The left he/she is referring were not anti-nazi, they were pro-communist, and almost uniformly pro-soviet groups that argued that the ruling social democratic government had betrayed the working class.
The Nazis weren't the nice guys, but neither were their opposition, at least not the one referred to by the parent.
Yup. Remember during the rise of Hitler, he was able to consolidate power because the CENTRIST government at the time agreed to work with Hitler to achieve short-term political objectives.
Well, now... To be fair the Weimar Republic was a political turmoil. It is not like the Nazis had "gas the Jews" in their party programme. They established themselves over 10 years, and due to the instability f any political coalition in the government they were able to maneuver themselves into a position where they could force events forward.
People seem to think the Nazi party showed up on the stairs of the parliament demanding genocide and war. In reality it was a 14 year progression of bad options, political turmoil and very hard choices to defend extremely weak coalitions. Were those choices good? Obviously not. Can we judge them after the fact? I would say no.
Maybe it wasn't in the party program, but everyone knew what SA violence meant and Hitler had been pretty explicit about his views of the racial supremacy of the Germans and what he thought should be done to the Jews in particular as far back as Mein Kampf.
Maybe if the NSDAP had campaigned with "we want to gas all the Jews" they wouldn't have won so many votes, but nobody can say that NSDAP voters could have been ignorant of the general tendency. In fact, I think this kind of "we couldn't have known what would happen" is IMHO revisionism.
The truth is that, while everything about economic depression, the political instability of the system, the KPD and SPD being unable to cooperate, etc., were important factors, it remains true that a large segment of the German population were totally OK with ideas of German imperialism, revanchism and anti-semitism, otherwise Hitler's rise to power would never had happened.
I completely agree. What I wanted to convey was that I do not think the events leading up to Hitler becoming Kansler can be easily summarised.
The simplified story of the nazi rise to rule removes one of the most important lessons that can be learned from it: the watchfulness required to protect democracy.
We don't need to watch out for the big step because those will be easily.spotted anyway, but for the many, many small ones.
The Nazis weren't the nice guys, but neither were their opposition, at least not the one referred to by the parent.