German culture is authoritarian, regimented and fascist. Always has been. Liberty and freedom are impossible there. They love the government and worship it. Even today, Germany is a totalitarian society with that same Nazi like mindset. Its just done differently under a different pair of jack boots. Multicultural, vegan ones but with the same mindset of godless tyranny.
“Everyone in Germany knew that voting for the National Socialist party meant they would seize power.”
Not sure that’s true, but assume it was: NAZI Party never came close to winning a majority.
That's better than I remembered they did, but still, if there'd been a run-off or a referendum before hand on whether Hitler should have power, it could well have been defeated. He wasn't anywhere near universally loved by the Germans before he took over.
It's true that Germans who voted for Hitler were voting for an anti-Semitic party, and they knew that, but it's doubtful that very many people foresaw death camps, gas chambers, and crematoria. People who vote for get tough policies sometimes don't ask what "getting tough" really means.
Part of the problem with the Germans was that they believed that the country had already decided for Hitler, when he had unfree elections after taking over -- or even when the Establishment set Hitler up as Chancellor. Those who didn't love Hitler also didn't want to go against what they thought their country wanted and had chosen. They thought patriotic virtue meant not making waves or going against what had already been decided.
FWIW: Wikipedia has those election results and you can check out the names of some of the tiny parties that ran in those last free elections: the Party of the Dissatisfied, the Dispossessed Middle Class, the Fighting Union of Retirees, Savers, and those Harmed by Inflation, the Unemployed Front, the Greater German Middle Class Party for Middle Class Dictatorship, the Party for the Unemployed for Work and Bread. Most of those groups only got a few hundred or at most a few thousand votes, but they indicate how desperate people were.
To be fair, they didn’t have very many options, either, especially when the only other formidable party available was the Communists, and that would have probably resulted in the exact same thing anyways, especially when Karl Marx was a rabid anti-Semite.
Plus, as others pointed out, he never actually was elected Chancellor, he was merely appointed to the position by Hindenberg. In fact, technically, he never even won any elections until AFTER he became dictator, and even there, it was through the same means Castro won his elections upon taking power, heck, how the Eastern Bloc did things (”It doesn’t matter who votes, it matters who counts the votes”). In fact, in the leadup to Hitler being nominated, that period of time was rather infamous for multiple “recall elections” being called, meaning the Nazis and the Communists were essentially doing Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals before Alinsky himself got the idea.
I’m not democracy either (largely because I know how democracy just makes things worse, starting with the French Revolution and Reign of Terror), and personally, I think democracy should be destroyed. However, in this particular case, it wasn’t actually the German People’s fault, if anything it was Paul von Hindenberg’s fault for being talked into nominating him. Honestly, had Woodrow Wilson not stupidly agreed to letting Germany take the heat for World War I, I doubt any of this would have happened.