If you read the entire article by Spritzler, you can see how he manages to combine the most discredited analyses of Nazism with the most discredited social science on bigotry. Quite an accomplishment.
Recent scholarship on the Nazi rise to power demonstrates that it had cross-class support, with the largest support from the middle class.
See:
Fritzsche, Peter. (1990). Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fritzsche, Peter. (1998). Germans into Nazis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
According to Spritzler:
"The real lessons of the Holocaust are that bigotry is generated by elites as a means of social control and that there is no limit to the horrors the ruling class will impose to stay in power."
This is a grotesque twisting of facts based on the Comintern's awful formulation of fascism as the most naked expression of ruling capitalism. Nice try. It was a bad analysis when it was concocted, and it is a bad analysis now.
See What is Fascism?
http://www.publiceye.org/eyes/whatfasc.html
Furthermore, almost all current social science research into bigotry and prejudice demonstrates that it is commonplace and banal, and not unilaterally resulting from "elite" propaganda.
See:
Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. (1996). The Anatomy of Prejudices. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Noël, Lise. (1994). Intolerance: A General Survey. Translated by Arnold Bennett. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
>
> http://www.newdemocracyworld.org/facing2.htm
> FACING HISTORY: HOW WORKING CLASS
> GERMANS FOUGHT THE NAZIS (Part II)
> By John Spritzler
> Editor's Note: Part I of this article (New Democracy,
> May-June 2000) shows
> that the high school curriculum on the Holocaust, "Facing
History And
> Ourselves," lies when it teaches one million students a
year
> that most
> ordinary Germans supported Hitler's rise to power and the
Nazis'
> destruction of the Jews.
> ANTISEMITISM: AN ELITE WEAPON>