ABSTRACT
Nazi narratives that reconstruct the history of the movement are punctuated by the rhetoric of the few, constantly ready and willing to fight against a sea of “enemies” in their quest to make their “Idea” prevail and save Germany from its state of national “prostration”; of an advanced troop operating in an environment completely hostile to their ideas due to an ubiquity of “Marxists”; of solitude in defence of their truth; of inferiority in the material conditions in which their struggle took place, often leading to death. The SA made violence and propaganda their means of intervention in political life, for both instrumental and expressive motives. In industrial enclaves, communists matched the Nazis in perpetrating the kind of level of political violence that gradually undermined the Weimar democratic order. William Sheridan Allen's study of the social and political expansion of National Socialism in Northeim, a Prussian town of about 10,000 inhabitants near Hannover, vividly reveals the impact of political violence.
