who joined the Nazi Party

By Sy Boles | Harvard Staff Writer | Harvard Gazette

The first Germans who became Nazis during Hitler’s rise to power may have been ideological zealots, but later members were largely “ordinary men” drawn into the movement by propaganda and social pressure.

This is one of several key quests in one new paper From Harvard researchers associated with the Department of Economics and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

Researchers used visual-language artificial intelligence to digitize the membership cards of more than 10 million members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, expanding on an existing database of 55,000, to illuminate who joined the fascist movement, when and in which sect. Their findings were published in April by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“What we can do with this new resolution is zoom in much more finely, temporally, but also geographically,” said Lewis Boshartis a co-author of the paper and a researcher at the Weatherhead Center at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. “What we see is that mass entry has occurred in discrete waves and that representation has increased over time. By the end of the regime, the joiners look like a much larger population.”

Led by Adolf Hitler, the Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, established a totalitarian regime in Germany that triggered World War II and killed 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. At its height, one in six German adults was a registered member of the movement.

Nazi operatives tracked information about members’ ages, occupations, addresses, and dates of entry into the party. Microfilm images of the cards, many of which were handwritten, are held by the US National Archives and Records Administration and are open to researchers — but efforts have been hampered by the laborious task of manual transcription.

“Entries are edited. Someone moves, so an address gets crossed out. Some cards are written all over the place,” the co-author said. Matthias Wiegandis an econ graduate student and an affiliate of the Harvard Center for International Development. “Thus, people are taking random samples for their purposes, replicating them and trying to work with it. We now have near-world observations of membership cards with features like membership portraits.”

The team used Google Gemini’s sight-language AI model to extract and standardize the data. The development of their algorithm took place through a long process in collaboration with the German Federal Archives. They then conduct manual checks to verify the model’s accuracy.

After slowly building up in the early 1930s, the first sharp wave of entry into the Nazi Party occurred in 1933 after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany; The second was in 1937 after the nearly four-year ban on membership was lifted. Early joiners, the researchers found, were predominantly middle-class, male and from non-agricultural industries. But those differences have narrowed over time. When the party disbanded in 1945, the new members closely resembled their county populations.

Much of the existing literature, in keeping with data limitations, has focused on differences between counties. But by linking millions of membership cards to census data, researchers revealed that 95 percent of the variation in Nazi Party membership occurred within counties, not between them.

Even within the same county, municipalities differ widely in their share of party membership, with no clear differences in population density, population composition, or dominant industries.

Municipalities that were initially Nazi strongholds remained — and municipalities without initial membership were less likely to develop later. In fact, they found that 40 percent of municipalities had no Nazi Party members recorded at all.

Findings show that those who joined the party before 1933 were more ideologically committed, but those who joined later were likely responding to social pressures and changing political winds.

“Historical research suggests that it’s working through social pressure, social norms, local spear flipping,” Weigand said, noting parallels to sociological models of riots. “The first person to throw a rock is always a radical, but the last person may not be.”

The study does not explore the ideological beliefs of the participants, Bosschert said, but sets parameters for future interpretations.

“Any explanation needs to be able to explain the very different trajectories between neighboring and seemingly similar municipalities,” he said, “and it needs to be able to explain nonlinear mass influx dynamics.”

Analysis of hundreds of first-person accounts collected by American sociologists in 1934 Theodore Abelshows that “national renewal/discipline” and “social belonging” were the top two reasons given for joining the Nazis, ranking above anti-communism, economic hardship and anti-Semitism.

“Our research points to coordination as a central force in institutional change,” Bosschert said. “Changes in regimes are moments of fundamental political uncertainty, and what people believe about the new equilibrium. We see this in the cascade dynamics around 1933. One could also say that a similar dynamic was at work after 1945, when former party members quickly adjusted to the new democratic system. You don’t want to pay a price for the old one. Rule in a stable new democratic equilibrium, just as you would in a new authoritarian equilibrium to be a big democrat. don’t want

“These patterns are consistent with an Arendtian perspective,” Bosshart philosopher Hannah Arendt argues, noting that mass political violence can be sustained by ordinary people conforming to a dominant order. “If that view is correct, the process may be general and not limited to interwar Germany.”

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This is the story is reprinted with permission From the Harvard Gazette.

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