Tag Archives: Hitler

It Can Happen Here

Legal scholar Cass Sunstein recently reviewed two books on Nazi Germany for the New York Review of Books.   (It was a timely review; even Godwin of “Godwin’s law” fame is on record saying that comparisons of contemporary events to the rise of Hitler may be appropriate.)

As Sunstein notes, the accounts of the Nazi period with which we are familiar seem barely imaginable. They portray a nation so depraved–so indifferent to evil–that we think it can’t happen here. The books he reviews–including Milton Mayer’s 1955 classic They Thought They Were Free, recently republished–suggest otherwise.

But some depictions of Hitler’s rise are more intimate and personal. They focus less on well-known leaders, significant events, state propaganda, murders, and war, and more on the details of individual lives. They help explain how people can not only participate in dreadful things but also stand by quietly and live fairly ordinary days in the midst of them. They offer lessons for people who now live with genuine horrors, and also for those to whom horrors may never come but who live in nations where democratic practices and norms are under severe pressure.

Mayer’s book focused on the lives and experiences of ordinary Germans–people who, like ordinary Americans today, found themselves living through events they had little individual power to affect. That focus was, Sunstein writes, a “jarring contrast” to Sebastian Haffner’s “devastating, unfinished 1939 memoir, Defying Hitler.” Haffner

objects that most works of history give “the impression that no more than a few dozen people are involved, who happen to be ‘at the helm of the ship of state’ and whose deeds and decisions form what is called history.” In his view, that’s wrong. What matters are “we anonymous others” who are not just “pawns in the chess game,” because the “most powerful dictators, ministers, and generals are powerless against the simultaneous mass decisions taken individually and almost unconsciously by the population at large.”

Trump’s grudging (and incomplete) retreat in the face of the public outrage against separating children from their parents underscores the validity of Haffner’s point. In a different way, so does Mayer’s book.

Mayer interviewed ten people who had been members of the Nazi party; those interviews took place over a considerable time-period, and were friendly rather than confrontational. Mayer concluded that Nazism took over Germany not “by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler.” Many Germans “wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.”

Mayer’s most stunning conclusion is that with one partial exception (the teacher), none of his subjects “saw Nazism as we—you and I—saw it in any respect.” Where most of us understand Nazism as a form of tyranny, Mayer’s subjects “did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now.” Seven years after the war, they looked back on the period from 1933 to 1939 as the best time of their lives.

Mayer’s interviewees spoke of Hitler much as the GOP “base” speaks of Trump; the rhetorical similarities are chilling.

And what of “the final solution”?

Mayer did not bring up the topic of anti-Semitism with any of his subjects, but after a few meetings, each of them did so on his own, and they returned to it constantly. When the local synagogue was burned in 1938, most of the community was under only one obligation: “not to interfere.” Eventually Mayer showed his subjects the local newspaper from November 11, 1938, which contained a report: “In the interest of their own security, a number of male Jews were taken into custody yesterday. This morning they were sent away from the city.” None of them remembered seeing it, or indeed anything like it.

The killing of six million Jews? Fake news. Four of Mayer’s subjects insisted that the only Jews taken to concentration camps were traitors to Germany, and that the rest were permitted to leave with their property or its fair market value. The bill collector agreed that the killing of the Jews “was wrong, unless they committed treason in wartime. And of course they did.” He added that “some say it happened and some say it didn’t,” and that you “can show me pictures of skulls…but that doesn’t prove it.” In any case, “Hitler had nothing to do with it.” The tailor spoke similarly: “If it happened, it was wrong. But I don’t believe it happened.”

Fake news. Alternative facts. “Those people.” The incremental nature of the Nazi takeover. The daily distractions that allowed ordinary people to become habituated to the unthinkable. It’s all terrifyingly familiar.

Read the whole essay.

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Troubling Parallels

When Tuesday’s primary results led to speculation about a brokered GOP convention, Donald Trump predicted (threatened?) that an effort to deny him the nomination would be met with riots.

It is harder and harder to avoid the parallels between the improbable emergence of Donald Trump and the social and political conditions that enabled Hitler’s rise.

I’ve always appreciated Godwin’s Law. Facile or offhand comparisons of contemporary bad behavior to the holocaust–a period in human history that remains inexplicable to civilized beings–is profoundly insulting; the effect is to trivialize atrocities.

But as Godwin himself recently noted, admonitions to be careful with analogies to Hitler and the Nazis should not be taken to mean that those comparisons are never apt.

I have always wondered how Hitler gained power. Where were the good people? How did a civilized, cultured population breed a movement of vicious, violent racial “overlords”?

Like many other Jews, my antennae are especially sensitive to intolerance and bigotry–but I’m also aware that I am at risk of overreacting to thoughtless comments or to the existence of hate groups composed only of a few damaged individuals who don’t represent a broader threat.

Back in December, CNN ran a very thoughtful article asking the question: is Trump a fascist? The author, Peter Bergen, goes through the precursors to and characteristics of fascism: a sense that the nation faces a crisis beyond the reach of traditional political solutions; the asserted superiority of the leader’s gut instincts over abstract and universal reason; the belief of one group (here, working-class white men) that they are victims, and that their victimization justifies extreme actions; the need for authority to be exercised by “natural leaders” (always male), culminating in a national ruler who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s destiny.

Bergen finds the Trump phenomenon squarely meeting those criteria. But he points to one characteristic that Trump does not share– “the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will when they are devoted to the group’s success.”

There is no hint that Trump wishes to engage in or to foment violence against the enemies, such as immigrants, he has identified as undermining the American way of life.

That may have been true when it was written, but it is clearly not true now.No one who has watched Trump deliberately fomenting violence at his rallies can have any doubt.

When he urges supporters to punch protestors in the face, when he promises to pay the legal bills of those who rough up hecklers, when the violence becomes so threatening that at least one rally has to be called off, when he speaks longingly of the days when “political correctness” didn’t prevent silencing dissent by beating up the dissenters or worse–the parallels are too close, too obvious to ignore.

And those calls for violence have been escalating.

A few years ago, one of Trump’s ex-wives reportedly said that he kept a volume of Hitler’s speeches on his nightstand. At the time, I dismissed the accusation as the product of divorce bitterness, but I believe it now.

I keep reminding myself that the United States is not Germany, and the year 2016 is not 1933. The differences matter. But the question we all face is: what can people of good will do to prevent a contemporary replay of one of history’s most horrendous periods?

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