The Nazi fervor wasn’t a top-down plot, but was a mass hysteria
www.loofwired.com
The Nazi fervor wasn’t a top-down plot, but was a mass hysteria
…and there is no more dangerous evil.
This is a great five minute except from Milton Meyer’s They Though They Were Free, about how the Nazi fervor wasn’t a top-down plot, but was a mass hysteria.
https://www.audible.com/pd/They-Thought-They-Were-Free-Audiobook/B072F819J6
This pairs well with this Science Moment…
This relates to the functionalism-intentionalism debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism%E2%80%93intentionalism_debate - the functionalists, also called structuralists, take the view that what happened was an emergent property of German society and the intentionalists take the view that it was imposed by people at the top. I'd suggest that both can be true; an avalanche is a self-sustaining process with its own internal workings and it can start in a chaotic way based on trivial things, a light gust of wind perhaps, but it's also possible to start an avalanche intentionally with explosives and to do things to maximize its impact. A panicked crowd in a theater has its own dynamics, but somebody can trigger those dynamics by shouting "fire". That a system is complex or chaotic doesn't mean that it can't be directed, at least up to a point.