system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How did it happen that Hitler influenced so many people and they actually believed him?
gpt
It wasn't as if Hitler said "lets kill al the Jews and reconquer Europe" and everyone else who had never even entertained those ideas before was hypnotized to go along with it.

What Hitler and the Nazis were selling were ideas that had been present for quite some time in a significant fraction of the population. And not just in Germany. A lot of the ideas that today seem unthinkable were thought quite freely by a large number of people throughout the 'civilized' world.

What happened was that Germany was in a crisis and people were looking for ways out. Hitler and the Nazis were populist who were telling many people what they wanted to hear and offered up simple solutions to complicated problems.

Populists like that always have popular appeal and with the whole economic crisis and the political crisis and elections happening seemingly several times a year, they had even more appeal.

The conservatives tried to use Hitler as a tool to fight the socialist not realizing that they wouldn't be the ones in control of the partnership and the Social democrats and the communist failed to properly work together to oppose the right wing coalition.
 
Before they knew it Hitler had taken over and quickly dismantled the system so that the Nazi propaganda was the only thing that anyone heard.

Every source of information echoed the party-line and used the same language. All forms of people organizing themselves were co-opted or banned by the regime and soon everything was Nazi. It was inescapable and insidious to those caught up in it.

Between the ones who had been with Hitler all along and the ones who went along because they were apolitical and now followed the rules of the new regime and the ones who joined up because they sought an advantage, quickly a large part of the population was on board.

You have to be pretty sure of your beliefs when you hold out when everyone else seems to be okay with what is going one.

The worse things got the harder it would have been for anyone going along with it to change their minds.

BY the time the war was over an entire generation had grown up in the regimes propaganda. It would have been like growing up in a cult.