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?
I think that there was a brief bit in my high school world history textbook about the period that mostly focused on our involvement due to the Great Depression, the US financial sector seeing something of an implosion, pulling funds from Germany — who was, at that time, dependent on US finance to keep industry running — and that exacerbating the political situation. I doubt that a lot of that would stick in people’s head for decades, so if you’re middle-aged, that probably wouldn’t be something people recall. Also, I read my world history textbook cover-to-cover, and the actual curriculum didn’t cover all of it, used chunks out of it, and I can’t recall whether the curriculum dealt with that section or was just material that I read on my own.
I believe that most of it dealt with the World War II era, which involved the US considerably more, rather than the interwar period.
I’ve read more myself, but that was later and probably would not be representative of what a typical American would do. And a lot of that was due to personal interest in military history, which focused on World War II, rather than German political processes in the 1930s.
I’ve taken dedicated coursework on the political situation in Germany around the time. I’ve read English translations of Mein Kampf and Zweites Buch. I’d probably be more familiar with political happenings in the 1930s in Germany than in another non-US foreign country — like, I could say more about Germany in the period than about Mussolini in Italy. I could give a rough outline of Hitler’s arc, the internal concerns that drove his base, and some of the critical moves that let him ultimately gain power. The early NSDAP and power struggles there and in the SA. I’ve read diaries of several German citizens (not just Anne Frank, but yes, her as well) from the World War II period to understand the wartime civilian experience, which probably gives at least some insight into what the typical person around the timeframe felt, though that’s a small number of datapoints.
But if what you really want to know is “would a typical middle-aged American (“40s and 50s”) have much familiarity with the political situation in 1930s Germany”, the answer I’d give is “probably not much”.