Hitler Came to Power Without a Majority

A chilling reminder

Reichstag Building, Berlin - © David H. Enzel, 2018

American Historian Peter Hayes explains that Hitler came to power in Germany without a majority:

[P]robably 55 percent of the Germans had never voted for Hitler or the Nazis by the time he came to power. A majority had remained loyal to their traditional political allegiances: the Center Party for the Catholics, the socialists and communists on the left for most workers. As a result, William Sheridan Allen has ventured the observation that more Germans “were drawn to antisemitism because they were drawn to Nazism, not the other way around.” He probably is correct, and the observation is a reminder that the key to understanding what happened in Germany after 1933 is not so much events and attitudes that predated that turning point but ones that developed after it. 

Hayes, Peter. Why?: Explaining the Holocaust (pp. 71-72). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition