Germany was the greatest power and the most developed country to go fascist. The Nazis were the world's largest fascist movement, with the largest paramilitaries and the largest vote. This was the most “radical” fascism, committing the greatest evil. Thus it is especially urgent to explain who the Nazis were, what they believed in, and how they seized power. Luckily, this is the best-documented case. Though there are always more questions to ask and more data to seek, this chapter and the next can come close to explaining the rise of the Nazis, solving some puzzles left by the sparse Italian database discussed in the previous chapter. And though fascist movements all differed, they shared enough for us to use the solidity of German data for broader, more comparative purposes.

Yet there were obvious differences from Italy. Unlike Italy, Germany had lost World War I. Germany also had a distinct postwar political history. A short period of revolutionary turbulence ushered in an advanced liberal democracy, the Weimar Republic, which conceded female suffrage and the most developed welfare state in the world. Germany also contained not one but two major Christian faiths, Protestantism and Catholicism. Since Hitler seized power only in 1933, the Nazi rise was also slower, affected by unfolding interwar events: an inflation crisis, disputes with the Entente Powers over borders, reparations, and armaments, the Great Depression, and the general surge of interwar authoritarianism.