I’m just curious what people like Marco Rubio and Mark Zuckerberg, who are passively supportive of the installation of authoritarianism, would have learned at school about that period in Germany.
I’m asking this as that question and not as a leading question into a discussion on today’s politics.
What is the level of awareness the average American person in their 40s and 50s on how the Third Reich started?
Average? Probably very little. I was in a decent school, and all I remember was a brief overview of the hyperinflation and reparations that led to rearrangements of german life. Like others, we read about the overall picture during the war, with a focus on holocaust victims.
I didn’t learn about the weimar republic until after college, and that was only found out about through casual browsing and mentions from others. The specific chain of events giving hitler his power were barely mentioned in formal education. I remember reading a short summary (maybe a diary entry?) of a first-hand account of the night of broken glass.