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Interestingly, I recently ran across some statistics on deaths among Nazi vs. Commie street-fighters under Weimar. I don’t remember the exact figures, but they were somewhere in the 300 to 500 range.

What was interesting is that about 20% more Nazis died in this fighting than Commies. Which is not totally in line with the common theory that the Nazis were the primary aggressors.

Look at it from the viewpoint of the German Middle Class. Russia went communist a few years prior, they had a civil war that involved wholescale liquidation of their middle class. In 1932 there was the Ukrainian terror famine, where Stalin deliberately starved millions in order to make the rest submit (many Ukrainian and Russian farmers were ethnic Germans (who were encouraged to immigrate there during Czarist times to teach Western farming techniques to neighbors). They stayed in touch with their relatives:

"We'll Meet Again in Heaven: Germans in the Soviet Union ..Write Their American Relatives: 1925-1937"
The book contains two hundred personal letters, written by ethic German/Ukrainians living in Soviet Ukraine to their relatives in North and South Dakota. Translated from the original German into English, these letters were written over a twelve-year period, 1925-1937, and deal with collectivization, dekulakization, exile, and the murderous Famine (Holodomor) of 1932-1933, that was responsible for the deaths of at least six million people (estimates range to ten million or more), including at least a hundred and fifty thousand ethnic German-Ukrainians.

So as it stood, by the early 30's, the German middle class was in terror of there being a Communist revolution there. And it was a near thing in 1919 with the Spartacist revolt. It was not surprising that they were willing to elect ANYBODY who seemed willing to fight the Communists