Nazi Nobleman/Analysis: Difference between revisions
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At the same time, Nazis did woo the nobility - with considerable success. By 1938, a fifth of all SS officers were noblemen. [[Blue Blood|High-born noble families]] were particularly prone to Nazism: between one third and half of all eligible people with princely titles joined the Nazi party. And, of course, the Nazi Wehrmacht was built out of the earlier German armies, so they inherited all of the officers wholesale, including a bunch of aristocratic officers, natch.
There are many reasons that this trope keeps recurring, but some of the main factors include [[All Germans Are Nazis|confusing]] [[Imperial Germany]] with [[Those Wacky Nazis|Nazi Germany]], simple [[Aristocrats Are Evil|prejudice against aristocracy]], a desire to include [[Rule of Cool|cool titles and ancestral castles]], and assuming that everyone who [[Democracy Is Bad|opposes Democracy]] does so for [[Strawman Political|exactly the same evil reasons]]. Another problem is that superficially, the Nazi ideology of "Racial Superiority" sounds like something that ought to dovetail neatly with [[Blue Blood|aristocratic superiority]]. Unfortunately, writers who focus too much on "official" Nazi ideology tend to miss the fact that the popularity of the Nazi party was also driven by [https://web.archive.org/web/20100609153311/http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/2931421.html envy, resentment, and fears of inferiority]. At the same time, Himmler did see the endogamous practices of the nobility as a model of eugenics.
The reaction to a trope can become a trope itself. Of course, [[Imperial Germany]] lead to [[Those Wacky Nazis|Nazi Germany]], and the German Army fought a genocidal war of extermination for the Third Reich. Both of this rather obvious points have been de-emphasized in - not merely German - public discourse, thanks in part to the early entrance of post-war West Germany into the Western bloc.
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