ABSTRACT
Reading Richard J. Evans’s The Coming of the Third Reich (Evans 2003) helped me put into perspective the oddness of the rise to power of the National Socialist (Nazi) party in Germany, a party which never got the majority of the popular vote for Parliament in a free election. Their success seemed to fit in well with the peculiar rigidities of the German class system, which in milder form shows similar characteristics to other class-ridden, which is another way of saying rather bureaucratic, societies of Continental Europe.
