A delightful find. The American Conservative's Scott Galupo runs across George Orwell's March 1940 (a period of the so-called 'Phony War') review of Mein Kampf, excerpts of which read:
Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain.... Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life....
Hitler has said ... "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.
It should however be noted that, contrary to a strangely enduring myth of popularized history, Hitler was never "democratically elected," and his National Socialists never democratically climbed to a Reichstag majority. Hitler was appointed Chancellor and Nazism ultimately ascended as Germany's sole political power through thuggery and oppression--not through the "psychologically far sounder" basis of a legitimizing democracy.
Plus, when Hitler's offer of "struggle, danger and death" loomed quite real just months prior to publication of Orwell's review, relatively few Germans were enthusiastic in their acceptance. Soon, amid the accumulating rubble and charred bodies, a desire for "ease, security and avoidance of pain" only grew.
Orwell was not often wrong, but I think he was here.