We had a relative (wife of a distant cousin, recently passed on) who was an Austrian girl during WWII. She didn’t much like to talk about those days but she said essentially the same thing - they thought of Hitler as a savior. He put them back to work and restored their sense of national self-worth. By the time they figured out what he was really about, it was too late.
Oh, and she told EXACTLY the same stories about the occupying Russians.
There are parallels to the fascists of today,
however, today’s fascists aren’t NATIONAL socialists,
they actually hate their own country.
They are INTERNATIONAL socialists.