to appease a capitalist publisher would be a plausible explanation for otherwise competent writers repeating this mistake. In any event, most of this paper is worth reading.

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Click here for events that happened today (July 28).

1942: Heinrich Himmler received a report from the railroad industry that, since July 22, 1942, five thousand Jews arrived from Warsaw each day for Treblinka and five thousand arrived from Przemyśl each week for Bełżec. Coincidentally, a transport of 1,010 Jews (542 men and 468 women) arrived at Auschwitz from Westerbork in the Netherlands; after the selection, 473 men and 315 women were registered, but the Axis exterminated the remaining two hundred twenty‐two.
1943: Otto Skorzeny arrived in Rome and visited Albert Kesselring at the Tusculum II villa outside of the city as the Royal Air Force (per Operation Gomorrah) bombed Hamburg, causing a firestorm there that killed 42,000 civilians.
1968: Otto Hahn, a key figure in the Third Reich’s nuclear arms programme, expired.