How did so many people succomb to "the rise of the Nazis"?

(The Retreat From Reason)

- Rise Of Nazis Still Not Understood -
Fest's words make it clear that by the late 1930s reason was a vanishing quality in Europe. The subsequent judgement at Nuremberg by the victorious allies, which placed the blame for the Holocaust upon the shoulders of a few bad men in Germany, and has never been contradicted, is proof that comprehension has continued its sad decline. Our public inability to recognise that Germany had gone mad, and that nations do become gripped by lunacy, reveals significant shortcomings in existing communal awareness; we just can't grasp what really happened, for apart from a few unusual individuals, we have lost the ability to understand reality.


PER J.C. Fest:
"But the emergence of Hitler, the conditions for his rise and his triumph, depended on circumstances far beyond the narrower framework of conditions in Germany. We need not mention Versailles, nor Munich, nor Moscow. We may confine ourselves to the common inner characteristics of which these and countless other comparable stages on the road were only symptoms: The turning away of almost all European powers from reason and realism; the disenchantment with traditional values and ethical standards, accompanied by a lack of will to defend any moral and legal principles whatever; a short sighted striving for advantage and security as well as, in particular, a susceptibility to illusion —the fatal characteristic of the epoch." —J.C. Fest 'The Face Of The Third Reich'.