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.
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