The first Germans to become 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.
That’s one of several key findings in a new paper from Harvard researchers affiliated with the Economics Department and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
The researchers used vision-language artificial intelligence to digitize membership cards for 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 what communities. Their findings were published in April by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Luis Bosshart (left) and Matthias Weigand. Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
“What we can do with this new resolution is zoom in much more fine-grained, temporally speaking, but also geographically speaking,” said Luis Bosshart, a co-author of the paper and a researcher at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies at the Weatherhead Center. “What we find is that mass entry occurred in discontinuous waves and that representativeness increased over time. By the end of the regime, the joiners looked much more like the population at large.”
