German farmers and academics denied national guilt and held extreme antisemitic views.

Evidence

Approximately two-thirds of the speakers expressed ambivalent attitudes towards democracy. There were twice as many explicit opponents of democracy as there were those who had no reservations about it. At the same time, half of the speakers rejected any shared guilt for the atrocities of the Third Reich. Two statistical groups stood out in particular for their negative qualities: farmers and academics. The farmers all without exception denied any share in national guilt; the academics denied it virtually without exception. Of the farmers who expressed views about the Jews, more than three-quarters proved to be radically or considerably anti-Semitic. The academics, who participated in the discussions to a far greater extent than average on every other topic, were noticeably withdrawn on the topic of the Jews. Of those who did express an opinion, over 90 per cent were radically or considerably anti-Semitic. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 465

Categorization

• XREF: This is the empirical seedbed feeding Adorno’s later authoritarian-personality and group-experiment findings on prejudice among educated strata. — connects to: Most postwar Germans rejected shared guilt; academics and farmers were most anti-Semitic — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1887; German respondents denied knowledge of Nazi crimes to preserve collective identification — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2028; Germans believed Jews’ power and capacity to cause harm was colossal. — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 498 (+1 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Most postwar Germans rejected shared guilt; academics and farmers were most anti-Semitic — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1887; German respondents denied knowledge of Nazi crimes to preserve collective identification — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2028; Germans believed Jews’ power and capacity to cause harm was colossal. — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 498 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Most postwar Germans rejected shared guilt; academics and farmers were most anti-Semitic #expands (0.97) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1887
• German popular antisemitism was weaker than in several other European countries. #complicates (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 115