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The majority of German citizens conformed to Nazi rule because of the dual positive and negative pressures exerted by the regime. The Nazis designed and aggressively propagated a programme likely to be attractive to most of the community and backed this up with an apparatus of terror to silence those not convinced. The successes of the party within the country assured widespread support. Hitler's foreign policy, that overturned the Treaty of Versailles and secured Germany …

…a broad cross-section of Germany, the high level of conformity exhibited in Nazi Germany does not seem remarkable. Germans conformed to Nazi rule primarily because of the regimes initial domestic and foreign policy success, and the success of the establishment of the Hitler myth. Those groups who either opposed the regime or were targeted by Nazi ideology had little impact on the overall support of the party because they were silenced by the highly-effective Gestapo.