The Nazi mass base came from nonvoters, the young, and peasants.

Evidence

Bendix noted that the staggering increase of 5½ million votes picked up by the Nazi Party in 1930 over its 1928 totals coincided with a rapid influx into the active electorate of nearly 2½ million adults who had failed to vote in 1928. These figures for new voters are exclusive of the estimated 1,760,000 young people who became eligible and voted for the first time, and there is reason to believe that these young people flocked to the Nazis in disproportionate numbers. In addition, there is convincing evidence from Heberle and others that, among older voters, the most dramatic shifts from other parties to the Nazi Party occurred in rural areas and especially among peasants. We conclude therefore that, whatever the social backgrounds or motivations of the activist cadre of the Nazis, its mass base was disproportionately recruited from among customary nonvoters, the young and the peasantry. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1973

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on what demographic segments extremist parties mobilize; also relevant to the reader’s interest in how mass political movements recruit — parallels Milgram’s law-merchant work only weakly, but strongly parallels discussions of low-information voters in democratic theory.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing later: does the same nonvoter-plus-youth dynamic recur in the recent rise of right-wing populist parties (e.g. AfD in Germany, Trump’s 2016 coalition)?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1973