Lessons from Hitler’s rise to power

Benjamin Carter Hett’s THE DEATH OF DEMOCRACY: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic is a month-by-month account of the politics of the years leading up to the Nazi conquest of power in Germany.

Hett described how Hitler went from 2.8 percent of the popular vote in the 1928 elections to 37.6 percent in 1932,  how he leveraged Nazi voting strength to make himself chancellor by legal means in 1933 and how all pretense of legality ended in the “night of the long knives” in 1934.

That was when Hitler destroyed all remnants of legality by simply ordering the execution-style murder of his opponents, including dissidents in the Nazi party.

Adolph Reed Jr. said in an Interview that Hett’s book is not only good in itself, but it throws light on contemporary U.S. politics.  In fact it does have lessons for the present-day United States, although not in a straightforward or obvious way.

A number of European countries, following defeat in World War One and with middle classes threatened by powerful Communist movements, became right-wing dictatorships.  Fascist Italy led the way.

Germany followed a different path.  A Communist revolution was crushed by a government supported by Social Democrats.   Socialists then joined forces with the Catholic Center Party and moderate conservative parties to form a democratic government.

The democratic coalition worked for a number of years.  The economy recovered.  Inflation was curbed.

Germany became a model for democratic socialism.  Labor unions were powerful.  The government provided compulsory wage arbitration and a strong social safety net.  Homosexuality and abortion were legal.

But, like today’s USA, Weimar Germany struggled with the issue of globalization vs. economic nationalism.

One big issue Weimar Germany had in common with the present-day USA was the question of globalization vs. economic nationalism.

The governing coalition accepted the need to pay reparations for Germany’s supposed guilt for starting World War One and to back their currency with gold.  Both were seen as the price of participating in the world economy.

The right-wing nationalists, including the Nazis, objected to these policies because they denied Germany the means to pay for rearmament and a large army.  They also objected to globalization on principle.  The Nazis wanted to end reparations, abrogate international trade treaties, limit foreign trade and make Germany as self-sufficient as possible.

The refugee crisis was another big issue.  An estimated 1.5 million refugees entered Germany between 1918 and 1922.  Most of them were Germans from former German territory in France and Poland, and many were refugees from Bolshevik Russia, but a lot of them were Jews.

Many Germans worried about their country’s inability to secure its borders. The Nazi position was to expel all refugees and also all Jews, refugees or not.

Weimar Germany had its own version of identity politics, which however was based on social class and religion rather than race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation.  By identity politics, I mean politics based on an affirmation that your own group is good and other groups are bad, rather than politics based on getting what you and your group want.

The identity group to which the Nazis and other right-wing nationalists appealed were the rural and middle-class German Protestants.  The American and British image of Weimar Germany is based on Berlin, but more than a third of Germans lived in villages of fewer than 2,000 people.  Rural Protestants tended to be highly religious, respectful of authority and nostalgic for the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm.

The typical rural Protestant German thought the new Germany was dominated by Catholics, Jews, Marxists and moral degenerates.  As a bulwark against this wickedness, they eventually turned to Adolph Hitler, in spite of the fact that he was an urban foreign-born radical who was nominally Catholic.

There also was a conflict of interest between urban and rural, as in most countries.  The urban workers wanted low food prices;  the farmers wanted high crop prices.  But this might have been worked out if not for their mutual hatred and contempt.

One feature of German politics with no U.S. parallel was that the principal political parties all had paramilitary auxiliaries that engaged in street fighting.  They included the Communist Red Front Fighters League, the Social Democrats’ Iron Front and the right-wing German Nationals’ Steel Helmet, among others.

Benjamin Carter Hett

The Nazi Storm Troopers (aka the SA or brownshirts) were the most ferocious.  They moved into Communist neighborhoods in Berlin and through raw force gained control of the streets.  Violent clashes between Nazis and Communists dominated the headlines and crowded out discussion of deeper issues.

The Nazis claimed that their willingness to kill and be killed for political objectives entitled them to respect that law-abiding politicians did not deserve.

The world financial crisis, which began in Germany in 1928, broke apart the democratic coalition.  Rather than borrow to maintain a social safety net, Center Party Chancellor Heinrich Bruning cut social services.  He encouraged wage reductions to keep German industry competitive.  He believed that the economy would recover on its own, but this didn’t happen.

The Social Democrats remained in the governing coalition because of their commitment to democracy, but as a result they lost support.

Eventually the more conservative members of the governing coalition listened to the industrialists and militarists, and tried to form a government without the Social Democrats.  This meant that they had to bring the extreme right-wing nationalists into the government in order to form a majority.

The Nazis meanwhile became the principal right-wing nationalist party.  The establishment parties distrusted Hitler and the Nazis, but bringing them into the ruling coalition was the only way to keep the Social Democrats out.

What few people understood before the Nazis came to power was how different they were from other parties, including other anti-semitic anti-democratic nationalist parties inside and outside Germany.

Many politicians lie.  But the Nazis appeared to have no concept of the difference between truth and falsehood, which is something else.  For them, truth was whatever they willed it to be.

Hett quoted one Nazi speaker as saying he didn’t want higher bread prices, he didn’t want lower bread prices and he didn’t want unchanging bread prices.  What the Nazi wanted was “National Socialist bread prices”—whatever that might be.

The other thing about the Nazis was that they rejected any limitation by laws or rules, including laws they made themselves.

There’s a school of thought called “critical legal studies” which, as I understand it, contends that all structures of law are also structures of power, operating to benefit certain people and oppress others.  But there’s something worse than unjust laws, and that is raw power exercised outside any law.

I put down the book with a feeling of great respect for the Social Democrats and others who stood up against Hitler even after his victory appeared inevitable, knowing that the likely consequences were death, torture or the concentration camp.

Benjamin Carter Hett ended the book with the remark that few Germans in 1933 could have foreseen what came next.  “We who come later have one advantage over them: we have their example before us.”

LINK

The Sudden Death of a Democracy: Historian Benjamin Carter Hett on the Fall of the Weimar Republic, an interview for the History News Network.

Tags: Adolf Hitler, Benjamin Carter Hett, Hitler's Rise to Power, Nazis, The Death of Democracy, Weimar Republic