Why did the German people support the Nazis?
The fundamental reason was that the regime was astonishingly successful on all fronts until Hitler decided to attack the Soviet Union. Without such success no amount of propaganda, however skillful, would have been effective. Goebbels’ major contribution was to introduce what the German-Jewish philology professor Victor Klemperer, who survived under the Nazis in Dresden, called “Lingua Tertii Imperii — The Language of the Third Reich,” in which common words took on new meanings. This enabled people to accept certain aspects of Nazi policy, particularly anti-Semitism, in a way that they previously wouldn’t have done, because they learned to think and speak in a different language. Take for example the different words used to describe how the Nazis intended to deal with the “Jewish problem”: “removal”, “resettlement”, “evacuation”, “final solution”, “eradication”, “annihilation”. Most of these words are imprecise and their real meaning changed until they all finally meant “murder”. Endl
