We learned about Anne Frank and read Night in middle school. In high school we had separate classes for US, world, and European history. We covered the beer hall putsch, kristalnacht, Reichstag fire, that Hitler was given emergency powers, etc. WWI reparations and hyperinflation. Propaganda and Josef Goebbels “if you repeat a lie long enough, people will start to believe it”. Watched some of Triumph of the Will. We also had separate classes covering western philosophy which included Nitzche and how Nazis appropriated the will to power. I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot of the details. However I suspect this is more education than the average American receives.

Can’t tell if you only want answers from Americans in 40-50s, but I’ll offer mine anyway lol

I was raised upper middle class, and homeschooled until a private school my parents agreed with opened nearby. I learned about nazi Germany only in the sense that was wrong to punish people for what they looked like, what race they were, and what professions they had. Very little was said about the people who were punished for helping Jewish people, and nothing was said about how the typical citizen was treated. I was taken to a traveling Holocaust exhibit and told to never be racist because of the human lives lost.

You could say I was raised to think authoritarianism was correct, especially because “democracy allows stupid people to have a voice”. I was not allowed friends from other races or social classes as far as my parents could help. So I was taught “don’t be racist”, but at the same time was very strictly told I couldn’t have anything in common with anyone else that didn’t look and live like me.

That changed a bit when I met my best friend in high school, they are a first generation immigrant. I remember later, as 19 or 20 year old, I took a quiz on my preferred government type and was fucking floored when it said I was a fascist. My dad moonlighted for an enforcement agency for much of my life, so I guess I learned some fucked up things that way, but still it was a shock.

Anyway, I have had to do a lot of introspection and self education, and I’ll never be done learning and growing. I’m not a billionaire, so I’ve probably been a bit successful with that

nonexistent. i wasn’t really taught much of anything about Germany except what led up to WWII and even then it was heavily edited and summarized. i had to find out the lengthy history for myself and do my own research.

One thing to keep in mind with a lot of responses is often when someone says “we didn’t learn about x in high school”, what they should be saying is “I didn’t learn about x in high school”. I’ve certainly heard former classmates claiming not to have learned something even though they were sitting next to me when I learned it.

When i was a preteen, we learned about WW2, mainly from a US perspective, and had a fairly large focus on the holocaust, including a visit to a holocaust museum.

As a teen, I had a class on specifically European history. In there, we learned about lot more about the rise of the nazis (though not much on Italian fascists).

Here’s the tl;dr on what I remember learning about then:

WWI ended with the treaty of Versailles which was not a realistic, sustainable peace. We learned about the economic trouble like hyperinflation. We learned about the beer hall putsch, and that it was effectively unpunished. We learned that Hitler then sought power through legal means by allying with a broad range of groups unhappy with the current government. As he rose to power, various elements were purged from the government. Concurrently, political violence from the stormtroopers suppressed minorities and other enemies from organizing against them. This culminated in Hitler being elected chancellor, and then the enabling act gave him ultimate power. In the night of the long knives, all the allied elements in the party were purged. After that was kristallnacht, the remilitarization of the rhineland, annexation of Austria and the sudetenland, and then finally the invasion of Poland.

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”.

Not good. All I know is that WW1 ended unfavorably for them, and that struggling under economic sanctions from the other Euro nations is a big part of what laid the stage for Hitler’s rise to power.

Plenty here are answering your question more directly so I’m going to answer it in a different way. I’m a 40 year old American by the way.

While we all would have learned about Nazi Germany and the rise of the Third Reich in school the depth will vary by state and type of schooling (public vs. private).

The most important thing, however, is to remember that it would have been taught from an American-centric perspective. For example, there wouldn’t have been much detail covered in all likelihood prior to WWII with the depth increasing greatly to its highest point where the US became involved in the war.

Basically, all history in US primary education is is essentially US history. It’ll cover global events in general terms but really only goes into detail when it involves the US.

So much of English class, not even any history classes I had, was covering the Holocaust. US History covered everything from Columbus up to and including WW2. I also had European History in highschool, but we only got up to the War of the Roses (and frankly my teacher sucked so I didn’t retain much from that class).

But I live in California; one of the most progressive states in the country. Even a shitty school here can be better than the best school in, say, West Virginia; the state with the lowest scoring education system.

Obligatory butt-in from a European: I just wanted to provide a baseline for comparison.

Here in scandinavialand we watched The Wave (1981) in school to educate us on how easily a population can be convinced to support fascism.

School teaching of history has changed a lot since I was in K-12 … but at that time, I never had a history class that got so far as WW1. Yep. We spent months on the history of Europe from the Holy Roman Empire up to (barely) von Bismarck. That was it.

I suspect that was because teachers were staying away from any history that might be known to anyone who was actually alive. My daughter, on the other hand, had a teacher who spent months on the Vietnam War. I was glad to hear that.

OTOH, when TV was black and white, there was a whole series on WW2 created by the US army called The Big Picture, broadcast on hundreds of stations. Each of over 800 half-hour episodes were available to any TV station that would air them. So there was a time when ADULTS -could- learn that stuff … and no doubt many of those who lived through that era were curious what their relatives and friends died for.

I’m fairly sure that a lot of today’s elected politicians would have paid no attention to that stuff. Many of them move in a different mental culture than people who’ve lost relatives to the whims of dictators. And of course they’re sure they’re smarter than people were back then. Like the Prime Example.

The guy who sings “Take Me Out” was killed for some reason is what I remember.

Honestly most of my knowledge of US history and WW1/2 really came from me just watching the History channel when it actually showed quality historical documentaries and recreations.

Otherwise in Illinois we would go over world war II I think several semesters in high school and we watched footage of concentration camp liberations that we didn’t get into the details of what happened to German society after the Nuremberg trials and during reconstruction. Probably would have touched on that in a college course but I swayed more towards Asian studies

It was clearly taught in World History that nazis were far-right fascist authoritarians, which branched off from Mussolini far-right fascists. They were hate filled christians and catholics that put their fictional race above all others as a reason for genocide, theft, power, and control. With their god at their side, they aimed to take over the world, and subjugate or exterminate all others they found inadequate based on religious or non-scientific reasons.

That’s what our leaders learned as children/teens, too. But the same thing that was wrong with the nazis is wrong with them. Hate, power, money, in combination with addiction to hard drugs deletes all empathy. There aren’t enough checks against power hungry maniacs with money, power, or threats attempting to control everything.

We were also taught that people would violently rise up against a tyrannical government. In the American Government part of American History class. 2nd Amendment. Even in America. Especially in America. See movie: “Red Dawn” (1984) for 80’s vibe check about military occupation of America. There we also learned that the Civil War wasn’t entirely settled, with the North ‘taking it easy’ on the South and not forcing immediate slavery, and civil reform. Which results today in remaining pro-slavery, and ultra-conservative southern remnants of the confederate states of traitors. And their eternal quest to destroy the American federal government in any and every way possible.

The level of public education in American schools, about anything that isn’t a STEM precursor, is basically nonexistent. The STEM precursors are sometimes covered okay and sometimes covered poorly, depending on your school system, but outside of that it might as well be nothing.

I went to some good schools and I literally can’t think of a single thing I learned about World War 2 from school, let alone about Germany before the war. It all comes either from family talking to me about it or from my own reading. I like to think of myself that at this point I have some fairly in-depth understanding but that’s not because of school.

I’m in the demographic you’re looking for. It went something like this:

• End of WWI with the Treaty of Versailles
• Massive war repayment debts placed on Weimar Republic
• Beer Hall Putsch
• The Weimar Republic falling because of disenfranchised German citizens
• Nazi party rising in power in the Reichstag
• Brown shirts (SA)
• Burning of the Reichstag
• Hitler seizing power
• Night of the Long Knives
• The west ignoring military limits on German military expansion (aircraft, Panzer 1)
• Annexation of Austria
• Talk of leibenstrom

etc

Thats from memory. Apologies for butchering any spelling or some of those events out of order.

So, yes, lots and LOTS of things in the USA government right now are ringing alarm bells like crazy. Executive orders just this week of military support for local police “to root out immigrants” sound close to creation of the Brownshirts (SA). The villainization of immigrants sound disgustingly close to the targeting of various minority groups that Hitler targeted (Roma, Jews, gays, Poles).